From what I have read, I think it's all of the above.
a space is wanted free from corps, ads, data perversion
people are fearful that 30 million people joining threads has automatically made it the largest instance. Once it integrates with ActivityPub and can federate, it will dominate the space and produce the majority of the content. People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content and content production with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
many believe meta will not act in good faith and is doing this to appease European courts and laws
Because of all of this people likely believe keeping threads quarantined right off the bat is the best solution to mitigate the amount of damage they can do to what's already been established.
Edit: I am adding to this post as I just stumbled across a post from the host of the lemm.ee instance (which I am a big fan of). He has also listed some great cons of Facebook stepping into the fediverse:
-there is nothing stopping facebook from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores which would ensure they end up on the front page of "all" for federated servers
-threads already has more users than all of Lemmy's instances... therefore, they can completely control what the front page looks like by dictating what their users see and vote on
-moderation does not seem like a priority for threads which would increase workload for smaller instances
-REVENUE FOCUSED
I paraphrased a lot of this but as this is getting some traction I wanted to provide additional visibility to the cons of federating with the Facebook.
Pretty much this, and I’d like to emphasize the part where Threads userbase outnumber the Fediverse 30 to 1 after only one day.
Lemmy is evolving into a very nice place so far because of the type of users it’s attracted, and the fear is that the atmosphere would shift on a dime when the voices here get drowned out by hundreds of millions of commenters from Instagram and Facebook.
I started a community to track the H5N1 global outbreak but I do NOT want to moderate it long term; if it picks up, the anti-vax/Plandemic people are going to start showing up (they already do sometimes in the reddit sub for it). I feel like opening the doors to Threads is going to hasten that.
A few years ago, Reddit strategically banned two terrible subreddits during one of their shitstorms (the whole AMA firing scandal), just as Voat was getting popular. It turned from a decent community that was starting to grow and challenge Reddit’s presence, to a right-wing extremist cesspool overnight.
You also see this sort of thing happen to subreddits all the time. Some of them go from a good community, and either slowly or quickly, shifts into a much more terrible version of itself. Russian bots/ops have transformed subs to push their own agenda.
The community matters, and how that community evolves matters a great deal. Communities can live or die from massive migrations like this.
People are fearful then meta will retract it/ defederate and take the majority of content with it (EEE). This would effectively kill the fediverse.
I don't see how that could possibly happen. It's not like they can buy the Fediverse. Seems to me far more likely that the Fediverse will be gain interest from people wishing to follow/interact with Meta users without being beholden to Meta and if/when Meta decouples from it again the Fediverse will be larger than before. Sure, some may come and go, but others will find interests outside of Meta.
Like everyone is pointing out, they already will be the largest instance. They are not going to gain that much by trying to trying to absorb the rest of people who are likely in the Fediverse from dissatisfaction with Big Tech and wanting to break free from their algorithms and restrictions.
Nah, I know they are evil, but I also know that there are things people want that they will never provide because they want full control and an advertiser friendly environment.
Like say, where would NSFW artists be more at ease? The Fediverse or an Instagram offshoot? Especially in the wake of Twitter falling apart.
Let's also not overestimate the scheming of tech tycoons are either. I believe Meta is making a blunder and I don't think we should stop them.
Let's also not overestimate the scheming of tech tycoons are either. I believe Meta is making a blunder and I don't think we should stop them.
You shouldn't underestimate it either. Even if this isn't their intention now, it's something they could easily do whenever they feel like it, and do you really trust Meta to have that power?
I don't think it's possible to take down decentralized social media unless it fails by itself, unless the ecosystem here is so completely unappealing people decide to get back to all the well known ills and dullness of Facebook.
Even compared to XMPP, it's not the same. Chat programs are a communication tool. Social platforms are communities.
I am not underestimating them, I don't know why this insistence that I must be. I think people are catastrophizing and spelling doom forgetting that we are seeing tech companies fucking up time after another, and also not giving enough credit to the advantages and potential that we have here.
If you think all it takes is peeking over the fence and the Fediverse will fall apart, the maybe it could never be. But I think the interest in something different will only grow now. I believe we can take users out of Meta instead.
while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.
Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it’s own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.
Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it’s communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.
Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.I do still think this is a good thing, but it’s a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren’t starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.
I am extremely skeptical of 2 and 3, because it means people who already decided to drop mainstream social media platforms will go back on their decision, and it suggests that people want instances to be more like Meta, rather than for it to function in a user driven way that provides things that Meta will never be willing to offer.
If people can be tempted off of the Fediverse so easily, the problem is not Meta. Keep in mind that right now people are already choosing not to engage with Facebook. I'm not naive to assume that they won't have appeal and influence and dirty tricks. but seems to me like such a complete lack of faith in the Fediverse to assume that if Meta merely exists alongside the ecosystem, it's inevitable that everyone will jump ship. That sounds like what they wanted was a Big Tech-driven platform all along.
I don't think that's right.
Comes to mind also that Mastodon has had many years of headstart. How much of a slow growth does it still need?
Meta taking their ball and going home some time a ways down the road is much less an issue than them dominating content by being there in the first place. They will have their own moderation and content rules that will shape the content that flows out from them, which will shape each community that interacts with it. Considering the very mercenary approach they have to that, it means that content will be far more monetized and monetizable. Which means both sanitization and pandering, neither of which benefits freedom of thought and discussion.
Considering the huge influx of people coming to places like Lemmy or Kbin to escape that kind of situation (reddit), it may mean the death of the community that has grown so far, before Meta even considers leaving.
Absolutely agree. The optimist in me wants to be excited for what this means and how this could impact the future of, well, the Internet.
But then I remember this is Meta we're taking about. They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta. As someone who doesn't use meta products, this brings concern.
This is such a blatantly obvious truth that I’m starting to suspect some users here are astroturfing, peddling this bullshit feigned naivety about the rampant unethical practices of FB/Meta. There’s enough history that we don’t need to question it or give Meta a chance.
I’ve been working on building the !vans community, but I may look into moving it to another instance if lemmy.world doesn’t change their mind on federating with Threads.
Edit: I guess they’ve only stated their plan for Mastodon, which is wait and see.
btw, can we stop using the name meta and call them Facebook? i feel like the Facebook brand has worse connotations that should be leveraged to get people off their horrible platforms
I’ve pointed it out a few times, but I think it still bears repeating.
Meta have done a lot of open source development, and in that way you’re using “meta” products daily. They are the people behind React and GraphQL, for example.
React (and React native, also them) is one of the biggest JavaScript frameworks, and GraphQL is an alternative to REST api’s that brings solutions to many problems around REST api’s.
I can almost guarantee you that some of the pages you visit in a day use at least one of those.
They also have a lot of other things. You might have heard of pytorch, a major library for developing and running AI projects.
Edit: to clarify, my point is that maybe meta only thinks of itself, but technology wise they do it pretty altruistic and help the related technological communities a lot.
They do not do things that are good for anyone but Meta.
They definitely do things selfishly in a way that maximises benefits to meta and ignore any downsides to anyone else, but while thier impact is probably mostly negative, there's some small positive aspects to some things they do, sometimes...
In addition to what you said, I think additional aspects to consider are the open standards and protocols Facebook/Meta have already abandoned once it became convenient to do so:
XMPP access for Messenger/Chat
RSS feeds for any newsfeed source. They even continued to use the RSS badge (which is unofficial as far as I’m aware) for their follow icon even after they removed RSS feeds.
The bare minimum price of Meta’s integration into the Fediverse should be nothing less than the return of those standards, and honestly even that may not be enough.
They are not physically in the US, and probably work listed as some sort of overseas contractor. Whatever wages they earn are from their employer who contracts for the restaurant.
I had a guy recently ask why his printer wasn’t working after he got a new router, and it turns out it is because the printer only went up to 802.11g. I’m pretty amazed that printer outlived the wireless standard it was using.
The router he got did have support for 802.11g, but for some reason I don’t remember we couldn’t turn it on. It was some integrated 5G router. The solution was just to use the printer’s built in AP to print. He has to disconnect from the internet to print things, but it still works.
Clearly, if my years on the internet taught me anything, the killer app ID is an app that hack's ex's socials with bonus functionality for changing their school grades
I think you can use existing software to do that. If your store has wifi (even if you can't access it, I think), you can geofence an area and have some action (such as popping up a reminder app) trigger. I've not used software like this myself, but I remember people describing behavior like this at least on Android. If it might be useful to you, you should give it a search.
I have an app that's meant to schedule things, but I just use it as a checklist and preface each action with the location. So long as I check it (second home screen on my phone, so not a huge barrier), I'm usually good.
Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show. Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.
They probably shouldnt be how they are now though, where every individual family wants to fire their own, thats a waste and really obnoxious when its in the middle of neighborhoods. Keep it to one centralized show, away from residential areas, and everyone gets to watch a bigger show.
Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show.
Completely agree!
Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.
Not with this though. A portion of the money has changed hands, the portion that goes to paying workers and investors. Another portion of the money was used to extract, refine, and process something that just burned up and no longer exists.
While money as an abstraction is made up, what it represents, the underlying value of society’s resources, is not, and that is unfortunately finite. So it’s also important to consider opportunity cost. That money could have been spent on other things, when you spend it on something wasteful and unnecessary that means it can’t be spent on more useful or productive things.
All that being said, I still think fireworks are rad and worth it, but they are a waste.
The money itself? Sure. But that’s not what people talk about when they talk about money, they are usually referring to what the money represents, i.e. resources, which were all burnt up and used to create that fire work when they could have gone to something else.
i.e. if we spent some huge proportion of our money on fireworks every year, we would still have the same amount of money on paper in the economy, but absolutely everything else would cost far more. From our actual lived perspective we would be poorer.
That is absolutely just how money works, if that same money had gone to say, healthcare companies instead of fireworks companies, we would have the same amount of paper money, and we wouldn’t have fireworks, but we’d have lower healthcare costs since we already paid some of them.
You’re bringing up a lot of examples that literally happen in reality and do not have the results you are claiming. Healthcare companies have been both steadily receiving more money and increasing their prices.
Assuming you’re talking about American healthcare companies, thats because you have a broken nonsensical healthcare system filled with middlemen who will suck up profits.
That has nothing to do with the concept of opportunity cost. Pick a different industry, like agriculture / food then. If you spend $20 on food every month instead of fireworks, then feeding yourself the rest of the food you need is $20 cheaper.
That’s like saying vacations or going to the movies are a waste. It’s entertainment and it stays in part as a memory. By your argument the only thing you should purchase is a large decorative rock for the front yard, because it will last longer than you do.
You are far safer behind me than in front of me. It can take me over two US football fields (200 yards or roughly 180 meters) to come to a full stop and it takes more distance if my trailer is empty. The average car can stop in half that distance. Most cars turn into tin cans when hit by a rig at 25 mph.
If you see a number of trucks all moving into the same lane, might consider getting in the same lane, behind us. Odds are pretty good we either saw something in the lane ahead or we heard about something over the CB.
I can see you playing on your phone while driving. Cops in some states have been known to hitch rides with truck drivers in order to catch distracted drivers.
I would imagine it has to do with traction and ability to apply braking forces without skidding the wheels.
Even in a pickup truck, it’s easy to skid the rear wheels (antilock brakes aside) with the bed empty because the brakes can easily overcome the traction of the tires. This is why pickups have height sensing proportioning valves.
Most of a tractor-trailer’s stopping power is split between the trailer brakes and the tractor’s drive tandems. If there is not enough weight on those axles, the tires can’t grip the pavement properly. If I apply too much power to the brakes the wheels can start bouncing or just lock up and start skidding if the ABS system is acting up.
Most tractor-trailers you see on the road in the US are designed to weigh 60,000 to 80,000 lbs (~ 27,000 - 36,000 kg). For comparison, a Honda Civic weighs roughly 3,000 lbs (1360 kg). Every system on the truck is designed around moving that amount of mass safely. With an empty dry van trailer your looking at closer to 30,000 lbs (~ 13,000 kg). Makes a difference in performance. Ride is rougher, takes longer to stop.
In the age of computer-controlled ABS and brake assistance systems, that just sounds like poor programming.
There’s no reason why the computer shouldn’t be able to take current weight into account and deliver more braking power to the tractor when the trailer is empty.
Some probably do, tech has advanced quite a bit since I started driving in 2008, but the newer tech tends not to be installed widely when it first comes out due to how unreliable tech becomes under the working conditions that are normal in the trucking industry. Fleet owners want their equipment on the road making money, not in the shop costing money, so they tend to wait till a tech proves itself to be reliable. Plus upgrades costs money, so they tend not to happen till a unit is replaced with a newer model, which can take a while.
Most large companies in the US have an experimental fleet where they try out new tech first, before they roll it out to the rest of their fleets. They are looking for cost effectiveness, reliability and driver response. The smaller owner operators, which make up the bulk of the trucking industry, tend to follow (slowly) after them. And as old as the trucks are, the trailers are often even older. While most trailers in my company’s fleet are less than 3 years old right now, the oldest trailer (now mostly used for hauling pallets back to Chep) was built in 1992 according to it’s data plate. If it’s ABS system is newer then 2008, when it was last active in the fleet I’m a monkey’s uncle, and I’d pay long odds it’s still the original system from 92.
Sounds like you’re talking about icy or wet roads. I’ve never had a trailer do that on dry pavement and I can definitely stop faster emptying than full.
I really wish that were entirely the case. The distances I quoted came from safety trainings I’ve had to take over the years. Given my personal experiences during that time, I think they were from before ABS was mandated. And I had a lot of ABS failures when I was OTR and few close calls as a result of those failures. That’s one of the reasons I chose to switch to running a yard truck 5 years ago. Far less stress.
When ABS failed on dry pavement and I needed to stop in a hurry, the affected tandem would tend to lock up and bounce along the ground. Nerve racking and scary when there’s traffic in front of you, but not near as bad as on wet or icy roads. The sheer terror of feeling one of my axles start sliding under me.
If I had one word of advice for drivers new to the industry, it would be to drive as if none of the safety systems on the truck and trailer exist because in my experience they will fail exactly when you need them.
Additional hot take, merge near the end of the merge lane rather than slowly try to force yourself into traffic further back. Keep it moving and respect the zipper merge at the end.
I have driven many thousands of miles and my favorite place on the road is 100 yards behind a big rig that’s heading my way. i can zone out and safely follow and people rarely want the spot between you and the truck for long so you can just go hours keeping that square centered.
It’s even better at night when the trucks lights give you a nice preview of exactly how curvy the road is.
Eventually big guy takes an exit and i always send a grateful salute cuz following a big rig 100 yards back is better than cruise control imo.
I found the whole ‘cake day’ thing on Reddit a bit immature myself, kind of like a stale remnant from the excitement and exuberance of the internet before it was dominated by a few massive companies.
By the time i left reddit my feelings towards those traditions were like yours. They seemed a bit hollow, over-egged.
Times have changed, Lemmy and its user-base are a reaction to the dominant internet campanies. With that i’d hope we can be more thoughtful about building an online experience thats healthy and sober.
To that point, i think marking an anniversary has a certain importance. I’d hope on Lemmy this kind of thing is approached with a more subtle maturity though.
But at the end of the day, what one person takes away from text, and what another person takes away from the same text can be surprisingly different. So maybe I just read all those cake day messages in the wrong light.
Just as capitalist states are “authoritarian” against working class interests, socialist states are “authoritarian” against capitalist interests.
The state is a tool for one class to oppress another. The goal of (most) communists is to transition from capitalism — where the capitalist class is in power — to a stateless, classless communist society via socialism — where the working class is in power.
Public perception of which is more “authoritarian” therefore depends on which class is currently in power and is able to manufacture consent, and that is the capitalist class in the vast majority of the world right now since the USSR’s overthrow.
socialist states are “authoritarian” against capitalist interests
The problem with this claim is that the USSR was quite authoritarian towards everyone. The Gulags were a place merely of political repression. Political jokes that are part and parcel of American late night comedy shows would get people harsh labor sentences during certain periods. The claim that this had to happen to protect the working class seems thin.
One regime’s political-dissident-by-speech is another’s dissident-by-drug-addiction. America’s “War on Drugs” was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it’s a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.
By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.
File system is a core component of any electronic system. Even if it’s just 1% less stable than other ones, it’s still less stable. Maybe it’s faster in some cases and supports better backups but ehh idk if it’s worth it. Losing documents is something you probably want to avoid at all costs
Yeah, but it isn’t noticeably “less stable” if at all anymore* unless you mean stable as in “essentially in maintenance mode”, and clearly good enough for SLES to make it the default. Stop spreading outdated FUD and make backups regularly if you care about your documents (ext4 won’t save you from disk failure either which is probably the more likely scenario).
not talking about the RAID 5/6 modes, but those are explicitly marked unstable
Well gtk if it’s really as stable as ext4. I will still stick to ext4 though because why change what already works well and tested on almost any machine you can possibly imagine?
I suppose by being more efficient, “using modern technology” (everything saving Google, Meta, Amazon etc. money and is thus extremely well funded, all server related stuff), is good for the environment.
If something runs faster on the same hardware, it may use less energy. It may also just be restricted in hardware usage, like not using multithreading.
Linux Distros shipping x86_64-v2 packages is a whole other problem…
I disagree. My partition is ext4, but Timeshift saved my ass when an upgrade went wrong. I just had to restore the system from a previous snapshot taken before the upgrade.
Of course updates can break stuff. What I don’t understand is why would you intentionally go for a less stable FS that can break and corrupt all files? It’s especially bad on old machines with limited space where full backups are not possible
I’m running it for over 3 years as complete linux moron with no issues whatsoever. It was default in openSUSE and its automatic snapshot feature saved my ass multiple times. I’ve heard everyone saying ext4 is super stable and I should use it, but I went with default and can’t complain.
Yes but why intentionally choose a worse option? Sorry but it’s not very smart imo.
And not having enough space is not an administrator failure. It’s usually budget issue. And are you saying that making apps bloated (like severely bloated) is ok and the user should always be blamed for having lower hardware?
Good that you mentioned that. Reminded me that I have an Arch Linux install here where I forgot that I did choose BTRFS during installation. Within maybe a month I noticed FS errors. Looked scary. Nervously searching for documentation was even more scary :
wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#btrfs_check -> This article or section is out of date. (Discuss in Talk:Btrfs) Warning: Since Btrfs is under heavy development, especially the btrfs check command, it is highly recommended to create a backup and consult btrfs-check(8) before executing btrfs check with the --repair switch.
What is this? My beloved Arch Wiki is not 100% perfect!
Then found this :
WARNING: Using ‘–repair’ can further damage a filesystem instead of helping if it can’t fix your particular issue.
Do not use --repair unless you are advised to do so by a developer or an experienced user, and then only after having accepted that no fsck successfully repair all types of filesystem corruption. E.g. some other software or hardware bugs can fatally damage a volume.
I figure this explains the popularity of BTRFS snapshot configurations. Luckily I had some backups :)
Filesystem snapshots won’t help, if the filesystem itself corrupts. But I’ve been using BTRFS for 6 years now and haven’t had a file system corruption, so mileage may obviously vary.
It’s also generally not about you in particular. They mostly just want to lump you in with similar lifestyles groupings. Then they target you and your cohorts with targeted sales, advertising, or sell that data on the open market.
Even still, it only takes a few data points to presume exactly who you are. They are all buying and selling data. The phone company says this credit card pays for that phone number. And that credit card is used with this store perks card… The data is all there.
They don’t really need to associate it with a specific person (although I’m sure they’d love to)- they can get plenty of data just within the context of what a single person buys in their store.
This is why I always try “Jenny’s Number” for loyalty programs when I can enter an phone number (Local area code +8675309). A Safeway near me used to offer fuel points with grocery purchases up to $1 discount per gallon. I saved a lot of money in gas for a while, then it seemed Safeway got wise and deactivated those numbers.
They’re associating it with your debit/credit card, unless you’re buying with cash only. Also, the “identity” isn’t so much the target as the “profile”. Don’t get me wrong, if they are able to personally identify you, the communication will be much more… personalized… (good english) - mailings, texts, emails and coupons for stuff either you’ve bought or adjacent to your stuff (with better margins for the store) addressing you by name, grouped with other purchase-history items. But back to the profile: building a profile of your likes, dislikes, brands and such is valuable data that gets more $ for corporate as the fidelity gets higher. And as it does, the messaging to you gets more targeted.
Nothing changed, the hardware is the same as before. Your little pi servers are still doing the exact same work they did before. The only variables are prices on SBCs vs used small factor x86s, and the short, short attention span of terminally online hobbyists.
Use whatever you like, no need to race after others’ subjective (and often hyperbolic) judgment.
Very much this. The allure of raspberry pis was that they were $30 toys that could actually be used to do things that were equivalent to much more expensive computers and computer control systems.
Somewhere along the way they lost the plot, probably when supply chain issues drove their prices sky high along with the compute modules being used for home lab servers, and now cheap knockoffs based off of Rockville chips or ESP32 are just as capable as raspberry pis for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time actual desktop computers in miniature form factor have become so cheap on the second hand market that they are incredibly competitive with the raspberry pi.
Don't get me wrong, pi is a great platform. But the use cases in which it leads the pack have become incredibly narrow.
Actually I can't think of anything that raspberry pi does that can't be done better by a less expensive alternative.
Even the pi5 with the nvme hat is not currently price competitive with a 4-year-old HP ultra small form factor as far as I know.
Actually I can’t think of anything that raspberry pi does that can’t be done better by a less expensive alternative.
That has been true even before the price increase - what still makes me use pis now and then is that just so many people are familiar with them, the standardized form factor with lots of extension modules, and the software support - pretty much any software targeting that kind of use has been tested on pi variants.
I’d nowadays go for using compute modules, though - they’re smaller, and you can get them with flash, eliminating the SD card problem many pis had. You can get carrier boards for the compute modules in the classic pi form factor, so you can have the best of both worlds.
Rockchip based boards are gaining traction. Whlie still not as easy as Pi’s, the community is starting to jump after they got ditched for corporations during Covid. Orange Pi is offering good value these days but it can still require tinkering if your use case hasn’t already been done by someone before.
A small form factor, small high density connector. Most interfaces are not populated, as on the regular pis, but just lead out via the connector, so you can decide what you want to expose on your compute module carrier. It has a gbit ethernet chip on board, and a pcie chip - rpi4 also has pcie, but it is hooked up to USB3 there. With the compute module you can decide what you want to do with that.
Yeah, make a Pi with 1GB RAM, video & ethernet for like 20-30€ and you’d ruin me.
I know about the banana, orange, whetever-pis but in my experience they always needed lots of extra stuff to work (like fucing and recompiling libraries). The Pi “just worked” IMO.
Christ do I feel old now. CDs and DVDs are read only, so you won’t do anything to them by ripping them. It’s just a copy of the data onto your drive and then probably a compression step of some sort. Nowadays it probably takes less than five minutes for the whole thing. I remember taking at least half an hour on a 2x drive, and then mp3 compression taking another hour or so.
We had a 1x but it was too slow for the new game we bought, Phantasmagoria. Instead of buying a new drive, my father picked up this terrible software that would write portions of the data to the hard drive when the game bogged down. It kind of worked but only after you went through it once, so whoever played the game after you got a smoother experience.
That’s really cool! It’s a good example of what i like to think of as “transitional tech”–stuff that did the job, but as tech continued to evolve their usefulness phased out.
You got no luck with me, I am not a native English speaker. In English I would call this “two ex” but now that I think of it in German we would say “two times”, or at least thats what I and my friends called it.
“Double speed” and “two ex” both work, however it’s much, much more common to say “two ex” because of the fact that a lot of modern disc drives can read up to 52x for CDs.
I’m a native English speaker, and all of the but the first get/were used. “Two times” would also be commonly used (at least where I grew up).
English is inconsistent as hell, even to native speakers. We are just better at hiding our confusion about it. (Bane’s speech on darkness, from one of the Batcam films, comes to mind)
They like the idea of a catastrophic event out of their control, or caused by sinners. They don’t like to be the cause because of their own greed and indifference.
I mean there is plenty theocratic terrorists in the US, that support Israeli expansionism and want war with Iran because they hope it to cause the apocalypse.
They are very much fine, with bringing on the end times, and how they didn’t get the memo, that according to their own scripture they’ll all rot in hell for it, is truly mind boggling.
There were also some of the Trump worshippers acknowledging how unchristian he is, but that they should support him, because he could be the Antichrist, starting the apocalypse. So people claiming to be christian say it is a good thing to support the Antichrist…
They think they’ll be slurped up in the Rapture and everyone else will have to deal with the tribulation. Who the fuck knows, I mean, these are Republicans and Evangelicals and Baptists and their ideas are so contradicotry and vague that they really have no idea what the fuck they think. They’re all sinners, and are going to hell, and even though Jesus died to forgive their sins, they still can’t commit sins, but they acknowledged Jesus as savior, so they’re sure to be saved.
My brother’s girlfriend found a really ridiculous pamphlet in the gutter in Albuquerque in 1998 or so about ‘what to do if you miss the rapture’. I guess like, in the bathroom? Maybe at work, sleeping? Surely you’re a great person and should have been part of it, but god missed you.
First it had a bunch of hilarious info and diagrams of what the mark of the best would be - barcode on the forehead, rice-size microchip in your hand, and a credit card slot on the back of your hand, too. It said that the FIRST thing that would happen would be that minions of the Devil would be out to destroy all copies of the bible, so one must get as many bibles as possible and hide them from Satan. That part sounds like a pretty bad idea to me.
Plus while there are signs of the end-times, the actual end is supposed to be Magic Jesus riding back on a majestic sled, smiting evildoers, not just some sciencey crap about warm weather and melting ice and droughts.
He personifies all the 7 deadly sins and fits the persona of the Antichrist. My only note is he isn’t fully widely popular. I thought almost everyone was supposed to love and accept the Antichrist as their leader.
Yea. The question is completely absurd. There is no such thing as “reasonable ads”. It is also completely against the philosophy of the project and the developers would never agree to it.
Also, ads are very much “give an inch, take a mile” in nature. Once you open that door and have say a tiny banner ad, then it’s like “well that didn’t do much harm, let’s do a slightly bigger one”, then before you know it it you have sponsored posts, sidebar ads, videos and all that nonsense.
It’s just one of the avenues where enshittification creeps in IMO.
First off, there is such a thing as reasonable ads, namely, ones you want to see. Sometimes you are looking to purchase something or some service, and you have to go out of your way to look for options. Ads for what you want, when you want is ideal. However, the point where advertising goes to far is trying to solve this problem by learning everything about you in order to effectively read your mind. That’s where it becomes unreasonable for me.
Second, the philosophy of lemmy (and federation in general) was not to tell all instances and users of said instances how they should use the internet, it was to give them the freedom to use the internet however they want, without sacrificing the connection with others who want to use it differently. It would not be equivalent to using reddit, because an instance that serves ads would have to compete with other instances who don’t. Whereas reddit is a walled garden where you are forced to take their ads along with their content, if a lemmy instance with ads became too “unreasonable”, the users have nothing to lose by leaving, the content is all federated.
The reality is, it’s not a matter if, but when we will see instances who try to fund themselves using ads. They’re free to serve them and you’re free to defederate from them in protest. That is the lemmy philosophy.
The issue with your first point is that in order to be served ads you actually want to see, the provider (instance admin) needs to know what you like and that way leads to tracking scripts.
That’s not “the issue” with my first point, that IS my first point.
In a perfect world, a “reasonable ad” shows you exactly what you’re looking for, without leaking any information about yourself. I understand that it’s tempting to say that’s not possible, but “proof by not being able to think of a solution” isn’t a proof, that’s why I’m hesitant to make such a strong claim.
Zero Knowledge proofs were thought of as impossible until it turned out they weren’t. Can someone serve “Zero Knowledge ads”? Maybe one day, idk.
Even if you don’t like ads, you can’t deny that they’re a powerful means of funding projects that otherwise can’t be sustainably monetized. We learned this lesson 20 years ago when the first federated internet platform hit the mainstream: the world wide web. So imo there’s no reason to think the fediverse isn’t about to relearn the same lesson.
It’s entirely possible, I agree, but as of right now, there’s only really two ways to show a person ads - targeted or not targeted. And that applies to all forms of advertising really, not just online. I don’t know enough about marketing to say how long it might take to develop zero knowledge ads but in terms of funding development and hosting we’re very long way away from that being a possibility.
And the ethos of the Fediverse was, in part, formed around the idea of not being served ads that were either utterly irrelevant and thus irritating or scarily relevant and thus unsettling. The Fediverse is pretty closely aligned with open source and privacy philosophy. I think any instance that runs ads is going to see either no revenue as they’ll be adblocked or the instance will see a sharp drop off in users.
There are no ads I want to see. If I am looking to make a purchase I will specifically seek it out. There is no advertising for anything I want that is acceptable.
Implementing ads is more against the philosophy of free and open source software than it is with Lemmy or any piece of FOSS software specifically. As for Lemmy we just won’t see any ads on Lemmy.ml in particular which is run by the Lemmy developers. It’s also not entirely true that there is nothing to lose by just cutting off the Lemmy instance that starts implementing ads if people start getting to attached to specific communities or user accounts of theirs. It would be nice if Lemmy had some kind of community and user migration to mitigate this risk.
You can say what you believe the “philosophy of the fediverse/foss” is until you’re blue in the face, but there’s literally nothing in place to enforce what you’re saying except for the users. Someone could start an ad supported instance tomorrow, and if people use it, then they use it. The Lemmy devs can’t compel them to remove ads, that’s not part of the license (afaik, I’d be glad to be proven wrong), nor would they compel instances to defederate from them. That is the opposite of the fediverse philosophy.
I’m getting down voted for acknowledging reality, but it is my firm belief that the moment we ignore this reality is the moment someone steps in and exploits it. In order to maintain the fediverse as we want it, it takes a user base that prioritizes choosing instances that don’t serve ads over ones that do, and not a user base that thinks ad supported instances aren’t possible. Meta’s Threads was an obvious attempt, and I’m glad that most instances unanimously agreed they were antithetical to Lemmy, but it won’t always be that easy.
And I 100% agree that migration of communities and accounts between instances should be top of the list of Lemmy features. Without that, then yes, as you say, any communities/accounts on that instance are lost, or worse, keep users on an instance that hurts the community. But even still, unlike reddit, that would only amount to a small subset of communities/users, and not 100% of them.
I agree there is nothing stopping someone from starting an instance with ads. It’s just that the overlap of people that agree with such a thing and are enthusiasts of free and open source software must be very niche.
I’m also not suggesting the devs could or should do anything about it. I’m just saying it isn’t something they would do. It would be worth determining which license is being used, but I doubt it is one that prohibits commercialization of Lemmy.
At any rate I don’t think such an instance would survive as the type of user that would agree with both ads and Foss is limited. It is unlikely to ever become a real issue.
My hope is that Lemmy/the fediverse can survive growth beyond just the tech enthusiast demographic, though. I would prefer to see the platform be the best option for social media for everyone, and not just one that makes compromises to maintain privacy for people who are interested in that sort of thing.
In 50 years I don’t want to see the lion’s share of content still being generated and only existing on proprietary platforms. I would much rather it be in openly accessible ones.
And given the power that ads have at monetizing platforms that are otherwise unmonetizable, as the platform grows, it’s inevitable that we will see instances start to leverage them.
Then our goals are fundamentally at odds. My hope for the future is the minimization or elimination of the ad driven internet. I’d rather see Lemmy die than succumb to ads and commercialization.
In 50 years from now maybe we will have found a better way. Perhaps instead of leaving the idea of social media and the Internets “public square” to corporations we could fund it in a more socialized way and have it be some kind of tax expense. I don’t want to see companies profiting off the simple act of communicating online forever. Maybe in the past it was novel enough to be a real technological hurdle that could only be done with privatized companies, but at some point I think it should be more like a public utility.
I feel that you’re still misunderstanding me. I have never said that my goal is an ad driven internet.
I would not be against govts running publicly funded fediverse servers, and I would not be against public funding going toward fediverse and open source projects, but I hope we would agree that we would not want the fediverse to be “owned” by any govt. The ability to run your own instance free from any govt control is vitally important.
Publicly owned servers introduce a new set of difficulties too. Unlike privately owned platforms, things like freedom of speech would actually need to be guaranteed. But that doesn’t mean you want any random account to be able to spread any info it wants, which would make the platform a target for manipulation. I would guess most publicly owned servers would thus resort to deanonymization to simplify the challenge of moderation. Which I wouldn’t be interested in.
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