There is an old joke about the difference between a service provider and a "service preventer". Often the difference is the type of power we allow them to have over the users.
There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.
Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.
In fact human living is basically a type of operating system, as we all juggle on a daily basis tasks, resources, input/output, storage, cache, and states. The concept of dashboard is an essential operating system tool, and on a human scale it is basically your bank, tasks, calendar and inboxes. Plenty of "self improvement" concepts then translate neatly into operating system best practices, such as using FIFO or LIFO to manage allocations, planning ahead to break deadlock situations, managing parallelism, and JIT garbage collection etc.
Humans often like to compare the brain to technology.
For example, when gears were high tech there were people that drew heads with gears turning inside of the head, likening the act of thinking to the motion of gears. And I think in cartoons etc we still see this sometimes.
Gears did something, they stood for purposeful activity. A light bulb illuminates its surrounding, letting you see in the dark - an apt metaphor for having an idea, seeing something that previously couldn't be seen, etc. In both cases these are metaphors, not actually imagining the brain running on gears or light bulbs.
Computer analogies are different. These are direct, not metaphorical, and rightfully so, because computation is fundamental and not just a piece of technology. Computer science stands at the intersection between mathematics and physics.
Heck, even the operating system could reproduce in some sense. If the operating system on one machine is set up to regard itself as DHCP server, it would begin responding to DHCP requests in the local network. And in the DHCP response it can provide network boot instructions telling other computers to network boot a copy of the OS image of itself that it is serving. Any other computer that is configured to net boot could then boot the OS. Of course most computers are not set up to net boot out of the box. But on a network where they use net boot already you might be able to race their own DHCP server and get some of the clients to boot your OS image instead.
I fully agree that physical aspects of libraries cannot be fully replicated with databases and searches.
Discovery indeed comes in many forms, sometimes by proximity, other times by serendipity, size of the book, even what sits on the recently returned racks.
In a similar sense, I mourn the death of printed phone books and yellow pages. And printed encyclopedia, dictionaries and atlases.
The loss of the physical formats removed forever, extremely interesting aspects of browsing and learning from these sources.
The Reddit situation reminds me a lot of the China situation:
"A major player, having built a near dominant position in the global flow chain, starts misbehaving. The entire world tries to de-risk by finding or bootstrapping alternatives."
A decade ago probably nobody thinks there is any chance China-derisking is doable, but from today's vantage point it is becoming more and more likely.
In the same way, there appears no easy alternative to Reddit right now, but never say never. Having planted the seed of distrust, an exodus from Reddit can happen anytime the critical mass is achieved.
Perhaps now is the right time to revamp Usenet to bring it up to par with the Reddit of today. I am also thinking that email / mail lists, forums, and even old protocols like finger and gopher are all worthy of upgrades, and these were all small parts of a true proven p2p, decentralized, self-hosted social networking environment and may even enjoy a new popularity, if developers work on modernizing them.
Last year my Samsung S20+ suffered the notorious "green vertical lines" and then soon after the "white out screens" (a pandemic-level hardware failure wave that has been widely reported), rendering it impossible to see clearly what is on the screen, even though everything else was still working.
Luckily because I was playing with scrcpy, I immediately knew it was my solution.
By using scrcpy to connect to a PC, I could still unlock the screen with my pattern or thumbprint, and when the app asks for passwords it is still possible to use the onscreen keyboard.
1) Can a metaverse "digital twin" really successfully preserve a nation's culture and civilization? Beyond just 3d maps and museum artefacts, this goal also needs to preserve languages, ethnic practices, food, music, literature, and a million other aspects of the civilization. Currently Hong Kong faces a similar dilemma of losing its distinct identity pre-1997, because of runaway CCP political-righteousness, and spawns a few efforts to digitally twin itself on the metaverse, but progress is extremely slow and unfocused.
2) Can a sovereign nation that loses its territory and hence becomes diasporic, still function as a government through the metaverse? Can it still collect taxes, issue passport, run embassies, defence, police, operate central bank, and license companies and industries? If yes, then it can solve a lot of the statelessness and displaced people problems of the world, where refugees live in a state of limbo without access to legal protection or right to make their own living.
The "Twexit" event is a huge opportunity for Fediverse to pick up new users, but I fear it will be wasted because the Fediverse software is still not ready for prime time.
The concept of "instances", "federated feeds", "different software for different media types" are all complexities unnecessary for the newbies.
Instances, local and federated feeds are core to the architecture of the system. There's pros and cons to this UX, and just because it's not exactly like twitter doesn't mean it can't catch on.
Different software for different media types... you mean like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok? Different media are interacted with in different ways and are optimal under different interfaces. At least with ActivityPub you can interact with all these media across the spectrum of software as you desire. Try following a YouTube channel from your twitter account.
In truth, fediverse is mature and ready for prime time. And there's still plenty of novel UX approaches to be explored, and I hope people do that. But it won't pick up the steam needed to steamroll things like Twitter because it doesn't game your mind to give you the dopamine hit, and people can't ban those they salivate over causing trouble for, they can only block them. For those people using Twitter that disliked these things and didn't know there were alternatives or couldn't put their finger on what they didn't like fedi is going to feel like fresh air, for the rest "there's just something missing." I give it a month before most of the new users go home to Twitter.
No I mean the media-specific server app branching like pictures (pixelfed), music (funkwhale), live cast (owncast), video (peertube), links (Lemmy) etc.
How do a newbie to Fediverse sensibly choose the right instance to home on, when he has to decide what media type he publish in, at the time of server instance enrolment?
I know what you meant, my point was that the non federating internet has the same thing and it doesn't stop people from using it.
I'd say you do the same thing you'd do on the big tech internet: you open a YouTube account if you want to make videos, so have a peertube account. You have a twitter account for microblogging, so have a mastodon/pleroma/misskey account. You'd have an Instagram account if you want to primarily share photos, so open a pixelfed account. Open 3. Share your accounts on the others. this is not a new problem, we already do this on twitter, Instagram, reddit, etc.
mastodon can't pick up twitter users because it doesn't try to be twitter. Lots of people want the recommendations, virality and discovery of the algorithmic feed, that's what got them hooked in the first place. There is no fediverse equivalent. (That's obviously by design, but I think it's a mistake to think that it can compete. Just like carrots can't compete with sugar.)
There are many domains of modern society that serve specific service roles, that should never have been given over-reaching power to also monitor and judge outside of a court order, but they do.
Finance used to have secrecy but no anymore, tax is now open book. Transportation and mobility is checked and prechecked. Free speech is being eroded both by snowflakes and copyright trolls. The slippery slope has no boundary and rolls into an avalanche.