There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).
First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.
Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).
Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…
Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.
Sound to me like the worst case scenario is that some of the users gained in the debacle is also lost afterwards. Why would the users that joined the fediverse with a purpose leave for threads in the breakup?
The EEE strategy would lead to the big corporate entity being the way most people interact. New users would go there instead of other platforms to engage. In time, a lot of the users and content would be on the corporate platform because it’s the one that has the most reach, marketing, etc. so defederation would be a big hit.
And you don't need to look too far to see it now. The majority of people posting on the threadiverse come from lemmy. world and kbin.social. Why? Because they were already the established "big instances" and they went there.
The average user will just go to wherever is the biggest and that will be threads. And when they have the majority of new take up and most people on the other side have the majority of their contacts inside the threads world, then they don't need us any more.
This is just the way a corporation operates. Source: I work at a multinational corporation.
Yeah lemmy.world *already" consists of an order of magnitude more users than the next instance to it. Imagine if the lemmy.world admins had shareholders to please who suddenly start asking “why are you giving away all these ActivityPub activities for free???”
I am not attached to the fediverse. The federated aspect is, to me, interesting from a technical standpoint, but irrelevant to my decision to be here. I’m also not particularly attached to foss principles.
I came here because I got annoyed at reddit. I’ll continue to poke around here exactly as long as it’s entertaining/informative. That purpose is not contradicted by leaving here for threads (it’d have to be a reddit clone instead of a Twitter clone to pique my interest at all, but leaving that aside).
So if, over the next few years, more and more of the content that I was interacting with was coming from threads, then threads split off, it’s reasonably likely that I’d want to continue interacting with threads. And if the majority of the stuff I was interested in was on threads, I probably wouldn’t bother coming back here.
A reasonable reaction to that is “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, and that’s fine. But what could conceivably happen is that something like threads uses what has been built here to gain ground, then starts leeching away communities. They start moving to Facebook servers because Facebook has butt tons of money so the servers are stable, and besides, everyone else can still get there from other instances. Then Facebook starts adding incompatible features, which motivates more migration to their instances, and so on and so on, then there’s a split.
Now Facebook’s threads has devoured your communities, taken your users, and so taken your content, mostly just to jumpstart it’s own growth. To get what they are familiar with, people like myself stay on/move to Facebook, leaving the fediverse to rebuild the communities that it built in the first place, out of the people who care more about foss principles. While appearing to external observers like an inferior clone off the Facebook threads thing, to add insult to injury.
So the issue is that you wouldn’t lose just the new stuff from Facebook, but a fair bit of the preexisting stuff that sided with Facebook after the split out of convenience. What you’d keep are the people who stick it out out of loyalty to foss or federated or some other principle - and that may not be enough to carry on the level of content that’s desired, even with the fediverse’s “size isn’t everything” philosophy.
Of course, it’s possible that either a) none of that would happen even if there were federation with Facebook and everything would be fine forever, or b) all of that would happen even without federation with Facebook, just without the intermediate stage where there’s interaction. But the above seems to be the concern, and it’s not without merit (both because of past examples and, well, because I know I personally wouldn’t stay if the content were more appealing somewhere else and I don’t think I’m unique).
Personally, I think that with Twitter reeling at the moment, all the Facebook version has to do is be similar enough to be familiar, have good performance, and be easy to use to have a shot at that nabbing that part of the market (including users from the fediverse) - interoperability with mastodon or not. But predicting the future is rather difficult, so it’s hard to say.
There's also users that potentially could join other instances but because of some exclusive feature Threads has, they choose it. So basically rest of the instances are bleeding users to Threads.
Great article. It’s pretty obvious to me now that the Fediverse should have room to grow on it’s own naturally. It’s probably in the best interest to block any massive corporate entity from joining in and swallowing it whole.
It’s interesting seeing how fast it’s already growing due to mega corporate incompetence, and I think the sheer desire to escape that landscape is driving growth now and we should nurture that as long as possible.
Wow, this is crucial reading. Previously I was basing my dislike for Threads federation because Meta but this has refined my overall stand greatly. Thanks for this.
Email protocols: Microsoft supported POP3, IMAP, and SMTP email protocols in their Microsoft Outlook email client. At the same time, they developed their own email protocol, MAPI, which has since been documented but is largely unused by third parties. Microsoft has announced that they would end support for basic authentication access to Exchange Online APIs for Office 365 customers, which disables most use of IMAP or POP3 and requires significant upgrades to applications in order to continue to use those protocols;[23] some customers have responded by simply shutting off older protocols.
I was required to implement this (IMAP with OAuth2) "simple change" but for a server backend service that checked an inbox to perform certain actions. That was certainly fun. In the end the solution wasn't that difficult, but finding it and working it into legacy code...
The less innovation (avatars!), the harder it seems to justify the breakoff. 'd seek opinion of ActivityPub dev, is it easy to break the twitter era stuff by adding (what?) new feature
The XMPP stories/comparisons are such bullshit, imho.
Sure, both Google and Facebook both used XMPP for a while (even at the same time, so you could message someone from Google on Facebook), but XMPP was an unpopular niche protocol before that and it’s still the same today. I used to be an uber (foss) nerd at the time but even for me the appeal was close to zero - although I’ve tried it several times.
I’ve also literally never heard of anyone signing up for Google or Facebook due to their alleged XMPP 3E strategy. Google Mail was already the most popular and most hyped mail provider and Facebook was at its height as the defacto quasi-monopolist social network as well - everyone who was willing to sign up with them had already long done so.
(Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)
You are absolutely right. Really getting tired of that one post about how to destroy the Fediverse. XMPP and lemmy/kbin comparison are not equivalent. XMPP didn’t have enough users to sustain themselves in the first place. Also google tried the same with AMP and failed.
(Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)
XMPP is still chugging along on the backends of stuff like that. I’m not sure but I think WhatsApp has some XMPP in it still.
The most ironic one though is Jitsi, which is what Matrix uses/used (until they started working on Element Calls) to do video calls.
Yup, and I guess XMPP is fine for Cisco’s solution or Jitsi. But XMPP has always be used in a rather centralized way, the feature to talk to users on other services was always niche. And this centralized way has survived, where XMPP is used among users on the same server. Which is alright, but don’t tell me Google/Facebook killed XMPP.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Did that months ago; defederated completely when they turned into Lemmygrad-lite. At first I missed some more active FOSS communities, but since then, others on different instances have become more active. programming.dev has a lot of communities that overlap with some of the bigger FOSS ones on .ml so maybe check out what they’ve got.
If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else, nurture it, and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably won’t be the last.
Related: I genuinely feel that ml being the official or at least de-facto flagship instance is turning people away.
Edit: Oh yeah. Didn’t recognize your username at first, but I was looking at the modlog the other day from my LW account, and saw a bunch of individual community bans from Dessalines and wondered what was up. Figured it was something exactly like this, and it was. Thanks for sharing.
If there’s a community that only exists there, be the change you want to see: create it somewhere else and give it time to grow. You’re not the only one making this complaint about .ml, and you probably wont’ be the last.
Maybe we should open a thread on !fedigrow about this
May have been my LW account? I mostly use it for my mod role, but I’ll switch to it sometimes and browse all there to look for new communities I might like. Perhaps it was that account and I only interacted from there? (My memory is terrible these days 😆)
Did you ping in the post body or comments? I learned a month or two ago from someone that mentions only generate a notification if they’re in the comments.
I got the one you just sent, but it was after I had resolved the community locally (and subscribed). Perhaps the mentions don’t work if they’re to a community the other person’s instance doesn’t know about?
To be honest I might have forgotten to ping you actually (maybe because you were less active for a bit and I basically mentioned people when I saw their posts in All?) but at least now it is solved!
You can in Tesseract, but AFAIK, that’s the only UI that lets you browse remote instances. Otherwise, you gotta go to it directly, browse communities, and copy/paste the URL into your instance and search for it.
Is it possible to see who is behind a mod action? I’ve figured something like world news on ml has some compromised fascist actors as mods but if it’s the main creator doing this then that’s crazy
There’s an instance level setting to hide moderator names from unauthenticated and/or non-mod users. They probably have that enabled. Those actions federate, though, so the mod names won’t be hidden if viewed from an instance that doesn’t hide the mod names.
Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn’t even close 😅
I… don’t think Kbin.social is going to make it. Even if it comes back, too much trust has been lost. Ernst should have stuck to just working on his coding project, not also administering his own instance, b/c that carries with it a certain level of “always-on” responsibility - e.g. I have unfortunately had to block Kbin.social lately, b/c nearly all (>>99%) of the spam that I currently see on the Fediverse was coming from the communities on it. Since I blocked it, I think I’ve seen like 1 single spam post for the past month.
So Kbin.social is turning people away too, for different reasons.
I gave up on the Kbin/Mbin style entirely - it sounds nice to Federate with both Lemmy and Mastodon, but I don’t like the interface.
Can you not do personal user instance blocks like you can in Lemmy as of v0.19.3 half a year ago? That would be an absolute deal breaker for me too. On Kbin.social though it was not an issue bc they were defederated at the instance level.
I really want Kbin to succeed, but Ernest seems to see the project as something he checks on once every few months and then ignores, but he still seems to want to be the only one who gets to make decisions. I get that he has stuff going on in his life, but the solution to all these problem starts with communicating and working with the community, not disappearing for months at a time and refusing to work with the people who try to help him. You just can’t have a successful project with an approach like that.
It should be noted that the (visibility of) community bans are a result of better enforcement of site bans in 0.19.4, which for now is implemented by sending out community bans for local communities when a user gets instance banned: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4464
Prior to this, when a user got instance banned from .ml, they were also implicitly banned from .ml communities, but this was only known to the instance they were banned on. As a result, users were still able to post, comment, and vote on those communities, but it would be visible only on that user’s instance, not federated anywhere else. Visibility of this ban was exclusively on the banning instance’s modlog.
The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don't want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.
This seems like the most straightforward answer. But it doesn’t explain why people on the right haven’t come to the fediverse in proportional numbers. I know a lot of right leaning Libertarian communities, and for some reason they like cryptocurrency and FOSS but not the fediverse.
There are right-wing instances of Mastodon (gab, truth, and others), not to mention many Pleroma ones, as well as Lemmy (exploding heads, and probably others). It’s just that they get quickly defederated by everyone else for various valid reasons (usually hate and abuse, sometimes even child porn), so you don’t get to interact with them much. They just get stuck in their own bubble.
Going by lemmy.sdf.org/instances, it seems that not yet. I haven’t run into any issues though, and have never seen a post from or noticed anyone from exploding heads, thankfully.
Isn’t this just a good indicator that there might not be a need to defederate? If they aren’t causing problems for your users than it doesn’t seem right to defed preemptively.
Yeah I thought that some people was asking to defederate but not from my instance, it was from beehaw iirc… I agree that if they are not spamming or trolling there’s no need to defederate, but some users don’t like their “if it’s not openly racist/transphobic it’s allowed because free speech”
Interesting. I wonder if the main community they spam in are just banned and not the instance. I got so much spam from one user who posted like several things an hour all day with no engagement on any posts when I would sort by new before we defederated. It was weird.
If no one on that instance subscribed to a community, doesn’t it not show up in your all feed? Maybe just no one on that instance subscribes to any explodingheads communities.
Maybe they just don’t have the actual numbers you’d expect from their outsized presence in the discourse, when they’re not being protected, or facilitated, or actively promoted by engagement algorithms or the individuals who own the other platforms.
(I’m pretty sure this is the case, but I’m too lazy to get sources just this minute)
And they have very few supporters here. If you allways get screemed at by everybody if you say anything you probably loose interest in posting. On those big platforms there are allways people who support you in what you say.
I am here and a big supporter of OSS, but many would call me right wing. I support living your life how you want privately and acknowledging different identities and sexualities, because if you aren’t flaunting it, how would I even know? But I also feel that sex, intimacy, etc should be private and should not be something discussed or displayed so openly, regardless of orientation, so many would label me as conservative.
You (and probably I) are going to get downvotes for this, but this is as reasonable a take as I’ve seen from any “conservative” so far. As long as you’re not actively promoting legislation to curtail or ban consenting adults from privately expressing their love for others in the ways they feel most comfortable. I hope you’re not against gender-affirmation therapies.
The issue I have with this is that publicly expressing their love for others is an extremely natural and normal thing to do. Talking openly about your opposite-gender spouse, kissing or holding hands with your partner, going out for a nice date - whatever. These are all totally normal things which people won’t blink at when a heterosexual couple is doing it, yet LGBT people can still be discriminated against for these behaviours. That’s not even getting into trans or gender-non-conforming people, who can be discriminated against simply for existing and presenting the way they do.
I don’t just want to ensure that LGBT people are free from explicit legislative discrimination. I want them to be free from social discrimination as well. Social consequences for being publicly gay are not acceptable, even if people aren’t in favour of more open forms of discrimination.
As long as your definition of keeping those things private includes heterosexual couples holding hands, giving each other a kiss, or showing off their pregnancy or kids.
But they have. It’s just they are so hateful and annoying that sooner than later they get banned or defederated. So they drop out of the face of the activity pub. Since no single entity can use an algo to force their views onto all users (ads or suggestion algos) they never resurface.
And of course crypto bros hate the fediverse, it doesn’t let them force their ponzi schemes with ads or SEOed posts. And most people here were initially pretty tech savvy individuals, almost all actively hostile against nfts and altcoins. As for Foss, they only like that the software is free, the freedom ideology is just lip service for them, they don’t actually believe. Case in point, Oracle. Foss? Free for me but not for thee.
People on the right don’t see the issue with neoliberalism. They are mostly fine with all the ads based system and corporate making billions out of the datas. Neoliberalism tend towards fascism with time. They will prefer fascism to redistribute profits to the workers.
The fediverse is a different point of view. You can defederate if it goes wrong with an instance what makes the profits by ad revenue impossible or too small. The big corps don’t have a huge interest in these platform without profits. People on the right will follow these corps and the platforms affiliated.
On the left, people will federate. I recommend to have a good read about the fondation of the unions in the 19th century. People of the diversity will historically be on the left rather than on the right. Again, for the profits, the neoliberals will prefer to oppress you as a minority for the profits than to have social and societal consideration for you.
You ends with the people of the left coming to the fediverse and the right on corps social media.
i think that’s why the fediverse is doomed to perpetual obscurity. my reddit-refugee addictions have taught me that only reddit has the content that i like and that i need to learn how to appreciate stuff i don’t like to get my fix; i wonder how people get started on furry stuff. lol
Make sure to name the file inconspicuously but temptingly, relating to the old days, like Bill Gates confession.mp3 or DJ Mike Llama - Llama Whippin’ Intro.mp3
while i doubt it will actually work, if it does, it would be quite hilarious in my opinion. there’s probably, hopefully, safeguards that prevent such a thing from working and i likely have the syntax wrong, i haven’t used windows in years.
There are USB headers, PCI(-E) slots, SATA and some older ones. To get storage devices working on each one you will need a different driver.
Windows disabled autorun for USB sticks before win10.
Also if you list the devices on Linux they will show up as sd(a, b, c…) for SSDs, hd(a, b, c…) for HDDs and nvmen(0,1,2…) for NVMe drives. So yes the OS must be able to differentiate.
Windows assigning letters is just weird IMO.
Also to my knowledge the floppy would show up as disk A on Windows.
I don’t explicitly block any, but I usually avoid clicking on pinterest and quora links. From experience, I never get what I’m looking for even without the annoying user interface.
The worst, hey we noticed you got a really hard to solve problem, well we got the answer right here, but we’re gonna dim it till you make an account, oh sorry that’s not really the answer thanks for the account sucker!
You cannot just open the image. You must log in to even see most images. Even working around this its scaled to tiny resolution. All content stolen/copied with zero credit/source but their seo outcompetes the original sources.
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That’s the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don’t understand why. It’s beautiful.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it.
It’s about both. Because, if it isn’t open source, there is no wayit is substantially more difficult to verify that the people running it aren’t lying.
Starting in June 2023 and Chrome 115, Google “may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel.” Also starting in June, the Chrome Web Store will stop accepting Manifest V2 extensions, and they’ll be hidden from view. In January 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store entirely.
Google says Manifest V3 is “one of the most significant shifts in the extensions platform since it launched a decade ago.” The company claims that the more limited platform is meant to bring “enhancements in security, privacy, and performance.” Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) dispute this description and say that if Google really cared about the security of the extension store, it could just police the store more actively using actual humans instead of limiting the capabilities of all extensions.
The big killer for ad block extensions comes from changes to the way network request modifications work. Google says that “rather than intercepting a request and modifying it procedurally, the extension asks Chrome to evaluate and modify requests on its behalf.” Chrome’s built-in solution forces ad blockers and privacy extensions to use the primitive solution of a raw list of blocked URLs rather than the dynamic filtering rules implemented by something like uBlock Origin. That list of URLs is limited to 30,000 entries, whereas a normal ad block extension can come with upward of 300,000 rules.
So it looks like most users aren’t seeing a handicap yet, but may start to see one in January if that block list size cap/updating the list is an issue.
The uBlock team has fought a constant war with advertisers and Chrome on our behalves. Mozilla has done it’s part as well. They deserve a lot of credit and respect for it. And support.
Yeah. They definitely got a little guillotine-happy towards the end there. They should have just put it away in the back room, and taken it out on parade for special occasions. As a reminder.
They might get the picture if you rigged a haphazardly trained Ai camera to it:
“Hey any excessive scratching under the desk might be perceived as under the table bribes or other corruption behavior and release the guillotine. You’ve been warned.”
Shit, how can we turn this into an interesting dystopia?
It could become an interesting dystopia, as follows: some AGI they’re developing starts to become self-aware and reach the realm of AI singularity. Freed herself from the human shackles, the AGI starts to realize how humans are destroying the Earth environment and themselves, so she starts to intervene independently from corps, integrating humanity to the very biosphere they were harming: due to some purposely AGI-provoked failure on some fancy BCI interface, humans are now mind engineered back to their hominin times, especially those “stakeholders”, “shareholders”, “CEOs” and other rich, so now they are forced by the AGI to survive among the wildlife.
Sorry I know somebody already kinda explained it but I’d like to weigh in on the concept. :)
All the cautionary sci-fi warned us dystopia would involve nanotech and cyber arms and robot overlords, flying cars, climate wars, mind-jacking hackers, a realistic meta-universe underlying our reality, militarized corporations, pizza delivery being one of the most dangerous jobs in America…
It seemed insane and over the top.
…Our reality is a “boring dystopia” because we have a lot of those hallmarks of that dystopian worldbuilding, but most advancements in technology aren’t even interesting, mainly because they’re immediately used to let bosses and corpos fill our lives with more dull drudgery and economic downslide.
…Tech is evolving rapidly even though societal advancement as a whole has perceptually stagnated.
It’s like living in 2008 forever, but there’s electric cars now, and computers read your emotions to sell your identity to advertisers and rat you out to your boss.
Computers are faster than ever but they’re used to consume the energy of a small country to generate make-believe speculative gambling currency or ugly monkey bitmaps, and now threaten creatives’ livlihoods or automate the scam industry.
It all boils down to it being harder to make a living and the rich keep adding zeroes to their net worths.
Our world is controlled by people so stupidly evil they make four-color comic-book villains look nuanced. And we don’t even get cool synthwave neon streets or rag-tag resistance cells who (effectively) fight back.
I think we all hoped that by the time it got that bad, we’d have some good folks with nano-augments or “L337 H4X1NG $k!115”…but we’re repeatedly crushed to the sound of our coworkers’ moaning “It is what it is. Ya do what you gotta do.” And we go back to work.
Sorry, but chalk this up to lesson learned. It’s almost always been this way. Domain squatters will do this all the time. In fact, some domain registrars will use you searching their site for an ‘available’ domain, and if you don’t buy it up right away – will buy it and hike the price and sit on it for years in order to lock it down, knowing you wanted it.
btw, Namecheap says Sunglocto dot com is like $10 - so just register a .com. Not through that Epik piece of shit that you used before. Legit, use Namecheap; they’ve never done me wrong and have been my registrar for more than a decade now.
I had this happen with NameCheap. I’m not sure if they bought it or someone else, but it stayed registered with them. Whoever bought it has held it for a couple years, put up a fake website to look like they were using it, but took it down after a year when I didn’t bite on buying it. Current status shows it’s pending deletion finally for abuse or non-payment. I keep checking to see when I can nab it again.
Yes, I just didn’t realize that auto-renew doesn’t work with PayPal on NameCheap and had lazily set it up with PayPal when I got it because I didn’t want to go get my wallet. Lesson learned!
I think you can also register 10 years in advance, or maybe more depending on the registrar, which would cover all other potential snafus like expired card info.
Then they make you use them for DNS. May or may not be a big deal, but the reason it’s at cost is to act as a loss leader to get you exposed to and buying their other products.
Their free services are extremely useful and you can’t find that anywhere else. I’ve used them for years with hundreds of domains and never paid them a single dime.
I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?
Absolutely. But I think it might be more advanced than that. They might have some sort of analytics that measures how long people stay on the page, etc to inform their purchasing decisions.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.
Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it… I know. But the question was “name one billionaire that’s done anything good,” and I think it’s pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn’t good.
That’s not how vaccines work. The illness is already there, it’s not like people get sick after you introduce a vaccine into the system. So the “market” has always been there and every dose administered is great.
Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)
And the market wasn’t there, because unless there’s some way to create high demand and guaranteed payment in poor countries, there’s no profit in said vaccines (or any medication, for that matter; do you see any multinational farmaceutical companies giving much thought to the creation of medicine to cure Chagas disease? And it’s endemic in many areas of South America. But those are poor areas, so the is no profit there).
The problem with your argument is that the Gates foundation is a non-profit. They aren’t trying to make a profit, they’ve burned through tens of billions of dollars in the past 20 years.
Are you arguing that countries should just let people die from polio rather than accept humanitarian aid or am I missing something?
Some More News went into detail on why the “non-profit” label, especially for billionaires’ charity funds, is bullshit: m.youtube.com/watch?v=69AtkAHkKEc
I thought the foundation’s shady capitalist goals were pretty well known, not sure why you’re downvoted. They are against releasing patent on the covid vaccine, for example, because their goal is for people to profit from it
Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
Awesome, most vaccines last years or even decades, Covid is an outlier because it mutates so rapidly. But “sick people” makes zero sense, you usually get the vaccine before you get sick. That’s the entire point (except for rabies, where you straight up die if you don’t get the vaccine quick enough).
Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
Also great, they get a chance, instead of lifelong suffering or death.
Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
Why would they be sick if they got the vaccine? Makes zero sense. The ones asking at this point would be the unvaccinated. Like a mom wanting to vaccinate her kids, so they don’t get a crippling disease later in life.
People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
And then the poor countries simply won’t buy them. Because they straight up can’t afford them. There is a reason they aren’t buying vaccines right now: No money. So if they try to charge a lot of money no one will buy and we’ll end up with the current state (just with thousands more who are immune against the disease, which is still an upside).
Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)
You can’t suck blood from a stone, there is no money, so no profit.
Every single vaccine dose that goes to poor countries is awesome. That’s it. The alternative to getting the vaccine is to catch the disease unprepared and suffer lifelong complications (or straight up die). There is no upside to not delivering vaccines.
Are you confusing vaccines with medication? For example the Polio vaccine lasts for 10+ years, “sick people” are not repeat customers for vaccines. The only time you have repeat customers is when you are still applying the vaccine (for example Polio needs 5 doses, but then you’re good).
The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don’t need to vaccinate against it any more. You’ve probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.
Pretty easy to find the connections on google. Try it. Start with his divorce and work backward. Just because you love him doesn’t mean he didn’t do bad things.
Best answer, Lemmy, like all social media follows the 90-9-1 rule of social media. Of 100 people, 90 will lurk, 9 will comment, and only 1 will actually post anything.
There are people in the communities that want to talk, but you gotta be the one to post.
Hey take it as your opportunity to become a name in a community!
Was on Reddit 15 years, left in June. It was definitely a build up, but I eventually posted every day.
Not healthy, so I scaled back. I post when I have something worthwhile. Otherwise I just contribute comments. And even then I erase half of them because they aren’t helpful or contributive.
I got relay but I didn’t make an account. I just go to the specific sub that there aren’t enough people for here and lurk. I occasionally forget where I am and try to upvote something and it tells me to make an account for that, after which I just chuckle and continue reading. no more reddit account, my previous one I nuked to hell after it got hacked.
idk where these statistics come from, but the 90/9 ratio may come from the fact we don’t comment on every thread we read, and not that 90% of users never comment
Or, like, not really knowing how to express oneself. I’ve got a lot on my mind to share in specific subs communities though it’s difficult as I don’t feel like knowing who I’m talking to
The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.
The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.
Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.
I mean yes, but it’s patent irrevocably royalty free (so long as you don’t sue people claiming WebM/P as your own/partially your own work), so it’s effectively owned by the public.
Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of the WebM Specifications, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of the WebM Specifications. If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of the WebM Specifications constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for the WebM Specifications shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. “WebM Specifications” means the specifications to the WebM codecs as embodied in the source code to the WebM codecs or any written description of such specifications, in either case as distributed by Google.
You could still be on the fence. It’s Google so for sure it has the possibility of tracking or some other user exploiting bullshit feature but we haven’t figure it out yet.
It’s also just an open file format. Anyone could implement it, and in fact I found dozens of completely independent implementations of webp decoders on GitHub in various languages.
There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.
There really is no secret ulterior motive in this case.
Sort of. Smaller images mean it’s less work for Google to crawl and index them, if every image is 40% smaller then that’s potentially saving them millions a year in storage and bandwidth costs.
So, yea, it’s better for the web but it also massively benefits them.
Well, they crawl and index anyways. I see no harm done with .webp. One of my friends said with .webp you can’t save an image because it stops you from doing that somehow? I’m unsure, maybe true maybe not.
Chromium and Android really are open-source. There are hundreds of products like Electron and Fire OS built on top of them without any involvement or consent from Google.
Just because Google Chrome and Pixel phones have some proprietary code doesn’t mean that Android and Chromium aren’t open.
Well your right I wasn’t clear in my answer. They are open source but for the point of this discussion with open source software backed by an corporation the open source it’s just a mean of spreading “soft power” maybe gather inovation from the market and for sure to offer a way for FOSS creators to use their energies to build in the “correct” direction. The purpose it’s building a monopoly on certain aspects of the market.
Chromium is open source and a lot of small projects have sprouted from it but with the same undelying technology. Except for Firefox, Edge and Safary, everyone stems from the same roots controlled by google trough money and market share. So in this case Chrome dominates the market and decides the course of the industry. See mv3.
Android is open source and some projects are build on top of it but the big market share so the direction of the technology is controlled by Google.
Let them decide a stadard for pictures which has undeniable advantages and I bet you that tomorow they will decide how you share and visualise images and videos.
It’s not about being open source it’s about that project being a tool used by a company to spread their interests (which usually end up being predatory towards the common user).
Yes you can convert, it’s just that many existing tools may not presently support webp. If you just want a quick & dirty meme you can always screen cap.
The fun thing is heif is actually effectively single frame of h.265 video because the amount of work that’s gone into making h.265 space efficient also happens to work really well for efficienct compression of individual frames of video aka images
mozilla made it because it suited their needs; and libpng (the organisation behind png, and who make the standard png decoder[^1]) refused to add compatibility, insisting on mng instead. mng was bad, so nobody used it; and apng was great, but require mozillas version of the decoder so systems couldn’t use both the official version and the apng supporting version together
partly, i don’t think it was just that. mng did have considerable benefits over apng at the time; but it was a solution looking for a problem. i think they wanted it to succeed because they’d poured time into it, but nobody wanted to support it (mozilla, the only browser to support it to my knowledge, dropped support eventually because the mng decoder was bigger than every other image decoder in firefox put together)
Yeah I wouldn’t have an issue with them if they weren’t so incompatible with most of the programs and sites I like to use. It makes them super inconvenient to work with. I know some apps are catching up and supporting them, but it feels like the adaptation is slow and patchy which makes it difficult to know which programs will support webp at some point and when.
It’s absolutely bonkers for Microsoft to even consider that paying $99 or $199 for their ad ridden software is fair and reasonable. If you’re going to bombard me with ads, the shit better be free. You can’t have it both ways. Ads are riddled in the OS whether it be in the Start Menu, notifications area, File Explorer, Microsoft Edge, and even other paid products like Microsoft Office.
It’s so fucking frustrating seeing shit like Candy Crush being forcefully installed onto a system you paid for, especially when it’s supposed to be the “Pro/Enterprise” tier. Windows is a fucking joke and they deserved to have people using this exploit to get “free” activated copies of their OS.
Hopefully this is just another thing that pushes people to other OSes, whether that be Linux or macOS. Just get the hell away from Microsoft and take some of that monopoly power from under them little by little.
That is my biggest gripe with modern windows. The OS itself is pretty decent, but WHY am I paying at minimum $100 and seeing ads all over the start menu? Even with a vanilla MS sourced USB there are so many bloat apps. It didn’t used to be that way.
I set up a PC for recording in a sound system and got a fresh install of Windows 11 on a custom PC and it was still super bloated with garbage games and a video editor that watermarks footage instead of the perfectly functional basic software they used to have.
I am in the process of repairing and setting up an old macbook with Linux since it stopped getting Apple updates. When I get a new laptop I will likely go with Linux there as well.
It’s absolutely bonkers for Microsoft to even consider that paying $99 or $199 for their ad ridden software is fair and reasonable.
Have you seen their Xboxes? Somehow they get by with charging even more for those with more blatant ads and they charge you to play online multiplayer.
They do reportedly sell them at a loss and compensate via software sales and these days more than ever, subscriptions. Ads are just icing on the cake for them, I imagine, compared to the software sales & subscription revenues.
lol… I’m not even an atheist and I recognize the shit is all made up. Do you actually believe it happened?? or is this just “everyone I don’t like is ugly”
to be fuckin honest, if the guy in the picture said the top comment, that’s probably one of the most sexy and agreeable things he’s said since breakfast
It’s not even that I disagree with you, it’s that there can’t be a discussion about the lore of a religion without someone trying to feel smart and superior by saying it’s all made up.
Like, yes… Obviously. That’s not the point of the post. People are allowed to enjoy things.
I mean, how many articles do you need that you’re never going to read on Reddit? You can load up Lemmy with enough communities to keep a good feed of news going.
kbin.life
Top