IMO it can be MUCH simpler. Deleting content should propagate across federation just like adding content does. De-federating should retroactively remove all content that it would normally keep from propagating (possibly leaving “this post/comment deleted” markers so that replies make sense). And losing track of an instance for long enough (e.g. a week, or a month) should be equivalent to de-federating, possibly with the option to resurrect content when and if the instance comes back online.

I believe that would remove a lot of the issues with extra traffic, and possibly a lot of the issues with extra processing. I don’t know enough about the protocol to tell whether it would add requirements for extra data, but I suspect it wouldn’t.

It’s owned by Microsoft now. Not like M$ is any better than Reddit. Software devs unionized? Nope. Didn’t think so.

Also remember this is useless without complementary security measures:

1. Encrypt the storage on any device where these are installed (including your desktop/laptop drives if you install e.g. the desktop version of Signal).
2. Lock your devices with pin or password, and store that pin/password only in your head (there’s no such thing as telepathy at this point in time so they can’t physically force it out of you, unlike biometric data like your fingerprints).

If you are relying on “Legally they’re not allowed to…” instead of, “They simply can’t, despite all they might try,” then you’re not doing it right.

Google does not really offer a space where people can come together to create communities or discussion threads. However, with the introduction of Perspectives, it may do so later.

So—despite the dumbass title (article’s fault, not OP’s)—explicitly not an alternative to Reddit, where literally the whole point is to create communities and discussion threads.

Who said anything about “common/uncommon”? Are you really enough of a subservient piece of shit to think that the way capitalism does things dictates the way they should be?

All right. Well, let me rephrase: it’s not a meaningful excuse which we should buy as justification for gross undermining of our privacy and our trust in organizations which allegedly exist to help us when we are in crisis.

All right. Well, TBF I’d rather “sound unemployed” (whatever that means) than sound like I’m shilling for big tech corporations and their predatory practices. shrug

Yeah. Good point. Might be a good feature to add…

Based on my experience in many privacy roles covering US, EU, UK and other countries, the sale of a company will likely be covered in Google’s privacy notice and is not considered a sale of personal data considering customer’s personal data will immediately be covered by the purchasing company’s privacy notice.

Funny, because if I decided to go into business with Google by renting a service from them, that honestly shouldn’t mean that I automatically decided to go into business with some other corporation at Google’s whim.

But hey, capitalism really cares about personal autonomy. It’s not like it just exploits our labor and treats us like commodities or anything. /s

I appreciate that the only JS scripts Beehaw seems to load are from beehaw.org. Usually NoScript shows like two full pages of domains, and (at least—you know, the obvious ones) half of them are for ads and “analytics”.

Out of 33 of these crisis center websites they looked at:

In follow-up tests, four organizations appeared to have completely removed the code. The majority of the centers we contacted did not respond to requests for comment.

Ignorance may have been an excuse prior to this investigation, but it’s not an excuse now.

Fascinating comment from someone who doesn’t understand rates of growth at all, and has no idea why this “offer” is coming at this point in time.

I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats

A majority?! Fucking hell!

They are important to capitalism. Not us.

https://thefreeonline.com/2015/10/20/capitalism-is-unnatural/

A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1000 people they surveyed – 74% – identify more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.

The revelation that humanity’s dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioural and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.

…

So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons…

Another problem is that – almost by definition – many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.

The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boasting that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.

…

Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness, but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one else cares.

And our “standard practice” should be to say “fuck off” to that BS.

Meta makes their own nice, QoL-rich instance that could integrate with Facebook/Instagram.

This part could actually be enough on its own, TBH. Imagine that there’s one Fediverse instance where you can interact with the rest of the Fediverse and interact with FB and IG, but it doesn’t propagate stuff between the two networks (i.e. it doesn’t allow people on Beehaw to see what someone on FB posts, and vice versa). Now there’s a reason for everyone to migrate to Meta’s instance, and a built-in way for Meta to advertise the migration to everyone in the FV. Once it sucks up enough users, it just de-federates from everything else and goes on its own way.

Which is a bad plan, TBH. At this point in history, zero waiting needs to be done to know exactly the sense of Meta’s involvement. The “if” is a certainty.

…and they never really had any intention of embracing an open source project.

Well, FOSS. Open source projects can still be proprietary, as just because you can see the source code doesn’t mean you have legal permission to use it as you wish.

Anyway, there’s a simple rule about this: capitalist corporations NEVER have the intention of embracing FOSS. Like, people want to give M$ lots of credit for contributing to the Linux kernel for a while, but the truth is that their motivation for doing so wasn’t to improve on Linux, but to gain advantage for their own hypervisor (and then cloud) platform. They’d tried to take over the web server space with Windows Server and realized it was never going to happen, so they took a step lower and tried to get every instance of Linux-based web servers running on Azure. Tailoring the Linux kernel for their brand of virtual environment was NOT done for the benefit of Linux developers or users.

they could make their own custom version of the fediverse

I mean, they already did and it’s called “Facebook” (and “Instagram”)? Are people forgetting that Fediverse apps are being developed as an alternative to the existing commercial “social media”? Meta is already heavily invested in keeping users on their platforms and killing alternatives. This is 100% an attempt to do that. They just added a pair of Groucho glasses to it and think people won’t see through the flimsy disguise.

'Member when the Zuck assured everyone that Facebook cared deeply about their privacy, and then immediately turned around and quietly implemented features where people had to opt-out of sharing all their shit (when opting out was even an option at all), and those users didn’t even know it?

Ah, the good ol’ days. And I don’t even resent it because I was personally affected. I’ve never had a FB account, and I just watched from the sidelines as it affected people I know and love and the broader online community as a whole.