December 2025 - Ploum.net En - listes.ploum.net

Prepare for That Stupid World
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 19 Dec '25

19 Dec '25

PREPARE FOR THAT STUPID WORLD by Ploum on 2025-12-19 https://ploum.net/2025-12-19-prepare-for-that-world.html You probably heard about the Wall Street Journal story where they had a snack-vending machine run by a chatbot created by Anthropic. At first glance, it is funny and it looks like journalists doing their job criticising the AI industry. If you are curious, the video is there (requires JS). We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.(www.wsj.com) https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84… But what appears to be journalism is, in fact, pure advertising. For both WSJ and Anthropic. Look at how WSJ journalists are presented as "world class", how no-subtle the Anthropic guy is when telling them they are the best and how the journalist blush at it. If you are taking the story at face value, you are failing for the trap which is simple: "AI is not really good but funny, we must improve it." The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all. Automated snack vending machine is a solved problem since nearly a century. Why do you want to make your vending machine more expensive, more error-prone, more fragile and less efficient for your customers? What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!" The Anthropic guy himself doesn’t seem to believe his own lies, to the point of making me uncomfortable. Toward the ends, he even tries to warn us: "Claude AI could run your business but you don’t want to come one day and see you have been locked out." At which the journalist adds, "Or has ordered 100 PlayStations." And then he gives up: "Well, the best you can do is probably prepare for that world." Still from the video where Anthropic’s employee says "probably prepare for that world" https://ploum.net/files/prepareworld.png None of the world class journalists seemed to care. They are probably too badly paid for that. I was astonished to see how proud they were, having spent literally hours chatting with a bot just to get a free coke, even queuing for the privilege of having a free coke. A coke that cost a few minutes of minimum-wage work. So the whole thing is advertising a world where chatbots will be everywhere and where world-class workers will do long queue just to get a free soda. And the best advice about it is that you should probably prepare for that world.

1 0

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 15 Dec '25

15 Dec '25

HOW WE LOST COMMUNICATION TO ENTERTAINMENT by Ploum on 2025-12-15 https://ploum.net/2025-12-15-communication-entertainment.html > All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected. A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post about Pixelfed hurting the Fediverse. I defended the theory that, in a communication network, you hurt the trust in the whole network if you create clients that arbitrarily drop messages, something that Pixelfed is doing deliberately. It gathered a lot of reactions. Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I thought that either I was missing something or Dansup, Pixelfed’s creator, was missing it. We could not both be right. But as the reactions piled in on the Fediverse, I realised that such irreconcilable opinions do not arise only from ignorance or oversight. It usually means that both parties have vastly different assumptions about the world. They don’t live in the same world. Two incompatible universes ========================== I started to see a pattern in the two kinds of reactions to my blog post. There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a "communication protocol" between humans. As such, anything that implies losing messages without feedback is the worst thing that could happen. Not losing messages is the top priority of a communication protocol. And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume. Dansup himself is communicating through a Mastodon account, not a Pixelfed one. Many Pixelfed users also have a Mastodon account, and they never questioned that. They actually want multiple accounts for different use cases. On the Fediverse threads, nearly all the people defending the Pixelfed philosophy posted from Mastodon accounts. They usually boasted about having both a Mastodon and a Pixelfed account. A multiplicity of accounts ========================== To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform. That also explains why most politicians want to "regulate" Facebook or X. They think it is impossible not to be on those platforms. They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly." People flock to the Fediverse with this philosophy of "one platform, one account", which makes no sense if you truly want to create a federated communication protocol like email or XMPP. But Manuel Moreale cracked it for me: the Fediverse is not a communication network. ActivityPub is not a communication protocol. The spec says it: ActivityPub is a protocol to build a "social platform" whose goal is "to deliver content." > The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralised social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content. (official W3C definition of ActivityPub) On open protocols (manuelmoreale.com) https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-open-protocols No more communication ===================== But aren’t social networks also communication networks? That’s what I thought. That’s how they historically were marketed. That’s what we all believed during the "Arab Spring." But that was a lie. Communication networks are not profitable. Social networks are entertainment platforms, media consumption protocols. Historically, they disguised themselves as communication platforms to attract users and keep them captive. The point was never to avoid missing a message sent from a fellow human being. The point was always to fill your time with "content." We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0." They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social! The lost messages ================= My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time. They don’t see the point in trusting a platform because they never experienced a trusted means of communication. Facebook m’a rendu injoignable (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/facebook-ma-rendu-injoignable/index.html Now that I write it, it may also explain why instant messaging became the dominant communication medium: because if you don’t receive an immediate answer, you don’t even trust the recipient to have received your messages. In fact, even if the message was received, you don’t even trust the recipient's attention span to remember the message. Multiple studies have confirmed that we don’t remember the vast majority of what we see while doomscrolling. While the "view" was registered to increase statistics, we don’t have the slightest memory of most of that content, even after only a few seconds. It thus makes sense not to consider social media as a means of communication at all. There’s no need for a reliable communication protocol if we assume that human brains are not reliable enough to handle asynchronous messages. A Society That Lost Focus (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2024-03-18-lost-focus.html It’s not Dansup who is missing something. It is me who is unadapted to the current society. I understand now that Pixelfed was only following some design decisions and protocol abuses fathered by Mastodon. Pixelfed was my own "gotcha" moment because I never understood Instagram in the first place, and, in my eyes, Pixelfed was no better. But if you take that route, Mastodon is no better than Twitter. Many reactions pointed, justly, that other Fediverse tools such as PeerTube, WriteFreely, or Mobilizon were just not displaying messages at all. I didn’t consider it a big problem because they never pretended to do it in the first place. Nobody uses those tools to follow others. There’s no expectation. Those platforms are "publish only." But this is still a big flaw in the Fediverse! Someone could, using autocompletion, send a message pinging your PeerTube address and you will never see it. Try autocomplete "@ploum" from your Mastodon account and guess which suggestion is the only one that will send me a valid notification! On a more positive note, I should give credit to Dansup for announcing that Pixelfed will soon allow people to optionally "not drop" text messages. How we lost email ================= I cling to asynchronous reliable communications, but those are disappearing. I use email a lot because I see it as a true means of communication: reliable, asynchronous, decentralised, standardised, manageable offline with my own tools. But many people, even barely younger than me, tell me that email is "too formal" or "for old people" or "even worse than social network feeds." And they are probably right. I like it because I’ve learned to use it. I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology. If I don’t reply or act on your email, it is because I decided not to. I’m actively keeping my inbox clean by sharing only disposable email addresses that I disable once they start to be spammed. Why you are probably not at inbox 0 (but should be) (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/why-you-are-not-at-inbox-0/index.html But for most people, their email inbox is simply one more feed full of bad advertising. They have 4 or 5 digit unread count. They scroll through their inbox like they do through their social media feeds. Boringness of communications ============================ The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. Use IRC and XMPP if you truly want real-time communication. Those are working and working great. And because of that, they are boring. Communications protocols are boring. They don’t give you that well- studied random hit of dopamine. They don’t make you addicted. On Social Media (gem.sdf.org) gemini://gem.sdf.org/beej/blog/2025-01-10-socialmedia.gmi Experiential Pica (www.lesswrong.com) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ZodFr54FtpLThHZh/experiential-pica They don’t make you addicted which means they are not hugely profitable and thus are not advertised. They are not new. They are not as shiny as a new app or a new random chatbot. The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans. As long as I’m not alone ======================== We believe that a communication network must reach a critical mass to be really useful. People stay on Facebook to "stay in touch with the majority." I don’t believe that lie anymore. I’m falling back to good old mailing lists. I’m reading the Web and Gemini while offline through Offpunk. I also handle my emails asynchronously while offline. Offpunk, an offline-first command-line browser (offpunk.net) https://offpunk.net/ There Is No Content on Gemini (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2022-10-05-there-is-no-content-on-gemini.html I may be part of an endangered species. It doesn’t matter. I made peace with the fact that I will never get in touch with everyone. As long as there are people posting on their gemlogs or blogs with RSS feeds, as long as there are people willing to read my emails without automatically summarising them, there will be a place for those who want to simply communicate. A protected reserve. You are welcome to join! https://ploum.net/files/framagroupes.jpg Illustration of a message board piled with messages by David Revoy (CC By 4.0) https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/framasoft__2023-05-20_Framalistes_by… Illustration of animal meeting at an intersection with messages by David Revoy (CC By 4.0) https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/framasoft__2023-05-20_Framagroupes_b…

1 0

Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 04 Dec '25

04 Dec '25

IS PIXELFED SAWING OFF THE BRANCH THAT THE FEDIVERSE IS SITTING ON? by Ploum on 2025-12-04 https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html > In January 2025, I became aware that there was a real problem with Pixelfed, the "Instagram inspired Fediverse client". The problem is threatening the whole Fediverse. As Pixelfed received a lot of media attention, I choose to wait. In March 2025, I decided that the situation was quieter and wrote an email to Dansup, Pixelfed’s maintainer, with an early draft of this post. Dan’s promptly replied, in a friendly tone. But didn’t want to acknowledge the problem which I’ve confirmed many times with Pixelfed users. I want to bring the debate on the public place. If I’m wrong, I will at least understand why. If Dan is wrong on this very specific issue, we will at least open the debate. This post will be shared to my Fediverse audience through my @ploum@mamot.fr Mastodon account. But Pixelfed users will not see it. Even if they follow me, even if many people they follow boost it. Instead, they will see a picture of my broken keyboard that I posted a week ago. The latest post of Ploum according to Pixelfed. https://ploum.net/files/pixelfedploum.png Ploum’s real Fediverse timeline (mamot.fr) https://mamot.fr/@ploum That’s because, despite its name, Pixelfed is NOT a true Fediverse application. It does NOT respect the ActivityPub protocol. Any Pixelfed user following my @ploum@mamot.fr will only see a very small fraction of what I post. They may not see anything from me for months. But why? Simple! The Pixelfed app has unilaterally decided not to display most Fediverse posts for the arbitrary reason that they do not contain a picture. This is done on purpose and by design. Pixelfed is designed to mimic Instagram. Displaying text without pictures was deliberately removed from the code (it was possible in previous versions) in order to make the interface prettier. This is unlike a previous problem where Pixelfed would allow unauthorised users to read private posts from unknowing fediverse users, which was promptly fixed. Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances (fokus.cool) https://fokus.cool/2025/03/25/pixelfed-vulnerability.html In this case, we are dealing with a conscious design decision by the developers. Being pretty is more important than transmitting messages. Technically, this means that a Pixelfed user P will think that he follows someone but will miss most of the content. On the opposite, the sender, for example a Mastodon user M, will believe that P has received his message because M follows him. This is a grave abuse of the protocol: messages are silently dropped. It stands against everything the Fediverse is trying to do: allow users to communicate. My experience with open protocols allows me to say that it is a critical problem and that it cannot be tolerated. Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter "P"? The principle behind a communication protocol is to create trust that messages are transmitted. Those messages could, of course, be filtered by the users but those filters should be manually triggered and always removable. If a message is not delivered, the sender should be notified. In 2025, I’ve read several articles about people trying the Fediverse but leaving it because "there’s not enough content despites following lot of people". Due to the Pixelfed buzz in January, I’m now wondering: "how many of those people were using Pixelfed and effectively missing most of the Fediverse content?" The importance of respecting the protocol ========================================= I cannot stress enough how important that problem is. If Pixelfed becomes a significant actor, its position will gravely undermine the ActivityPub protocol to the point of making it meaningless. Imagine a new client, TextFed, that will never display posts with pictures. That makes as much sense as the opposite. Lots of people, like me, find pictures disturbing and some people cannot see pictures at all. So TextFed makes as much sense as Pixelfed. Once you have TextFed, you realise that TextFed and PixelFed users can follow each other, they can comment on post from Mastodon users, they can exchange private messages but they will never be able to see post from each other. For any normal users, there’s no real way to understand that they miss some messages. And even if you do, it is very hard to find that the cause is the absence of pictures in them make them "not pretty enough" to Pixelfed developers. Worse of all : some Mastodon posts do contain a picture but are not displayed in Pixelfed. That’s because the picture is from a link preview and was not manually uploaded. Try to explain that to your friends that reluctantly followed you on the Fediverse. Have a look at any Mastodon account and try to guess which posts will we showed to the Pixelfed followers! That’s not something any normal human is supposed to understand. For Pixelfed users, there’s no way to see they are missing on some content. For Mastodon users, there’s no way to see that some of their audience is missing on some content. With the trust in the protocol broken, people will revert to create Mastodon accounts to follow Mastodon, Pixelfed accounts to follow Pixelfed and Textfed to follow Textfed. Even if it is not 100% needed, that’s the first intuition. It’s already happening around me: I’ve witnessed multiple people with a Mastodon account creating a Pixelfed account to follow Pixelfed users. They do this naturally because they were used to do that with Twitter and Instagram. Congratulations, you have successfully broken ActivityPub and, as a result, the whole Fediverse. What Meta was not able to do with Threads, the Fediverse did it to itself. Because it was prettier. How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html Pixelfed will be forced to comply anyway ======================================== Now, imagine for a moment that Pixelfed takes off (which is something I wish for and would be healthy for the Fediverse) and that interactions are strong between Mastodon users and Pixelfed users (also something I wish for). I let you imagine how many bug reports developers will receive about "some posts are not appearing in my followers timeline" or "not appearing in my timeline". This will result in a heavy pressure for Pixelfed devs to implement text-only messages. They will, at some point, be forced to comply, having eroded trust in the Fediverse for nothing. Once a major actor in a decentralised network starts to mess with the protocol, there are only two possible output: either that actor lose steam or that actor becomes dominant enough to impose its own vision of the protocol. In fact, there’s a third option: the whole protocol becomes irrelevant because nobody trust it anymore. What if Pixelfed becomes dominant? ================================== But imagine that Pixelfed is now so important that they can stick to their guns and refuse to display text messages. Well, there’s a simple answer: every other fediverse software will now add an image with every post. Mastodon will probably gain a configurable "default picture to attach to every post so your posts are displayed in Pixelfed". And now, without having formerly formalised it, the ActivityPub protocol requires every message to have a picture. That’s how protocol works. It already happened: that’s how all mail clients started to implement the winmail.dat bug. The Winmail.dat Syndrome (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/winmail-dat-syndrome/index.html Sysadmins handling storage and bandwidth for the Fediverse thank you in advance. We are not there yet ==================== Fortunately, we are not there yet. Pixelfed is still brand new. It still can go back to displaying every message an end user expect to see when following another Fediverse user. I stress out that it should be by default, not a hidden setting. Nearly all Pixelfed users I’ve asked were unaware of that problem. They thought that if they follow someone on the Fediverse, they should, by default, see all their public posts. There’s no negotiation. No warning on the Pixelfed website will be enough. In a federated communication system, filters should be opt-in. If fact, that’s what older versions of Pixelfed were doing. But, while text messages MUST be displayed by default (MUST as in RFC), they can still me displayed as less important. For example, one could imagine having them smaller or whatever you find pretty as long as it is clear that the message is there. I trust Pixelfed devs to be creative here. The Fediverse is growing. The Fediverse is working well. The Fediverse is a tool that we urgently ned in those trying times. Let’s not saw off the branch on which we stand when we need it the most. Illustration by David Revoy, CC-By-SA https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/misc__2024-09-09_My-Neighboor-Mastod…

1 0