dynamorando

What project are you referring to?

Is the Mozilla organization generally responsive to social media? I have had a hard time trying to figure out where the organization responds to publicly, generally.

I would love to have a Mozilla hosted email and calendar service from them, for example. I don't understand why they aren't branching out into more common web citizen needed services.

You seem to have some knowledge in this area. I'm curious your thoughts on Enhanced Geothermal?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/18/fervo-energy-hits-milestone-...

I realize that this article is about Wind + Solar, but given this breakthrough, can anyone who is an authority on the subject explain if EGS is also set to take off?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/18/fervo-energy-hits-milestone-...

So to me, this sounds more like building a personal knowledge base. Not a dashboard IMO.

How does this differ from other note taking apps like Obsidian?

What is the end state here? A way to measure personal life KPIs? Or just building a dak board?

Bring back AOL!

I realize that there's a million obvious answers; but as I type this in the part of the country currently roasting by the heatwave in the United States: will something like this ever happen for climate efforts?

One thing that frustrates me is that Solid relies on Linked Data; and working with Linked Data, at least in my experience, is frustrating.

It's not, though it does get partial funding from the US government. I've been for a few weeks now to try and unpack the ramifications of public funded social media.

Blog post here: https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

The most common refrain that I get whenever this topic comes up is "First Amendment" - meaning that public funded social media should not be in the business of moderation; though I often wonder how come NPR, PBS, BBC and so on don't run their own social media websites (based on your deciding flavor of ActivityPub instances.)

I believe the German and Dutch governments run their own Mastodon instances, I don't understand at the moment why other governments don't follow this path.

Is NPR subject to these restrictions in the US?

Why isn’t there funding for public social media? Doesn’t Germany and the Netherlands run their own Mastodon instances?

Could someone in Europe educate me as to why it seems (at least to me) that Europe seems to be leading in leveraging the Fediverse, along with data governance policies (the Data Act, GDPR?) versus America?

I assume it's because Europe is adverse to American companies, and I assume that culture wise America will never adopt these kinds of strategies, but I'd like to hear from others on this.

Thank you for your feedback.

A concern that I constantly see brought up is that although administration would be done by semi-public institutions; the First Amendment would require all to post, leaving the option of hate speech and spam flooding public social media.

I am not a lawyer so I am curious: is this an actual problem?

Interesting. I personally found the whole defining your schema up front to feeling like trying to construct the universe up front.

I’ve been trying to work on an alternative solution to SOLID, but I’m always double checking myself just to make sure that I’m not just simply failing to grasp the concepts.

Does there exist a medium between host moderators and user moderation the makes this work?

Wikipedia is self moderated and there are well moderated Reddits. The host of the ActivityPub site doesn’t have to do all the moderation, and there doesn’t seem to be a reason that users themselves couldn’t “mute” troublesome posters from their own feeds, right?

I want to acknowledge that feedback, because it’s useful.

As a follow question: is this a solvable problem between host moderation and user self moderation?

In other words: Let’s pretend NPR hosts a Reddit-like site whose primary objective is to facilitate discussion on topics shared by NPR.

NPR doesn’t outright ban everything unless it violates some terrible things.

Could user moderation NPR Reddit also expand on this? So long as they fall under the same guidelines?

I ask this question because it seems to me that there does exist some useful moderation: there are well moderated Reddits and for the most part Wikipedia is also pretty well moderated.

I’ve been recently trying to unpack an imperfect idea of trying to publicly fund social media (and how to generally improve the internet).

I have somewhat blogged about this, though I realize the idea may be incomplete.

https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

I welcome any tactful feedback. Also I have no idea how to initiate such an idea.

I’m curious - have you used SOLID? Either as a developer or a consumer?

I found myself struggling with Linked Data for quite some time now, and I have struggled with the idea that perhaps part of the problem with adoption of Linked Data is existing mental interia of RMDBS or other systems.

I’m curious - do you see a path forward for “public” social media?

I had half an idea yesterday on this from HN:

https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

I blogged about this yesterday after seeing a similar post on HN

https://dynamorando.pages.dev/blog/the-public-web/

Though I am not sure the political will exists.

> Why would the government want to facilitate communication between citizens?

I have thought about this, and the only idea that would probably be useful for public support is discourse in support of education/information.

Phrased differently, social media amplified disinformation. Arguably if done correctly discourse can be done without uselessness.

In other words, I would argue that social media could be useful for example: to provide near real time updates on public concern: Wildfires, for example.

But I would argue that you don't want government supported "influencers" or, you know, tax payer money being used to post cat memes.

Infrastructure bidding war for a large contract provided by major cloud providers.

Fediverse deployed instances by semi-public institutions: NPR, PBS, University of [Your State or City]. Non-profit institutions could also benefit: Wikipedia, etc.

Data retention policies as part of this legislation must be declared upfront: What data is being collected? What is the retention policy? Is a comment on this instance considered Creative Commons? Would this data be considered public domain and used to train AI models?

> I think there's merit to a discussion of a "public utility".

I have thought about this a lot. Twitter brands itself as the "public square" and I've tried to figure out how that works in practice. In the United States we have public parks, why can't we have public web spaces?

There was a post in another thread about the idea of what a "public web" would look like, and I am trying to understand how it would work in practice.

There is _somewhat_ of an existing framework for this in the form of public media IMO such as the BBC and NPR - I have been debating if such institutions could start hosting Fediverse flavors to continue public discussion on topics. The infrastructure could be provided as a contract that would be bid on by tech companies on their cloud services; while the administration would be left to various semi-public institutions: PBS, NPR, BBC, your local state university, etc.

Basically, just encouraging public funded Fediverse instances, but infastructure provided by the contract awarded bids. Data on these public instances could be considered public domain; and companies wanting AI training sets could leverage these if the proper policies existed on how to utilize these data sets with public sanctions.

Arguable IMO it could be argued for civic engagement and discourse and education. That’s the charter as I understand for NPR, I don’t see why a public social network couldn’t fall under that.

Misinformation on social media exists today, I don’t see why we couldn’t argue as a society that public discourse on the network couldn’t be perceived as a way to educate the public.

As far a infrastructure, just limit content type and posting limits (time gate posts on topics, or limit 1 post per day, etc.)

Companies would get public data to be trained since everything would be CC licensed. And a contract to be won for reserved services.

Should we start a public petition?

EDIT: This is an idea that I’ve recently been advocating for; I just don’t know where to start. We have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces? Offer a contract every few years to be bid by large corporations such as AWS, or Microsoft. Administration by semi-public entities such as universities or NPR. Make it join the Fediverse to enable sharing of content.

What am I missing?

EDIT: User submitted content would be bound by CC licensing.

NPR Mastadon instance: sponsored by Cloudflare

This seems to make sense; we have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces online?

Would it make sense if NPR ran a Mastodon instance?

EDIT: or if public universities ran their own instances? All content submitted by users would be CC licensed.

EDIT EDIT: To keep costs down, just rate limit the number of posts that could be made per user.