I get asking for mercy for family or a close friend, even when they’ve committed crimes, heinous or otherwise. I’ll chalk that up to human emotions.

But ffs, read the room a bit.

His dedication to leading a drug-free life and the genuine care he extends to others make him an outstanding role model and friend.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Danny’s character is his unwavering commitment to discouraging the use of drugs.

His dedication to avoiding all substances has inspired not only me but also countless others in our circle. Danny’s steadfastness in promoting a drug-free lifestyle has been a guiding light in my journey through the entertainment world and has helped me prioritize my well-being and focus on make responsible choices.

Saying stuff like that when he’s convicted of drugging victims before taping them is just nuts. Even by some sense of stupidity you think you’re just trying to highlight that he’s not a habitual drug user, you’re essentially just highlighting how calculated his actions were by drugging his victims.

This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.

For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.

Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.

Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.

It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.

The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.

Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.

There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.

I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.

So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.

And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.

Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.

So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?

Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?

It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.

Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.

Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.

@remindme@mstdn.social in 2 years.

The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.

If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.

Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.

1. Make up some thinly veiled use cases that supposedly highlight how this would benefit users, while significantly stretching the definition of “users”
2. Gaslight every one by pretending that people simply misunderstand what you’re proposing and what you’re trying to achieve
3. Pretend that nobody provides reasonable feedback because everyone is telling you not to commit murder in the first place instead of giving you tips on how to hide the body
4. Latch onto the few, inevitable, cases of people going too far to paint everyone opposing it in a negative light
5. Use that premise to explain why you had to unilaterally shut down any and all avenues for people to provide comment
6. Make the announcement that you hear people and that you’re working on it and that all will be well
7. Just do what you want anyways with minimal concessions if any and rinse repeat

For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:

https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md

https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md

Mastodon the non-profit is all but compromised.

The guy in charge is essentially in cahoots with Meta and is under an NDA from them.

It doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.

1. Threads federates with Mastodon instances
2. Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
3. A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
4. Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
5. The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
6. Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns

3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.

WEI can potentially be used to impose restrictions on unlawful activities on the internet, such as downloading YouTube videos and other content, ad blocking, web scraping, etc.

Did the author of the article come from some dystopian parallel universe?

You don’t know Some Software Corp and their world famous website somesoftwarecorp.com?

Pro tip: if you do insist on using Google scroll to the bottom until you see a notice like the one below.

You can then click on the complaint to see the URLs that were removed.

They’ve wisened up a bit and now require a (throwaway) email to access the links, but chances are that if you’re looking for something more obscure, the link you seek is still there.

Definitely!

I've deleted all my Reddit accounts, but from time to time I remember seeing something on some subreddit way back when that would be useful for something I'm currently working on and try to search for it.
This time I found a rabbit hole in the process and couldn't help but share what I found.

You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.

At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.

Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:

Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/master/Unity%20Software%20Additional%20Terms.md

Wow, didn't even know this existed. What hot garbage.

Then again, like you, I don't know why I'm surprised.

Huffman et al. straight up admitted that's how they got Reddit off the ground, by making posts under fake accounts: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/

I think you might be misunderstanding what this does.

You did a search for symbol references that contain "User" ignoring cases.

When you do a search for symbol references this way, Xcode will return two things:

1. A declaration of all the symbols containing "User" and/or some context surrounding the symbol (ignoring Case)

2. Show any places where your code references the symbol

And it did just that.

The first three .swift files show references to symbols that contain "User".
The forth one, User.swift, is in and of itself a symbol that matches the query and has symbols inside itself.
The last one UserViewModel.swift is in itself a symbol as well and all the parts that are nested within that you've annotated with underscores and question marks, serve to give you context about the symbol "UserViewModel", hence the ellipses.

It's essentially telling you "Hey I've found this symbol UserViewModel, it starts with a var named username, has a bunch of stuff following that (i.e. …) then has an extension, then some more stuff (i.e. …) and then ends".

Without knowing what's inside UserViewModel.swift I can't tell if it goofed with giving you a typical declaration, but that doesn't change the fact that its trying to give you context about a valid search result, the symbol UserViewModel, so that you can figure out if that's the one you're looking for.

Keep in mind that variables are considered symbols as well, but in this instance I don't think that's what happened here, otherwise it would've been marked with a P instead of a C.

If this is not desired behavior then I suggest you switch from "Containing" to "Matching Word" or instead consider using the search bar at the bottom of the Symbol Navigator. Another option, if you're searching while going through code, is to right click on the symbol in your code and click Find > Find Selected Symbol in Workspace.

Lastly it might be an idea to go over the Xcode documentation as a refresher. This would be a good starting point.

That said, Apple clearly feels that things can be improved by clarifying, because in the current Xcode beta they've changed the option label from References to Symbols (and added a few more options).

Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.

Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP

“Aside” is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, it reeks of a nauseating amount of hubris and makes one wonder if they’re suitable to maintain the project at all if they’re so oblivious to potential threats to the project.

I don’t understand what people think should happen here

Not roll out the red carpet for starters, and not engage with the company under NDA would be a good second.

Especially for a FOSS project that receives a healthy amount of contributions from others and likes to tout that it's co-owned by all contributors, it could be argued that it's highly objectionable for one person to engage, essentially as a representative, in non-transparent dealings that are sealed under NDA.

It really isn't rocket science, here's how the admin of the Fosstodon instance handled it.
Notice the lack of red carpet, the unwillingness to participate in an "off the record" event and the abundance of transparency towards the people he's responsible for.

I'm not saying that Rochko should've adopted the same abrasive "lol, get rekt" tone, its up to him if he's comfortable with that, but the points I'm hammering on about above can be achieved in respectful manner as well.

There is tons of choice here and the way it’s architected, several layers of protection.

There is no protection. As I've stated in a different comment, t doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.

1. Threads federates with Mastodon instances
2. Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
3. A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
4. Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
5. The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
6. Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns

3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.

At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.

Perhaps it is destined to be destroyed.

The concerns and ramifications of a large corporation, or any entity that vastly overshadows the "organic" Mastodon user base in orders of magnitude for that matter, federating with Mastodon have been brought up numerous times by many parties, with the goal of looking for a solutions.

These concerns weren't only brought up in light of a possible EEE strategy that lead to the death of Mastodon, but also in light of a more Google-esque play where the market share isn't necessarily used to outright kill, but instead to exert control^1^.

Every single time it fell on deaf ears (i.e. Rochko ignored it, if not outright killing the discussion), often shrugged off matter of factly that it isn't a risk.

Also make no mistake, we're talking about a layered issue here.

A network that can destroy Mastodon against its will due to its sheer size is bad enough.
Mastodon, by virtue of Rochko, facilitating this from within, adds an entirely new dimension to this.

^1^ Google famously bypasses standardization bodies and simply implements their in-house developed standards, leaving other browser engines to get with the program and implement what Google wants, or become irrelevant

There’s not much for him to be concerned about currently, given that he is dead.

As for 16 yo Aaron who wrote that list of hot takes in order of controversy, is it really surprising that a kid that developed an opinion of free speech extremism penned that down?
Especially after being inspired by this article as per his own admission?

The article also helps provide context for the time period this was written in.
Simple possession was still a relatively novel concept and simulated CSAM wasn’t criminal yet in the US.

Don’t misconstrue my own position on the matter, I originate from, and was legally trained in, a jurisdiction that criminalizes hate speech, imposing a significantly broader limit on free speech than the US currently does, and I think that’s the better path to take.
So I personally don’t adhere to free speech extremism.

Nevertheless, while not agreeing with his take, I can see the logic that persuaded him.

It’s essentially the facetious version of “Why stop here, why not also ban hate speech/guns/drugs/etc?”
All of those can be argued to be gateways to the harm of others, perhaps even disproportionately children.

To me it reads as him challenging the logic, not condoning the outcome much less the subsequent consequences. Very edgy indeed.

As for those who bring up that he reinstated his blog multiple times and with it this particular post from when he was 16, as a way to posthumously attribute this to a more older adult version of him; I’m not sure it’s that cut and dry.

As a fundamentalist such as himself it could also just be an exhibition of his free speech extremism perhaps combined with an effort to maintain transparency.

After all, it could suggest an eroding of his beliefs on free speech if he would remove it “now” with little benefit to him since the cat’s already out of the bag, even if he disagreed with his former self at the time of restoring the blog.

A better indication of his opinions later in life would be comments that reaffirm the prior expressed beliefs or, if the suspicion is that he practiced what he preached, one would expect this to have come out during the FBI investigation, considering they went through all his data.

Do I think it’s healthy to consider him a hero, or anyone else for that matter?
No not really, if only because the likelihood of heroes having irreconcilable blemishes is extremely high just by the very virtue of their, let’s say, unique thinking producing the things we love about them but also the things that might cause pause in many.

Love the fear mongering for something that A) already happens, B) shouldn't be an issue for people that are in the up and up and C) should be music to the ears of members of the "law and order" party.

You can still do this if you use https://www.shodan.io/

It’ll let you find IoT devices and cameras connected to the internet if you know what to search for and an alarming amount of them are locked behind an admin/admin login.

I advise against nosying around because there’s a near 100% chance that it’s illegal to do so in your jurisdiction.

Current 2FA implementation in Lemmy is a bit janky with the risk of being locked out.

First things first: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LOG OUT UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE YOUR AUTHENTICATOR WORKS AND THAT YOU CAN LOGIN USING ITS GENERATED 2FA CODE

Now that that’s out of the way, here are some steps to follow:

1. Ideally clicking on that button will open your authenticator which will then prompt you to select login credentials to attach it to; if it doesn’t and you instead are lead to a URL with a secret key or if you right click and you can copy that URL, then you need to manually copy the URL and paste it in the 2FA section of your authenticator or password manager
2. Once you’ve figured this out don’t log out, instead open a private browser window and test to see if you can login with your credentials + 2FA

If you can’t get it to work then you can disable it in the window you’re still logged into.

If you share which authenticator you use, people might be able to give you more specific instructions to get you through step 1.

Whatever you do, don’t log out. You will be locked out!
Unlike most common implementations, there is no built in step to verify if you can successfully generate a TOTP before 2FA is fully enabled.

Agreed.

Hold them in contempt of court and let them spend a week in jail all expenses paid.

They’re just trying to run out the clock so that, come election time, they’ll throw their hands up in the air and go “Welp, guess we’ll have to use the old map”.

Having a special master draw up a map is great in theory, until SCOTUS stays the lower ruling and drawn map and decides to not rule on the case until after elections (if they even were inclined to rule in favor of a fair map to begin with).

Another such rough edge is that comments sometimes get posted twice, like your comment

There are plenty of instances that are open, but it depends on your definition of “censored” if they are what you seek.

Completely “uncensored” instances are rare if not non-existent because most instances will at least try to adhere to the laws of their jurisdiction and in addition will have some rules in place to keep things running smoothly and pleasant for everyone.

Most big instances are run from the EU so they’ll often have rules regarding hate speech.

Depending on your definition your only options might either be Japanese instances due to less strict laws around certain content or right wing instances, but both will be almost uniformly blocked on other instances.

Typically low level attacks such as these is where it starts because they grant access to parts that can be used to learn more about the system as a whole.

This understanding then can be used to find easier to exploit avenues.

A good example of this is the history of exploits on Nintendo hardware.

They almost all started with finding an exploit at the hardware level, which then subsequently lead to finding software exploits and ways to leverage them in an easy way for end users.

But for iOS you’re forced to use Xcode for implementing certain things like permissions, build and upload.

You can do all that via VSCode as well if you so desire.

Permissions, configurations, etc. are essentially all just XML files and can be edited as such, building, running in simulator and uploading can all be done via CLI.

And if you're not comfortable doing it via the terminal in VSCode, you can also find some extensions.

Personally as a native dev I don't know why you'd want to of course, but to each their own.

The US can look at how other countries, that don’t outright provide free education, do it instead of reinventing the wheel.

Getting rid of the discharge protection is only a small part of it.

It’s more important to set a legal maximum for college tuition for accredited institutions.

Then make any subsidies and funds contingent being accredited.

Lastly make federal loans contingent on enrollment to accredited institutions, with the additional benefit of being able to cap the loan amount at a level correlated to the legal maximum tuition (not to be confused with setting at the tuition level because living expenses need to be taken into account as well).

Make the interest rate sub 1%, because the government shouldn’t profit off of you as it is a service and do away with private middle men that administer the loans, instead establishing a special loan administration agency.

This will have as effect that institutions either get in line or lose all government funds and a significant portion of enrollments.

If you then also manage to uphold a uniform quality level that you regularly inspect at the accredited institutions, you’ll end up with a clear, affordable choice of quality education v. unknown quality education that may or may not be a huge waste of non-publicly provided money.

ETA:

You can even take it a step further and follow more examples from abroad in terms of acceptance.
Where you aim to get to a situation that everyone that applies with the pre-requisite prior education credentials, gets accepted.

The way this is often done abroad is with a centralized application process managed by the government, in which you indicate your top 3 preferred colleges, the portal verifies your prior education (as it's centrally registered) and then enrolls you in order of preference.
For some studies, like law school, med school and psychology they'll have more applicants than available spots, and in those cases it's decided by lottery with slightly weighted chances based on your grade average.
The end result is that the vast majority of people automatically get accepted and the ones that don't get in via the lottery are almost guaranteed to be placed the following year.

This solves the whole minority/legacy/etc. acceptance debacle, makes applying for schools less like applying for a job with writing essays and stuffing your resume with a bunch of extracurriculars and in the process makes the accredited institutions even more attractive compared to the potential hold outs that keep doing things the old fashioned way.

Is that what you found out during your experiments?

That seems like a really inefficient and useless implementation to have all instances provide those details to one another, when every instance can simply keep track of it for their own users and pass along the total number.

Typical Lemmy experience, haha.

Honestly has its charms, gives me the feeling of nostalgia, like we're back in the early 2000's.

I mean personally I think it’s highly likely that someone at Reddit is behind it, if only because they stand to gain most of something like this and Huffman started emphasizing in interviews how the sentiment has changed in Reddit.

But out of the principle of intellectual honesty I didn’t feel comfortable blasting my personal suspicions as facts in the OP without something more concrete.

@mrmanager@lemmy.today was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.

They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.

You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.

But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.

However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there's an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.

There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.

This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.

Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband's computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.

Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.

Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn't include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.

And then there's the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.

Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we'd see an upwards trend.
Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn't offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn't explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.

In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @mrmanager@lemmy.today was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.

Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.

And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.

Well that explains why they did a 180 on their "no AI" rule, which has the mods in a tizzy.

Who knows, maybe it'll cut back on the toxicity in the sense that you don't have to interact with toxic people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good instinct, here’s a BBC source.

Edit: Apparently this is old news? Or the news is that lawsuits have commenced?

I was wondering myself as well so I got you.

Basically what happened was that these were technically two separate cases with two separate jury pools to decide the amount for damages.

One jury pool came to the decision that there were damages and awarded $50k to each individual in couple 1 (totaling $100k) while the other jury pool independently decided that no damages should be awarded based on the same evidence.

Keep in mind that this region is generally pretty hostile towards LGBTQ+ people. The judge had the option to overrule a jury if they find that the decision doesn’t match the evidence in the case.

The lawyer of this lady is actually hoping for that in the case that lead to a $100k damages award as per the quote below.

“Two juries heard the same evidence and the same arguments, and only one jury returned a verdict that was based on the facts and the evidence presented at trial,” Daniel Schmid, senior litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel and one of Davis’ attorneys, told CNN via email. “In the Yates case, the jury returned a verdict of $0.00 because that is what the evidence required.”

“Without any evidentiary support, the Ermold jury reached a verdict of $50,000 for each plaintiff. The evidence presented at trial simply does not support that verdict, and Ms. Davis will be filing a motion for a judgment notwithstanding the verdict next week,” Schmid said. “Ms. Davis trusts that the courts reviewing the evidence presented will see that the Ermold verdict lacks any evidentiary support and will agree with the Yates jury that the plaintiffs are entitled to no damages whatsoever.”

Source

Yup, and very little people realize that almost all RCS implementations are by Google (often via their Jibe service).

It means no porn, how much that overlaps with anything remotely considered NSFW is up to the admin and you’d have to ask them.

They’re right about browsers, but jumped the shark on keyboards.

Custom keyboards come with some rules and limitations for obvious reasons, but they’re by no means the system keyboard in disguise like how browsers are all WebKit under the hood.

Here’s documentation on custom keyboards: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/CustomKeyboard.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014214-CH16

It’s hard to explain without a similar sound existing in English.

The “eu” part in “neuken” and “keuken” is pronounced like the French word for 2: deux.

The ”-ken” end of both words is almost exactly pronounced as the word “cunt” without the t.

“de” is pronounced like “the” but with a “d” sound, like “duh” but not in the exaggerated way you’d do it when you’re mocking someone. And “in” is the same pronunciation as the English one.

So putting that all together, I’d write it out as follows if I’d like to make it pronounceable for an English speaker: “neuxcun in duh keuxcun”

ts obvious you have some strong feelings about this and it sounds like they come from you wanting Mastodon and the fedivserse to thrive. I respect that. I’ve enjoyed my time here so far. It would be a shame if it got torpedo’d by a big corp (especially a shitty one like Facebook).

Of course, I wanted Mastodon and the fediverse to thrive, if only because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to dethrone corporations that have a complete disregard of people's wellbeing as long as it turn them a profit.

Mastodon's figurehead in particular has squandered the opportunity and if not outright self-sabotaged himself.

My main focus thus far has been Mastodon as oppose to the fediverse as a whole, because Mastodon has a unique challenge that other fediverse projects don't have, namely the social graph.

People visiting Lemmy don't care and don't know who the person above and below them is, at most they might care that they're not straight up Nazi schmucks and preferably they're someone who has an interest in the topic of the community they're posting in, but that's about it.

On a "twitterlike" the identity of the people present is of more importance. Which is why I think in particular Mastodon will suffer the most, without knowing exactly if and how the other fediverse projects will be affected by Threads.

That said, I don’t think anyone has rolled out the red carpet.

I fail to see how this is the case.

Even if we ignore everything else, ignore the severe lack of transparency from the side of Rochko, his refusal to deny that he has received funds from Meta and his refusal to pledge not to accept funds in the future, ignore what could've transpired during the meeting with Meta, literally pretend like we are in a vacuum and the only thing related to Meta from his hand is the blog, then the blog alone is a perfect top of the line red carpet that has been rolled out.

I mean he hails it as a victory and ends with a tacit invitation for other corporations to do the same.

Just this quote alone is enough of a red carpet being rolled out:

This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

How much more does someone need to be inviting to be considered to have rolled out a red carpet?

I’ve also seen a lot of jumping to conclusions and fantastical strawmen at the bottom of everyone’s slippery slope arguments. A few of your numbered points would fall into that conclusion jumping bucket, and some of your other points are based on an, imo, misunderstanding of the users of the fediverse.

For instance, #3 and #5 don’t give this community enough credit. The bulk of the people on the fediverse are big proponents of free and open internet, privacy, foss, etc. Most are refugees of Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook to begin with–they aren’t just hopping back in bed with Facebook.

And to that point, why would they all of the sudden care about the social media all of their friends are on? I can almost guarantee that their “normie” friends aren’t on the fediverse. The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.

Respectfully, this is difficult to read with a straight face after having experienced first hand the effects the Threads launch have had on my Mastodon timeline.

I follow close to 2k people on Mastodon and it used to be that at any given time I could open my timeline and 400+ posts were waiting on me to peruse.

It's completely dead now, no more than 20 or so posts showed up in total for the entire day, this after a day where there was a sea of people posting a link to their Threads profile.

Safe for a few holdouts I can count on one hand, nearly everyone created a Threads account and they're more active there than I've ever seen them on Mastodon.

If anything, it seems like I gave the people on Mastodon too much credit and I've underestimated how strong the network effect is, since I thought it would at least take until the actual "embrace" phase of it all i.e. until Meta would be ActivityPub compatible.

And it's not like the vast majority of people I follow are normies or anything.
About 90% of them are software engineers like myself not afraid to tinker with things and deal with the "difficulty" of making a Mastodon account.

Hell, about a 100 of them run their own instance, one of which is the one I'm on and a good chunk of them are very active in the FOSS community themselves.

Sure, some of it might be because of the hype and novelty, so some might come back, but if anything that proves my point that they'll happily jump ship if Meta does decide to nix the compatibility in the future.

And this is me being generous, like I said activity by people that moved to Threads has skyrocketed, not only did entire social graphs migrate to Threads, they were made whole again.
People that weren't seen for ages since leaving Twitter popped up there much to many people's delight.

Most people that migrated to Mastodon wanted a 1:1 Twitter replacement first and foremost and took the ideology as a nice bonus.

These are people that built a support network on Twitter, people that built a professional network on Twitter, people that built a network of peers, in short, a network that was important if not essential to them.

If I take myself as an example, an indie iOS dev, before I left Twitter I used it to stay in touch with friends I had in my industry, other indie devs, engineers at Apple, journalists covering and reviewing apps, local organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice, national organizations and affiliated people working towards social justice and then the rest was purely to ingest information and news.

The purpose of being in touch with these people varied, from comparing notes on how to best do my work, socializing with friends, arranging collaborations on projects, keeping track of what others were working on, promoting my own work, getting help from Apple engineers when I hit a snag, helping people get a job at places that were looking for someone, staying in the loop in case I wanted/needed a job, staying in the loop about local organizing and coordinating with organizers, etc. etc.

I was lucky that I happened to work in a field that is tech savvy and so most of my social graph, but not all, transitioned to Mastodon.

Many people weren't this lucky and even the people in my social graph that transitioned had a considerable chunk of people that wasn't entirely enamored by Mastodon.
Personally I welcomed the change of pace, but I couldn't deny that their gripes were valid.

So to circle back to your comments about the core crowd and the crowd that Threads attracts:

The core crowd on Mastodon aren’t going anywhere. The crowd that Threads will attract were never coming to Mastodon to begin with.

Unless you by "core crowd" you refer to what Rochko called "nerd circles", then I'm afraid you're wrong on this.
Just as you're wrong on the crowd that Threads attracts, because not only "were" they coming on Mastodon, they literally were on Mastodon until recently.

Somehow this statement by Rochko is now even more laughable in hindsight:

Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Not only was Mastodon already heavily slanted towards "nerd circles" at the time these words were published, but it will only become more of a "nerd circle" from here on out.
ActivityPub hasn't even been enabled on Threads and Mastodon isn't "where we are now".

edit: Oh for what its worth: https://jogblog.substack.com/p/facebooks-threads-is-so-depressing Thats a hilarious read about Threads and why its already pretty lame.

While a funny writing style, it comes across as uninformed.

As much as I wish it was the shitshow as depicted in that blog post, I'm sad to say that those were for all intents and purposes just placeholder posts, as soon as you start following people you won't really see those anymore.

Call it Chicken Little-ing, call it FUD, call it whatever you want.

My timeline is dead and pretty much my social graph is happy they've found their precious Twitter replacement, so other than a very niche group, I'd say Mastodon is dead.

I might not like it, but I'm not gonna pretend like the blog you linked is based in reality while I stare out the window at the cool kids having fun like I'm Squidward

Most likely different incentives and platform culture.

Customization isn’t that big on iOS, other than the occasional viral fad, so there’s less interest for custom keyboards and in return less development spent on it.

Monetization of custom keyboards is also really hard and due to limitations on tracking and collecting data the incentives that Android has don’t really exists on iOS.

So what you end up with is a handful of custom keyboards often by big players that have bags of money to throw at it or as a companion to a regular app (e.g. Grammarly, GIF apps) to fulfill a specific function.

I appreciate you affording me good faith, it is a breath of fresh air.

May your enshitification be slow as well

Isn’t that a little bit of circular reasoning?

If I doxx someone online then it gets indexed by Google, if someone then Google’s the information it stops being doxxing?

I’d assume most doxxing isn’t done by someone who has unique firsthand knowledge (e.g. “Oh I know John, he lives on so and so road”) and instead is done by finding the information online whether via Google or a different public source.

At least in the US, where a ridiculous amount of private information is deemed “public”.

I think it makes sense for a “redditlike” to be searchable, while also understanding that Mastodon is a different beast and can benefit from lack of search.

Don’t know if Mastodon posts on Lemmy instances have a specific characteristic, but perhaps you can consider filtering them out while keeping “regular” Lemmy posts and comments?

That sounds like a gaping security hole, but with how likely it is that you lock yourself out with the current 2FA implementation, I can't be mad about it.

If all else fails you could also reach out to the admin of your instance I suppose and see if they can disable 2FA on your account, but I figured it's best to avoid the headache altogether and just not log out until you're 100% the 2FA works properly.