I understand that you might want to run your own JavaScript and not others’ JavaScript, but I had a brief laugh at listing “no JavaScript” and “MOAR JAVASCRIPT” together.

i think that a lot of the value of art comes from the effort.

Many things that we do are only worthwhile because of the difficulty.

I think this is one of the biggest disconnects between people who create art and people who don’t (me). I don’t understand this sentiment at all. I don’t care how much effort a piece of art took or what the process was, I care about the output. But I know lots of people who create art and this stuff about the process and difficulty really seems to matter to them. Which is fine, they are entitled to like what they like, but I just don’t get it.

I don’t like AI art because it steals from artists and looks like crap, but the fact that it’s easy doesn’t matter to me.

I wonder if this is part of the disconnect between artists and AI boosters (I am neither).

Lots of good answers here. You might want to read up on Existentialism, a line of philosophy grappling with exactly this problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

Oh I’m married so 1) the bar to get laid is lower 2) there’s a ceiling on the amount of poon I can land in a week. Really frees me up to do important things like fart around on Lemmy.

Chase poontang all day every day. Not even joking, I know myself.

I mean, a lot of “chasing” would be working out, eating healthy, and earning money, but I know why I’d do those things.

Zoltan!

Bold answer. I respect that.

Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

My wife is like this. I just set her up with Chrome’s password manager despite the fact that I’m a Firefox and Bitwarden user. Works in Chrome, on Android, and on iOS - she doesn’t have to use Chrome on iOS, you just have to install Chrome and set it as the iOS password manager and it still works with all apps and Safari. She doesn’t care if Google has her whole life on file and I’m not paid enough to care for her.

MetaFilter

Oh yeah this has little to do with the original question about why bsky is more popular. This suggestion of “let people write their own algorithms” is for the devs who think algorithms are harmful. They aren’t harmful if you give users the power to choose their own algorithm. Techie people can write the algorithms and non-techie people can choose them. Chances are a few algorithms would eventually become the most popular and very few would be written after that, but the point is you let the users decide instead of the Mastodon devs having to write the algorithms.

And now I realize bsky actually has something like this: Custom Feeds. If I understand correctly, they get around the “running untrusted code” issue by not running the code on bsky servers. Instead whoever wrote the custom feed gets the data from bsky, runs the algorithm on a separate server, then returns the custom feed. Pretty clever. https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds

I was thinking along the lines of being given a list of popular algorithms, but if you find an algorithm you like on another instance you can copy it over to your instance. So it is not necessary to write code and nearly nobody would do it, they would just use ones that other people created.

But I realize this is an extremely difficult request so I’m not really serious when I propose it.

But it still won’t put my friend’s popular posts at the top, right? I don’t want to scroll past 20 pictures of people’s dinner and then find out one of my friends got engaged, I want the “I got engaged” post at the top because it’s probably getting the most interaction.

God yes. I used to share Lemmy links until I realized what a horrible UI I’m sending them.

I think people are misunderstanding what I mean by algorithm. An algorithm could show you stuff from people you don’t follow (yuck), but it could also show you popular stuff only from people you follow. That used to be how Facebook did it.

I didn’t say it was a bad thing, I just said it’s one reason Bsky is more popular. People are busy and want algorithms.

I’d you go to a post you are always told that the host server may have more replies

Just yesterday I opened a post on Masto that had 80 boosts. I went to my home instance to boost it, and it said 10 boosts. I get that things will sometimes be out of sync due to federation and I don’t think those numbers need to be exactly the same, but that’s a huge difference.

If you don’t like the instance (why wouldn’t I?) you can just move to a different one. Yes, and restart my network. It’s not really a good solution.

Yep. I’ve moved several times and the process sucks. It’s ridiculous that your posts and followers don’t follow you. It’s technically possible to do it: just give every account a public/private key pair for identity, and if you migrate to a new instance your public/private key pair come with you so you can prove that you are still you, and then there should be no problem bringing your posts and followers to the new instance. But despite the fact that switching instances is a core feature of the Fediverse, the process sucks.

It looks like that’s popular posts by anyone, not just by people I follow. So it’s a start, but different people want to see different things so having a single firehose like Explore doesn’t really meet the need. For me, I want to see popular stuff by people or hashtags I follow. Other people might want to see other things.

I didn’t say refusing to have an algorithm was a bad thing, I just said it’s one reason Bluesky is more popular.

Exactly, a lot of algorithms on for-profit sites are manipulative trash but refusing to have any algorithm at all is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.