My point is that any meaningful capital is directly tied to resource usage. Our ability to produce energy directly depends on our ability to mine resources to build power plants and maintain them. Saying that we can increase energy production infinitely is reductive beyond any meaning, it’s like a physics problem about a perfectly spherical cow.

Not at all! To use real examples to avoid spherical cows:

Used to be that you needed wood to generate energy. Then coal (which is an order of magnitude better). Then oil (another order of magnitude). Then solar. Then fission. Then (hopefully) fusion. Then who knows what. At each step, we’ve taken something which previously wasn’t considered a resource at all and used it to generate exponentially more and more energy. There’s no limit to how often we can do this-- things which were previously not resources become resources once we know how to use them.

Another example is food production. I saw a graph recently-- if I find it I’ll edit this message to include it, but it showed how it used to be that we needed 100% of our population dedicated to food production. Now it’s less than 1%. Meaning that 1 person is producing enough food for 100 people. Incredible.

These examples (and many more) show that our ability to produce things are not subject to limitations of natural resources, because natural resources aren’t limited. There’s enough energy coming out of the sun to be infinite, for all intents and purposes.

Yes, natural resources are limited, but that doesn’t mean that capital is limited. What I mean is that: yes, we’re using more energy as a civilization, but thanks to the investment of capital, we’re also expanding our ability to produce more energy at the same time. And “how much energy our civilization is capable of producing” can increase infinitely.

Yeah, the problem of pollution is certainly an existential threat. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that the type of threat is “we’re running out of resources”. We’re not running out of anything, we’re just producing too much atmospheric carbon!

This is essentially the argument that Thomas Malthus (economist) made in the 1800’s. And he had a point!

In his time, history had shown that the entire output of a country/state was people’s productivity times some function of land and labour. Meaning you could increase the output of a country by making people more productive (limited), or increasing the land available (limited), or by increasing the labour available (also limited). Therefore, there was a hard limit on how much output a country could have. And therefore we were fucked because population increases exponentially but output only increases linearly and has limits.

I think this is similar to your lego analogy: the pieces (land, labour) are limited, therefore the output is also limited.

Then the capitalist revolution happened and once the capitalist-style legal framework was in place which allowed the ownership of capital, countries’ outputs broke from the historical trend. We realized that a different function better described the output of a country. Rather than land, the correct thing to look at was capital. So the new function was people’s productivity times some function of land and capital (hence, capitalism).

And unlike land, capital is, in fact, unlimited. Someone might build a factory on the land, and owning the factory, he/she has incentive to improve the factory. “How much you can improve the factory” is, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. Therefore the output is also unlimited. This equation better described the growth in output that people were seeing in reality (GDP is an attempt to measure this), which has been growing exponentially ever since.

So… we’re not fucked? Well, it remains to be seen! We’ve certainly avoided being fucked so far! The standard of living of the average person on Earth has increased by a lot since Malthus.

Of course, this has come with negative externalities (pollution). We’re still seeing infinite growth riiiiiight up until we go extinct. The trick is to keep the infinite growth without going extinct!

EDIT: spelling correction

Good to know, thank you!

Personally I think we should add a differentiation between the storage policies of content which is owned by your own instance and content that federates from other instances.

The former should be kept for a long time (forever?), while the latter can be cleared more regularly.

Yeah, a few times. It was especially helpful in finding causes of subtle UI bugs, to identify the exact commit which changed the UI.

Agree! Defederation is a nuclear option. The more we do it, the more we reduce the value of “the fediverse”, and the more likely we are to kill this whole project.

I think defederation should only be a consideration if an instance is consistently, frequently becoming a problem for your instance over a large period of time. It’s not a pre-emptive action.

Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem. Thank you for all the attention you’re bringing to it.

My fear is that we might overcorrect by becoming too defederation-happy, which is a fear it seems that you share. However I disagree with your assertion that the federation model is more risky than conventional Reddit-like models. Instance owners have just as many tools (more, in fact) as Reddit does to combat bots on their instance. Plus we have the nuke-from-orbit defederation option.

Since it seems like most of these bots are coming from established instances (rather than spoofing their own), I agree with you that the right approach seems to be for instance mods to maintain stricter signups (captcha, email verification, application, or other original methods). My hope is that federation will naturally lead to a “survival of the fittest” where more bot-ridden instances will copy the methods of the less bot-ridden instances.

I think an instance should only consider defederation if it’s already being plagued by bot interference from a particular instance. I don’t think defederation should be a pre-emptive action.

Agreed from a technical standpoint.

But the implications are still interesting. One might (big might) trust Reddit as an organization not to use this data for evil, but with federation, there’s nothing stopping an instance from simply releasing all users’ voting history to be public.

Of course, my instance didn’t even ask for an email to sign up, so my entire account is anonymous that way.

I wonder if there are technical ways to federate votes anonymously?