setrofim_

Seems to be back up (10:41 GMT)

Down for me too, as of 10:38 GMT

> It is the most populus federated network I have seen.

Yes, same; but that's kind of the point. Mastodon is the best effort I have seen so far; which is why it was disappointing to see it falter shortly after it started to really pick up.

There seem to be a mass exodus from Twitter (at least, among the people I follow), precipitated by Twitter's latest unwelcome UI tweaks. Initially, it seemed really cool -- it was specifically addressing Twitters biggest pain points (longer messages, chronological timeline, saner threading), and was OSS and federated to boot.

However, quickly the veiner started to crumble, with there appearing to be an increasing number of issues, such as undelivered DMs, scrambled threads, dropped mentions. A lot of them seemed specifically related to interactions between federated instances. To make matters worse, the UI seemed to be getting increasingly slower.

Eventually, the combined frustrations, and to some extent perhaps network effects, resulted to gradual return back to Twitter.

This is, admittedly, a skewed view based on the observation of the small slice of Twitter community that I follow, and my own limited experience with the platform (spanning a few weeks).

I am still hoping that Mastodon (or something like it) makes it, but I'm not holding my breath.

> but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"?

Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it.

Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post:

"Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about."

He notes two issue in particular:

- Degradation of UX

- Loss of development effort

From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve.

All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is...

[edit: grammar, formatting]

Yes, fair point. This is a common problem for social studies. One must keep in mind and be explicit about the population the study sample is drawn from; and very cautious about extrapolating the findings to other populations.

First of all, thank you for sharing your experience. It was insightful, and I completely agree with your criticism of the article.

I would like to make a small, and perhaps somewhat pedantic comment regarding your last statement:

>In my own humble opinion the only "science" that matters on this subject are the opinions of those whom have lived it and recovered. Go survey the opiate addicts that didn't end up dead and find out what worked for them.

There is a problem of silent evidence and survivor bias here. What is important is not what they did that led to their recovery, but what they did differently (or, more generally, what was different in their circumstances) from those that tried to recover, but didn't.

So, IMHO, what is needed is not _just_ the opinions of those that recovered, but a longitudinal study to identify which, out the many factors that were involved in the recovery process, have been the most instrumental.

> In that case, surely the professor should be commenting on the original assessment, not any paper that accepts the published literature?

She does. Most of the criticism in the blog post is directed towards the findings in the previous studies. The professor explicitly disqualifies herself from discussing the findings of the current study, as they are outside her area of expertise. The criticism of this paper is that it fails to distinguish sufficiently clearly its a priori assumptions from the conclusions drawn from the present findings.

> I don't know what the "political implications" means. I think I've missed something. Did Trump tweet about it or something? I don't know why this would have any political implications at all.

I meant gender politics, rather than the US national politics.

You are right, the authors of the paper only claim that their results demonstrate a); they are, however, assuming b) based on previous studies.

What the Professor is arguing, as I understand it, is that those previous studies do not necessarily warrant the assumption of b), and thus the paper's title "A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics" is misleading -- there has been a confirmation of "female", but not of "warrior". Something like "Skeleton, that some evidence points to being that of a warrior, was confirmed to be female"; but that's not as pithy or sensationalist.

Those not reading the paper sufficiently carefully (or at all -- only limiting themselves to the title and the abstract) will end up drawing conclusions unjustified by the paper. Which, given the political implications, may be undesirable.

[edit: grammar]

Yup, it's kind of surprising "traditional news outlets" didn't make that list.

It's nice to see something like this being proposed, but, the NHS probably have a tonne of bespoke software running on top of Windows, all of which would need to be ported. And given the fact that they don't have the funding to even keep their existing systems patched and up-to-date, a full-on migration is out of the question, unless the cash is raised...

Well, there'd be a massive box for systemd in userspace, udev, dbus...

Reminds me of:

here was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.

-- George Orwell, 1984

It's misalignment of incentives rather than stupidity (well, in some cases, maybe also stupidity). Governments make decisions from one election cycle to the next. So taking on debt that will be some future administration's problem in order to finance public projects now, and increase the current administration's popularity makes perfect sense.