Wow, right up front, they’re being disingenuous:
“The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.”
…No? Apple won’t bear that burden because they’re going to keep using WebKit. Firefox can keep using WebKit. Not using WebKit is a choice, with pros and cons.
Ever try a hot cola?
I once drank a Coke that had been sitting in my car console for a day during the summer.
It was a revelation.
Kbin defederating from Threads would be an own goal of hilarious proportions. The only entity that would be harmed is Kbin.
Threads presents a serious danger to the long-term viability of the fediverse if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederation.
If Threads federates… it’s part of the fediverse.
Even if you don’t accept that tautology, sure, maybe the fediverse (not including Threads, which is also fediverse at that point, but ok whatever) doesn’t do great, but kbin will definitely suffer if it defederates from Threads, once Threads becomes part of the fediverse federates does whatever you think it’ll be doing that’s not exactly the same thing as joining the fediverse and therefore becoming part of the thing that you think will become non-viable after the most viable piece of it joins. Kbin will become an also-ran within the fediverse, because most users will want to use tools that allow them to interact with the most people.
I guess what I’m saying is you can’t in one breath say that “Threads will join the fediverse” and then in the next breath say “the fediverse will become non-viable” as if Threads isn’t part of the fediverse in the second breath. Let’s not do “separate but equal” with social media, please. It’s silly.
If Kbin defederates from Threads, it’ll be Kbin that suffers.
Star Wars, drive-in, 1977. I was 4.
Duct. Duck is a brand name
Yes. But also mostly no.
Wikipedia:
“Duck tape” is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as having been in use since 1899 and “duct tape” (described as “perhaps an alteration of earlier duck tape”) since 1965
and:
In 1971, Jack Kahl bought the Anderson firm and renamed it Manco. In 1975, Kahl rebranded the duct tape made by his company. Because the previously used generic term “duck tape” had fallen out of use, he was able to trademark the brand “Duck Tape” and market his product complete with a yellow cartoon duck logo. Manco chose the term “Duck”, the tape’s original name, as “a play on the fact that people often refer to duct tape as ‘duck tape’”, and as a marketing differentiation to stand out against other sellers of duct tape.
People should really do the bare minimum double-check before showing their whole ass.
As others have noted, “duct tape” is the last thing you want to use on ducts. Better to actually call it “duck tape,” as it was for the first 65 years of its existence.
Bots aren’t a “problem” for Twitter unless the advertisers think there are more of them than there are real users. But if you can convince advertisers that you’re reducing bots, while also not actually reducing bots, you’ve got a winning formula. Bots are reliable posters, they contribute a lot more than a regular user, and they make high-engagement tweets/posts/tweex that end up getting a lot of views, aka advertising opportunities.
In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in
The galaxy brain shit here is that I suspect the bot problem actually doesn’t concern Musk in the way he claims. If he can make it seem like there are fewer bots (because of these policies) while at the same time not actually getting rid of them, the engagement level stays up and the advertisers are happy in their ignorance. Bots are better users: they’re not fickle, they don’t go to sleep, they can be reliably expected to be posting more regularly than normal users. The trick for Musk is convincing everyone they’re gone.
I make 30 minute videos with ads at 10 and 20 (with natural breaks) and refuse to do more than that because ewwww. (The automatic ad populator puts like 10 ads in the same amount of time. It’s insane.)
My channel is tiny and I still manage about $25/month (making money isn’t my goal) so I feel like my limits are good. I’d rather someone watch my stuff than bounce because there are too many adds.
They’re going to try to pull a Microsoft: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Once Selig announced that he could not keep Apollo going after June 30, I was done with Reddit. That was days before Huffman said anything publicly - even before the AMA in which he pasted prefab answers to 14 questions.
I’m treating the blackout and the aftermath as a worker strike, and treating any mods replacing removed mods as scabs. But more to the point, it’s a strike and I do not cross picket lines. I will not go even to the Reddit front page until the corporation reverses course, accedes to the demands of their unpaid labor and backs the fuck up.
Give Meta an inch they’ll take a mile. No quarter. No wait and see. No half measures. We don’t literally know nothing; we know Meta is involved. That’s enough for me to say no.
They’ll follow the Microsoft route, pretending to be for open standards, then extending the standard for only their apps and sites, and with sheer numbers and money they’ll grab a bunch of users who will come to expect the features and implementations they provide and then bam. No more fediverse.
Not. One. Inch.
The Beeple sale got a lot of press. That was the extent of the novelty, but then the money-eyed scammers figured they had a new grift in the making. But it started with the media surprise and interest over how big the Beeple sale was.
I used Redact and afterwards, before I deleted my accounts, I checked to see if there were any posts/comments still showing up under my user profile and I didn’t see any. Account was over a decade old. Not sure if it really did kill everything, but even if not, it was close enough for my needs (a middle finger to the Reddit-man).
For me, part of the reason that the concept of the fediverse is hard to grasp comes from there not being any good visual representation of how it works, like a “metro transit map.” It also doesn’t help that the way you “get to” other instances’ content is by using awkward @ notation. Kbin’s top left info next to Threads is handy but only if you know how to read it. I’d prefer to see something more like:
Host: <instance name>
Magazine: <magazine name>
rather than the current cumbersome “/m/<mag-name>@<inst-name>”
Also, and this may be a culture thing that I’m not privy to, but I find it weird that there’s no quick way to tell which instance a user is commenting from (without interacting with the page in some way) [1]. It seems that there’s this default intent to make the federated nature of the fediverse somewhat invisible, and I think the better option would be the exact opposite. By making the different instances (and their users) immediately and easily recognizable, it will condition new users to better understand what the heck is actually going on under the hood, and lead them to discover things about the fediverse that they wouldn’t otherwise have known was even stuff to know.
[1] Right now I can hover over a username and get a pop-up card telling me what instance they’re from - indicated as @<user>@<instance>. I feel it would be considerably more helpful (and habituate new users more easily) if the username above the comment gave that info explicitly without having to hover over. Maybe something like “<user> from <instance>”.
This is great but it won’t really help the majority of users, who live underneath the tip of the iceberg. What would be nice is if there were a way, within kbin’s interface itself, to mod in styles like that without having to install a *monkey and download files.
It’s strange that the filter is there, in that icon, and not where you’d expect to find it - under the icon that looks like a funnel, just above the start of the feed itself.
I’m treating the blackout like a strike, and I don’t cross picket lines, and neither should anyone else. No scabs. No one should be agreeing to moderate a sub that has lost all of its moderators to forcible removal.
“I lost a brother once. I was lucky. I got him back.”
“I thought you said men like us don’t have families.”
“I was wrong.”