Egregoros

@shibao @shibao I am somewhat more optimistic than you about letting the normies filter themselves, I think.

> here is the pudding: every single tech trend can now be labeled a form of devolution. the attempt to reify nostalgia like bbses, newsgroups, irc servers, phpBB forums, windows vista rices, devolution. the retreat to self-hosted open source software, devolution. the evacuation to alternative social media, devolution. the fortified bunker of local-first, devolution.

I do disagree with this. I don't see low-resource or self-hosted systems as devolution. I think we had this marvelous internet built by clever people and then we got herded into the boomernet and people lost skills. DIY is good shit, I think: I don't think amateur radio is like a devolved version of broadcast radio. You flip on an FM station or satellite radio, right, and you receive a transmission, you don't get to dick around with antennas and you don't have to solve any equations or account for lensing or do any improvised engineering. It's a fundamentally different activity. Fedi is like a side-effect of all the fun hacking. I learned more about Postgres by doing Pleroma than I have during my entire professional career: at work either the scale was too small to matter or the scale was large enough that there was a DBA and coders didn't get to touch, but I debugged my shit and helped people debug theirs and there's a lot of stuff you find out when the budget is nil that you do not find out when the DBA files a ticket to get a bigger machine and bitches about replication. I mean, I was on Twitter but I didn't really give a shit about Twitter: I give a shit about fedi because of fedi but also because there are weird hacks. And not just that, but I get to see things I wouldn't see otherwise. The FBI thing, right, I wouldn't have learned anything about the innards of FBI data harvesting if that hadn't happened. (I recall you mentioning that it was prudent to be cautious about catching an obstruction charge; I don't know if I showed you the full post-mortem but it's here: https://blog.freespeechextremist.com/blog/fse-vs-fbi.html .) When there are about to be major events, like, the October 6 thing was preceded by about a week of massive upticks in ssh brute-force attacks. German feds, I was barely aware that German feds *existed* until they showed up on my server.

> to recapture that bell labs magic

So, and had some interesting thoughts on this, and basically spelled it out in one of his write-ups, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System", that even though Multics was a failed project, it had cemented the idea of what he called "communal computing": hackers sharing a box, trading code around without friction, wandering through each other's home directories, hanging out in the machine room and sharing a machine. I think it's understated but I think that's the core of the magic and I think also that not as many people understand this. On a good day, fedi gives you a fraction of that (in between all the goddamn political threads).

My theory on the boomernet is essentially that people were herded there: the fade of broadcast media meant that the feds no longer had the option of calling up the handful of people that owned all the newspapers/TV stations/radio stations. When phones were the primary means of communication, they could tap a line. They had a handful of phone companies to deal with, they could just ask for what they needed. Along came the internet and it got real murky when that started being the primary means of communication. Google's got direct DoD ties, and if you look, all of the "social media" companies have DoD ties. So the mall internet won, but I think that was temporary. So I view it as the embers being stoked rather than dying out.

> and if not for all those just educating themselves, cleaning apartments, trying to raise families, finding lifelong partners (i will be alone forever if you couldn't tell already), and building things.

See, I remember how things were before 9/11. These are the things people concerned themselves with before everyone got extremely literal-minded ("Um, sweaty, actually a whale is not a fish and I have no idea what figurative language is"), intolerant of ambiguity (I couldn't figure out why Avenue 5 was cancelled because it was great but the IMDB reviews commonly complained that they weren't sure who the "target" of the satire was, meaning that they didn't know if it was a funny show or not until they could be reassured that they were laughing at a comfortable/safe target group), and also grandiose ("Fuck making life better for the handful of people near me: if it doesn't change the world, it's not worth doing"). Starting from Carter's election and continuing until the last election, boomers were the *majority* of voters. I view boomers as the aberrant form and I think culture is healing, but it's like, people didn't receive culture from the boomers per se: it was the prepackaged generation, you know, they received culture rather than creating it, they didn't really pass it down.

> the endless flood of p-zombie normies

This is another thing about fedi, IRC, etc.: people bitch and moan that you can't attach an image to an IRC channel. They want to use Discord and if they're moderately clever, Matrix. "This book has no pictures!" They get confused by fedi: it's complicated, they don't like it. So they don't come here. The FediBBS client has kind of a "I'm goddamn sick of normies ruining my life" manifesto in the README ( https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fedibbs;a=blob;f=README;h=50d1d4950a49500d32c32433f29b94452ccafbf9;hb=HEAD ) and some of the other docs and it's like...this is what I want, I made a client that does what I want a client to do and it makes zero compromises to placate people that I don't want to talk to, let alone be flooded with. I think this was the main problem with Soapbox, like, I know I've ranted about this ad nauseum but it *looks* like Twitter and there was the very short-term "It gets people that don't understand fedi to use fedi" and what made anyone think that was a good idea? If you show up somewhere and it *looks* different, this primes you to understand that it *works* differently: making it look exactly like Twitter just let people slip into treating fedi like Twitter. Then they complain that Twitter features are missing: they wanted quote-posting so they could dunk on $outgroup. And the shitty normie Twitter slapfights came here.

And not just normies themselves: once you have enough normies, you attract people that want to manipulate normies. You see the German feds call fedi "the hydra on the web" ( https://media.freespeechextremist.com/rvl/full/faa13e7f66b7ff9e97634aaf04f6fd4faab95cf3931080fd03b0d98d76c7df2a ) and talk about the difficulties of using NetzDG as a pretext for eliminating "misinformation". You get political shills, you get broadcast-only callous use of the platform to push views (whether they're pushing their own views or they're shilling for someone else) like 90% of Mastodon, or you get political NGOs like NewsMast that are here just to push politics. I think these people get in the way of hackers talking to hackers. (Speaking of NewsMast, the way I found them was their botfarm picked it up when I had this MRF on for a while: https://git.freespeechextremist.com/gitweb/?p=fse;a=blob;f=lib/site/mrf/shut_yr_mouth_about_them_politics.ex;h=2d861996b79deb2a1df69f59fa2d18a0472ff966;hb=HEAD . Essentially it tag-stuffed every post from FSE with political hashtags and NewsMast started scraping FSE and retweeting the lainbot.)

So if the normies go elsewhere, I'm actually *happy*.

> so too will the online platforms be transferred to the quasi-governmental organization of uhhh, checks notes, the us tech oligarchy and palantir

I like your optimism, but I think this already happened.

> the only ones that remain will be the true nerds again, the autists and the schizoids and the dysgenic, the weirdos among weirdos, the outcasts among “outcasts”,

I see no problem with this. There's U-235 and U-238 and you only get critical mass if you have enough U-235 with less U-238. U-235 is only fissile if it's more than 90% of the material: any more U-238 and you get poor yield. Adding more U-238 for broad consumer appeal just gives you a shittier bomb.

@p@fsebugoutzone.org

> I don't see low-resource or self-hosted systems as devolution

here is my rebuttal. a lot of interesting things is happening in low-resource or self-hosted systems, but if you scroll through awesome self-hosted you're going to find a lot of items which look, sound, and accomplish almost verbatim what an existing enterprise service did. For instance, flip between uptime kuma and uptimerobot, you're really not going to see much of a difference except one of them did a lot of pioneering work to build a successful model and the other imitated it within free software legal constraints. i am very appreciative and supportive of free software yet i will still clearly point out that a vast majority of self-hosted applications are merely "vegan" versions of "non-vegan" offerings, and the few that are genuinely unique, are almost always started before the advent of ai-agent-driven development. they may be the low-background steel of our time. so while there may yet still be an interesting or two projects that are doing something interesting, the vast majority of the self-hosting "community/scene" is overall regressive even though they are making often, objectively better architected and designed software that can even surpass the proprietary inspirations they started with. low-resource items are interesting and have a much higher percentage of interesting novel work, but they depend heavily on the almost waste products of absolutely massive systems. if the massive companies like espressif or TI or whatever stop producing chips, all low-level work besides like specialized military campaigns would be massively screwed. without massive taiwanese fabs, and even with us-only fabs online, we would still be massively screwed. the closest boards fabbable at home are similar to the boards made in the 50s, there's really no alternatives that do not depend on absolutely massive megacorporations to work. so as all these massive corporations have decided to forgo all their consumer capacity in favor of ai datacenter components, this field too is regressive.

I learned more about Postgres by doing Pleroma than I have during my entire professional career

same, self-hosting on linux has vastly improved my efficiency and effectiveness as a software developer, and i can recommend it for everyone who wants to improve their computing

I don't know if I showed you the full post-mortem but it's here

I read it and enjoyed it extremely much, thank you for producing it!

@p@fsebugoutzone.org

I think also that not as many people understand this

I also think that this was much more dependent on the connection to the core flame than he or others realized. the milieu and zeitgeist, but even more broadly which I call the flame I think provided a lot of invisible fuel for that bustling nature. i really like the chinese word 熱鬧 (rè nao) which basically translates to hot + noisy, and represents the nature of like a shoulder-to-shoulder asian night or day street market. sure that many of them were on the street to purchase their groceries, but without the long term migration patterns that caused the density and foot traffic in the area to be as populous as it is, the market would not have had the success that it would've had, regardless if it's set in a particularly convenient location, etc. in the olden days, every single computer user was regularly in their home directory for almost everything, and yet nowadays people won't even view their desktop, as it has been supplanted with an app directory.

My theory on the boomernet is essentially that people were herded there

it's less that they were herded and more that it was the only path that is available for their level of skill and effort, but mostly the effort. i'm sure most normies could do a 8-10 mile hike through dubiously maintained trails if they wanted, but their complete lack of effort means they will only take a couple loops through a tiny, paved concrete path, so I highly believe the level of skill or advertising or propaganda should take little of the blame. one can argue that propaganda and advertising can result in an echo chamber that leads to this herding, but in my opinion the amount of effort required to break out of these domains is so incredibly small, especially when there is nothing physically blocking most people in western nations with free internet access from doing so. maybe this has changed in countries like the UK in recent years, but it still does not explain the overarching trend that one can argue started with facebook's rise in popularity over a decade or two ago. it is the sad truth that normies do not care at all if their watering holes are completely captured, as long as they can still drink and it doesn't kill them.

@p@fsebugoutzone.org

if you look, all of the "social media" companies have DoD ties

i think i first learned about this when I was in middle or high school, and it was fascinating to me. it's such a history hidden in plain site, and the published memoirs are fascinating. and it can't be understated how interesting that it extends to almost every single social media platform they are using as well. it makes me think of a lot of enterprise business hidden behind the veneers of the public offerings, how much of facebook's apparatus dedicated to not just fbi compliance, but like legal and financial compliance for third world shitholes? how much of it was dedicated to bribing those officials? it is not out of the question that they might have had personal corporate entourages, and things like that fascinates me.

So I view it as the embers being stoked rather than dying out

i'm confused how you can take this view immediately after describing an entire natural flourishing of social media formats being co-opted and whitewashed by political machinations. embers needing to be stoked implies that they are dying out, and stoking implies that new material is added, i am pretty sure this is not the case, except maybe idk, vine and tiktok. tiktok is just a happenstance chinese copy of vine which was snuffed out before it could even really hit escape velocity. i'm not even sure we will even get another geniuinely inspired social media format, the latest batch (threads, periscope, etc) has been completely co-opted and guaranteed their failures from the start. all new potential social media will be regressive unless the entire apparatus reverses, which is guaranteed not to happen. that is not to say there will never be new value provided by innovative new social media sites like farcaster or something (if it even counts lmfao), but by definition of always remaining fringe from now on, is categorically regressive.

These are the things people concerned themselves with before everyone got extremely literal-minded, intolerant of ambiguity, and also grandiose

i'm not sure i share this perspective, i think they moved on from places that you could bring yourself to look. the youths are still alive and well in their tiktok microcommunities, twitter niches, and discord servers. but they suck to be in and you are completely justified to disregard these. however, they still exist.

I view boomers as the aberrant form and I think culture is healing

most definitely. however, my awareness of even my own generation is greatly distorted because i am not very aware of the undercurrent of my generation that has degraded to neetdom in their parents houses, and whatnot. i hear about them a lot through secondhand circumstances though. i just never come into contact with them for some reason (i know the reason).

they didn't really pass it down

but this is the point, they wouldn't need to pass it down if the flame was still present, i think is my proposal

@p@fsebugoutzone.org

If you show up somewhere and it looks different, this primes you to understand that it works differently: making it look exactly like Twitter just let people slip into treating fedi like Twitter.

perfect. but this goes back to the effort, these people literally are not capable of providing even a fraction of the effort required, and are thus practically subhuman for the purposes of this discussion, although they are not compeletly subhuman like as if they dispensed with objective moral principles in favor of tribalism or postmodernism. but functionally they act the same, and thus are the same practically.

And the shitty normie Twitter slapfights came here.

but where did the shitty normie twitter slapfights come from? i am postulating that they emerged as inevitabily as twitter's rise in the first place, as it stems from the same source, the strength and lifecycle of the flame.

you attract people that want to manipulate normies

again, the lifecycle of the flame, the end is as inevitable as the beginning. i have an entire separate manifesto that i handwrote with fountain pens on pieces of paper about what I dub the subsection of the flame population that arrive earlier as the "nouveau". i forget what i called these people, but i have a word for them as well lmao. anyways i had been stuck on a worthwhile conclusion besides "wow it's cyclical but like centrifugal motion rather than a pendulum" so i have yet to publish it. maybe something will click soon, especially after this. i wrote this like 4 or 5 years ago at this point like my god. lmfao.

So if the normies go elsewhere, I'm actually happy.

yes but this is focusing just on the soot, and not the core issue of the flame choking itself out and covering everything in soot.

I think this already happened

yes but it is definitely still playing itself out. amtrak is going to be so amazing, don't you think? :^)

There's U-235 and U

i like this extremely a lot :)

@shibao Delays due to digging a hole. It is easy to forget how much dirt is in a hole until you remove it by hand.

> but this goes back to the effort, these people literally are not capable of providing even a fraction of the effort required

Then let them sit on Twitter, you know? They can consume content. Fedi is upstream and some of our turds float down to Twitter. Even 4chan is still upstream of Twitter, you know, for a while it was popular to joke that 4chan was the shadow government of the internet, the memes were created there and then trickled out. "lolcats".

> but functionally they act the same, and thus are the same practically.

LLMs demonstrated that p-zombies are real.

> but where did the shitty normie twitter slapfights come from?



The 24-hour news cycle started dying when Twitter decided that it was Important, and these coincided with the development of PRISM. Coopting hackers coincided with Dongles and the Ada Initiative and OWS turning into a drum circle and Justine Sacco getting fired, Suey Park. It was a psyop.

> the lifecycle of the flame

Recommended reading if you haven't seen them yet, especially if you plan a manifesto:

https://medium.com/@maradydd/when-nerds-collide-31895b01e68c

http://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths

> yes but this is focusing just on the soot, and not the core issue of the flame choking itself out and covering everything in soot.

Well, I think, like, concentrating the nerds into a nerd zone is a good thing for the nerds. This is an interesting conversation, and for a while I was talking to a nerd while tamping down the dirt (gonna pour concrete), it was a fascinating conversation. I don't get interested in conversations with most people. I am interested in places where the nerds are, they understand what I am saying when I speak, they say things I hadn't thought of. So there's fedi, there are a couple of IRC servers, technical mailing lists.

> yes but it is definitely still playing itself out.

Eh, they're in the progressive refinement stage. No upheavals foreseen.

> i like this extremely a lot :)

I think it's accurate.