I think about Reddit-style platforms being the centralized bulletin boards and forums of these days, and Lemmy is closest we have to a DIY kind of thing which is controlled by the community.

Back in the day only a sufficiently tech savvy person could set up and run a forum software. Now everyone can do it, and with the Fediverse it’s all nicely interconnected, interoperable and truly free and open.

In general the Fediverse is the best shot we got right now to get back to the non-corporate Internet of my childhood and youth, I really hope it will succeed. And succeeding does not mean that it must grow and outcompete the commercial offerings, I think success is if enough motivated and interesting people join and participate. Quality > quantity.

But what you say IS a kind of technique that hyped for a while in the “speed reading community”, e.g. here is an implementation https://codepen.io/keithwyland/pen/yLyLNz

Or a post about it https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/ye6583/whatever_happened_to_spritz_rsvp_kindle_word/

I personally find it exhausting.

Yeah agreed, but that presupposes that the person watching can distinguish someone just babbling and someone who actually is someone qualified to comment on some topic. And I guess the latter kind is a drop in the ocean, because expertise is a limited resource but opinions and bullshit are cheap.

Yeah in the best case it’s just a promotional teaser. Obviously you cannot explain anything non trivial in that amount of time.

Well that’s the platform effect kicking in. Once you ascend to become the environment, you are above petty little competition, you are the system.

Oh I’ve heard some billionaire was planning to go there too, with his kingdom. Maybe pick a different planet.

Are you talking about ePA? Because this is how you leak a lot of sensitive data into all the wrong hands, including hostile countries like the US (central storage in US company clouds) or opportunistic hackers (illegitimate and uncontrolled access to patient data).

I agree that very often stuff is over discussed, but sometimes some garbage solution is deployed that really should not have happened.

They should first repair streets, bridges and schools, and then maybe hire some proper IT specialists before pushing the digitization, Germany is maybe the land of the engineers, but most definitely not of the software engineers. At least the good ones certainly do not end up working for public infrastructure.

How is it that companies known for garbage software such as Microsoft and SAP dominate their domains? Apparently software quality or UX is not even in the top 10 of what you need to run a successful business. I guess Thiel was onto something with his “become a monopoly as quickly as possible and then squeeze the customers out when they cannot run away”, the concept is much older than his fascist version of it.

Somehow I can’t imagine European countries fighting each other again. Fighting at the borders of the EU? Maybe. But like, Europe infighting like back in the old days? No fucking way. Against Russia and/or the US? That may be. But I also do not think so. It will continue to be a hybrid war played out by propaganda and economical warfare, and the occasional tactical military flare-up. I think in our post-modern times almost nobody wants an old school war. Hard to sell to everyone. No need if you can get whatever you want using other manipulations.

The multi-wumms of a country being driven against the wall. Probably against the anti-fascist firewall. Let’s put oil in the fire, maybe it helps.