[FRIAM] gone Meta on Twitter, GoodReads, etc.

Mon Nov 7 11:21:51 EST 2022

On 11/6/22 6:52 PM, glen wrote:
> That you call Mastodon 'twitter-like' is discomforting. 
I call it that only because that is what I was looking for... and 
because that is how Mastodon is often touted in this moment that people 
are seeking Twitter-ternatives.
> ActivityPub is fundamentally different.I guess the premature 
> registration is reasonable, given the politics of the moment. But the 
> 'fediverse' really is distributed, very unlike twitter.
I've been a fan of distributed and decentralized (even federated) since 
forever as well has having been an early enthusiast of the potential for 
self-organizing, collective, social phenomenon, especially when mediated 
by global electronic networking.   I'm just too old, tired, cynical to 
do more than pantomime the shaking of my tiny fist as I mouth vacuously 
"get off my lawn" into the aether-void of my faulty apprehensions and 
memories.
> I really love that the Gab twits ported to Mastodon. That, unlike 
> Musk's perverted conception, is a real example of free speech. You 
> really are free to turn open source and open protocol to your weirdo 
> subculture. We just don't have to link to you.
>
> Don't think 'twitter-like'. Think 'decentralized'.

bottom line is that in principle I'm a fan of *all* of this but simply 
missed my window... had more of it been more available (and mature) 
earlier in my life I might well be swimming in the self-similar fractal 
stew of alternative modalities and subcultures linked together by 
federated/distributed models.... To (ab)use SGs favorite metaphor... a 
member of a a fractal Acequia Association faciltating the delivery of  
fresh, nourishing water to every farmer, gardener, great and small, 
Peone and Noble rather than wait for the giant smog-cloud in the sky to 
drop it's acid rain on us.

In any case, I'm glad that there are others who in fact *can* indulge in 
these distributions (temporal, spatial, spectral) of conceptions, 
options, and idioms...  maybe this rich (dare I say lush?) diversity 
will rescue us from the technological lock-in, canalization, corporate 
greed, and what *also* feels like the babble of post-Babel sometimes.

I think what I was exhibiting in my lame response to "how do I leave the 
Twitterverse/GR/ even though i was only barely there?" was a conceptual 
lock-in to the extant examples, the niches the current  (or recent 
previous) landscape offers instead of properly looking forward to the 
ones I am probably embedded in if I would just muster the energy and 
focus to look around and make sense of it.  AlternativeTo.Net  seemed to 
provide my frail old eyes a snapshot in the Hellride (Zelazny-Amber 
reference) I feel I am making (clinging desperate to the back of my 
mount) through the rapidly evolving landscape.

There is probably some lesson from Essentialism 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism> (and it's failures) in this 
random, reflective maundering...

In short... "sadly you are right".

>
> On November 6, 2022 5:51:40 PM EST, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
>     Trying to understand BookWyrm vs StoryGraph vs GoodReads and
>     Twitter vs Mastadon (and beyond), I found this aggregator of
>     alternative recommendations:
>
>         https://alternativeto.net/
>
>     which doesn't necessarily solve anything, it just makes it obvious
>     how challenging "too many choices" can be...
>
>     After a lame attempt to go with Mastadon I decided to abandond
>     Twitter-like things altogether.  I doubt I will be willing to
>     throw GoodReads over for anything else because of the
>     participating base of my own personal/family network there.   I
>     can at least avoid clicking through a GoodReads recommendation to
>     order from Amazon.
>
>         https://alternativeto.net/software/bookwyrm/
>
>     I haven't begun (tried?) to evaluate AlternativeTo.Net itself...
>
>     Is this the tragedy of the "free market" (subset of "commons")?
>
>
>     On 11/4/22 3:00 PM, glen wrote:
>>     I'd forgotten about this until the release yesterday:
>>
>>     https://joinbookwyrm.com/
>>
>>
>>
>>     On 11/2/22 14:52, Steve Smith wrote:
>>>
>>>     On 11/2/22 9:43 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>>>     Thanks, Glen.
>>>>
>>>>     It would be nice if there were a public bibliographic reference
>>>>     url that one could use to name a book that only conveyed the
>>>>     thing in itself.  Goodreads was that once, then Amazon bought
>>>>     them.  Ditto for video and audio recordings and other objects
>>>>     of public interest.
>>>
>>>     I admit to continuing to use Goodreads this way in spite of two
>>>     problems... the Amazon affiliation/ownership of course, but also
>>>     the too often spotty reviews...  I don't provide many nor
>>>     particularly good reviews myself, so I've no room to complain
>>>     really.
>>>
>>>     So I suppose I agree with your "public bibliographic reference
>>>     url" point.   It seems as if Wikipedia is a good candidate but I
>>>     haven't done the work to understand how new entries are made...
>>>     are they always required to be made by a citizen of the
>>>     community who is NOT affiliated with the book (publisher,
>>>     author, etc)? I find a *lot* of the books I seek in Wikipedia
>>>     and prefer them for reference when their book-description (and
>>>     cross links to related works, author, etc) are particularly apt,
>>>     but that is also spotty.   I use Goodreads mostly to follow what
>>>     family/friends are reading and what *they* think of their reads.
>>>
>>>     The trend toward crowd-sourced public-use corpii being acquired
>>>     by private interests (even public corporations are private
>>>     interests) is disturbing (FB <-Mapillary,
>>>     Amazon<-Goodreads)...   Twitter->BoringCo, etc)
>>>
>>>>
>>>>     Eugenia Cheng has other books and a pile of youtube videos. 
>>>>     Interestingly, her primary institutional affiliation is the Art
>>>>     Institute of Chicago, where as resident scientist she teaches
>>>>     math to art students. She has a public reading for kids
>>>>     scheduled in Jersey City this month.  Her definition of
>>>>     category theory is "the mathematics of mathematics" which she
>>>>     expands as "the logical study of the logical study of logical
>>>>     things."
>>>>
>>>>     Hasok Chang has a third book, Is Water H2O, which Amazon fails
>>>>     to index on his amazon author page, though it is on amazon at a
>>>>     blistering price in every available format.  I found a pdf on
>>>>     the internets.  It's details the history of working out the
>>>>     chemical identity of water. Two themes are that 1) the
>>>>     consensus answers to scientific questions often change in
>>>>     anticipation of the arrival of corroboration, 2) there are
>>>>     often multiple acceptable answers to scientific questions. 
>>>>     These are possibly consequences of being a realisitic realist.
>>>
>>>     Interesting set of recursions...  we CS types tend to love our
>>>     arbitrary-depth recursion, but the special cases like
>>>     double-negatives, and Rummy's unkown unknowns and now Chang's
>>>     logical logicologoy of logics and realistic realists are ...
>>>     *special*?  While some may prefer "turtles all the way down"
>>>     sometimes just a few turtles deep suffices?
>>>
>>>     - Steve
>>>
>>>     PS... couldn't help hearing/reading "Cheech&Chong" on the first
>>>     reading of this thread.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>     -- rec --
>>>>
>>>>     On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 9:57 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>         There. I fixed that for you. 8^D
>>>>
>>>>         On 11/1/22 19:36, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>>>>         > Interesting visit with my old boss/friend today, he
>>>>     mentioned some books of interest, and while looking for them I
>>>>     discovered yet another book.
>>>>         >
>>>>
>>>>     https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-joy-of-abstraction-an-exploration-of-math-category-theory-and-life-eugenia-cheng/18557720?ean=9781108477222
>>>>
>>>>         > Exploration-Category-Theory/dp/1108477224>
>>>>         > Eugenia Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction: An Exploration of
>>>>     Math, Category Theory, and Life, published October 2022.
>>>>         >
>>>>         > A presentation of category theory that keeps the
>>>>     underlying algebra basic.
>>>>         >
>>>>
>>>>     https://bookshop.org/p/books/inventing-temperature-measurement-and-scientific-progress-hasok-chang/9513488?ean=9780195337389
>>>>
>>>>         > Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and
>>>>     Scientific Progress
>>>>         >
>>>>         > An itemized history of temperature and all the wrong
>>>>     turns taken along the way, more detail than even the author
>>>>     cares to read again.  Poetic justice to examine the operation
>>>>     of the pragmatist's ratchet and pawl over the centuries as it
>>>>     rescues workable definitions of temperature from thermal
>>>>     confusion.
>>>>         >
>>>>
>>>>     https://bookshop.org/p/books/realism-for-realistic-people-a-new-pragmatist-philosophy-of-science-hasok-chang/18368583?ean=9781108470384
>>>>
>>>>         > Hasok Chang, Realism for Realistic People: A New
>>>>     Pragmatist Philosophy of Science, available on kindle on
>>>>     November 30, 2022.
>>>>         >
>>>>         > -- rec --
>>>>
>>>>         --     ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>>
>
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