this is so fucking stupid though. almost everyone reads books and/or watches movies, and their speech is developed from that. the way we speak is modeled after characters and dialogue in books. the way we think is often from books. do we track down what percentage of each sentence comes from what book every time we think or talk?

very interesting point

this is what i’m frustrated with. why do all these engineers let themselves be told what to do even if it makes a worse-functioning tool? that’s not real engineering.

“because they’ll get fired”

not if enough of them do the thing that should’ve been what got them interested in engineering in the first place.

maybe we shouldn’t call them engineers, but something else relating to being the one who does the dirty work for institutions that aim to steal people’s attention and decrease their quality of life.

and if they do get fired, then they should join together and make the reasonable company that makes good tools for human use.

ok, you make good points, but i feel like the algorithm could work to not have the system grind to a halt. i’d have to look at other examples where this has been done. but maybe i am overly-optimistic and it’s not possible.

who would pay for those nodes you are querying

the people who are already running nodes, like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, me, etc. i run some services on my home server that i let anyone use, because i have the hardware and the bandwidth to be able to afford it. there are enough people who have the necessary hardware and bandwidth to contribute to it at minimal detriment to them. it’s already an open-source project where people volunteer their time to code it.

i’ll read up on oxen network.

in an anonymous way

wait who said anything about anonymous? what are talking about being anonymous? there would still be user accounts.

if I don’t want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I’ll have to fine someone to do it for me

this is already what is done, except that the data is not stored in a replicated and distributed manor. you get all the posts in the world of a community of an instance. it is one server, with all the data stored on its harddrive, like a traditional website. in what i’m proposing, this is also what would happen in many cases, because the thing wouldn’t requery the entire network every time you request posts, there would be a time threshold, like how posts are cached on your local mobile device for most social media apps. posts would be cached on the server.

now, yes, this architecture would in fact result in more network traffic occurring between each and every node, as they receive updates about events on other nodes. so that would be extra burden upon the hosts. but i believe it is something we can work through.

1. you connect to some lemmy instance on your web browser
2. the client application (lemmy web app) authenticates your login credentials by first checking its own user database, if it doesn’t find you (which it should because by default you’d be connecting to an instance that you’ve already used, and if done through a mobile app for example it would automatically find the best instance to use by lowest latency), it send out a message to the nodes(instances) that it knows about, searching for your user, recursively, when found, sent back and stored in each node that was part of the searching. (there’d be some threshold of tree depth so the unsuccessful branches don’t keep going forever, and some other algorithmic details to prevent redundant network activity)
3. you navigate to your subscribed communities feed, lemmy shows you the posts that are already on the node that you are directly connected to, then asynchronously sends out a request to the surrounding nodes to pull more posts from those communities, recursively reaching out to adjacent nodes, again avoiding repeatedly hitting the same node via algorithmic details which we can discuss further if you wish, sending back the info up the tree to your primary node. now a bunch of servers have duplicated community data, like a distributed storage system, but you, the user, don’t know about all that stuff that just happened behind the scenes. your GUI is updated accordingly
4. now you can interact with these posts, make new posts, and each interaction will be sent out to all the relevant nodes in a reverse process.
5. another user on the other end can visit some community that you just posted to, and a request will again be propagated through the network, but starting from his node, and eventually reaching some node that has your new post.

the advantages of this:

• if a node goes down, not all of the community and user data is lost, because its neighbor nodes have replicated the data
• if i am hosting a node, and have limited bandwidth and storage, i can specify limits so that my network is not unintentionally DoSed. so this implies that when the prior-described processes are occurring, some instances will not store the data they are pushing through, which is fine, and one of the intended features of this distributed architecture
• similar to previous point, each instance can have a whitelist or blacklist of communities (for either storage and/or data passing), defined by the admin, if he/she wishes to tailor the content for example to keep it related to content they are interested in rather than being forced to serve everyone on the network. it’s like if someone wants to help a little bit but they don’t have all the bandwidth and storage in the world, they can, instead of having to handle traffic for a bunch of irrelevant-to-them communities.

ok. so you are misunderstanding what i am proposing then.

i can explain in more detail any part of the design if you wish.

you want to strip all that out

i do not want to strip out the functionality of communities having mods that moderate the discourse and ban malicious users etc. it sounds like you misunderstood what i was proposing.

This is all different when building a social network

wait you want censorship in a social network? also, the architecture i’m describing does not do away with moderation and social structure. what about it makes you think that to be the case?

subject to the whims of global capitalism

so how can we make that not be the case? this is what engineers and innovators are thinking about. we are thinking about what the next system will be and planning how to get there.

the “term” technology has been corrupted. what people call “tech” is not tech, it is gadgetry.

so this is why i think that reasonable engineers (and most actual engineers are reasonable, hence being an “engineer”) should get together and make good stuff. stuff that is not corrupted by perverse incentives. an engineer is capable of understanding the flaws of an economy and how that can be detrimental to the functionality of some tool or system.

to expound:

the tankie instance or the nutballs on the fascist instance

here you reveal a conceptual misunderstanding, or rather, a part of the lemmy architecture which i disagree with. there shouldn’t be a concept of a “interest X instance” etc. it should be similar to a distributed storage model. so the concept of a community is not per-instance, it’s just an abstract thing that exists in conceptual space.

I thought things are distributed and are replicated across servers (much like how distributed storage and computing works)

yes, exactly! when you use the internet, you don’t manually choose which ISPs to route through. you can pick which DNS servers to use but you don’t have to. when you use youtube, netflix, or facebook, you don’t choose which CDNs to use.

everyone has all the duplicated data.

everyone does not have all the duplicated data. they only have the data that they need – the data requested by a user who happens to be using some instance.

handling defederating is a good point. there could be malicious nodes that would be damaging to the network. i suppose there could be a community-mainted ledger of known malicious nodes (similar to minecraft usernames of known hackers), and the admins of the servers would maintain a blacklist. (obviously you configure that your instance’s blacklist would be automatically synced with this ledger)

the mega community idea could be good. where is this being discussed?

no, you’re misunderstanding. that shouldn’t be how it works. there shouldn’t be any difference between the software on each instance such that it make your data insecure. this is how bitcoin works. this is why anyone can spin up a bitcoin instance and have it start contributing to the bitcoin blockchain and you as a user don’t have to “trust” that particular node. trust is built into the distributed software architecture. you don’t “choose” a set of bitcoin nodes. you don’t “choose” your CDN or DNS servers.

you already share water with them though. how is this any different? more seriously though, you already share internet infrastructure with them. the packets you just sent to make that comment could have been sandwiched between a “tankie” and a “fascist nutball”. that’s just the way it is man, there have always been crazy humans.

such bullshit. how can engineers not let this happen?

this is why instances should be abstracted away as underlying infrastructure and the users don’t have to think about “instances”. accounts and communities are replicated across servers.

i’m still just pissed that they renamed it to “play store”

“Those are just a few of the big transport visions that, just a few years ago, Silicon Valley told us were right around the corner.” where’s the source on this?