I don’t generally judge people based on their appearance, but this man’s face gives me the heebie-jeebies. There’s something alienating about the lack of affect he seems to have, plus his features seem to be an approximation of a human face - the mouth is too small, the ears too big, the forehead too shiny…
Damn it, didnt even get a notice about this comment. It uses GANs, similar but not the same as the LLMs used by chatgpt trained on a large set of photos (I think it was trained on the ffhq set) to generate new faces. See youtube for cool videos that transition between faces.
Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that’s a death sentence. It’s impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let’s be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked anywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won’t do it.
I consider email (and snail mail) a significantly more essential service than social media. Email service providers starting to block each other is much more likely to have a negative effect on my life than being disconnected from some friends, influencers or current news
On the one hand you’re right, but at the same time here we all are on lemmy leaving reddit behind. You shouldn’t underestimate people’s willingness to not deal with shitty companies these days
In the long term, alternative platforms need to be built on something different than outrage and “not being the bad company”. In the end, the vast majority of people cares very little about the underlying technology, they just want their content and people to interact with. Mastodon is in decline already, the fediverse shouldn’t be a place where people come to say “wow, [company] sure does suck”, and then go back to that company if they actually need a piece of information or reach a person that does not know or care what an API or federated protocol is, aka 99% of the population.
Lemmy should specifically be about not catering to these kinds of people. People that just want their content and don’t care about anything else can stay on reddit/threads.
I see Lemmy and the fediverse more as an evolution of how we approach the web. We should absolutely cater to more casual users eventually, and try to have as many people as possible to leave behind these greedy internet monopolies. We clearly saw that they’re not the way to go.
How we get there is a bit of a question mark, it’s clear that there’s a big push from more involved/aware users to break away from big corporations. This doesn’t mean we’re building on outrage, just that it was the initial push to get something new started.
The difference is that the email protocol has long been established and any new email client is built to that protocol standard. What we have here is an open protocol still being developed. The fear is that FB will force changes into that protocol and take it over. Then it will no longer be an open development protocol. By expunging FB right now before they get a firm grip on the userbase it can preemptively prevent FB from causing damage.
We are kind of in unexplored territory right now. You could compare it to google/MS taking over xmpp but it’s not quite the same situation either.
But the reality is that the current fediverse doesnt need facebook to be successful. It already has the users to continue to grow. By combining user pools facebook would have the majority share with their instagram users which means they would have a controlling share of users and would leach users away from the fediverse over time until they broke away at which point fediverse would die as most users would be forced to follow in order to keep their feeds.
This way those feeds never mingle with FB and thus fb cant leech them.
That’s why it has to be done now - before we rely on them for content.
This isn’t email or LinkedIn, it’s not about who’s on it - it’s about content and the community
If we join with them, we’ll get way more content and a way bigger community - not a better one though.
We need enough, and we need organic growth. We don’t need a firehose, and definitely not one held by the people who made social media what it is everywhere else
Gmail doesn’t use an algorithm designed to make you depressed and lead to a higher rate of suicide among teenagers. Facebook and Instagram does. And Meta knows it did since day one of implementation.
I know lots of people will disagree with me, but I personally think it’s madness and will drive most people to use threads.net instead of any other ActivityPub instance. Also threads.net isn’t even federating yet.
How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy? (And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).
Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.
So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish. 1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we’re friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types. 2.they start Extending that standard “to make it even better” - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard. 3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn’t the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn’t compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.
Yes. Threads wants to use the ActivityPub Protokoll. We can interact with Kbin and Mastodon users thanks to this Protocol. The fear is that they use their huge user base to change the protocol to their liking (basically take control over the ActivityPub) and everyone who wants to stay federated with them and their users has to adapt those changes until the day they will simply cut everyone off.
the standard is made by the World Wide Web Consortium, which I trust to not let facebook take control of their standard. They also manage standards like HTML, CSS and SVG
No, they re-publish the work of WHATWG in standards form, the vendors literally made a pact not to deal with them. Then sometime in the last decade they standardized EME, even after the technology activists told them fucking not to. Defective By Design said this shit for years, decades, and W3C ignored everyone. I have more reason not to trust Berners-Lee at this point than put any stock in his leadership skills.
Yes, sounds like there should be Meta’s fake, desecrated version of “ActivityPub”, and the actual Fediverse version of ActivityPub that does not budge to any of Meta’s interests.
If one instance gets too big they could just ignore the standard and start adding random tweaks to it. And all the others would eventually have to adapt to that or become incompatible with the big instance.l
Federation allows for choice. Indeed, many AP implementations already add to the base AP stuff. Peertube already does this itself.
For this to really be a problem, the server software would need to be maintained by the same person running the instance, and they have to have the manpower already to either a) Build an implementation or b) Run a fork of existing software. Both take effort and quite frankly is juice that isn’t worth the squeeze to risk cutting yourself off from the network like that.
I agree in theory, but in practice, when Google dropped RSS and XMPP support it took most of my friends with it, which is what started this mess in the first place. I’m actually not a fan of mastodon; feels too ambitious to start a new protocol without a killer app. RSS and XMPP are extensible protocols and I really just want modern support for those.
ActivityPub wasn’t built with the purpose of having a “killer app” in mind. That’s centralization logic. The point is for all apps to be able to talk to each other regardless of where on the network and maintaining the ability to do so seamelessly without the user having to think too much about it.
Mastodon should be able to talk to Lemmy. Lemmy should be able to talk to Pixelfed. Et cetera. I don’t believe XMPP had the same purpose, matter of fact I remember it just being a subpar IM protocol iirc, and I don’t see social media going by the wayside the way IM clients of the past did.
That’s the same problem as with Chrome. If internet for most people goes through Google Chrome (which it currently does: Android, smart devices, Electron Apps, Android apps, Edge, Brave, etc.) then the controlling entity can redefine the meaning of that protocol. In the above example it would be Google redefining the meaning of the web, see DRM, manifest v3, and similar efforts. Small players wouldn’t be able to play catch-up or disagree (it wouldn’t matter) and risk bring irrelevant.
The admins of defederating instances fear the same could happen to ActivityPub and fediverse.
Threads is using the protocol that the entire fediverse is using, called ActivityPub. The protocol allows for lemmy instances to communicate with each other and with other sites like kbin and mastodon. What lemmy.ml did is called defederation, so threads can’t communicate with lemmy.ml. This is to prevent meta/Instagram/Facebook from killing ActivityPub in the same manner Microsoft, IBM, and Google has killed open source protocols in the past.
The most notable one imo is Google semi killing XMPP. They started Goolge Talk based on XMPP and after many people started relying on it, they replaced XMPP with their proprietary protocols.
I like the look. One thing I would like to see is integration of the community search tool to make discoverability easier. Something that shows what server each community is on but also will allow you to search across servers in case you don’t know where things are, and a way to view the list of all communities if you want.
Yes that’s great. I looked at the Figma file but seeing stuff moving around on a screen is very powerful. I think this looks like a huge improvement and it tones down a few of the stronger elements making it pass better as an iOS app. Have you worked in iOS at all?
Stu has already put a mock-up of some of these ideas in place and it’s looking very exciting!
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