One of the things as a software developer I have a hard time reconciling is how much people think that an app lives entirely on their phone. Like, LinkedIn is an app, and all of the infrastructure is inside it, and maybe all of the people live in there too? And if you delete the app from your phone, all the infrastructure and people and technology fall screaming into the void?
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@evan to me, that it is possible to misunderstand this has always been a bizarre design dark pattern. With physics in the world, we can't control how hard it is to know what's going on behind or inside or whatever, but in software, it's all human design! Phone apps, and software in general, could be made so you can easily open the hood and see what's happening. Someday i hope that seems worth the effort, and people do it.
@evan This is an example of maladaptation at a fundamental level of cognition.
Our brains are not wired for asynchronicity or the dissolution of a storyline into fragments and tokens. We HAVE to fill in some gaps to make communication "whole" to us.
But most humans have neither the technical experience nor the self-reflective detachment to realize that is what's going on.
It's the cause for disturbing parasocial imbalances, lots of online harassment, "AI psychosis", etc.
@evan distributed information systems are fundamentally alien to embodied beings who interact with a multisensory, physical world at a range limited to somewhere between arms length and earshot.
There's probably something about the limits of object permanence in this thought space, too, but I really need to try to get some climate modelling homework done.
@evan Maybe in the near future, it could become possible to host a Bsky PDS or even our own Fediverse data directly on mobile
This would require building a new approach that removes the need for reverse proxying, but technically it doesnt seem out of reach
Such a model could significantly reduce storage and energy consumption in data centers. In theory, it might also provide very high availability (close to 99.99% uptime) considering that most people rarely turn off their smartphones anymore
@evan in the early 90s I thought people who had websites left their 486 computers connected to their dial up connection 24/7 in order for them to be available to visit.
Understanding what is local and what is not is one of the hardest thing to understand for non-technical people.
