"Why would corporations come to the Fediverse they couldn't possibly monetise it" they said.
And in a later breath they would also say the best way to deal with a scraper is to block it rather than fix the protocol.
These companies sell you as the product.
Fedi's model makes it extremely attractive to do so, and we all know laws are for the poor. So what if they get a fine? A fine is just a fee if there's no other penalty. It's a cost of doing business.
People are gonna be sitting there praying for GDPR to save them, praying for blocklists to save them, praying to false gods when the reality is everyone with a shred of fucking sense in this space has been screaming this is a major fucking problem and the Fediverse's model is very much one which is friendly to companies like Meta and Automatic.
Maybe they'll get a GDPR fine. But given the way Fedi works, they've got a strong defense.
Syndication of all posts to local servers? Like literally just copying them?
Brilliant fucking idea lads. Truly the work of geniuses. Truly a platform which will respect your privacy.
People will get upset for me saying this part but the only way, the ONLY way, to ensure privacy on Fedi, is to put an end to syndication of post content. It should be a URI with access control. It should not ever be fucking content. Content should just not be fucking syndicated EVER.
"But the load on servers"
You know what? A fediverse database has unbounded growth due to its model, and will grow with the number of instances. The average growth is n * m, where m is the average number of messages per server over a chosen interval, and n is the number of instances. For 1000 instances with 100 messages a day average (this is averaging out huge instances like m.s), that's 100k of messages PER DAY.
It's utter madness!
For something like threads they can become too big to block and they can definitely use other methods at their disposal to get your data. Like literally buying instances quietly or just setting up ones and astroturfing.
I don't know why people thought Meta or Automattic WOULDN'T want to come to Fedi. Wishful thinking? Or maybe just... more people don't know how Fedi works.
Wait, isn't this conflating the instance admins with the people on that instance? If my instance admin shut down my instance, I'd be bummed that my old posts wouldn't be available any more. Ideally I'd be able to move my posts to another instance, but that's not really a part of fedi's features in general, even if some tools have workarounds for it. I should get to pick whether to keep my old posts, not my instance admin.
user-initiated post migration is something that certain instances support (some of the *keys), and I look forward to seeing it on more instances. data exports also exist but data imports don’t seem common.
to se dozvíme, já v tom vidím možnost pro #Piraty se oklepat a uvidíme jak to dopadne ve sněmovních volbách. Bohužel to vidím, tak že bude vláda #ANOZmaru 🫣
Monthly releases are coming, but right now, they're for testing only! Get the latest update on the Thunderbird Planning mailing list: thunderbird.topicbox.com/group…
I am always astonished that frequent updates are supposed to describe a good software product. For ME, good software should be SO good and hardened that I do NOT need frequent updates, but only in extremely exceptional cases! Further developments, on the other hand, do not need to be handed over to ME on a monthly basis. 🧐 And yes I know there are LTS versions. In my eyes this should be the normal update cycle and there could even be a "VeryLTS" additionally. 😎
@CafeJunkie We think having the monthly and LTS versions are a good balance for all the kinds of users we have, from ones want the newest features right away to ones who want something stable and long term. This approach also works with the size of our team, since those very LTS versions need more people to maintain them!
Lors de ma dernière insomnie, hier donc, j’ai découvert « Everything Everywhere All at Once » et j’ai réalisé que si j’avais des amis, on m’aurait déjà parlé de ce film tellement c’est le meilleur film d’action + science-fiction + comédie + familial qui soit. (Un créneau jusque-là réservé à Dead Pool, donc.)
Il est dispo en replay sur FranceTV, VO et VF. Je recommande vivement.
@Bubu ich meine mich dunkel daran zu erinnern dass das Schild schon vor ca 10 Jahren da war, als ich zum letzten Mal hier in der Ecke war. Und es könnte sein dass es damals auch kaputt war und ich auch damals ein Bild davon gemacht habe. Müsste mal im Archiv gucken ...
It's the ten year anniversary of XKCD 1425, one of the all-time greats and one that resonates slightly differently today. Wrote up some notes on that here: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/24/…
To be honest, the fact that we now have this power is extremely scary, and I don't think we're seeing the ramifications just yet.
Tech companies will soon have the ability to scan every picture we send, every article we write and every conversation we have, in a way that can't easily be beaten by euphemisms or thinly-veiled references.
The obvious use cases are fighting CSAM, fighting spam, child safety, censoring all evidence of protests and finding everybody who expresses anti-government sentiments. The non-obvious use cases, which are, in many ways, even scarrier, are ensuring that people don't break platform rules.
Think "dating app where you can chat for free, but the app will ban you if you try to meet up IRL without paying a fee first."
This gives tech platforms weird powers and business models they never had before.
This won't affect Whats App (as long as end-to-end encryption holds), but it will definitely affect Tinder, Airbnb, Craigslist, Instagram, Uber, eBay etc.
And not just China, I like to watch people reading Reddit stories on YT when doing chores, and "redrum" (murder), "grape" (rape) and "spicy time" (sex) are words these people have to use to avoid drawing the ire of the allmighty algorithms.
For now that's just "simple" keyword and voice / face recognition. As tech progresses and models get smaller, it'll become a lot more pernicious.
I think a "no more discussions of copyright infringement and vaccine conspiracy theories on the internet" law (that actually works) is something we will get in the next 20-ish years in at least one major country.
🏠 Stěhování je vždy těžké a postihlo to také web infoek.cz.
🔄V současné době dochází k přesunu na nový server. Několik hodin nebudou publikovány nové příspěvky, web bude zcela nedostupný, bude docházet k problémům s načítáním obrázků a mohou nastat i další potíže....
🚀Brzy bude infoek.cz mít nový domov, aby mohl nadále růst.
A new service that helps web devs keep up to date on changes to support for web features; you can subscribe to RSS to get weekly reports on BCD changes. From your chums at @igaliameyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/202… (Vivaldi browser has a built-in feed reader, just sayin..)
I’ve been thinking about what a new protocol could be like, and I think there’s room for a suite of simple, strictly-defined protocols that collectively account for all requirements to federate. Something like that would be much easier to implement, and could therefore be bolted onto existing fedi backends.
diasporafoundation.org/ I heard diaspora is promising but I have never looked into it. I genuinely don't know what's "promising" about it but I do know that friendica supports diaspora (and some other protocols). I'm curious to how realistic it would be to make instance software that has dual support for diaspora & AP.
Out today: Sally Rooney’s new novel Intermezzo. I’m actually gonna grab this from the local bookstore today while I’m out and about. amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/03…
"We need #UBI not to protect us from some future prospect of zero employment but to cushion the blow from the constant disruption that automation has imposed on the labor market for hundreds of years."
In honor of Frazer Hines's birthday, Big Finish is having a limited time sale where many of his stories are available at discount prices. bigfinish.com/search_results?s… #DoctorWho
One of the upcoming features is the drawing tablet assistant. Install Plasma 6.2 Beta, try out the assistant with your own device. If you find a bug 🪲, report it!
#TrinidadYTobago🇹🇹 anuncia que retirará las tres carabelas de Colón (que “descubrió” las islas en su tercer viaje) de su escudo de armas y las reemplazará por el instrumento musical nacional, el ‘steelpan’.
El ‘steelpan’ es a su vez una apropiación de un símbolo imperialista: los trinidadeños descubrieron que si martilleabas un barril de petróleo (traído por las multinacionales estadounidenses para llevarse el oro negro del país) podías afinarlo
In the September Community Office Hours, we chatted with the voice of our community - the Thunderbird Council! @dannycolin and @clokep, two current council members, talk about the council's origins, its responsibilities, and how to get involved.
To the extent one defines "enshitiffication" as "increasing margins in very tiny increments, at the cost of large damage to user goodwill", it is structurally pretty hard to enshitiffy open source. But...
I just learned from @podcast episode 303 (transcript at livingblindfully.com/lb0303tra…) that the percentage of working-age blind people that are unemployed hasn't changed in 60 years; it has stayed high. I'm not saying it's hopeless, but when we look at it this way, it seems obvious that we have to do something different. I don't know what, though.
That one stumps me as well. Educational outcomes are better, we have all this fancy technology to help us, what is the missing piece? Cynically, I want to suggest attitudes of sighted employers, but I have nothing to back that up.
I've looked at this at one point, and the percentage was very different between countries. US was the lowest I could find.
There was 0 statistical rigor to that analysis and the studies might very well have been comparing Apples to oranges, so take that with a grain of salt.
From Brian Vogel: Advice to those reporting accessibility issues to companies where accessibility is not one of their central focuses . . . groups.io/g/tech-vi/message/78…
ChevronWP7 was a "jailbreak" tool for Windows Phone 7 that abused the lack of HTTPS certificate validation to enable sideloading apps... Microsoft fixed this bug *but* in the process they talked to and worked with the ChevronWP7 team to offer a $9 unlock in the form of ChevronWP7 Labs, which would later be integrated into Windows App Hub as a $20 fee, and made free in Windows 10 Mobile
wait is apple's developer offering even comparable to what windows Phone had? when I read "sideload" and "unlock" I imagine it becomes fairly easy to install additional apps and without a limit; even though it's free, Apple's offering is still just painful for anyone to use unless you're developing the app (which is still painful, you just are generally moreso expected to be able to deal with it), because it must be self-signed and it only lasts like a week and you can only have like 3 apps at once (or was it 5? also some BS limit on the number of times they can be reactivated within X time period, last I checked)
was the windows phone thing equally awful to what Apple has been offering for years now? (price aside)
by "jailbreak" and the fact that windows apps are generally not very isolated and can do various interesting things at a closer-to-the-system-shell level (I don't know how this differs on Windows Phone 7, though), i also assumed this actually means you can install arbitrary things, not just those that could easily map to a PWA (easiest analogue to describe a certain kind of app; I don't mean web app, but restricted like an iOS or Android app would be, and a PWA is the best cross-platform concept like that); in which case Apple just clearly does not offer that and never have.
New from 404 Media: Google is serving AI images of mushrooms when users search for some species. Very risky, potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to find what mushrooms are safe to eat. Could have "devastating consequences" one expert said 404media.co/google-serves-ai-g…
The COSMIC development team is working on accessibility features! Fill out this survey to provide your input and help make #COSMICdesktop better! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…
Let's create Wayland Protocols but much more iterative.
Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality.
This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled.
We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.
the governance model of wayland-protocols is set up in such a way that encourages and sustains all of these problems. there isn't really a realistic path for doing this sort of iteration in that model; nor a path for me to fix any of the other issues as an "outsider."
The wayland-protocols governance model was created in the early days. People wanted lots of features in, we feared that many of them are designed like X11 and violate the Wayland design principles, and so there was more disagreement than agreement on how to design things in order to get the features end users need. We always wanted downstream projects to develop extensions first for themselves, then see if they work for others as well.
A big problem with Wayland extension is that their stability requirements are greater than those of a library ABI. If a library breaks ABI, one can at least vendor an old copy of the library with an app. That is not possible with Wayland. Protocol fragmentation hurts interoperability, which is why wide agreement on extension is very desirable. Getting wide agreement is also the hard part of design, as everyone knows.
Some Wayland extensions should get wide agreement, while others are fundamentally enabling something that will never get that wide agreement. A good example are the protocol extensions that make wlroots the modular base for anyone to build a custom environment by choosing and picking helper programs. That design is inherently against the fully integrated product design used by e.g. GNOME. Both have good reasons to exist.
I think in the past at least some people have seen the acceptance to wayland-protocols as means to force everyone to support the extension. It does not work like that. Some extensions should get wide adoption, others do not need to. That is how the wayland-protocols namespaces wp, xdg, and ext came about. It is possible for an ext extension to become widely supported, too, but there is usually not as wide agreement initially that it would have made it into wp.
What are the concerns of easily accepting new extensions into wayland-protocols? Fragmentation, causing interoperability problems between apps and compositors. Some fragmentation is unavoidable, but I think it is still good to at least try to minimize it by looking for wide acceptance. Doing major revisions to extensions is a breaking change too, increasing fragmentation.
But anyone can just make extensions and ship them outside of wayland-protocols. This was even a goal in the early days when @krh was still developing Wayland. Let downstreams mature extensions, and then let them grow their support organically.
I think that idea still carries, but we need to think how to deal with the fragmentation.
wayland-protocols partly came about from the desire to have "blessed ground" for known-good extensions.
I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head as to why we have a problem now and why frog-protocols now exists.
When I talk to folks who develop compositors, the majority of them don't support this idea that protocols need to be perfect before they land. On the contrary, it seems to be burning people out to try to deal with that expectation. Also, I think that the "principles" had little influence on adoption of Wayland, but rather desperation to replace X11.
In practice, it does not seem to be as hard as it looks to get wide agreement, it's just much harder to get *universal* agreement. It often seems like the latter is necessary to get anything done, and that's something we need to put more effort into squashing.
There also seems to be a fear of "dead batteries", but I don't think that's something we should be concerning ourselves. Things tend to naturally work themselves out over time anyway.
Wayland, as used today, is already not functional without things that aren't in wayland-protocols. On the GNOME side, there's both private protocols and a mixture of private and public D-Bus interfaces. On the KDE side, they use private protocols and third-party protocols. Most other Wayland environments follow the KDE approach too. A lot of them are the same third-party protocols. That says to me we're not doing a good job of integrating things that are commonly needed.
Federico Mena Quintero
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