@ivanski thanks! i gave it a shot, but (very conveniently for the user!) it follows the contacts it finds with separate requests to the server, and I make so many requests my instance rate-limits me. so i'd like to go back to export-then-import. (it worked for me in an earlier version.)

has anyone else had a problem with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ such that after the scan completes, the page just goes blank, so there's no way to export the contacts you've found?

@adoran2 yes. when the public square became a few giant websites, we created vast single points of failure for our collective history. it's so bad when a small website you've linked to disappears (or when medium size sites like ft.com just decide they can reorganize and drop history). but the loss of twitter will be quite a catastrophe. i've grown very accustomed to citing tweets, profiles, and threads.

@akhilrao @bert_hubert is it because you can become so fabulously rich? if our entrepreneurs topped out at $100M rather than became Caesars wielding the weath of empires, would that matter very much (to the virtuous sides of innovation)? or is it just that in the US you really need a few million dollars to self-insure the amenities of an upper-middle-class family, and the perceived upside of achieving that is really high?

there’s lots to think about this post on innovation in Europe (vs the US and to a lesser degree China) by @bert_hubert.
one fun bit is that ordinary life is so precarious and dystopian in the US you’re not really giving up much risking a startup, while very safe and comfortable life paths are available to ordinary europeans. (if safe comfort were more unconditional, maybe it could flip the US’ risk-tolerance advantage.) https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/

it takes democratically accountable central power to overcome centralizing dynamics inherent in market arrangements to sustain decentralization in the marketplace.
cf eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-apple-allow-users-to-install-third-party-app-stores-sideload-in-europe

@hcetamd i’m thinking local followers get it in their home feed, and in an authenticated-users-only local feed perhaps, but neither the public local feed nor followers elsewhere see nonexported posts.

"The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good." ~Caitlin Flanagan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/sheryl-sandberg-leaving-meta-lean-in-feminism/661291/ //the end of the piece is wrenching

@rohan the Fed could replace Andrew Jackson with Kalecki on the twenty dollar bill. in either case, the numismatic equivalent of waving around the head you've just guillotined.

@protecttruth I'd certainly agree with that, but I don't think it's an orthogonality I contributed!

Conjecture: Art AI makes art more like science. Individual contributions matter less, the cumulation matters more. That's a big mismatch for the current funding model. We should fund artists well (of course) and encourage them to develop "orthogonal art" — art not within the range of extrapolation from the existing corpus. I'm not sure whether there is a way to measure this, with respect to existing models.

Critique (one of many): Subsumes the expressive dimension of art to the instrumental.

@ginnyhogan our writers are a bit tacky, not very subtle. great literature we are not.

@ParaGauchial i don’t think so. i think the architecture is bad. we shouldn’t have been there under old management, but it was tolerable and hard to leave. Musk has given us an opportunity to escape the network effect and experiment into better things.

in theory an account with no margin requirement—not even zero, negative balances permitted—ultimately can never lose. no matter how underwater one gets, with no limit to gambling for redemption, eventually you must find it.
but in practice, there is no such thing as an account with no margin requirement. an institution that purported to offer it, even to a single customer, would eventually find it faces its own margin requirement.

i’ve been encouraging people to withdraw their attention and writing from twitter. i see when doing so a lot of people are taking their accounts private, or fully deleting them.
i don’t think i’ll do that. there’s important history in past public twitter. a lot of links rot and important conversations become unintelligible when that history is taken offline.
i’m restricting my use of twitter mostly to encouragements to move and critiques of current management. but i’ll leave my past around.

@jwsgeek the idea here wouldn't be you follow the corporations, but that media orgs would host instances for their writers. there's certainly risk that corps could scrape data from their writers' engagements. i guess they likely would, though maybe some explicit terms of federation could prevent it. without that, if this is valuable to them, i wonder if there won't emerge an ecosystem that quietly, covertly collects such data for them, even if they do not overtly host instances.

“Being right for the wrong reason makes someone dangerous.” ~Claudia Sahm https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/burden-of-proof-is-on-the-inflation

(Personal apology) Yesterday I attempted https://www.movetodon.org/ to troll thru many thousand twitter contacts + follow those I don’t. I’d done a find/import weeks ago with https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ but movetodon found lots of new contacts, and seemed easier as it follows directly, no import step. but my sheer bulk (and dumb retries) stressed https://fosstodon.org/. i’m rate-limited from following ‘til this evening.
if you’ve followed me i’m likely to follow back, but not til then! sorry!

machine learning is analogous to the copernican revolution in the sense we are having to grapple with learning we are not so special.