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Tay gently pushed the plastic door of the printer shut with an edifying "click".

Servicing Dark Printers had been illegal for years now. They enjoyed the seditious thrill.

---

It had started as a subscription grab after the printer companies tried hobbling third party toner cartridges.

"Subscribe for a monthly fee and you'll never run out of toner again."

"Let us monitor your printer so you don't have to."

People saw it for what it was - vendor lock in - but they had no choice really, not after all the printer companies started doing it.

Then came generative AI.

Everyone wanted to scrape every word ever written on the internet, tokenize it and feed it to an #LLM. #Reddit sold out, then #Tumblr, even open source darling #WordPress - selling out their user base for filthy token lucre.

So people started hiding their words, their art, their thoughts, their expression, not behind disrespected robots.txt, but through obscurity.

Rejecting Website Boy's "fewer algorithmic fanfares", they forked into the Dark Fedi.

Unscrapeable, unscrutable, ungovernable.

---

But people had forgotten about the printers.

The printers had to be connected 24/7, for "monitoring".

But you could tokenize postscript as easily as HTML.

And so every time a document was sent to a printer, it was harvested for tokens. Even secure documents. Documents not online.

---

Tay shut the metal door behind them, Dark Printer cossetted safely in its Faraday cage, and shuffled the hot stack of A4 paper it had borne.

It was a children's story, about how words were sacred, and special, and how you had to earn the right to use them.

---

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot


Visit #FanFiction.net, and you too can try to decide who you dislike more: #CloudFlare, the website admins, or the authors who keep posting there (hint: the last one is kind of unreasonable but not entirely without merit). Most websites give you at least one reason to hate them in 2024, but this is a three-for-one deal. For even more choice, get your #fanfic recommendations through #Reddit, where everybody ends up linking to the terrible, unnecessary mobile-specific version of the site because they have a terrible, unnecessary mobile-specific version of the site. #fanfiction


* Facebook has AI.
* Google has AI.
* Microsoft has AI.
* Reddit has AI.
* Tumblr has AI.
* WordPress services on their DOT Com has AI.

In 2024, you must assume, any service you cannot download and install yourself, will have AI and will use whatever you write to train an AI.

#Facebook #Reddit #Google #Microsoft #Tumblr #WordPress #AI


leave #reddit now

{ Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.” }

https://www.404media.co/reddit-we-are-in-the-early-stages-of-monetizing-our-user-base-2/


Oh btw, this is why I do not use #Reddit

Ask yourself, do you want to train AI?


There's a new free open source Reddit-style platform for the Fediverse called PieFed. It's still fairly early in development, but you can try out a demo server at:

➡️ https://piefed.social

There's more info on its official website at:

➡️ https://join.piefed.social

You can follow the project at:

➡️ @piefedadmin

It's lightweight and written to make it easier for developers to contribute. (For any devs reading this, it's written in Python.)

(via @Mrfunkedude)

#FediTips #Fediverse #Reddit


while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.

i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.

some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.

best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.

i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎


"According to the r/blind team, #Reddit invited the moderators to test the #accessibility improvements a few hours before they were announced.

"What they're asking [us] to do is essentially something that you would contract someone to do this work," Carver said. "It's not the community's responsibility to make things accessible. It's not a well-intentioned developer's responsibility to do that. That is Reddit's responsibility.""

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/01/1184258201/reddit-api-accessibility-mods


I’ve finally found the time to listen to the episode of @podcast I was graciously invited to speak on.

(I’m very excited about some of the #wwdc stuff, including #VisionPro.)

I want to say I’m touched by the way Jonathan explained the impact of r/blind on people dealing with vision loss, as well as the rest of the community. That’s one of the things that made it so hard to make the decision to go dark for two days.

Since we spoke, we’ve also come out of a meeting with Reddit with mixed feelings, and Transcribers of Reddit have announced the upcoming API changes are forcing them to shut down permanently.

I’m growing sadder and more and more disappointed. Whatever happens next, #Reddit will be less welcoming to #blind people.

For what it’s worth, we’ve been testing a Lemmy instance at https://rblind.com. As discussed with Jonathan, federation and FOSS allow us to be in charge of our own destiny, while staying connected to other communities.

These are hard times, but communities are made up of people, not platforms.


#Reddit demodded me as head of /r/piracy in order to reopen the subreddit. I posted about it in /c/piracy on #lemmy and today I realized this achieved our first 1K votes threshold 🎉

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35555


Guess me and #reddit will be parting ways. The dude is turning into a cartoon villain.


There's a Fediverse alternative to #Reddit called #Kbin. More info at https://kbin.pub

Still VERY new, not many servers yet, two so far in English:

https://fedia.io
https://kbin.social

No app yet, use it through these sites. Subreddits are called "Magazines". You can interact with magazines from other servers.

Coders help Kbin at https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core, non-coders donate at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

(Sorry to people bored of this, had many requests to put info in one place)


Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist


I keep seeing lots of people who are totally giddy about the #Fediverse, who are gushing over it, who want to promote it, who want it to spread.

And who want it to advance. To learn new abilities. To grow new features.

That's all fine and dandy.

But almost all of these people are still fully convinced that the Fediverse equals #Mastodon. And nothing else. At least not until Tumblr and P92 join the fray. Okay, maybe the #WordPress plug-in that's the talk of the town now that it has become official. Okay, maybe a few of them have also heard of #Pixelfed and/or #PeerTube because their makers are all over the Fediverse.

When these people are talking about the Fediverse, they mean Mastodon. And when they're thinking about the Fediverse, they're only thinking about Mastodon. Because that's all they know.

So these people want new cool features or even new cool use-cases in the Fediverse, stuff that Mastodon doesn't have. They want Mastodon to have it, or they want new projects to be launched that have these features.

If only they knew.

If only they knew that everything, literally everything they propose has already been done. Yes, in the Fediverse. In projects which are fully federated with Mastodon. Why don't they know? Because they've never heard of any of these projects, much less what they can do.
So they want "quote-tweets" in the Fediverse. Which means they want Mastodon to introduce them.

Tell you what: Mastodon is the only microblogging project in the Fediverse that doesn't have quotes. Not only will Eugen Rochko never introduce them, but all the other projects have them with Mastodon forks #GlitchSoc such as being the exception. #Pleroma has them. #Akkoma has them. #MissKey has them. #CalcKey has them. #FoundKey has them. #GoToSocial has them. The old heavyweights #Friendica and #Hubzilla have them, and so does Hubzilla's youngest decendant, the #Streams project. Et cetera.

You want "quote-tweets"? Switch to something that isn't Mastodon, and you've got "quote-tweets".
Or text formatting in posts like bold type, italics, underline, strikethrough, code blocks etc. Would be great if Mastodon had that, in spite of other people saying they don't want it.

Again: Pleroma already has it. Akkoma already has it. MissKey already has it. CalcKey already has it. FoundKey already hasit. GoToSocial already has it. Friendica already has it. Hubzilla already has it (look at this post at its source in a Web browser and weep). (streams) already has it. And so forth. This time, even Mastodon forks have it.

It has been done. It has been done many times. It has actually been done before Mastodon.
Next, long-form blog posting. We need something like #Medium in the Fediverse that isn't Medium itself. Mastodon's 500 characters are too few, and Twitter-like threads are inconvenient.

Except we already have that, too. #Plume and #WriteFreely are about as close to Medium as Mastodon is to Twitter, including clean and distraction-less layouts. Oh, and Hubzilla can do that, too.

By the way: Again, Mastodon is the only Fediverse project that can do microblogging that has a 500-character limit. Pleroma, Mastodon's oldest direct competitor, raised it to a default of 6,000. MissKey and its forks have 3,000 as a default. Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have character limits of "go ahead, drop your short story in one post in its entirety," so virtually none at all. And yes, Hubzilla has long-form writing on top of that.
Speaking of Hubzilla: Most recently, there has been the idea to uncouple one's online identity from a specific instance. Your online self should no longer be firmly tied to any one server exclusively. Now, this sounds so ambitious, it might just as well be science-fiction.

What if I told you that just this very thing already exists as well?

No, really. No, I'm not making this up. But you should know by now that I'm not.

Better yet: It was conceived as early as 2011. By the guy who launched Friendica in 2010. He invented a new principle named #NomadicIdentity and a new protocol named #Zot. In its early stages already, even with no technical implementation yet, Zot was more powerful than ActivityPub is today.

In 2012, Zot became reality as the basis of a Friendica fork which later became known as #RedMatrix and, upon its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, which is still prior to Mastodon's initial release, Hubzilla. Hubzilla is still being developed and improved, and it has a fledgling but growing "successor of a successor" named (streams) which offers nomadic identity, too.

Now, what does this nomadic identity even look like? Well, not only does it let you move your channel(s) around from instance to instance with ease and, unlike on Mastodon, with absolutely everything on it. No, it also lets you have your channel on multiple instances at once. Identical clones, automagically kept in sync in real-time, all with the same identity, the same content, the same connections.

Your identity is no longer strapped down to one instance. Not only that, but your channel, your posts, your content is no longer hosted on only one server. This means that if one instance with one of your clones goes down, you still have spares.
Okay, so how about community groups/forums? That'd be cool.

Well, for one, there's #Guppe. It's basically bolted on Mastodon, and in practice, it's centralised because there's only one instance. But it's impractical to use.

Besides, this is becoming a running gag here, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) have exactly this built-in and open for the rest of the Fediverse.

Better yet: There's also #Lemmy which amounts to a federated #Reddit or #HackerNews clone. So not only does Lemmy offer this, it specialises in it.

Hubzilla alone can provide Fediverse feature suggestions with "has been done" for years to come. Not to mention what else the Fediverse has to offer. Even if someone should want a free, non-commercial, decentralised, federated #GoodReads clone in the Fediverse, it has been done: #BookWyrm.


This is also how the Open Web dies. Trying to read a page on #reddit using an iPhone. I simply closed the page. Ain’t nobody got time for that.


Was having strange connection issue on @thunderbird
for #office365 accounts via IMAP

Message indicated:
User is authenticated but not connected

Found the solution on #reddit:

switch ` network.dns.disableIPv6` to `true` in the config editor

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/zxelqn/came_back_to_thunderbird_after_christmas_and_now/