Blasting a bunch of bad guys in Rainbow 6: SMOL…

Alternate view on how things went:

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/status-report-warning-signs-for-trump?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Interesting. I do visit a few websites regularly but I guess I’ve always just kept the tabs open in Safari and called it a day. (And Safari just stays in permanent Privacy mode so that as much tracking data is flushed as possible each time I close a tab.)

Interesting. Personally I’ve been using Mlem with great success on iOS.

I have literally never used a web app from the 3gs to this day. No idea why people think this is such a huge deal?

Yeah, but that’s unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they’re like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.

Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you’re correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it’s text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.

The “screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource” mentality is out of control.

There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it’s discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.

I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…

I’m chipping in $2 a month as it is…

I mean this is all basically just more media clickbait on the theme of “how is this bad for Biden”.

“Biden called old while being exonerated of classified document prosecution! How is this bad for him?”

Why congress critters and immediate financial beneficiaries are allowed to buy anything but index funds and possibly ETFs is beyond me.

For values of public posts, yes.

My default for new posts is followers only and I have approve followers checked. (And I’m pretty picky, so far.)

More to the point, the discussion started out about the back end (whoever is in control of the servers selling all your data straight out of the database) and you’re referring to the front end (using a tool to scrape as much posted content as possible).

I would join infosec.exchange of the ones mentioned. Or just join mastodon.social. It’s not going anywhere and it’s the default and it’s likely going to be the most stable in terms of user experience and longevity.

Having said that, to a degree it doesn’t matter? Just follow the hashtags that you are interested in as soon as you get there and it should create an instant active feed. And don’t forget to tip your server (I recommend kicking in a buck or two a month to the server admins and same to the mastodon devs.)

With respect to Blue Sky, which I was specifically addressing, it only has 3 million active users vs Mastodon’s 8 million right now though, which also somewhat obviates the whole network effect for new BS users. Not to mention since it is also decentralized, it does still suffer from the issue of instancing. About the only thing it may have going for it is an algorithm. I don’t honestly speak to that since I’ve only been there briefly, but since Twitter ran just fine without one and attracted tons of users (and got a lot of them angry when they switched to an algorithm), I suspect it isn’t a huge deciding factor for a lot of users.

I guess my point is… Blue Sky is still trying to launch and struggling. Mastodon is much more mature and only going to accelerate into the network effect more rapidly from here on out as well as standing a much better chance of not just being enshitified 5-7 years down the road, so when choosing between the two, I would definitely encourage any friends leaving Xitter to join Mastodon rather than Blue Sky.

Also, I feel like the users that care about algorithms and following Drake or whoever are just going to stick with Xitter anyway, because they really don’t care about all the “drama” of who owns it or what they are doing with their data.

Aha, I did indeed miss the “external storage” row—mostly because it only uses the “Tb” acronym quite late in the description. I think the difference between Firewire and USB-C is minimal? (ie they are both “fast enough”) but I guess having wifi is a step up (although I always still plug my phone in to transfer music at this point so…)

Haha, yes it is an unfortunately acronym their name makes.

This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.

Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.

OTOH, having said that, I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you’re not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.

I mean I think the fact the “red wave” fizzled completely at midterms is an indication that women are voting more liberal and in greater numbers? Nothing politicizes like an entire gender being told their rights are being removed because “think of the children”.