The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I'm interested to see how he's planning to handle this and I wish him luck.

Remember when Bernie Sanders got dismissed as a crackpot Trumpian conspiracy theorist for suggesting that a multi-billionaire owning WaPo influences its coverage? Much like how most of a glacier is underwater, most of the influence is more subtle than this and has been happening behind the scenes for ages; I'm just impressed with how brazen it's getting.

Yeah I recall that the Japanese instances have a big problem with that shit. As for the rest of us, Facebook actually open sourced some efficient hashing algorithms for use for dealing with CSAM; Fediverse platforms could implement these, which would just leave the issue of getting an image hash database to check against. All the big platforms could probably chip in to get access to one of those private databases and then release a public service for use with the ecosystem.

Good call from the instance admins. Meta's been a known actor for over 10 years at this point, which is more than enough time to observe their behavior (including up to a few weeks ago when they got fined for violating the GDPR). They're not going to be participating in good faith and we don't need to give them a chance to shit up the Fediverse.

Firefox gang rise up!

Hot damn! Thank you, EU. Maybe we'll finally be able to climb out of connector hell.

I'm getting the feeling that within the next five years I'm going to be abandoning YouTube and just living without video content going forward.

If Reddit just charged the AI people for API access and left 3rd party apps alone I doubt anyone would have given a shit, but they had to go and two-birds-with-one-stone it. Then they insisted on digging their hole deeper by running their mouths and making the situation worse.

In the context of the article, it refers to American centrists; they're notorious for lackluster, means-tested policy that is woefully inadequate for addressing society's problems when they're not actively making things worse.

Chromebooks expire? What the fuck? Are there logistical problems with installing Linux on these devices?

Firefish sounds like what someone would call malware targeting Firefox users. I was hoping the name would be better.

Maybe my problem is with redditors

Yeah, probably. That site has a problem with racism/sexism/queerphobia because the admins have consistently refused to properly deal with the site's problems for basically its entire existence. I still recall CNN having to goad Reddit into banning the jailbait subreddit.

but at the very least reddit was equipped to keep the dumbest of dumbasses out of visibility.

lmao, I wish mate. It's less of an issue in smaller niche subs, but the defaults/large subs have been garbage for a long time.

At this point, I already have a fairly negative view of the fediverse.

The Reddit-like portion is dealing with a bunch of bullshit right now due to the protest and exodus bringing in tens of thousands of users from a website that has a fairly reactionary baseline in the first place. The rest of the Fediverse has largely not been impacted, though. You should try Calckey; it's a Twitter-like platform, but it also has threaded comment replies (it displays differently than Reddit's, though). It'll give you something to do while the dust settles and content moderation on Lemmy/kbin can get sorted.

Finally, pokemon taken to its logical conclusion.

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about Threads privacy policy lately, where people seem genuinely shocked about it.

I know I shouldn't still be jarred by stuff like this, but I am. It's like when I encounter people who don't use adblockers and they just sit in their chair and watch that shit. I really wish normal people gave more of a shit about this stuff.

Hopefully Pocketpair wins, because they made the better monster catching game. I'm still reeling from how bad the performance is in Scarlet/Violet.

1. Mozilla's goals for the web line up quite nicely with my own.
2. The performance is good for what I want.
3. The extension API is more powerful than Chrome's.
4. Outside of the Apple ecosystem, it's the last major alternative to the Chrome skins.
5. It isn't actively trying to cripple adblockers.

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber

IMO these were their best products. 🙁

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Ugh, god damn it.

Also from the article:

A cultural shift might be necessary — one that views politics as a part of people’s identity but far from the most important part. Americans’ ability to live together, quite literally, might depend on it.

Their suggestion to enact a cultural shift that deprioritizes politics does not actually address the problems with being a chud (the misogyny being one component of that), thus having to compromise/make peace with it is the logical conclusion of their suggestion. Compromise in general suggests that both sides of a dispute are making concessions towards each other, when in reality it's the chuds who need to stop being ghouls. This would also fall in line with the larger media trend of telling liberals to move to the right. The WaPo article itself is more subtle about this than explicit, but I do not think the headline of the FAIR article is inaccurate.

Clearly the wizards at Nintendo know something about optimizing games for the Switch that others don’t.

Could someone share this information with GameFreak? The beats shouldn't drop as hard as the FPS.

How many of these corporations have been giving money to anti-LBGTQ+ politicians while donning the rainbow?

It's Mastodon with a better featureset and UX. Forked from the well-established Fediverse platform MissKey. Some things I like:

• Threaded comment replies (though they display differently from Lemmy's).
• Antennae for discoverability.
  • Can use hashtags AND keywords.
  • Can filter results by instance.
  • Can create multiple timelines to display content in.
• Customizable UI via widgets.
• I think the theming options are better.
• Full-text search.
• Quote posts.
• Cat mode.

The only real hardware problems I come across these days with Linux is WiFi cards being shit. As far as I'm concerned, carefully selecting hardware is a problem for the *BSDs at this point. Am I missing something?

Privacy-focused? GSMArena says this thing has a Qualcomm chip and Qualcomm was just caught phoning home without user consent with unencrypted personal data (even if you use a privacy OS); what does the phone do to mitigate this?

Calckey has the superior feature set to Mastodon by far. When the project matures, it'll be a force to reckon with.

That's a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.

Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I've definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we'll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that's open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.

The botting and astroturfing was already out of control. It's going to be so much worse going forward.

When you type up a DM on Mastodon, there's a little popup notice that appears next to the text box that says:

Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.

IMO the platform handles informing users about this responsibly.

Good, hopefully it keeps tanking so we don't have to pay any further mind to it.

It's quite unfortunate that Rexxit happened before the platform was ready for it. Looking forward to refederating when the time comes.

American socialism has the demilitarization of the police and ending police brutality as key policy goals, so news like this is of interest to keeping tabs on that problem.

Yeah, it's really weird that people keep acting like Reddit hasn't been astroturfed to shit for years at this point. I wouldn't trust the product reviews I see there.

Pipewire was honestly the most pain-free introduction of a new audio technology on Linux; it was a nice change of pace.

I agree with the author for the most part, but I don't think it's just "us." I would say that discoverability in general is just a lot worse now due to SEO gentrification and search engines facing enshittification. There's still cool projects like Neocities around, but if it weren't for networking I'd have no idea they exist. When I type "build a website" into DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I just get links to squarespace, wix, godaddy, and a few listicles. In order to curate cool stuff, you have to be able to find it first; have new tools popped up that facilitate this? What are the new heuristics for discovery?

Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn't very much, but if they're paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.

Firefish has federation support. You can even see the platform the posts come from in the top right corner of each post.

Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.

Right, and the rest of us would be able to more effectively filter it out from our instances.

I've been using PipeWire for a couple years now and it's honestly the most painless audio experience I've ever had on Linux. Looking forward to the 1.0 release!

That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.

No it wouldn't, because it'd still be significantly easier for instances to deal with CSAM content with this functionality built into the platforms. And I highly doubt there's going to be a mass migration from any Fediverse platform that implements such a feature (though honestly I'd be down to defederate with any instance that takes serious issue with this).