My principle of “blockchain’s fundamental value” is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.

To break that down further:

• “Valuable information” isn’t data - it’s something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn’t that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of “this is real” vs “this is Monopoly money” is related to the information quality.
• “Secures” means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it’s been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but “automatically secure” is all dependent on what application you’re aiming for.

You don’t need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by “what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them”, the maxi- “we will rule the world” cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical “VC-backed corporate blockchains”, but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.

What tends to break people’s brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn’t a case of “public” vs “private” goods. It’s more akin to “commons” vs “enclosed” spaces, which is an older notion that hasn’t been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, “Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?” And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.

And so there is a huge amount of spam around “ownership”, but ownership itself isn’t really a factor. That’s just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making “plays” and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.

My favorite example of “weird camera” is Journey to the Planets. It’s an Atari 800 game with graphics that are more 2600-esque. It’s mostly side view, but the proportions are abstract, like a child’s drawing: the spaceship is about 1/3rd the size of the player sprite, but then as you lift off it shows zoomed out terrain and the sprite is the same size. The game is based around solving adventure game puzzles with objects that are mostly just glowing rectangles, but your way of interacting with the puzzles involves a lot of shooting. Even though there’s so little detail, every room feels “hand-crafted”.

I’m pretty sure the game permanently altered my sense of aesthetics.

I’ve become comfortable with saying, “it’s not worth it being normal”, and thus am ok with the normie tag, even if I don’t want to turn it into a slur. Normal is a form of social construct that tends to be imposed on us: it’s when the teacher enters the classroom and the class sits down and shuts up, not because they explicitly agreed to, but because it was normalized. There isn’t anything in particular suggesting that normal = good.

And that does have an elitist ring to it, which does upset the goal of equitable outcomes in some ways. There are certain philosophies in which a premise of elitism is assumed, as in, some people just won’t be able to access the necessary understanding to participate, so it’s better to have a gate than to let anyone wander through. This is the view of Leo Strauss and followers - for a really detailed explanation try Arthur Melzer’s book Philosophy Between the Lines.

Even if you don’t read that book(it’s a good book), I would make the case in this way: it’s the difference between online gaming that uses automatic matchmaking, versus a martial arts dojo. Online gaming and toxicity correlate because there is no lower bar on who can play, so all sessions are pushed to the lowest common denominator of cheating, griefing, etc. But someone who participates in martial arts like a gamer gets kicked out of the gym, if the standards are high: an instructor who values students does not let them attempt to eyegouge each other or slam their head on the mat.

Occasionally someone like that will sign up for a tournament, commit an illegal move in the first round, and get themselves disqualified. But they can leave their opponent seriously injured in the process, and maybe end a career. So the standards tend to condition a degree of gatekeeping, respect for others, etc. Not every gym does well at this, and some styles like boxing have a norm of “hard sparring” where full-contact is trained and damage is expected. But predominantly the focus is on getting the techniques and training without destroying yourself or others.

And I do liken the idea of complete access to, essentially, allowing dirty street brawls to be the only kind of sparring, the only way in which you can interact online with strangers.

Martial artists also sometimes use the normie term. They will say it outright: you have to be a weirdo to spend so much time getting beat up and choked out. We can have a gate and still be tough on ourselves to do better.

Eugen is not the person I would trust for good judgment on this because his agenda has always been user growth-centric, so a Fediverse that resembles Facebook would just be a “yay” moment for him - either way he can still end up with a career by leveraging his role with ActivityPub.

That said, I don’t believe EEE works here, because AP evolved in an environment that already had to compete like-for-like with corporate options. You’ll still log in for the rest of the fediverse if it brings you better content than Threads…

…and it has an edge on that, because these spaces are not designed around herding around industrial quantities of users. They have a natural size at which moderators shrug and close the gates if a big instance is too troublesome, because it hurts the quality of the experience for their own users. This peeves instance admins who want the power fantasy of “owning” a lot of low-quality users, but it also basically guarantees defederation with corporate social, because it’s never been able to handle its own moderation problem other than in a “pass-the-buck” way.

I have no plans to support p92 precisely because it’s going to “push” users together as a commodity. What Meta has jurisdiction over is not its communities but rows of data - in the same way that Reddit’s admins have conflicted with its mods, it is inherently not organized in such a way that it can properly represent any specific community or their actions.

So the cost-benefit from the side of extant fedi is very poor: it won’t operate in a standard way, because it can’t, and the quality of each additional user won’t be particularly worth the pain - most of them will just be confused by being presented with a new space, and if the nature of it is hidden from them it will become an endless misunderstanding.

If a community using a siloed platform wants to federate, that should be a self-determined thing and they should front the effort to remain on a similar footing to other federated communities. The idea that either side here inherently wants to connect and just “needs a helping hand” is just wrong.

I believe there is a healthy relationship between instances and magazines, actually: the way in which topical forums tend to be “hive-mindy” fits well with Fediverse instance culture. The difference is that instead of Reddit-scaling leading in the direction of “locking down” topical discussion to be a bureaucratic game of dancing around every rule, because all users are homogenous - just a name, a score, and a post history - you can have “this board is primarily about this” but then allow in a dose of chaos, affording some privilege to the instance users who already have a set of norms and values in mind and pushing federated comments out of view as needed, where you know the userbases are destined to get into unproductive fights.

This also combats common influencer strategies applying bots and sockpuppeting, because you’ve already built in the premise of an elite space.

There’s work needed on the moderation technology of #threadiverse software to achieve this kind of vision, but it’s something that will definitely be learned as we go along.

The most universal mammal behavior I know of is not visual, it’s the “hi I’m here” bark or grunt. It’s something that was pointed out in a wildlife tour video where they visited mountain gorillas: if you don’t make any noise and their first indication is visual, you may have predatory intentions, but if you add a little “mm” noise, you’re just passing through and they can relax.

It works for many kinds of creatures, humans included.

Recently I entered the world of dip pens and got a set from Deleter: Dip pen holder, G-nibs, and the Black 4 Ink. The G-nib is the most common nib used in manga drawing. It needs some pressure to do its work, but it’s flexible enough to do thin and thick strokes.

They aren’t hugely expensive items - the nibs can be bought in large packs for a few dollars at stationary stores, and are made to last for a few months of heavy use each. The ink is a little more expensive. It’s the kind of thing where the results are better in that you can get some really sharp lines by using viscous ink that would clog anything else, but also, you’d only use it if you’re deep into working with ink and aren’t satisfied with felt fineliners. It’s just logistically harder to deal with keeping an ink pot secure on the desk, dipping the pen, cleaning the nib, putting everything away. Fountain pens are way more popular with collectors, but dip pens are workhorses and there’s almost nothing to troubleshoot, just “how do I keep ink from blobbing on it” (scrub off the protective factory coating with mild detergents or just using the ink itself) and “how do I clean it” (rinse with water).

The other tool of that type is the kolinsky sable brush - sable hair is more springy than synthetics. I am on the fence about actually getting one of those, my rubberized-felt brush pens do a decent job of getting the elements of brushes that I want, and cleaning brushes is more annoying.

Mastodon’s export portability mostly focuses on the local social-graph aspects(follows, blocks, etc.) and while it has an archive function, people frequently lament losing their old posts and that graph relationship when they move.

Identity attestment is solvable in a legible fashion with any external mechanism that links back to report “yes, account at xyz.social is real”, and this is already being done by some Mastodon users - it could be through a corporate web site, a self-hosted server or something going across a distributed system(IPFS, Tor, blockchains…) There are many ways to describe identity beyond that, though, and for example, provide a kind of landing page service like linktree to ease browsing different facets of identity or describe “following” in more than local terms.

I would consider these all high-effort problems to work on since a lot of it has to do with interfaces, UX and privacy tradeoffs. If we aim to archive everything then we have to make an omniscient distributed system, which besides presenting a scaling issue, conflicts with privacy and control over one’s data - so that is probably not the goal. But asking everyone to just make a lot of backups, republish stuff by hand, and set up their own identity service is not right either.

That is a tendency with long-running MMOs. Planetside has gone the same way and until the day the subreddit closed for the protest, there were zombie players in every thread gaslighting the community about a “dead game” that is still very alive. They can’t move on, there’s nothing like it.

If you look at the links by each post, you’ll notice that some will reference a URL that goes off of your local instance. In Lemmy these are icons, in kbin it appears from the “more” link. Sometimes it’s unclear who/where I’m interacting with and examining the URL helps me get some idea of it. In federated social media different instances often develop a different subculture, but since they can access each other you have more dimensions of interaction and how to behave.

I subscribe to the Tony Seba / RethinkX view that we are in a decade of multiple major technological disruptions - energy, agriculture, information, transportation. He’s lectured on the topic several times: https://youtu.be/z7vhMcKvHo8

Even if he is wrong about the details, it’s great hopium.

Follow admins and moderators on other instances, that starts federation.

Reputation will vary by which instance you’re on because it’s just a calculation of actions people have made, and those counts vary based on who subscribed to whom and when. If you’re on instance B and instance A and C are talking to you, but defederated from each other, you could be +100 when looking from A and -100 when looking from C. So the score will be increasingly meaningless-looking the more you are federated.

Meta attempts to federate and every user is immediately swarmed with bots that tell them to stop using Meta, a baby site for babies, forcing Meta to defederate.

This is essentially why there are a small number of “legacy” web sites that never got subsumed into the oligopoly - they have communities, the communities host content creators, if you want the fresh content you have to be where they are.

The thing that allowed communities to end up on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter was mostly a matter of traditional forum hosting being a challenging, technical thing with ongoing maintenance tasks and one account per forum you wanted to visit, instead of “button press and we do the rest”.

The result is that (at least so far) both the post and the hashtag has not federated to lemmy.ml, or to my Mastodon accounts. On kbin it appears, but backwards in time to when the topic was first posted.

Remember that fedi is “multi-dimensional” in that we have both community subscriptions and account-to-account follows. When I follow someone from my kbin account, the threads they post and boost start appearing in my “microblog” feed, and that can lead to community discovery. So one way to grow the community is to build microblogging awareness by encouraging follows and boosts, using hashtags, etc. There are already hashtags being used on fedi - actually, let me test something out here and see if I can get it to show up elsewhere:

#mastodon

To get the initial federation going, some kind of “subscribing” action has to take place, e.g. following a user.

Not dead, just sleeping. It’s a tougher, higher interest-rate market which cuts out a lot of the gambling behavior. I remain invested but my principle has shifted away from the financial and trad-economic terms to this:

Blockchains are valuable where they secure valuable information. Therefore, if a blockchain adds more valuable information, it becomes more valuable.

And that’s it. You don’t have to introduce markets and trading to make the point, but it positions those elements in a supporting role, and gets at one of the most pressing issues of today: where should our sources of truth online start? Blockchains can’t solve the problems of false sensation, reasoning or belief, but they fill in certain technical gaps where we currently rely on handing over custody to someone’s database and hoping nothing happens or they’re too big to fail. It’s just a matter of aligning the applications towards the role of public good, and the air is clear for that right now.