SLA? If that means something like “service level agreement” (I don’t know, you didn’t specify, I’m guessing) then I can still find examples where it falls well below what I would expect from a public service such that if there was an agreement in place that I would definitely be opposed to it as a tax payer.

And if X isn’t viable there are other platforms that are.

I mean yes obviously, there are much more viable platforms like Mastodon, or even a self-hosted website.

Is Twitter/X viable for that? They can decide, and have, to randomly put information behind login walls.

Not exactly, no, but a website can’t reasonably be expected to cover everything and that wouldn’t be desirable either.

What does “cloudflare so who cares lol” mean exactly?

Cloudflare is so good that you don’t even have to care about your privacy because they’ve got it covered?

or

Nobody who uses Cloudflare would care about privacy, and for some reason that’s worthy of a “lol”?

or what?

Yes, the term censorship in this context is particularly infuriating to me. It’s not censorship since these are privately owned websites that can link to whatever they like, and users can choose whether or not to use them. When DuckDuckGo launched, before privacy concerns were such a pressing issue the fact that they filtered poor quality sources was one of their most advertised selling points: https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/07/26/26327/the-search-engine-backlash-against-content-mills/

My biggest regret was getting rid of a perfectly good portable CRT TV that would have been ideal for pre-7th generation gaming, just as they stopped making good quality CRTs.

I’m about to get rid of my ageing “dumb” TV and not replace it. Everything comes in to my laptop now, so any monitor and set of speakers to plug it in to will do.

My prediction is that this is going to be the end of the line for TVs as stand-alone hardware - just like most people don’t really have stand-alone Hi-Fi systems any more.

Yes, I was kind of being rhetorical there, I thought that would be enough to draw attention to what’s going on. Also a new Lemmy account that exclusively links to one unknown website is a big red flag.

Well he’s on Mastodon so I guess that’s your answer.

Why would we attack the author? That seems like an oddly specific request that makes me oddly suspicious of the author, if anything.

Sure, I wish them nothing but failure, but I’m intending to wait around and see what happens first. From what I’ve heard Threads isn’t going well for them anyway. I still worry that even if there’s mass defederation it would still poison the pool, because it would influence the culture of instances that are federated with it and isolate those that aren’t.

Nothing is federated to Threads, they haven’t switched it on yet.

None of that is particularly the thing that worries me - Meta could be crawling Lemmy right now and getting all that information even if they weren’t planning on supporting federation, but it’s on the public web intentionally to be read, so it’s just like anyone else reading it. The only piece of information I’m surprised would get shared is IP address, and without knowing the technical reasons I’m wondering how/why they would get this and if it’s something Lemmy could fix in software.

The main thing that worries me is still if the toxic culture of Meta’s social networks floods into our communities.

Thunderbird has all I need for RSS, newer style readers I find tend to be lacking in some way.

Not for me it isn’t, smartphones and tablets have always been a horrible user experience (and I’m always bewildered by stories about them replacing desktop/laptops for people), I only have a smartphone out of social pressure, making them even worse is going to drive me away further.

If based on the thing I used most then it has to be Firefox!

If you want something more trivial but personal, openttd - the best game ever. :)

No doubt better AI exists and is in development, but this article sets off my FUD detector; if it was that secret they wouldn’t be showing it off to writers, and if it was that good they’d be using it more already.

This doesn’t answer your question properly, but a few years ago when I moved away from the YouTube front end (I use FreeTube primarily), like you I initially missed the recommendation algorithm (more than I thought). But the longer I went without it, I realised that the recommendations were really fuelling a kind of mindless addiction, eventually I started to watch fewer but higher quality videos, usually based on what other humans had recommended to me and I’ve found that to be a much better experience overall. Remember the algorithm is designed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, not necessarily to give you the highest quality experience.

Selling support or related services is one way, I think Stallman gave the example back in the day of how he made money through selling physical copies of software (before online distribution was universally viable). The software was free and could be re-distributed, but a profit could be made from providing the service of doing the distribution.

On a bigger scale (although they’re not so popular at the moment), historically Red Hat has been the go-to example for how to make money in the spirit of free software. They fund and contribute to many upstream FOSS projects, and in return they can make a fortune out of selling commercial support for that software, while the software itself is still free.

I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.

Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn’t have a problem with that.

I don’t think that at all - a dozen or two replies to a topic is great because you can then reply to all of them on a personal level. That’s how things were on forums in the old days. If you have hundreds of replies then there’s the feeling of shouting in to the void, everyone competing for attention, that’s where centralised social media platforms went wrong. On a decentralised platform we can take back the personal approach, that’s what makes it better than Reddit - the danger is that it might get too centralised again and end up just as impersonal.