What does entropy mean in the given context?
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Entropy can in a very simplistic way be described as chaos/randomness. It come from physics and the flow of energy but has usefulness in other fields as well.
I know the technical definition, and i don’t see how it is a positive thing in the context that was used. Does op mean dispersion of ideas? Similar to how entropy is dispersed energy?
Chaos because there are so many separate ideas coming together?
I think more the randomness aspect of it, comments people requesting accesses, accounts being created all around, etc...
Usefulness of energy
I think you might have that concept backwards, so the fediverse would have the least entropy out of all the social networks
Well no because it is more spread out and chaotic
Well, that's true as well, I suppose. my point was that as entropy increases, useful energy decreases, and vice versa. Your comment made it seem like the opposite
Regular social networks run on data centres with just as much redundancy and decentralisation from the technical perspective. If anything, in the Fediverse only content that people actively seek gets duplicated to other instances, so the overall energy requirement is smaller.
On the other hand, I can't compare the effectiveness of small Pi computers people running at home for their instances, and huge server farms. I guess it's comparable to some degree, as most likely both use some shared resources and are also used for other things.
Ok. What is energy in this context? Is it the literal electricity that keeps instances alive? Is it the motivation for people to post and discuss?
Could probably be used as a good random number generator, by using the state of the network at any given time, similarly to how cloudflare uses a wall of lavalamps to generate random numbers since the system is quite chaotic and unpredictable.