It comes from Fortune, they can't conceive of something that's not a business.

Here's the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:

Twitter DNS rankings over time, Jan-Jul 2023

It's a bit self-serving of me to phrase it this way, but I do think the Reddit debacle shaved off a disproportionately not-terrible segment of the Reddit userbase. I think you could make your comment about Redditors instead and it would still be fair. There's obviously a lot of Twitter users we don't want here, but if we got the top 0.1% of Twitter users by quality? That's not bad.

Long-time Sync user here, now on kbin. I'm hopeful that cross-compatibility will be considered, like Hariette's Artemis app which aims to support both kbin and Lemmy (and both Android and iOS). I'd love to jump back onto Sync, but probably not if I have to move off kbin to do it.

@MilkToastGhost As long as we're YSKing, just want to let you know that the word "spaz"/"spastic" has a complicated history. While its meaning has drifted heavily in the US, in the UK especially it remains closely associated with the disability cerebral palsy, and is considered highly offensive to many. The relative innocuousness of the US version has led to it being used in pop culture (e.g. songs by Beyonce and Lizzo, and also Mario Party 8 for Wii), which in turn has resulted in recalls and edits when they were released in the UK to some offense.

I'm not the word police, you can say whatever you want, but it's handy to know when you're speaking to a global audience how your words might be interpreted.

I know it's petty, but I find it extremely frustrating that he likely didn't have enough time to realize just how wrong he was about everything before he died. He went to his death saying "No, it's the children who are wrong."

Time for somebody to make an EU-exclusive Mastodon instance called realthreads.legit and put it up on app stores. The real way to grow the fediverse in a hurry is to trick people into it. /s

Bit of a downer, but it is an Android news site. kbin currently doesn't really merit much of a mention in that context. The PWA is nice, but by its nature barely related to Android, since it also runs on Windows, MacOS and everything else under the sun.

The term unicorn refers to a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion. It is commonly used in the venture capital industry.

In case that helps anybody else as much as it did me.

We can definitely debate the merits of the term scammer, but at this point it's definitely undeniable that Molyneux is a liar. The Project Milo demonstration at E3 2009 is just a series of deliberate falsehoods, from the actor hired to behave as if she's interacting with Milo improvisationally, to claims that Milo can identify subtle changes in human users' moods by analyzing their facial expressions to the repeated claim that "this technology works now" even though the entire thing is pre-recorded.

If he wasn't stating things like "This is true technology that science-fiction hasn't even written about, and this works today, now," you could pass it off as him just being enthusiastic about what they can achieve. But he openly and repeatedly stated that they had already achieved all of this, which he knew was not true. Again, we can say E3 or any other PR presentations are all lies on some scale--there's kind of a line you have to ride in marketing where you present things in the best possible light--but Molyneux consistently steps way over that line by making obviously, verifiably false claims.

It's easy to say there's no malice behind it, but the fact is he's a businessman selling a product, and it benefits him personally if people buy his product. He's not some innocent childlike imp creature whose motives are always selfless, he's a human being who likes money and is sometimes willing to say things that aren't true to secure more of it. Is that "malice"? I don't know. It's at least "avarice".

It almost certainly won't be at launch, as the kbin API is not ready yet. Artemis, another upcoming kbin/Lemmy double-act app, is currently relying on a web scraper and self-hosted shim API to access kbin content, with the goal being to switch to the real API once it's available.

Basically, it's a lot of extra work to support kbin right now, but in the future it should be about as easy as Lemmy. I'll be interested to see if any other Lemmy apps pick up kbin support as a result, but even just a couple is more than I expected so soon.

Hard to tell. It's been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.

On Reddit, I gave up on engaging with anything that people even have strong opinions about years ago because I wasn't there looking for a bad time. It's a hard habit to get out of; I'm basically that pink blob in a box meme.

No, it's just saying "I won't come into your room." They can still go anywhere they want.

Semi-related, Wikipedia discussion pages used to be left blank, with a red link, unless there was actually discussion there. Now every article has a boilerplate article quality scale rating template, a notice about when to use or not use the discussion page, etc. pasted onto the talk page as soon as it's created. I miss seeing a rare blue talk page link and going "I wonder what weird stuff people are saying in the talk page for Alex Kidd in Shinobi World."

Yeah, the front page is working just fine, what's not as good is going to a specific community for a subject you're interested in which currently has 1-3 posts and zero replies.

@NPR had an article the other day about a submarine rescue in those sorts of circumstances: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/20/1183249112/missing-titanic-submarine-rescue-pisces-iii

It was a small (phone booth-ish?) two-man sub stranded for three days back in 1973. The two men conserved oxygen by not speaking or moving and were successfully recovered.

The linked page specifically tracks Lemmy, although it's not clear to me whether it's tracking posts by users from Lemmy instances or posts to Lemmy instances, which is a medium-sized distinction (the latter would include kbin, Mastodon and other Fediverse users who are posting to Lemmy from their home instance, while the former would obviously include only Lemmy users).

"Maybe the worst bluff I've ever seen." - Michael Bluth

This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there'd be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.

In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don't matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it's tough to pin down an exact start date because "When did it become the fediverse?"), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There's any number of things Meta might want, but I don't think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.

I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn't threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we're not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they're not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU's new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse--which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr--and saying "See, we're all on equal footing! We don't control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users."

I believe they're talking about a situation where somebody is like ...

Wow, everybody check out this amazing thread! https://someother.instan.ce/post/1194109

Anybody who sees that link and is not already from someother.instan.ce now has to track down that post on their home instance in order to interact with it, which is a bad experience. It's not the absolute worst thing in the world, like the home URL for the discussion we're in right now is https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 and if you paste that URL into your local domain's search it should find you the relevant discussion locally, but it still kinda sucks. In theory this would be sort of solve-able on the server end by having it search for any instance links behind the scenes and re-write other people's links to point to the equivalent page on your own instance, but right now there's no "nice" way to handle that situation.

kbin has not been defederated from Beehaw, so interactions between those servers are continuing as normal. There's lots of posts about how "we" are defederated from Beehaw on the kbin front page, but those aren't coming from kbin itself, they're just showing up on the kbin front page because they're popular content in the threadiverse.

We (all of us, not a specific instance) should probably get into the habit of referring to our instances by name instead of just saying "us", "we", etc. because it causes exactly this kind of confusion when we don't.

It's such a shame we don't get many modern indie interpretations of these single-screen racers. There's a clone on Wii U and Switch (and probably other platforms) called Rock 'N Racing Off Road DX which I played to completion even though it was buggier, uglier and less fun than Super Off Road just because I've already played SOR so much. The game crashed immediately after the final race and I promptly deleted it.

The last one I know that was really great was Konami's super underrated Driift Mania for the original Wii. Great handling, fun tracks and colorful visuals made it one of my favorite WiiWare games, which sadly today means you can't legally get it anywhere. The craziest feature was the 8-way multiplayer using four Wii Remotes and four Classic Controllers, so each player is tethered to another by the Classic Controller cable. Worth tracking down if you want to play a "modern" (14 years old, pff) single-screen racer.

Based on the article, they're not sure if this is the same game he's had in development since 2019, Legacy, which is some kind of business sim where you have to buy your land as NFTs then create more NFTs to sell to other players.

There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It's self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.

Does EarthBound count? It's sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There's ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there's several cities to explore.

Lemmy communities are "groups" in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.

It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I've seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.

Groups don't even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can't stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.

In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize "This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something," than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly--in corporate terms, it's like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.

As much as I'd like to argue otherwise, it's easily one of the most accessible versions of live chat around currently. I'm still on IRC and also on Matrix, but neither is as user-friendly as the centralized single-account, single-app, single-server setup of Discord. That's absolutely not to say that it's the best option, but it's the simplest to explain by far.

My fellow Matrix nerds can tell us all day about how they got their whole family using Matrix and it's great and everybody understood it, but I strongly suspect there's a level of one dedicated user doing things like app and instance selection (or self-hosting) for the entire group, while everyone else is pretty much along for the ride.

Matrix does solve some of the issues of IRC, like using a single account to interact with basically any server, but room discovery is still not great, the mobile apps lag heavily behind desktop, there's persistent basic usability bugs like unread notifications getting permanently stuck, and privacy is an afterthought with most Matrix apps broadcasting your presence to all other users at all times without any option to stop that behavior. Plus, the heavy reliance on bridging with IRC for many communities also kind of loses you the benefit of the single-account approach since you end up having to register an account for your bridge user anyway (and I can hear the eyes glazing over at this point).

Then there's the network effect, of course. Most of the stuff you can reach via Matrix is super nerdy: Linux distros, fediverse support rooms, Wii U homebrew development channels. This part isn't Matrix's "fault" per se, but it's definitely a reason why people would choose to use Discord or maintain a presence in both. At this point, unless there's just nothing that interests you on Discord, switching to Matrix really has to be an ideological choice.

Yeah, they can vote and reply and all of that and others who remain federated will see their interactions, but you or any other server who defederates them won't.

I saw in another comment that it's because of a last minute change for Lemmy compatibility. Apparently, /kbin originally used boosts as its upvote system, but this was changed so that kbin/Lemmy would communicate upvotes in the same way. Some of the /kbin interface is still set up to use boosts instead of upvotes. Since it doesn't break anything other than hearts fixing it is probably a low priority for now.

I made another comment about this previously and I really don't want to end up as the designated "don't donate to Wikipedia" user on the threadiverse, but here we are anyway. Before I continue, I will say I'm not personally involved and I'm not anti-Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I do think the Wikimedia Foundation is misleading Wikipedia visitors about its funding, or at least that it has in previous donation drives.

It's worth mentioning that "Wikipedia" is itself never asking for money. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation puts those donation drive banners on Wikipedia, and those banners misleadingly suggest that money will go mostly or entirely to Wikipedia (it won't) and that your donations are necessary for Wikipedia to continue running (they're not). The Wikimedia Foundation receives upwards of $150 million dollars a year, which is much more than the upkeep of Wikipedia, ⅔ of which is not from the individual small donors who respond to those banners.

Wikipedia's internal "newspaper", The Signpost, has a couple of pretty thorough articles on the controversy. The short version is that a) The Wikimedia Foundation receives millions in funding via corporate donations from tech giants like Google (more than enough to sustain Wikipedia on their own), while the income from banner ads represents about a third of their yearly finances, and b) they then spend the vast majority of that funding on things that aren't Wikipedia:

Total expenses were $146 million (an increase of $34 million, or 30.5%, over the year prior). Some key expenditure items:

• Salaries and wages rose to $88 million (an increase of $20 million, or 30%, over the year prior).

• Professional service expenses: $17 million.

• Awards and grants: $15 million.

• Other operating expenses: $12 million.

• Internet hosting: $2.7 million.

(Fingers crossed that Markdown works.)

Before I'm accused of cherrypicking data, I'm literally quoting the Wikimedia Foundation's Consolidated Financial Statements for 2021-2022.

Some of those are a bit nebulous, but even if you're charitable (and we are talking donations!) you can lump in "professional service expenses", "other operating expenses" and "Internet hosting" together as "funding Wikipedia", for a total of $31.7 million, which is about 22% of what they receive in donations. For that matter, it's less than half of what they receive in "large" donations, before we even start factoring in donations from sympathetic Wikipedia visitors. Meanwhile, the Foundation spends $103 million on paying its own staff and giving awards and grants to other people or organizations.

Now, you can certainly make the case that individual donations allow the Wikimedia Foundation to remain independent from corporate or other influence, because they in theory could stop taking those large donations and continue operating Wikipedia, albeit they'd have to slash their staff salaries, grants and other expenses to do so, since, say it with me, the vast bulk of their money is not going toward Wikipedia's upkeep.

I want to be clear that I don't think any of this stuff is evil, just that it's misleading to suggest your donations go any more than a fraction toward the continued operation of Wikipedia. Wikipedia will be fine either way, but the WMF certainly appreciates your donations.

This isn't a hill I'm willing to die on at all, but it does mildly annoy me that The Open Source Definition is used by proponents to mean the same thing as "open-source". For anyone not familiar, The Open Source Definition is a document used to determine whether code should be certified by the Open Source Initiate as "OSI Certified". Proponents argue that anything which does not meet the OSI's definition is not open-source, while I think there's room in the language and the mind for disagreement on whether "open-source" and "eligible for OSI certification" are synonyms.

The OSI was originally founded with the goal of registering a trademark for "Open Source", but this was unsuccessful as the term is too broad and descriptive. Failing that, the OSI decided to instead register the trademark "OSI Certified", which can be applied to works which meet their Open Source Definition. Ultimately, what this means is that nobody owns the phrase "open-source" and it's an organic part of language which is not strictly defined by the specific terms of any certifying documents.

Over the years, there have been plenty of non-commercially licensed software with source available for use: a popular example is video, computer and arcade game emulators. The MAME emulator was for years released under its own non-commercial copyleft license before eventually being relicensed under BSD (which meets OSI's Open Source Definition), and popular SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis emulators Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX both continue to be released under similarly "open but non-commercial" licenses.

I'll happily agree that none of those are eligible to bear the "OSI Certified" trademark and that they don't meet OSI's Open Source Definition. But when people start saying they're "not open-source" it rubs me the wrong way, because we're just talking, not trying to achieve trademark certification. Not to mention that the whole nature of software licensing is to note what restrictions there are on the use of the code, e.g. most open-source, copyleft licenses deny you the right to use their code without attribution. However, we basically all agree that that's fine and you can still call a license open-source if it includes that restriction. It's a shades of gray situation that people are treating as black and white just because a definition exists which they can refer back to, with the assumption that all people must subscribe to those specific terms.

There's entirely valid counter-arguments, of course. It's useful to have strict definitions of nebulous concepts like open-source because it could cause confusion, and you have to draw the line somewhere or else the term becomes completely meaningless. e.g. You risk people referring to things like source code leaks as "open-source". There are frequently cases of people ignoring non-commercial license terms and selling those softwares (Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX are often bundled with commercial retro emulation hardware), which you could argue stems from confusion about whether or not commercial use is allowed. But the same devices often violate the licenses of OSD-compliant software as well, so it seems more likely they just don't care about open-source software licensing terms.

So anyway, Genesis Plus GX is open-source but I'm not willing to fight you about it.

Years ago, I tried to max out everybody's stats by New Game+ing over and over to collect the 10 or so Tabs you find across the entire game to increase stats by one point at a time. I was not successful. I think I made it through three or four NG+ cycles, though.

I think this is something which makes kbin pretty interesting. It supports threads and microblogs, so it can serve both purposes. I have a Mastodon that I post to once every few years, but I think I might post or at least reply more to people if I could just click between threads and blogs on the fly.

But yeah, for that and all of the other reasons, Threads is out. No interest whatsoever.

Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn't a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it's closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.

Yeah, my understanding is that defederation prevents any incoming communication, so you won't see any posts or comments that come from lemmy.bullshit, however users from lemmy.bullshit will still see all of your comments and posts from lemmy.world unless they choose to defederate you back.

I'm doing my part.

There's a work-in-progress effort called tafkars to create a hostable API relay which Reddit apps can talk to to have it relayed onward to the Lemmy API. If completed, it should allow anything that uses the existing Reddit API to talk to Lemmy with a small app modification. It seems like a bit of a stop-gap solution to me but it's a cool idea.

Defederation and the Dutch