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Maybe Bluesky has "won"

(anderegg.ca)
461 points GavinAnderegg | 3 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.102s | source
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bsimpson ◴[15 Nov 24 21:24 UTC] No.42151280[source]▶
Decentralization feels like it's driven more than idealism/zealotry than pragmatism. In theory, I understand the appeal of owning your data. In practice, systems churn. I haven't had a portfolio in years, because I used AppEngine to host mine; they forced everyone to migrate to Python 3 after I'd built it, and I never bothered to update it. Meanwhile, everything I uttered on Facebook in college still exists. (And plenty of precious content that ended up on other services, like Qik, no longer does.)

If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

The Linux chat rooms are on Matrix because highly ideological people are active in Linux communities, but everyone else just uses Discord. And even Matrix has a webapp that makes it almost as easy as Discord.

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FactKnower69 ◴[15 Nov 24 21:42 UTC] No.42151468[source]▶
>If "owning" my data means I need to spend time learning a new format and setting up a way to publish that format on a domain I own, and then maintain it into the infinite future, the odds I'm gong to bother are very low.

Good! Higher barrier to entry is exactly why Neocities, Mastodon and [redacted] are so much higher quality than the NPC internet. We need a couple hurdles to keep out the low effort posters.

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doawoo ◴[15 Nov 24 21:47 UTC] No.42151538[source]▶
Last time I checked that’s called gatekeeping.

Neocities is a ton easier to try for “non-engineers”- it even has a discovery feed and a WYSIWYG editor…

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1. fragmede ◴[15 Nov 24 22:35 UTC] No.42152009[source]▶
Yeah but is it good gatekeeping or bad gatekeeping? Because having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one. And anyway, when did gatekeeping pick up such a negative, pejorative tone? The gatekeeper is the one who kept people out of the gate. Some people were kept out for good reasons, others were kept out for bad reasons. Depending on the gate and country politics, nobody or everybody was let in through the gate. That doesn't make gatekeeping inherently bad. Doctors gatekeep who can call themselves a doctor, and while there are broader problems with that, fundamentally, some random fraudster shouldn't be able to call themselves a doctor sell rat poison in a pretty box as cure for cancer. There are some kinds of gatekeeping that are bad, but it's not inherently so.
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2. ◴[16 Nov 24 00:54 UTC] No.42153151[source]▶
3. beeflet ◴[16 Nov 24 02:25 UTC] No.42153598[source]▶
>having to agree to a code of conduct is a gate, but I don't think we want to remove that one

depends on who you ask.

but in general I think that the goal of gatekeeping should be to filter out bad candidates without filtering out good candidates. You could imagine that for a medical degree, if students were graded on exams based on their handwriting and spelling that many otherwise good candidates would be eliminated, which is bad. So we want to avoid arbitrary gates and uphold meaningful gates.

If we are talking about gatekeeping new technology, we might want almost everyone who uses it to grasp it well, so it does not become a system of organized control. It may be reasonable to allow the technology to filter those who struggle with its inherent problems, but it would be good to avoid filtering out people due to the tech's unnecessary complexity (complexity based on its implementation, for example). So it is good to cull this unnecessary complexity of the system.

For example, a good gate for technology is making sure users understand the modular aspects of it (for example on linux this would be commands and unix pipes) and how to repurpose those modules for their own needs. A bad gate in this case might be bash syntax.