It’s something that should be publicised not because OpenAI has promised privacy, but because a lot of people seem to assume it where it has not been offered, and they need to be reminded that they’re kind of out to lunch on the issue.

Like, people in companies keep using these things to write reports with privileged information. People need to be informed as gently but alsonas firmly as possible that they’re sending this stuff over the internet to an organization that considers everything it can see to be its own.

Oh fun. Who is Elon going to just haphazardly drop the ISS on top of?

Never seen an explosion on the surface of a stellar remnant*? This year, you’ll have your chance

Nothing pseudo about it. This is the natural progression of capitalism.

Ad soon as they go public, their product is their share price. And even before then, since most growing private companies seek out private investment long before going public.

Yeah, there’s plenty about how Mastodon frames itself and its features that are frustrating. That “easy mobility” requiring an 80 step process that involves downloading and re-uploading a bunch of files kind of anchors you for seeing how disconnected some developers are from the user expectations they set.

But does there?

This comes back to what federation and “the fediverse” is, and why trying to hide its nature is harming it.

No one expects their Facebook post history to follow them to Reddit, or to a forum, or to Lemmy, because they’re different websites. Just as no one expected their Twitter history to come with them to Mastodon.

But because it’s framed as “Mastodon” and not “social.website.com” the expectations are different.

Federation isn’t a mess, it’s just… messier. And too many federated services do their damnedest to hide that they function differently, meaning people treat them like they’re perfect drop-in replacements.

It results in a lot of questions about “Why can’t I ____?” and answers of the “Because this doesn’t work that way” variety.

Like, look at Mastodon. It bends over backwards to hide the fact that it’s 10,000 different websites. The result is that people could not understand what the big deal was, nor why it wasn’t as easy to see everything from some other website as easily as they could from a single website that everyone was using.

This further led to centralization of the Mastodon ecosystem, which… I mean, at that point, you’re just abandoning the central concept.

“Just use this thing that you’ve already rejected for X, Y, and Z.”

“Have they fixed X, Y, and Z yet?”

" Fuck you for asking."

“Futurologist” is a self-appointed honorific that people who fancy themselves “deep thinkers” while thinking of nothing more deeply than how deep they are. It’s like declaring oneself an “intellectual”.

How often does “a bunch of non-devs flock to a half-baked community FOSS project and suddenly gain a bunch of devs” actually play out?

The one reasonable possibility is that they might pick up a designer or two, but how many community FOSS projects seriously consider non-code or non-art contributions? Because based on the FOSS software I’ve used, it’s a vanishingly small number.

Coders over-value code, and under-value everything else.

I think much of it comes from “futurologists” spending too much time smelling each others’ farts. These AI guys think so very much of themselves.

See, the thing is, the corporations believe they already own our money, so not giving it to them when they demand is the real injury, not us downloading a game or a movie. All the product does is tell them which internal bounty hunter to credit with the safe capture and return of what was already theirs.

If that’s the case, I’d say the new mod did get the memo about Lemmy, and about the fediverse at large, and actually understood the legal risks involved in hosting this community.

Federation works by receiving and locally storing content from remote instances, which means any instance based in the USA is going to assume some significant legal risks by not banning this community.

It’s not that they’re refusing to let people look through a window into another, remote host. It’s that they’re refusing to host and serve that content from their own website.

“I trust these guys to not sell my data because they’ve only sold me data over there” is a hell of a take.

Someone has their identity tied up in this for some reason

I saw some engagement graphs a few weeks ago for a few niche subreddits. Not necessarily niche in the “small” way, but in the “focused interest” way.

Posts and comments per day completely collapsed during the 3rd party app-pocolypse, and never recovered. Community membership didn’t even show a blip, but actual discussions fell off a cliff.

The Reddit app is really bad, and the website is worse. The mobile website is somehow the worst of the lot. Doing anything but voting and scrolling is painful. Reddit has successfully ended its usefulness as a community space. Most people there don’t aeem to have noticed this sea change, yet.

Or at least, they’ve found no compelling reason to go elsewhere yet.

It was deemed legal and fair use after the film and music industries sued VCR manufacturers and users.

So yeah, it absolutely was considered piracy by the media production and distribution companies. The courts disagreeing with them doesn’t change that.

People choose not to choose. They’re not interested in engaging with the space or technology any deeper than the default.

Exploiting this fact to the point of defacto monopoly should still be considered wrong.

The people that use Google today did not move to Google back then. They came along after Google conquored the browser market.

Just like way back when, “The Internet” was Internet Explorer, today it’s Chrome. And until we can convince people to abandon that, then it’s an up-a-sheer-cliff battle.

The Internet today is propped up by the people who do not lament that it has turned into 5 websites in a trench coat, but who actively kick up a fit at the idea that it could or should be anything more varied or complicated than that.

Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it’s the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon … [isn’t] very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it’s really impressive!

🤨

Mastodon has an order of magnitude more active users than Lemmy - and the whole rest of the Fediverse - if not two orders of magnitude.

Lemmy’s a great platform, but Reddit is already the niche social media site among the mainstream, and the kind if niche interest forums that ultimately built Reddit just haven’t reached critical mass here yet, and that means Reddit remains very sticky. Pile on people being kind of uncomfortable with the local namespaces for both users and communities, and I don’t know that Lemmy’s really the killer platform for the 'verse.

Fediverse adotion is going to be a collective effort. Loops has a good chance of attracting people. It would be nice if Mastodon would actually use a standard ActivityPub implementation so it played nicer with neighbours. And microblogger discovering something other than Mastodon would be nice.

But it’s not going to be just one platform. If it is, then the fediverse idea has totally failed.