Not being bri’ish

Just kidding, I’m neither lol

I’ve been buying Sony headphones because they sound great for the price but they ALWAYS fail at the same plastic left ear hinge within 1 year or usually less. No more.

There was a project called Yacy but it clearly never took off.

just like RSS feeds did not become mainstream while Reddit did, the current state of the fediverse will not gain mainstream popularity; however, it’ll serve as a stepping stone towards a new federated internet that’ll be seamless and intuitive for non-technically-inclined individuals and those who are indifferent to the implications for privacy and digital freedom.

97% of people will only jump from walled garden 1 to walled garden 2

97% chance of being EEE. Suddenly everyone will be coming to the Fediverse but not because they’re interested but to talk to people on Threads. Then they’re going to deviate from the AP spec slowly and become the de facto standard and so on. Or they’re going to pull a Google Chat.

Even if it was, it’s a red herring. Lemmy is AGPLv3 licensed to ensure you will always have the liberty of knowing whether a malicious instance is doing shady things with the source code. On the “enlightened” platforms you have no such possiblity. I can’t stress enough the importance of a strong copyleft license for most important software you use.

most of stack overflow, IT subreddits and SEO content farms that regurgitate stack overflow data summed up in two sentences.

Snarkiness, snobbery, walking on eggshells, opinion downvotes and in general the unbearable attitude of most redditors.

Back when I was a teenager I had the blind optimism the future would be bright and we would keep all the positive trends we had in the early 2010s.

But is hosting your own mail server and using it for work/finances/everyday life still an option? I don’t think so, at least not without workarounds because sooner or later you will have to send/receive to/from big email.

My respects to you. I really think websites and software in general need to have efficiency in mind again. Webapps should use as few resources as possible, save people’s time, their money and the planet.

No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous.

Okay you do have a point. The thing is they get abused for email where it’s pretty much a racket. I just really hope Lemmy doesn’t end up the same way, since if some bad faith powerful actor starts having control over a list then they get to dictate which servers can federate and which ones not, which is pretty much a walled garden.

I do get the need to identify malicious instances preemptively though, spambots are a threat wherever we go and some instances are just insufferable like exploding heads.

I think the small instance can temporarily defederate to reduce the load. kbin.social had to do this during the first reddit exodus because they grew too much too fast and couldn’t handle the load.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.

buen nombre

Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.

These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.

Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.

By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it’s already harming society as a whole because it’s causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.

This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it’s only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it’s extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.

It already did since 2 years ago, random “unverified content” bullshit login walls on popular/valuable advice, tens of megabytes of Javascript that took long to load on intermittent/unstable connections and terrible UI in general.

It shouldn’t. Karma encourages the vices we’ve seen on Reddit like karma farmers, hive minds and threads full of unfunny jokes.

No thanks, it would be yet another EEE scheme.

Rice with lentils is a good option, add salt and pepper and salad of choice