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Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’
(www.theverge.com)
Kinda funny, not too long ago it was a fun mental exercise if you were paying attention to the tech industry to try to think of the ways in which Google or MS could fall.
Now, AFAICT, neither are falling any time soon, but there certainly seems to be a shift in how they're perceived and how their brand sits in the market (where even so I'm still probably in a bubble on this).
But I'm not sure how predictable it would have been that both would look silly stumbling for AI dominance.
And, yea, I'm chalking recall up to the AI race as it seems like a grab for training data to me, and IIRC there were some clues around that this could be true.
Any chance the relevant incident could be unpacked and used as a demonstration of how these changes would alter the outcome or encourage a different outcome?
As someone who only saw pieces of it after the fact, I am potentially in the dark here about the purposes and context of these changes.
That being said, from what I did see, it seemed very much like an instance admin imposing themselves and their superior power on a community when there were probably plenty of other more subtle action that could have been taken, where subtlety becomes vital for any issue complex and nuanced enough to be handled remotely well. I'm not sure I'm seeing any awareness of this in this post and the links provided.
For instance, AFAICT, the "incident" involved a discussion of if or how a domestic cat could eat a vegan diet. Obviously that's not trivial as they, like humans, have some necessary nutrients, and AFAICT the vegans involved were talking about how it could be done, while the admin involved was basically having none of that and removed content on the basis that it would lead to a cat dying.
And then in the misinformation link we have:
In the context of cats and their food ... which "living beings" are being harmed and who is encouraging or discouraging this harm?
Whether you're vegan or not, this seems to me formally ambiguous and on the face of it only enshrines the source of the conflict rather than facilitating better forms of communication or resolution (perhaps there are things in the by-laws I've missed??).
Two groups can have exactly the same aim and core values (reduce harm to living beings) but in the complexity of the issue come to issue a bunch of friendly fire ... that's how complex issues work.
So, back to my original question ... how exactly would things be done better?