The post is clear. That is what matters. If some assumer starts making shit up based on the title alone, the assumer is at fault, not the poster.

Most people don’t even know what’s a proprietary image format. From their PoV it would be “shitty broken Mastodon doesn’t show images properly”. And they would still pressure Mastodon users to switch.

if Threads won’t display in a browser they’ve just blown one of their legs off.

I’m not sure but I think that a similar strategy could work for browsers, using a web plugin.

But even if Meta decided that Threads is unavailable from browsers, it wouldn’t be blowing one of Threads’ legs off. There are far more mobile than desktop users nowadays; and if they want to EEE the Fediverse, they need numbers for that.

I’m a mix of OK and not-OK.

The good: I’m excited with Xmas + New Years’ Eve. It’s just family but I always get hyped up. Learning how to paint oil on canvas. Got nice gifts for my family, “nice” not as “expensive” but as “things that they’ll enjoy”.

The bad: lots of things to do. Juggling the will of five people and two cats for the festivities, as I’m the one cooking most of it. (Yes, the cats will get treats. Yoghurt for one, shredded chicken breast for another.) Work is also extra hard those days.

The ugly: I hate summer. Insect thinks that my desk is a love hotel, my feet get swollen, 13:00 and I turn into mush, my cats get more nocturnal so late night/early morning they’re “MEOW, MEOW” = “stop sleeping and play with me, stupid human”. At a certain point in my life I seriously considered buying a house in the Alps so I didn’t need to deal with summers any more.

Note: I did read your comment fully, but I’m going to address specific points, otherwise the discussion gets too long. (Sorry!)

“Some data format” is still a pretty vague handwave […]

It is vague because there are multiple ways for Threads to screw with the Fediverse through data formats. But if you want a more specific example:

Let’s say that Meta creates a new image format called TREDZ. It fills the same purpose as JPG, but it’s closed source. The Threads app has native support for TREDZ images, but your browser doesn’t render it.

If you access a Mastodon instance through Threads, everything works well, since the Threads app has support for other image formats. However, since your browser and current Mastodon apps have no support for TREDZ, pics in this format fail to render. You get broken content as a result, and probably some Threads crowds screeching at you because you ignored their picture, saying “u uze mastadon? lmaaao its broken it doesnt even pictures lol”, encouraging you to ditch your instance to join Threads instead.

And you might say “reverse engineer TREDZ, problem solved”. However:

• reverse engineering is costly and time-consuming
• Meta has professional coders in a paycheck, Mastodon relies mostly on volunteers
• Meta could easily encumber TREDZ with all sorts of nasty legal shit, like parents, and aggressively defend them.

As such, on a practical level, it would be not feasible to reverse-engineer TREDZ. And even if it was, the time necessary to do so is time that Threads is still causing damage to Mastodon.

Of course, this is just an example that I made up on the spot. Meta can think on more efficient ways to do so.

I’m sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. […]

Yup. As you said, everyone wants that button. But due to the difference in power, Meta is closer to get that button than Mastodon is.

the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.

The protocol might be solid, but the community isn’t. Communities stronger than the Fediverse died; and the Fediverse has the mixed blessing of decentralisation - the death of a part doesn’t drag the other parts to the grave, but the survival of the other parts doesn’t help much the dying one either.

The difference is the same as between boiling a frog* by throwing it in hot water, versus throwing it in cold water and heating it slowly.

In the defederated scenario, people resist to ditch Mastodon and go to Threads, for ideological reasons. The only ones who’d do it are the ones who are pissed at Twitter alone, and short-sighted enough to not realise that the issue with Twitter applies to traditional social media as a whole.

In the federated scenario, however, that resistance has been slowly degraded. Because Mastodon users are already interacting with Threads users, forging social bonds with them, and they’ll try to avoid to lose those bonds.

I’m more worried about the load if it truly gets big and mastodon and threads interact a lot, tbh.

I’m a bit worried about this, too. You toot something, it gets insanely popular, and now Threads users hug your instance to death, the old Slashdot effect.

*inb4 boiled frogs are bad science, but a good analogy.

I fully agree that it doesn’t matter for Lemmy right now. The issue is mostly Mastodon and Kbin, as both compete directly with Threads; and in a smaller scale Friendica, Matrix and PixelFed as they compete with FB/WhatsApp/IG.

The main reason why I support defederation is to not have users in Mastodon relying on contacts and content from Threads at all. Because, once Threads pulls off the plug (eventually they will want to), Mastodon won’t be some small but stable network; it’ll be a shrinking one, and that’s way worse.

Sorry for the wall of text.

What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn’t be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too?

The features don’t need to be impossible to reverse engineer; they could be costly enough to do so, rely on other FB/Meta platforms, or demand server capabilities past what you’d expect from typical Mastodon instances. For example:

• implementing some data format that is decoded by the front-end
• allowing you to access content from FB/IG/WhatsApp from Threads
• “we now allow big arse videos”.

and it’s unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can’t accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.

Killing a bird and a baby mammoth with a single stone, before they grow and invade your turf.

On one side you have Twitter/X; it bleeds money and Musk is an idiot, but he has enough money to throw at the problems until they go away, and he has a “vishun” about an “errything app” that would clearly compete with FB/IG/WhatsApp. On another you have the Fediverse; it’s small and negligible but it has potential for unrestricted growth, and already includes things like Matrix (that competes with WhatsApp) and Friendica (that competes with FB).

From Meta’s point of view, Twitter/X is by far the biggest threat. It could be addressed without federation, but by doing so would feed Mastodon, and a stronger Mastodon means a stronger Fediverse and this power would put Matrix, Friendica etc. in a better position. With federation however they can EEE one while killing another, and still advertise the whole thing as “I don’t understand, why you say that we have a monopoly over online communication? We’re even part of a federation? Meta plays nice with competitors. I’m so confused~”.

Portuguese ⟨bisonho⟩. I always used it as “needy”, “demanding excessive attention” (like a child). Until someone informed me that it was supposed to be “weird”.

They might not be inherently bad, but they’ll be likely bad depending on how it’s done, and Facebook isn’t to be trusted.

Just for the sake of example:

• What if Threads develops features that work well with the ActivityPub protocol, but since they’re closed-source they cannot be implemented by Mastodon instances?
• What if Threads implements asymmetric federation - where Threads users can interact with outsiders’ content, but outsiders cannot interact with Threads’ content?
• What if Threads has some bullshit term of agreement like “by using our platform you agree to have your data collected, and if you’re seeing this you’re already using our platform”?
• etc.

Note that Facebook has a long story of user-hostile decisions; as in, this crap wouldn’t be below its moral standards. So, while most of the time this would be FUD, in this case it’s just F, no uncertainty or doubt.

I think that Facebook is trying to kill the Fediverse and Twitter, before either becomes a real competitor.

It makes sense when you look at the big picture; Facebook’s power is mostly Facebook itself (connecting people), Instagram (sharing pictures), and WhatsApp (“private” [eh] messaging). Microblogging has a small market in comparison with those three, but it opens a door to them - so both the Fediverse and Twitter have room to expand right into FB’s turf.

So in the case of the Fediverse, if my reasoning is correct (dunno), the third “E” would be the traditional “extinguish”, not “exploit” as proposed in the OP.

I was wondering about what steps should be taken to quarantine (and possibly block/ban some of them) on the lemmy.ml instance?

I’ll tag two admins of the instance, as I don’t think that they’ll want this content: @joebidet@lemmy.ml, @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml

A lot of those users are already doing shady shit. HinduSher for example is clearly squatting on multiple comms, among them three (!bakchodi, !bharatvarsh, !bharatvarsha) that, while not intrinsically associated with fascism, do provide enough context for his username.

I won’t address everything because it’s a lot of text, OK? (I did read it though.)

I think that it’s more accurate to say that reasoning is a “tool” that you use to handle knowledge. And sure, without knowledge you aren’t able to use reasoning, but sometimes even with knowledge you aren’t able to do it either - we brainfart, fall for fallacies, etc.

Another detail is that ignorance is far more specific - a person isn’t just “ignorant”, but “ignorant on a certain matter”. For example it’s perfectly possible to be ignorant on quantum mechanics while being informed on knitting, or vice versa. In the meantime intelligence - and thus stupidity - is split into only a handful of categories (verbal, abstract, social, etc.).

To someone who knows more than us, they’d consider us stupid.

They’d consider us ignorant. At least if following the distinction that I’m emphasising.

When we talk about people being stupid or smart, we’re just reducing that complexity so we can make simplistic insults that make us feel better about ourselves, but ultimately aren’t saying anything meaningful about the human condition.

Not necessarily reducing it but I get your point, given that I think that it’s simply easier to talk about ignorance and stupidity as behaviour than as something inside our “minds” (whatever “mind” means). And in both cases it’s behaviour that we all engage; some more than others, but we all do.

It depends on the context. In some cases the person might be taunting you to defend your position, or simply trying to avoid some subject.

But let’s say that the person says this out of the blue, and is proselytising this view that human rights should be opposed. In this situation I believe that the person thinks that they benefit from denying human rights to other people; it’s mostly selfish. (And worse, stupid - the person will be likely in the short end of the stick.)

Yeah, I think that this is part of the deal.

When someone says “people are stupid”, they usually are not conveying “the average person has a lower-than-average intelligence”. And I don’t think that they’re even comparing people with some point of reference (the average, or themself, or someone else); in the context they’re usually criticising some behaviour that they see as stupid. For you this behaviour would be “living below their potential”, for me it’s “showing blatant lack of reasoning”, for @_danny@lemmy.world’s (from another comment) “lack of curiosity, drive to learn and critical thinking”.

Frankly, that is just a big pile of babble.

but “people” is defined [SIC] around the average person

There’s no “definition” here. The closest to what you said that would make some sense would be “but “people” implies a generalisation around the average person”, but it doesn’t work in your argument because it does not contradict what BananaTrifleViolin said. Nor it justifies your assumption that

by saying “stupid” is not defined around average intelligence, you’re really criticizing the phrase “people are stupid”…

I genuinely think that you did not understand what the other poster said, so I’ll repeat it under different words.

The comic has an implicit definition of stupidity as “lower than average intelligence” (see panel 2).

BananaTrifleViolin is highlighting that this is not the definition that people use for “stupid” when they say “people are stupid”. And that leads to a fallacy called “straw man”, where you misrepresent a position to beat it. Munroe (the cartoonist) is doing this, either by accident or on purpose. (It is not the first time he does this; his comic about free speech also shows the same irrationality.)

know

Wine is wine, bread is bread. Let us not conflate lack of reasoning (stupidity) with lack of knowledge (ignorance).

More like 90% of human actions are stupid, as I’m not sure if there’s an even split of “the stupid” and “the smart”, and plenty people mix both. (E.g. being oddly competent at something specific, only to vomit assumptions on something else.)

In special I feel like four types of stupidity became a bit too common, too harmful, too egregious. They’re the failure to handle:

• uncertainty - or, “how your belief might be wrong, and you’ll need to handle the case that it is wrong”
• complexity - or, “how small details have a profound impact on everything”
• undesirable possibilities - or, “how nature gives no fucks about your fee fees, and things don’t become true because you roll in wishful belief”
• context - or, “how things are never isolated, and you need to look outside the thing to understand the thing”

They’re intertwined, I think. And perhaps there’s something more important than those, but those four are the ones that I notice the most.

What you’re really saying is “other people aren’t as smart as me.”

I like xkcd but I feel like Munroe is being assumptive here, assuming “your expectations are based on you”. Are they?

Here’s the link.

Major mention, ani.social - here’s a link to the relevant discussion and the outcome, from ani.social’s PoV.

Now you’re really straining.

You do realise that this reads a lot like an implicit acknowledgement that you’re a failure to counter any argument contradicting your claim… right? “Run to the hills!”