MudMan

I just don’t think that’s a reasonable view, and it’s certainly a marginal one in the community. Nobody is out there claiming that the core feature of Fedi apps is self-hosting a tiny social network for your friends, disconnected from every other piece. The selling point is supposed to be that your tiny, self-hosted instance is still connected to this distributed, crowdsourced larger network.

Building a social network sure is hard and requires a building a lot of software, but unlike other pieces of software, social networks carry a LOT of additional costs to run at scale and make no sense to run without the scale. You can host Jellyfin for your small group of friends. Maybe a chat server or a list service, not a forum or a link aggregator.

In any case, even if you are an outlier and see that as a valid use case, that’s definitely not a majority view, and the Fedi community has both ambitions to get larger and an expectation that this will be done with effective moderation baked into the service. You and I agree on the existence of that problem, we just disagree on the resulting state after it surface.

You’re still thinking about it as an asymmetrical problem. Taking one portion that has a problem and isolating that from the rest. I’m saying if every part has the same problem that doesn’t solve it AND it means the entire network is no longer interoperable, which was the entire point from the start.

What you’re ultimately saying is that you can have a small interoperable network or a large centralized network, but not both. Which, if you’re right, begs the question of why try to decentralize and federate in the first place if you don’t have a solution to secure that arrangement.

And, to be clear, even in that scenario now you have an isolated, self-run social network that has exactly the same moderation issues and running costs as Reddit or any other alternative.

I am old enough to remember that IRC had more in common with 4chan than modern social media and that moderation of atomized, non-interoperable forums was either just as bad or handled at much smaller scales by people with commercial interests.

You care about how many bad actors there are if they are enough to be in every instance. Again, you’re presuming that bad actors will choose a specific instance to populate. You can’t defederate from every instance that allows people to sign up or you end up with a group chat instead of a social network.

That’s the Fedi-wide problem to solve if it ever gets truly popular. If I put together a bot farm or a sweatshop tomorrow that targets every instance of every Fedi app with multiple spam signups per minute how would you stop that? Especially if I’m not immediately posting spam and instead generating bad content slowly over time.

What if instead of one person doing it it was thousands? How high are the garden walls at that point? Is there anybody left inside them?

“There are tools to do that” is a bold assertion, but nobody has been able to explain to me what those tools are or how they’d work at scale. I’m all ears. Even if I don’t think it’ll be needed I’d love to know what the plan is, if there is one.

Agreed, for sure. If anything, decentralization makes those things harder, I’d say. And also agreed that there are benefits to decentralization along the lines you mention. Those two things can be true at the same time.

I think it’d be cool to figure out what the toolset to handle those issues is before they become a problem. Or, honestly, just because figure it out would be a meaningful challenge and may move the sorry state of social media in the right direction just in general. That said, there is a LOT of overcomplacent assumptions, at least in the userbase, regarding decentralization being a magic bullet. I think the development side is a lot less… I don’t want to say naive, but a lot more realistic about the challenges, in any case.

No, see, you’re assuming that this is a problem for one instance. Which makes sense because there’s nobody here and not much incentive to target people who are.

If you’re the size of a Twitter (and that’s a couple hundred million accounts) or a Facebook (about ten times that), then there are more than enough people to be targeted by more than enough bad actors to swamp EVERY instance with more spam sign-ins than Beehaw ever had, legitimate or not.

And you have nothing to stop bad actors from spinning up entire instances, which you then have to moderate individually, too.

You can’t defederate from every instance that gets hostile accounts because the logical thing if you’re a malicious actor is to automate signups to ALL available instances. Spam is spam is spam. You do it at scale. And you can’t shut down all signups on all instances if you want to provide the service at scale.

There is no systemic solution to malicious use. If there was, commercial social media would have deployed it to save money, at least when they were still holding to the pretense that they moderate things to meet regulations. Moderation is hard and expensive, and there are no meaningful federation-wide tools to manage it in place. I don’t even know if there can be. The idea that defederation and closing signups will be enough at scale is clearly not accurate. I don’t even think most of the big players in making federation apps would disagree with that. I think the hope is the tools will grow as the needs for them do. I’m not super sure of how well that will go, but I’m also not sure things will get big enough for that to matter at any point soon.

Yep. People around here love to attribute some magic powers to decentralization it definitely does not have. The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups. If anything, the decentralization makes it significantly harder to scale up moderation, on top of all the added costs of hosting volunteer social media servers.

That said, I’m not concerned at this point. There is nowhere near enough growth happening to make this be a problem for a long time. Masto worried about it legitimately for like twenty minutes back in some of the first few exodus incidents, before all the normies got alienated and landed on Bluesky.

Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, it feels all retro and kinda like 90s forums, but “what if it gets so popular it’s swamped with bad actors” is VERY low in my list of priorities. We have like two spammers and they’ve become local mascots. Mass malicious engagement is NOT the concern at the moment.

Ah, hey, everybody going “everybody else doesn’t get it, but I do”, we finally see an example of not getting it in the wild.

See, my problem with this is how everybody is silently appending “except for me” to this opinion.

You’re going to pretend we’re not on that timeline right now? I see your play, time traveller.

If I’m reading this right this still required a manual clickthrough (seemingly forced through a fake video player) and running an executable, right? The description is simultaneously very detailed and fuzzy on the social engineering portion.

Analysis of the redirector chain determined the attack likely originated from illegal streaming websites where users can watch pirated videos. The streaming websites embedded malvertising redirectors within movie frames to generate pay-per-view or pay-per-click revenue from malvertising platforms. These redirectors subsequently routed traffic through one or two additional malicious redirectors, ultimately leading to another website, such as a malware or tech support scam website, which then redirected to GitHub.

Not to say you don’t want an adblocker for security reasons, but still, the implication in the reporting is “have an ad pop up, get infected”, when it was more “click on the “watch PopularseriesS02e04” prompt, fail multiple times due to it being an obvious scam, get prompted to download some files, install said files, get infected”.

Seems like a weird preconception in the first place. I mean, who goes to an opera and wonders if the singers wrote the music? Or watches a movie and wonders if the actors wrote the script?

I don’t even know that non-British places have such a brazen pledge of loyalty to the monarch in the first place.

The one place where I’ve lived that was a Constitutional Monarchy didn’t have public figures swear an oath to the monarch, they just pledge to follow the Constitution (just looked it up, members of the government do mention the monarch in passing, members of parliament do not).

The monarch does pledge to follow the Constitution when they become the monarch, though, so it’s mostly the other way around. At a glance, this seems to be a pretty standard formula.

Brits and the people they’ve permanently damaged just seem particularly into the whole tradition of monarchy and haven’t really toned it down as much as other places. Not that other monarchies don’t have their zealots, but it’s a bit of a different role.

This is true, and I keep forgetting that’s the default to this day until I see it on someone else’s computer and I’m actually startled.

I was downloading a bunch of suspicious crap, but I also was… you know, not opening executables? I feel like you heard a lot about more sophisticated attacks back then, but most of the bad stuff was super obvious. But maybe my experience is not typical, I don’t know.

Did you guys get a lot of viruses in the 00s? I remember bumping into it more back in the good old disk days, where we got infected with skin-to-floppy contact, as the lord intended.

I will choose to believe my eyeballs on that count, but thanks for your contribution, I suppose?

This is a real issue with stereoscopy, in that it’s hard to talk about and there isn’t a guarantee that people’s perception of it is identical. Here, for example, I don’t know what you mean by “blurry”.

Potentially you could be talking about the ghosting effect you see when the lenses aren’t properly lined up with your eyes. I find that is entirely resolved by the eye tracking unless you’re moving the console around on the what, three different New 3DSs I have used for any length of time. I can’t guarantee something about your eyes or your 3DS isn’t different, though. I can only tell you I have a 3DS in front of me right now and I’m tilting it every which way and I see no ghosting as long as the camera gets line of sight to my face.

Or you could be talking about resolution. Because the way 3DS stereoscopy works is by angling alternate lines of pixels to each eye there is a horizontal resolution change on the display between 2D and 3D, although your brain should sort most of it out when overlapping the two images. I’m sitting here with a 3DS in front of me typing this and flipping the slider on and off and the image doesn’t lose any resolution to my eyes, it just goes deep. Can I promise that your brain is parsing the half-res-per-eye the same way mine does? I guess not.

All I can tell you is the effect is rock solid for me and I would take it on a tablet or laptop any day with no improvements (although I’d like to see how much further it can be pushed with modern tech). This is non-negotiable and the results of real life testing in real time right the heck now. Unfortunately for the same reason I can also not sit here and tell you that you aren’t seeing what you’re seeing. I can only report on what I see.

They abandoned many things when transitioning to the Switch. Most notably home consoles. I wouldn’t extract too many conclusions from that train of thought.

But yeah, I’m not saying the 3DS stereo display was hugely popular, even if the console itself did pretty well. Clearly a bunch of people were very hostile to it (and to every other variant of 3D display) right off the bat and never looked back. If the meme of “I switched the 3D slider down and never touched it again” popular at the time didn’t show that this thread seems to be good proof.

I’m saying people were extremely wrong about that and I’m surprised that the massive improvement in the New 3DS flew under the radar enough for some people to not even be aware that it happened. The tech absolutely works, and the two iterations Nintendo did absolutely show that it can be implemented very effectively for cheap.

2014. It had a bigger screen, eye tracking for the stereo 3D, a built-in second stick nub thingy and a bit more performance. It came in two sizes, to match the OG and XL versions of the base model.

Kinda nuts that this fell through the cracks for some people. The improvements to the stereo tracking were dramatic.

The 3D display on the 3DS was absolutely treated way more harshly than it deserved because it landed smack in the middle of the hipstery meme of claiming 3D cinemas were a scam and 3D TVs sucked. Both of those things had different degrees of grains of truth at the core, but none of them really applied to the 3DS.

If that’s your hangup, I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree, because I WILL hold to that. It happened and it was absolutely the children who were wrong. You know because they weren’t even done being unreasonably mad at 3D displays for sheer mob dopamine when they started getting hyped about putting the same 3D displays on their face, which had most of the same issues plus made everybody puke in the crappy early iterations. I’ve kept a mental naughty list of all the games journalists that were super snarky about 3D monitors and the 3DS but immediately fawned over Palmer Luckey because, man, did that bit of flip-flopping not age well.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there, because the point I’ve been making all along is that I am surprised at people not realizing that the New 3DS fixed the shortcomings of the original when it came to stability and viewing angles. For the umpteenth time.

I also sniped your googling, but hey, the count you found gives it a few extra million over the one I found, so that’s neat. Again, that puts it ahead of the Dreamcast, the Game Gear and the Saturn and just behind the PS Vita in terms of units moved. I think you’d be surprised if somebody showed up not realizing that one of those existed. That seems reasonable. More relevantly to the point, you don’t need to have owned one to be aware of this. Not only were these on display kiosks all over the planet (because 3D was and remains hard to market otherwise), but this was the big selling point. It was all over reviews of the new models.

And again, I’m not saying people do remember and are lying, I’m surprised at the fact that they don’t remember. Or at least that they don’t remember so hard they’re willing to be confidently wrong about it online. Which seems both reasonable and entirely up to me, to be honest.

Was it?

Look, you seem very keen on having an argument about this, but this conversation so far boils down to:

-3DS did this well. -No, it didn’t. -Oh, I meant the New 3DS that made it better. I didn’t realize people didn’t know about that one. -People probably didn’t know about that one.

While we’re at it, the 3DS sold 75 million units. There are probably way more people out there who tested a New 3DS than a Dreamcast.

EDIT: Made me check. 10 million units, as per Wikipedia. I would have guessed higher, but hey, I was still right, it’s more than the Dreamcast.