I'm absolutely baffled over how much of a clusterfuck Reddit and particularly Huffman personally has turned this into.

Why in the ever loving PR suicide by not shutting the fuck up, did Reddit think that starting a war against their own moderators would be a good idea? I'm wondering if I have ever seen a company handle a situation this badly before. This is utterly insane.

Huffman has somehow managed to take a mild inconvenience that would blow over in a few days and turned that into a major crisis and then turned that crisis into an existential threat to the future of the company.

I really wanted something similar so I threw a quick and dirty tampermonkey script together to fetch the subscriptions from the settings page. I think it worked out pretty alright.

Edit: Someone else can probably do something a lot better, but here is the code: https://pastebin.com/P0mR9QL6

Paste it into a new script and call the addSubscriptionsSidePanel() function to run it.

Edit2: I've uploaded it to Greasy Fork so that you can install it directly: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469139-kbin-subscriptions-panel

Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won't. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.

So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

It's funny, I'm not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.

Interestingly it seems like the main reason is not the enormous data gathering list that has been posted a few times, but rather the connection to Instagram and whether the two services are allowed to share user data.

Meta is also using Threads as a test bench for the Digital Markets Act, so they are probably holding off the launch until they can get federation going.

This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the "free" web that we are used to.

No, I'm not saying that selling out one's personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn't sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.

Will the test instances be publicly available?

That would be greatly appreciated by us over at /m/kbinStyles so that it’s possible to see that everything still works before the new version goes live.

Obviously not exactly high priority, but I thought it was worth asking anyway.

Just to put it in perspective, there are about 15 million users total in the entire Fediverse, of which ~9 million are on Mastodon.

There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.

I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.

Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.

If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.

I don't think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.

I know that is a popular narrative in the Fediverse community right now, but I honestly find it unreasonable. Google and Meta didn't kill XMPP, they abandoned it and without them it went right back to where it was originally: barely used whatsoever. The Fediverse already has a small, but relatively healthy user base. Meta can abandon ActivityPub or twist it into something unacceptable, but all that will do is bring us back to where we are right now.

All that is irrelevant, though, because the difference is that Meta is legally required to incorporate interoperability with other services and that's why they are going with ActivityPub. Not from the good of their hearts, but because they need to and is in their own self interest to keep alive.

Right now, they are early adopters of ActivityPub and have a very early strong position there. When they federate they will be by several magnitudes the largest instance on the network. Whether we like it or not, they will inevitably be a major player in dictating the future of ActivityPub. Thus, they want to keep ActivityPub alive because they want to make sure that becomes the future EU mandated industry standard for SoMe. Otherwise, some other technology will be chosen, one that might not be lead by Meta, but by Google, Apple or ByteDance.

Note, that I'm not arguing whether this is good or bad, but only what I predict is happening.

Repeat after me: ChatGPT is a language model not a digital librarian.

That’s perhaps the most frustrating part. There are numerous ways they could have handled this that at worst would have resulted in a few people whining about it and then moving on.

Even if he had just shut the fuck up for a few days, most subs would probably be up by now. But no, his fragile ego couldn’t handle it, so he decided to go on a personal crusade against the very people who are working for free to keep the site running.

Without the mods and power users, Reddit has barely any value whatsoever.

I don't want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.

But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger "main" network, and everything in-between.

Meta has several billion active users across their platforms. 30M is nothing to them.

Also don’t forget that we’re talking about a microblog, so it will inherently generate a large amount of individual posts, much more so than e.g Instagram. The quality is however likely very low initially and a lot of users are probably just trying out the current talk of the day.

I do suspect that Threads will probably grow to a few hundred million users before the end of the year; anything less would probably be regarded as a colossal failure for Meta.

We migrated to Matomo, which has very similar functionality as GA, but can be self hosted and is GDPR compatible. It can even be configured to run without consent since it doesn’t build a third party ad profile, which should actually improve the data coverage a bit.

The tracking API is a little different than GA so we had to redo some things to get all the events to trigger properly (especially for e-commerce), but for basic usage statistics it’s relatively plug and play in the tag manager.

https://matomo.org/

I'm not entirely sure how to properly ping users, but I've updated the comment with a pastebin with the code. https://pastebin.com/P0mR9QL6

@mrbitterness @LennethAegis @RodPhoto

Awesome! Glad it worked.

I guess it depends on how this "Data Protection Review Court" actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn't seem to really matter much to US agencies so we'll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

Nevertheless, it's good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We've had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.

Maybe I'm just being dumb, but wouldn't site: kbin.social also catch everything that kbin.social is federated with? You wouldn't of course literally be searching the entire fediverse, but it would functionally be more or less the same thing, as I understand it.

No worries, it's my first published Tampermonkey script so there are probably a lot of quirks that should be ironed out.

I'm using Chrome on MacOS. Which extension are you using? I've only tested this in Tampermonkey and I did read somewhere that Greasemonkey may have dropped support for the GM_addStyle() function which I'm using.

If possible, it would really help if you could post any errors that you might be getting in the web inspector console.

Honestly, I would probably be using both, in that case. The Threadiverse feels a lot like the early days of Reddit and I would love to be part of it and see it grow up. Assuming this keeps expanding, it's too late for me to go back to exclusively using Reddit at this point. Giga brain Mr. Huffman made sure of that.

However, there are numerous great communities at Reddit that haven't found a place here yet. Especially many of the smaller subs that were already very niche as it is, and that one probably won't not find anywhere else anytime soon.

I'm already regularly using multiple different sites as it is. Both larger international ones, as well as smaller local blogs and forums. I don't personally see an issue by itself to keep both Reddit and Kbin on that list.

Hopefully, we will see entirely new communities pop up and grow in the Threadiverse. That is, communities that aren't just different flavours of "Reddit sucks". Not saying it's not entertaining, but I think we need to broaden the scope a bit going forward. :)

So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.

The issue is that you don't have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can't even build your lemonade stand.

Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.

So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you're making from the lemonade.

That's OK for me, though. I wasn't doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it's finished, I'm fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.

So everything is tugging along and now you're actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you've always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don't actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.

Currently, your company haven't made a single cent, but that's fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.

Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.

So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.

Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can't actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company's value plummets and eventually closes down.

Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn't make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You're also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.

Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.

Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.

I'm guessing it's a poorly worded way to say that Threads will reach 1 billion users before Twitter. Otherwise, I don't know. Facebook has almost 3 billion users.

You use an Instagram account to register a Threads account, but they are two different services. After the Threads account is linked, there is however no way to remove that account without also removing the Instagram account.

Just for comparison, there are something like 2.3 BILLION Instagram accounts.

I think many people here are immensely overestimating the value of the Fediverse user base. The entire active Fediverse, let alone individual instances, is barely a rounding error for Meta.

There is no if or when Threads become the biggest instance, Threads apparently got 10 million users in 7 hours. The whole of Mastodon has ~9 million users in total. By now, Threads alone is likely bigger than the entire Fediverse combined, which mind you is something like >99% bots and inactive users.

Even if every single instance defederates from Meta, their fork of ActivityPub would by far be the most significant one by not a small margin.

like this alternative sidebar which I unfortunately couldn't get to work as intended.

Oh, what problems did you run into? I haven't pushed that many updates lately because I thought it was fairly stable, but perhaps there are still some bugs for certain configurations?

Thinking out loud, there might be some compatibility issues with Greasemonkey specifically. I'm personally using Tampermonkey, but I know that Greasemonkey have a tendency of being a bit troublesome sometimes. I did have to fix a few bugs related to Greasemonkey for the Kbin Usability Pack a while ago.

Anyway, please give me a shout and I'll see if I can get a fix out.

JetBrains have some quite extensive VC tooling built into their IDEs which I use almost exclusively. I used to do everything in the terminal, but I find it so much quicker and simpler to do it directly in the IDE.

Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.

However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.

I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.

As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:

1. Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.

2. Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.

Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.