Oh look, it’s almost as Meta is an untrustrworthy actor that plans to EEE the fediverse. I consider any instance that federates with Meta a lost cause, to be defederated as well.
I’m new to here so maybe I’m missing something. But why is it a problem if people from the fediverse can communicate with people on threads? It shouldnt negatively effect people on Mastodon right?
Yes the article is showing that meta likely wants to control people in annoying ways but isn’t that only an issue if you’re a Threads user? It’s cool to be able to talk with people in Threads from Mastodon as long as you don’t need threads yourself.
Of course they haven’t actually connected up threads yet as far as I know.
GoogleTalk once federated with XMPP/jabber, good times until their userbase was big enough to deferedate again, crippling the jabber network. It will happen again if we let it.
Metas plan is to draw users into their network and use the fediverse as an initial catalyst (“look! so much content already there!”). Once their userbase is large enough, they will deferate again claiming protocol difficulties or something equally vague, but they will just want to start rolling out advertising which would not be displayed to users from other instances. Most users will not keep two accounts and jusy stay with the big corp and leave the original fediverse again.
I would agree with this if they weren’t brining the entire user base of instagram along with them. They just want an easy way to boost their platform’s initial content. We lose nothing if they defederate. Most people here already hate their guts and would rather die than use their platform. I’d even think some of their users may miss the fediverse and migrate over if they have to.
I think they’re using the fediverse as both a free boost of initial content and possibly as an experiment to see what it would be like if they decided to federate something even bigger: Facebook itself.
EEE stands for embrace, extend, extinguish. This is the embrace step, where everything is all sunshine and flowers. Actually the whole thing is sunshine and flowers, just the last step happens in that shaded area where nobody is paying attention.
But anyways, they embrace it and it seems like they are supporting the good thing.
Then they extend it with new shiny features. They are a large company and can afford to throw a bunch of developers at the project. This seems like they are doing more good, but the subtle thing is that now development outside of what they are doing is dictated to a degree by what they are doing. Sure, others can ignore the new features, but if they are important to users, doing so will mean that more users move over to their platform.
They can also adopt proprietary features that cost licensing fees to use. Or use their own. This essentially locks other devs out of those features, kinda like when a company decides to charge a ridiculous amount for access to their API, you either go along with it or you lose access to that API.
Once they have a lion’s share of the larger platform’s user base, they gain some power over the platform itself. They can start dictating things otherwise they’ll cut dissenters off.
Of course, the next question is why would this be any different from just defederating with meta right now? It mostly comes down to inertia and people getting used to things. Say your friends are on threads and you’re on some other non-meta instance. If you aren’t federated, then you have other ways of communicating with your friends that you use and are used to. But if you are federated, then maybe you use the platform to communicate with your friends. Now all of a sudden there’s a demand from meta to send Zuckerberg-compatible energy credits that would leave you defederated if your instance doesn’t comply.
In the first case, meta’s demands don’t affect you at all. In the second case, ignoring them would disrupt your routine, which will be frustrating and that frustration might get targetted at meta or maybe it will be targetted at the instance when they decide to ignore the demand and defederate. Now multiply that by thousands of users and you might be able to see how having a connection with meta might give them the power to disrupt instances they have no direct control over.
Now that said, I don’t know how much power meta will be able to build here. Personally, I already like the feature set they’ve got right now and think it only really needs tweaking. Reddit adding features to make their new site more attractive never even slightly tempted me to stop using the old site or an app that had nothing to do with the company. Maybe I’m lacking imagination, but I can’t think of any features that would both attract users en masse, would be difficult for other instances to add, and would be something that I’d personally want. And any threat to remove meta’s userbase from the fediverse sounds like threatening me with a good time.
So I lean towards defederating but not because I’m worried about meta eventually ruining this but because I think they will immediately ruin it by making it too popular. Kinda like Reddit’s growing popularity over time seemed to correlate with a decline in average quality before even taking the admins and mods into account (though I’d bet that the growing popularity also contributed to those declines as well).
The thing is, meta has a user base 100sx the size of the fediverse, and absolutely no incentive to EEE a project that is very very niche and inaccessible to a lay audience.
Stuff like this is why I went to Mac in 2020 and I only begrudgingly look back the few times a year I absolutely need something windows exclusive. They really have a lovely way with software and UI that Microsoft does not.
Remember how bored everyone got of ignoring news about the massive issues in the 90s that still affect everyone? You still can’t bring it up without people’s eyes glazing over. Drives me nuts that people just don’t give a shit.
There is one but it’s still in TestFlight. I believe it’s supposed to be out officially by the end of the month but apple may be giving them issues. Toot from the developers
Much like Chrome before it. Remember when Google’s whole push was about how fast Chrome was compared to other browser? Now it’s a world full of bloated Chromium wrappers and Firefox.
I tried using outlook this year for the first time in 15 years, and immediately NOPED the fuck out when I noticed it displayed ads in-line with my inbox.
And then there are those rumors that they want to display ads in the settings panel. Fuck Microsoft, they have ZERO trustworthiness in my book
I have been using Outlook for over 15 years and it’s fine. I have never seen an ad in my inbox. Tips aren’t ads. Not sure what you are talking about. I’m running the latest build connected to an EXO mailbox.
Email clients stop innovating 20 years ago. The strength of Outlook is the interoperability with other Microsoft apps. I am sure you think those are cancer, and that’s fine. lol
Oh, you should know. Windows 11’s newest version lets you just have Outlook for free. You can just click a button in Mail and have the “new Outlook for Windows.”
I didn’t know, thats terrifying. We don’t allow Win11 in our company. Only Win10. Everyone is on paid outlook connected to our orgs cloud exchange. Unfortunately we will never stop supporting MS. Lucky I don’t have to deal with that stuff anymore as dev ops.
Outlook on windows 11 absolutely has ads in the inbox, though I understand you may not have windows 11 or installed the free outlook through the windows 11 upgrade.
“It’s fine” was always my experience when I used outlook through work. Thunderbird can also be integrated with microsoft programs, i’m not sure why its interoperability is such a standout feature for you. But having advertisements masquerading as unopened mail within my inbox is absolutely not fine.
I unfortunatelly have to use outlook and teams at work. If this really becomes the case, I will both write to EU regulators and try to petition our IT to move away from microsoft teams and potentially outlook.
If you work for an EU company using Outlook might be illegal, as they now send all emails unencrypted via their own servers.
At our work place, which is mostly Linux, some people have been using outlook if they opt to use windows or Mac or android or iPhone. And when outlook started to send all emails via their own servers (not respecting your smtp settings and such), we instated a full ban on using all outlook clients on all platform.
It’s really sad, as a Linux user I think outlook used to be the best email client period. Before this privacy hell and before adds in the program of course.
Same for me. My company talks a big game, but is bad at audits or detection for authorized devices / unauthorized access.
I wiped my work pc and ran linux daily for a year. Remina for remote management was far better than the native RDP client in Windows. Web based outlook got the job done. Teams app in Windows is just reskinned chrome anyhow. Works just as good in a browser. Had a remote box set up for any thing that absolutely required Windows.
Gmail does this too. I’m pretty sure my adblocker handles them on my PC but I see them on the mobile app all the time.
We use o365 for work so I’m seeped in that environment already. I tried using o365 for my personal email for about 3 months and finally gave up and went back to gmail.
Its usually in the separate tab, the “promotion” tab, where they send most subscriptions emails. It’s not good, but it could be miles worse. Yahoo mail for example is a lot worse: you get Ads in the website taking away screen space unless you pay a premium
I see a couple of ad “emails” entries in my promotion side of the inbox, usually in the 3-4 rows, and I also use both adblock + uorigin. Again, not really disrupting, because its usually a section of the inbox I dont go into too much, but I can see it being annoying for others
I have never experienced this with Gmail, though I use ublock as you mentioned. I haven’t seen any through the gmail app on mobile either.
Email is an open protocol, there’s no reason to continue using an email client (web or otherwise) that displays ads. I highly recommend you use something like thunderbird if this is your experience.
Ads are pernicious no matter where they appear, but them being associated with any kind of personal communication is fucking nuts, I wish we wouldn’t normalize it.
It’s possible to uninstall it (and many other things like Cortana) through the AppX package manager built into Windows 10, but most people wouldn’t know how to do that. There’s no option on the apps management panel to uninstall it.
I don’t know if it’s still the case with Windows 11, but I would assume it’s still possible.
I removed Edge and IE on my work computer and the only time I had trouble was when I tried to open the built-in manual in some non-Microsoft software and it failed.
I think it used some embedded browser component that Edge or IE provides
Edge/IE doing what they do make me want to swap to Linux. Edge is a resource hog and also tries to run in the background during startup. I thought I paid for a computer. Why can’t I uninstall this bloatwear easily?
Today is a good day to start dual booting or at least look at it via a live usb boot. I would recommend Linux Mint for starter, If you don’t like how it looks, no problem you will be able to install another Desktop later, just start getting familiar with it. linuxmint.com
If it wasn’t for nVidias drivers still being shite I would’ve moved over permanently a long time ago. Either AMD catch up in performance / features or nVidia / nouveau drivers become comparable to Windows counterparts. The day I am forced off of W10 LTS IOT I will be leaving windows instantly, I am never going to use an OS that forces me to log in using their account system.
Out of curiosity, what problems are you having with the drivers? I have a GTX 1070ti graphics card and the drivers for it have been ok on Linux, the integration hasn’t been as smooth as Windows but I haven’t had any problems.
Loads of issues, majority of their features are completely missing and since nvidia are asshats that keep things proprietary a lot of it lacks equivalents that are of the same quality as their features.
The absolute biggest issue for me is Wayland support being complete crap on nvidia.
Is it a hog or an opportunist? My understanding is browsers will take all the resources they can to make you 40 tabs flow smoothly as possible, but they should also release those resources when other programs demand it. How those priorities are ranked, I don’t know. You don’t check your Task Manager until everything is already slow, right? That’s when browsers look like the culprits with the biggest RAM usage. But are they really? If you start changing tabs and finding they’re blank and need to releaod, that’s an indicator the browser gave up some resources
I think the issue here is not which browser is better, but companies not respecting your preferences and use scummy methods to make you switch. This might be a Microsoft issue now, but I can see it becoming a slippery slope and have more companies in the future do the same. Lets say that Microsoft succeed here: whats stopping Google to do the exact same with Android. Then you end up to keep in sync your favorites in 3 different browsers (Safari, Edge, Chrome. Firefox gets shafted since even if you use it as default each company will force its own browser) depending on the OS you are using.
You did pay for a computer. But not just with your money, you pay by being forced into using the services of the company that subsidized the price of your product. Be it Android bloatware that you can’t get rid of, a free version that keeps reminding you about the premium features or simply ads.
Back in the day, the products you bought didn’t keep trying to sell you other products. However, we tend to take for granted the amount and quality and value of services that companies just give for free. Back when free mailbox used to be limited to 6MB, encyclopedias and map services used to cost a lot of money. The sheer amount of things we can do today online without giving a payment method is astonishing. And it is not just because of the advancement in technology. Personally I prefer this model of giving a product for free and using it to promote the paid product as long as it “polite”. Those who would like to get a premium experience will pay.
You could use Linux to avoid paying for software while avoiding the bloatware. Linux had massively improved over the recent years in being noob-friendly. However, you still pay for it with your time as still there are things that are not supported and you have to come up with workarounds. Personally I use Linux, but it took me a while to get comfortable with it. Unlike Windows, I can configure it nearly any way I like. But I can’t recommend this to everyone.
It is a lot better than it used to be. Emulation tools got much better over the last couple of years, and there are many things that required applications in the past and now just work from the browser. You can edit documents, send emails, play games and videos, configure devices, edit images. All from the browser - over windows or Linux.
Making the shift to Linux is easier now than it has ever been. Linux caught up, Windows got bloated, emulation and platform agnostic web services gave a lot more options for counteracting Windows main advantage - which is software compatibility. And as Linux gains popularity that is changing for the better as well.
“Windows Modern Standby” is attempting the same, just failing miserably: youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c
Of all PCs at home, Steam Deck has by far the best standby experience and that’s not flawless either because it doesn’t do hibernation which means after a few days of regular standby the battery is empty.
I mean it's pretty obvious, but then investors are technological illiterates. Companies still use user counts to measure their livelihood for investors, that tells you it works. It's retarded. It's fucking dumb money. But these types never stop long enough to learn, it's how they get where they're at.
That's not true. Instagram has 1.6bn users and all can use their Instagram logins to sign in to Threads. The roughly 1% who have signed up already have chosen to activate Threads, it's not done automatically.
mildlyinfuriating
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