The best explanation of the fediverse I've heard is that it's like email. No one cares if you're on a gmail or yahoo or aol or some company's email system; you've got an email address and it can send and receive to any other email address. The underlying protocol allows all the different systems to interact with one another. The fediverse wants to do that same sort of thing with other units of content (i.e., whatever a tweet is called now, a video, a photo, a blog post, a podcast, etc.). It doesn't matter where exactly that thing is posted within the greater fediverse, you can view it within its own system (i.e., just on Mastodon for tweet-like bits) or however you like to interact with the fediverse (you've got a client that will pull in all of the different sorts of content regardless of where they're posted).
I'd like to hear more about the feder verse. It's not just for the Google problem but also the platform problem. Do folks remember what the Internet was like before apps and before platforms? You just had a site chilling in the void and you hoped web rings and such would help people find you.
My hope for the feder verse is the ability to customize my feed like I used to do with RSS. Sometimes I want the firehouse of the Internet and other times I want a narrow specific view of just the things I want.
Being able to block specific ads or ads of certain kinds. Auto play out, text fine, etc.
I absolutely want more episodes on the Fediverse. I am also very sad about what the Internet is becoming and if getting on a couple different apps can help I want to do that! I gave up on mastodon but I’m using Threads so I’ve apparently already started. I want to know so much more but I also want someone else to do the research for me.
One thing is also worth noting is how edifying it is switching search engines away from Google. I've been being $10 a month for Kagi for the past year or so and the whole experience is just so much more pleasant. No ads, great results, no Google products forced upon me.
I was sceptical at first, but I love it now and it's the easiest $10 I pay.
I’m working on a web-based project right now, and currently in the phase where I’m looking at examples of other similar finished projects for inspiration. Google has almost exclusively served me results for products that can make the project, with a few finished project examples and other unrelated info sprinkled in. I spent the week thinking ‘damn, people must not be doing these sorts of things’ until I decided, on a whim, to try out DuckDuckGo for the first time. Same search terms, over a dozen perfect, directly related results. I’ve heard people say ‘get off google, get off google’ over and over but just never did myself but now I get it.
I think one of the issues we’re facing is that there is now a critical mass of internet users (myself included) who have never seen over Google’s walls. I mean, think about students whose first experiences of computers was/is Chromebooks. It’s easy to stay when the experience inside the walls isn’t that bad, and you don’t know enough about how the internet and search engines and web browsers work to have an idea of what might be beyond the wall. For example, even though I would consider myself to be very tech literate, I was surprised that my DuckDuckGo search activity appeared in my Chrome history. I think people think of Google as all-or-nothing when really you can mix and match as much as makes sense to you.
The thing that drives me nuts about these Google AI snippets is that they are so inane and usually useless 😩 the people who wrote ranking articles actually did a lot of work to understand what people needed and now we have this bot who just does some barely relevant categorization to pull together some b.s. that it thinks will distract us when what we really need is a deep human conversation about all the nuanced practical and emotional takes on the topic.
And because people quote them all the time, these snippets, when they telle something I always ask, where's that info from? I've become a terrible sceptic about everything.
I want to learn more about the Fediverse please! I’m not an internet nerd by any stretch of the imagination, but I do care deeply about the free exchange of ideas and the necessity of quality, freelance, and independent journalism. If we lose everything but The NY Times and Ai, our information will be homogenized and controlled by a very few voices. We owe ourselves better.
Hi! Am loving the episode so far, well not loving, I hadn't heard the Google news and I'm still reeling from the way my stomach dropped. Especially as a Canadian where Canadian news media has been dying out and I feel the direct impact of not getting local news when I need it, even in the city! I digress!
I'm commenting to ask you PJ, to please not use the word Eskimo! The correct word for the original folks of the north that you are likely thinking of is Inuit! Of course, there are other FN groups from the north; Dene, Tagish, etc, but a safe bet is to use Inuit! My stomach dropped a second time hearing that and I'm not even Indigenous!
I think the evolution of names that existing colonial structures use to identify FN Inuit and Métis peoples is very interesting. Especially here in Canada where our government is “striving towards reconciliation” though still effectively operating the ‘Department of Indian Affairs’ under a different name. Harper changed the name in 2011 from ‘Indian and Northern Affairs Canada’ to ‘Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada’. Now we use the ‘Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada’. It's just an interesting progression.
If you also find this topic interesting (I mean, the Indian Act (of 1876) predates our Independence for goodness sake!!!), there's much more to learn! There are a few pods out there that tackle different words surrounding Indigeneity, the negative feelings associated with some, but also the way others are empowering, that can provide way more info than I can :)
It could make for a cool ep or two of Search Engine. It certainly takes up a big chunk of my search engine’s history :-)
Take care, love your show, sorry for the run-on sentences!
Very much enjoyed this one. I relate to the notion that I could tell that these “zero click” answers appearing in Google over the last few years were simultaneously very helpful and destructive for the original sources of that information.
What I would like to see… err, hear… more about is, when all those sites are dead and gone (writers laid off, URLs decommissioned, etc.) then what the hell will we even be left with? And while it’s clear that Google well effectively retain an internal ‘copy’ of history as we know it, how will these large language models continue to work if NEW information (the history yet to be written, if you will) and facts aren’t being written/reported/generated by the trusted media outlets because they won’t exist?
Excellent episode. I can’t wait for the upcoming two-parter!
I recently read about some Pew research on ‘link rot’, which is the when links on a page bring you to pages that no longer exist. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this first hand but it was nevertheless validating to see that people are quantifying and analyzing it. 38% of pages from 10 years ago no longer exist, over half of Wikipedia pages have at least one defunct link in their sources sections, and 13% of city government pages have no functioning links.
Late to the party, but in wondering if you've heard of the Mikkelsen Twins "publishing" website/MLM that's scamming vulnerable people into paying huge sums of money to learn to publish AI generated ebooks? I've just had a retired friend lose over 7k to it and think there might be a story there..
Would love your input on how to make the fediverse (or "social web" as I call it) less nerdy, more approachable, and more interesting. But it seems challenging like democracy, which is hard to get people excited about until they're about to lose it...
If both you and Casey both clearly see that the web we had is one that we're going to lose in the next few years, why are you doing more to advocate for what Casey clearly understands is the only solution against the technoligarchs?
These episodes and the 'how much glue should you put in your pizza?' episode have been really interesting. It's like we're living in a prequel to the movie Idiocracy and about to start giving Gatorade to crops.
I feel like in half the episodes there is some mention of Twitter going up in flames and I'm honestly so confused by that. It is my most used social media app and I don't see what's burning and it's driving me crazy because I'm like am I the crazy one, what the hell am I missing.
The best explanation of the fediverse I've heard is that it's like email. No one cares if you're on a gmail or yahoo or aol or some company's email system; you've got an email address and it can send and receive to any other email address. The underlying protocol allows all the different systems to interact with one another. The fediverse wants to do that same sort of thing with other units of content (i.e., whatever a tweet is called now, a video, a photo, a blog post, a podcast, etc.). It doesn't matter where exactly that thing is posted within the greater fediverse, you can view it within its own system (i.e., just on Mastodon for tweet-like bits) or however you like to interact with the fediverse (you've got a client that will pull in all of the different sorts of content regardless of where they're posted).
I thought you guys were saying “feta-verse” 🧀
I did too until one of them said "federated" or maybe "federation". Ohhhhhhhh...
I'd like to hear more about the feder verse. It's not just for the Google problem but also the platform problem. Do folks remember what the Internet was like before apps and before platforms? You just had a site chilling in the void and you hoped web rings and such would help people find you.
My hope for the feder verse is the ability to customize my feed like I used to do with RSS. Sometimes I want the firehouse of the Internet and other times I want a narrow specific view of just the things I want.
Being able to block specific ads or ads of certain kinds. Auto play out, text fine, etc.
I absolutely want more episodes on the Fediverse. I am also very sad about what the Internet is becoming and if getting on a couple different apps can help I want to do that! I gave up on mastodon but I’m using Threads so I’ve apparently already started. I want to know so much more but I also want someone else to do the research for me.
The new music selections are dope.
One thing is also worth noting is how edifying it is switching search engines away from Google. I've been being $10 a month for Kagi for the past year or so and the whole experience is just so much more pleasant. No ads, great results, no Google products forced upon me.
I was sceptical at first, but I love it now and it's the easiest $10 I pay.
I’m working on a web-based project right now, and currently in the phase where I’m looking at examples of other similar finished projects for inspiration. Google has almost exclusively served me results for products that can make the project, with a few finished project examples and other unrelated info sprinkled in. I spent the week thinking ‘damn, people must not be doing these sorts of things’ until I decided, on a whim, to try out DuckDuckGo for the first time. Same search terms, over a dozen perfect, directly related results. I’ve heard people say ‘get off google, get off google’ over and over but just never did myself but now I get it.
I think one of the issues we’re facing is that there is now a critical mass of internet users (myself included) who have never seen over Google’s walls. I mean, think about students whose first experiences of computers was/is Chromebooks. It’s easy to stay when the experience inside the walls isn’t that bad, and you don’t know enough about how the internet and search engines and web browsers work to have an idea of what might be beyond the wall. For example, even though I would consider myself to be very tech literate, I was surprised that my DuckDuckGo search activity appeared in my Chrome history. I think people think of Google as all-or-nothing when really you can mix and match as much as makes sense to you.
The thing that drives me nuts about these Google AI snippets is that they are so inane and usually useless 😩 the people who wrote ranking articles actually did a lot of work to understand what people needed and now we have this bot who just does some barely relevant categorization to pull together some b.s. that it thinks will distract us when what we really need is a deep human conversation about all the nuanced practical and emotional takes on the topic.
And because people quote them all the time, these snippets, when they telle something I always ask, where's that info from? I've become a terrible sceptic about everything.
I want to learn more about the Fediverse please! I’m not an internet nerd by any stretch of the imagination, but I do care deeply about the free exchange of ideas and the necessity of quality, freelance, and independent journalism. If we lose everything but The NY Times and Ai, our information will be homogenized and controlled by a very few voices. We owe ourselves better.
The music this week was so fire. I mean, every week it’s consistently the best original music on my feed, but I want full tracks of todays songs…
This!
Hi! Am loving the episode so far, well not loving, I hadn't heard the Google news and I'm still reeling from the way my stomach dropped. Especially as a Canadian where Canadian news media has been dying out and I feel the direct impact of not getting local news when I need it, even in the city! I digress!
I'm commenting to ask you PJ, to please not use the word Eskimo! The correct word for the original folks of the north that you are likely thinking of is Inuit! Of course, there are other FN groups from the north; Dene, Tagish, etc, but a safe bet is to use Inuit! My stomach dropped a second time hearing that and I'm not even Indigenous!
I think the evolution of names that existing colonial structures use to identify FN Inuit and Métis peoples is very interesting. Especially here in Canada where our government is “striving towards reconciliation” though still effectively operating the ‘Department of Indian Affairs’ under a different name. Harper changed the name in 2011 from ‘Indian and Northern Affairs Canada’ to ‘Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada’. Now we use the ‘Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada’. It's just an interesting progression.
If you also find this topic interesting (I mean, the Indian Act (of 1876) predates our Independence for goodness sake!!!), there's much more to learn! There are a few pods out there that tackle different words surrounding Indigeneity, the negative feelings associated with some, but also the way others are empowering, that can provide way more info than I can :)
It could make for a cool ep or two of Search Engine. It certainly takes up a big chunk of my search engine’s history :-)
Take care, love your show, sorry for the run-on sentences!
Very much enjoyed this one. I relate to the notion that I could tell that these “zero click” answers appearing in Google over the last few years were simultaneously very helpful and destructive for the original sources of that information.
What I would like to see… err, hear… more about is, when all those sites are dead and gone (writers laid off, URLs decommissioned, etc.) then what the hell will we even be left with? And while it’s clear that Google well effectively retain an internal ‘copy’ of history as we know it, how will these large language models continue to work if NEW information (the history yet to be written, if you will) and facts aren’t being written/reported/generated by the trusted media outlets because they won’t exist?
Excellent episode. I can’t wait for the upcoming two-parter!
I recently read about some Pew research on ‘link rot’, which is the when links on a page bring you to pages that no longer exist. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this first hand but it was nevertheless validating to see that people are quantifying and analyzing it. 38% of pages from 10 years ago no longer exist, over half of Wikipedia pages have at least one defunct link in their sources sections, and 13% of city government pages have no functioning links.
Late to the party, but in wondering if you've heard of the Mikkelsen Twins "publishing" website/MLM that's scamming vulnerable people into paying huge sums of money to learn to publish AI generated ebooks? I've just had a retired friend lose over 7k to it and think there might be a story there..
Would love your input on how to make the fediverse (or "social web" as I call it) less nerdy, more approachable, and more interesting. But it seems challenging like democracy, which is hard to get people excited about until they're about to lose it...
If both you and Casey both clearly see that the web we had is one that we're going to lose in the next few years, why are you doing more to advocate for what Casey clearly understands is the only solution against the technoligarchs?
These episodes and the 'how much glue should you put in your pizza?' episode have been really interesting. It's like we're living in a prequel to the movie Idiocracy and about to start giving Gatorade to crops.
As long as Google's AI tells me I should eat rocks, I'm going to ignore it an scroll past, just like I've done with Bing on my work search engine.
I feel like in half the episodes there is some mention of Twitter going up in flames and I'm honestly so confused by that. It is my most used social media app and I don't see what's burning and it's driving me crazy because I'm like am I the crazy one, what the hell am I missing.