Yeah, I mean that’s true of any social space though, if you say something agreeable (definitionally) you’re going to get agreement. If you view upvoting as consensus building (i.e “I like this” / “I agree”) it’s just a more concise representation of a reply saying as much.

But that is scrutable.

What becomes a problem is content getting surfaced/buried on non-scrutable metrics (typically engagement) — ragebait isn’t anything new, online or in societies. But when algorithms target content that gets engagement, ragebait is naturally surfaced in higher proportions. Often time such platforms completely bury content or make it impossible to find something not explicitly surfaced (YouTube search for example is widely known to be terrible here, FB rabidly buries comments on posts).

WRT communities, there definitely are instances and communities with very different rules, values and expected behaviors. Federation allows communities to pick and choose what other communities they think they’ll get along with. This includes banning individual remote users if they don’t follow local rules, or defederating entirely if other instances have drastically different values.

The federation model as described does well by my metrics. I can pick an instance that shares my values, participate in communities (in the Lemmy technical sense) that share them as well — and largely avoid or choose not to engage with people from communities (in the instance sense) that I don’t share values with. This is extending “freedom of association” to online spaces in a way that large platforms largely cannot and willingly do not enable.

I would say scrutability in itself doesn’t automatically make an algorithm good. “Demote everything that doesn’t support Trump” is perfectly scrutable but leads to a skewed discussion.

This is mostly getting into normative vs descriptive philosophy. If it’s scrutable that a site/instance is demoting everything non-aligned with a worldview; then on the Fediverse it’s users’ choice to leave (and part of ‘community values’).

In fact I would say any content boosting algorithm at all leads to skew and what you call sycophancy. That includes upvotes/downvotes that affect what posts users see first. So I would get rid of all that stuff and just show purely chronologically.

To some degree, yes. New Reddit is particularly bad about this, it actively buries unpopular replies (but it goes further, and doesn’t just use upvotes) — Software like Lemmy is better, you can easily set Sort by New or sort by Top as the default. There’s also no ‘Karma’ system that propagates across the site.

Sycophancy is a human trait, so it’ll always emerge in social systems; but normatively, our systems should not cater to these negative traits (e.g. Twitter).

For algorithms, anything that isn’t a straightforward scrutable way of presenting user content is bad, IMO.
Algorithms that promote engagement, monetization, and sycophants are bad.

As for community of communities, that’s how the Fediverse works — you have a home instance which communicates with other instances. An instance has (nominally) rules, and expected conduct, and is often centered around a particular interest (game dev, programming, cities or countries, etc) then these communities interact with each other.

Having home instances with shared values and a subset of the entire userbase allows for recognizing and connecting with other “local” users. The same way people would trust their immediate neighbors more than random people from the city over. It helps form webs of trust, and establish natural networks.
This is how human society has functioned up until very recently — it’s what the brain evolved to do.

We can see the consequence of systems that don’t respect that fact, sites that try catering to everyone and put us in the same tent, it destroys social regulation, you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to tens of thousands of angry people on the Internet, nor should people be exposed to such vitriol.

It’s not the point of the article, but I think it nonetheless speaks to the power that the community-of-communities model provides.

The algorithmic content surfacing models are what primarily rot online interaction. Having all-encompassing sites is another cause. Letting people join communities with shared values, and those communities collectively deciding who they interact with, is a fundamental working model of human societies since prehistory.

With respect to CSS, there’s already several projects that recreate the Win 7 and Vista look.

https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/

https://github.com/Avayy/Windows-Vista-HTML-Clone-WIP

It solves a pretty hard problem that is a self-hosted video platform; a lot of places use YouTube to host videos, even if they aren’t doing so to make money through adsense, this is for their own site material, posting to groupchats, and similar purposes.

Issue is that otherwise you rely on platform owners like Google, who can decide to unperson you, your business, or an employee. It effectively happened to me, YT terminated my channel for unsubstantiated reasons, and hosting my own peertube is likely in the future to replace where I host my decades of video content.

Further, ideologically, we should be collectively moving away from “platforms” for what should be obvious reasons to those of us on the fediverse.

I think it’s “the algorithm”, people basically just want to be force-fed “content” – look how successful TikTok is, largely because it has an algorithm that very quickly narrows down user habits and provides endless distraction.

Mastodon and fediverse alternatives by comparison have very simple feeds and ways to surface content, it simply doesn’t “hook” people the same way, and that’s competition.

On one hand we should probably be doing away with “the algorithm” for reasons not enumerated here for brevity, but on the other hand maybe the fediverse should build something to accommodate this demand, otherwise the non-fedi sites will.

Further hampered by the Steam “discussions” that are an incredibly unmoderated cesspit.

If they were a small or free service I wouldn’t have much issue, but they do charge, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they at least attempt to scrape the wider web.

Building their own database seems the prudent thing long-term, I don’t doubt they could shore up coverage over Bing. They don’t have to replace the other indexes wholesale, just supplement it.

They have smallweb and news indexing, but other than that AFAICT they rely completely on other providers. Which is a shame, Google allows submitting sites for indexing and notifies if they can’t.

Running a scraper doesn’t need to cover everything since they have access to other indexes, but they really should be developing that ability instead of relying on Bing and other providers to provide good results, or results at all.

Small web always returns 0 results for anything that isn’t extremely broad, unfortunately.

I’ve been using Kagi for the last year+.

Personally, I wish they’d tone down the AI stuff that ruined Google, but at least you can turn most of it off.

Their results are okay, a little better than Bing, but obviously they’re limited by their existing index providers, I wish they’d run their own spiders and crawl for their own data, since I think Bing fails on a lot of coverage of obscure websites.

In general I find the weighting of modern indexes to be subpar, though the SEO industry has made it a hard problem to tackle, I wish more small websites and forums were higher ranked, and AI slop significantly de rated.

I still see lots of different emails out there, outlook/hotmail is still huge, yahoo occasionally, icloud in the US.

Among my techy friend circle all of us have either our own self hosted mail, a ‘privacy’ company email, or something in the middle.

All to say, I don’t think it’s that uphill of a battle for the very large percentage of Internet users to accept the way federation works.

In my experience these “containment” boards/servers/sections tend not to work.

Long term it basically just creates a place that attracts those you don’t want, and becomes place for those ideologies to spread. Then it either gets bad enough they take over (you know the site) or they break off wholesale and form a new community dedicated to those worst impulses (pyrrhic victory at best).

The best policy is to actively moderate, and in the case of the fediverse, defederate, those groups and those that give them shelter.