Related to moderation are the notions of procedural fairness, including 1) the idea that rules should be applied to all users equally, that 2) rules should not favor certain users or content, and 3) that there exists a process to seek redress, to list a few examples. These are laudable goals, but I posit that these can never be 100% realized on an online platform, not for small-scale Lemmy instances nor for the largest of social media platforms.

The first idea is demonstrably incompatible with the requisite avoidance of becoming a Nazi bar. Nazis and adjoining quislings cannot be accommodated, unless the desire is to become the next Gab. Rejecting Nazis necessarily treats them different than other users, but it keeps the platform alive and healthy.

The second idea isn’t compatible with why most people set up instances or join a social media platform. Fediverse instances exist either as an extension of a single person (self-hosting for just themselves) or to promote some subset of communities (eg a Minnesota-specific instance). Meanwhile, large platforms like Meta exist to make money from ads. Naturally, they favor anything that gets more clicks (eg click bait) than adorable cat videos that make zero revenue.

The third idea would be feasible, except that it is a massive attack vector: unlike an in-person complaints desk, even the largest companies cannot staff – if they even wanted to – enough customer service personnel to deal with a 24/7 barrage of malicious, auto-generated campaigns that flood them with invalid complaints. Whereas such a denial-of-service attack against a real-life complaints desk would be relatively easy to manage.

So once again, social media platforms – and each Fediverse instance is its own small platform – have to make some choices based on practicalities, their values, and their objectives. Anyone who says it should be easy has not looked into it enough.

Reddit has global scope, and so their moderation decisions are necessarily geared towards trying to be legally and morally acceptable in as many places as possible. Here is Mike Masnick on exactly what challenges any new social media platform faces, and even some which Lemmy et al may have to face in due course: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ . Note: Masnick is on the board of BlueSky, since it was his paper on Protocols, Not Platforms that inspired BlueSky. But compared to the Fediverse, BlueSky has not achieved the same level of decentralization yet, having valued scale. Every social media network chooses their tradeoffs; it’s part of the bargain.

The good news is that the Fediverse avoids any of the problems related to trying to please advertisers. The bad news is that users still do not voluntarily go to “the Nazi bar” if they have any other equivalent option. Masnick has also written about that when dealing at scale. All Fediverse instances must still work to avoid inadvertently becoming the Nazi bar.

But being small and avoiding scaling issues is not all roses for the Fediverse. Not scaling means fewer resources and fewer people to do moderation. Today, most instances range from individual passion projects to small collectives. The mods and admins are typically volunteers, not salaried staff. A few instances have companies backing them, but that doesn’t mean they’d commit resources as though it were crucial to business success. Thus, the challenge is to deliver the best value to users on a slim budget.

Ideally, users will behave themselves on most days, but moderation is precisely required on the days they’re not behaving.

Used for AI, I agree that a faraway, loud, energy-hungry data center comes with a huge host of negatives for the locals, to the point that I’m not sure why they keep getting building approval.

But my point is that in an eventual post-bubble puncture world where AI has its market correction, there will be at least some salvage value in a building that already has power and data connections. A loud, energy-hungry data center can be tamed to be quiet and energy-sipping based on what’s hardware it’s filled in. Remove the GPUs and add some plain servers and that’s a run-of-the-mill data center, the likes of which have been neighbors to urbanites for decades.

I suppose I’d rehash my opinion as such: building new data centers can be wasteful, but I think changing out the workload can do a lot to reduce the impacts (aka harm reduction), making it less like reopening a landfill, and more like rededicating a warehouse. If the building is already standing, there’s no point in tearing it down without cause. Worst case, it becomes climate-controlled paper document storage, which is the least impactful use-case I can imagine.

Racks/cabinets, fiber optic cables, PDUs, CAT6 (OOBM network), top-of-rack switches, aggregation switches, core switches, core routers, external multi-homed ISP/transit connectivity, megawatt three-phase power feeds from the electric utility, internal power distribution and step-down transformers, physical security and alarm systems, badge access, high-strength raised floor, plenum spaces for hot/cold aisles, massive chiller units.

Absolutely, yes. I didn’t want to elongate my comment further, but one odd benefit of the Dot Com bubble collapsing was all of the dark fibre optic cable laid in the ground. Those would later be lit up, to provide additional bandwidth or private circuits, and some even became fibre to the home, since some municipalities ended up owning the fibre network.

In a strange twist, the company that produced a lot of this fibre optic cable and went bankrupt during the bubble pop – Corning Glass – would later become instrumental in another boom, because their glass expertise meant they knew how to produce durable smartphone screens. They are the maker of Gorilla Glass.

I’m not going to come running to the defense of private equity (PE) firms, but compared to so-called AI companies, the PE firms are at least building tangible things that have an ostensible alternative use. A physical data center building – even one located far away from the typical metropolitan area that have better connectivity to the world’s fibre networks – will still be an asset with some utility, when/if the AI bubble pops.

In that scenario, the PE firm would certainly take a haircut on their investment, but they’d still get something because an already-built data center will sell for some non-zero price, with possible buyers being the conventional, non-AI companies that just happen to need some cheap rack space. Looking at the AI companies though, what assets do they have which carry some intrinsic value?

It is often said that during the California Gold Rush, the richest people were not those which staked out the best gold mining sites, but those who sold pickaxes to miners. At least until gold fever gave way to sober realization that it was overhyped. So too would PE firms pivot to whatever comes next, selling their remaining interest from the prior hype cycle and moving to the next.

I’ve opined before that because no one knows when the bubble will burst, it is simultaneously financially dangerous to: 1) invest into that market segment, but also 2) to exit from that market segment. And so if a PE firm has already bet most of the farm, then they might just have to follow through with it and pray for the best.

I see my typo, and it’s too funny and I’m just going to roll with it haha

As a practical matter, relative directions are already hard enough, where I might say that Colorado is east of California, and California is west of Colorado.

To use +/- East would mean there’s now just a single symbol difference between relative directions. California bring -East of Folorado, and Colorado being +East of California.

Also, we need not forget that the conventional meridian used for Earth navigation is centered on Greenwich in the UK, and is a holdover from the colonial era where Europe is put front-and-center on a map and everything else is “free real estate”. Perhaps if the New World didn’t exist, we would have right-ascension based system where Greenwich is still 0-deg East and Asia is almost 160-deg East. Why would colonialists center the maps on anywhere but themselves?