Five

Five , 1 month ago

Cracking, unlicensed MAME, jailbreaking - these should be free-speech fundamentals that are instead prosecuted as crimes.

Five , 1 month ago

I find it unclear what the relationship is between free speech and the UK using flawed but licensed proprietary software to wrongly convict innocent people of fraud.

Five , 1 month ago

Yeah, most laws have nothing to do with justice and are merely threats made by social elites to working people. I don't need that explained to me. I think you misunderstood my politics from my initial comment.

Five , 3 months ago

You can see beehaw has a lot less activity now then it had last year.

Fediverse Observer and FediDB show a drop in active users, but the pattern of peak in July 2023 and then a slow regression isn't unique to Beehaw, and is a pattern seen across the Threadiverse.

You left, but Beehaw being willing to give teeth to the concept of defederation is the reason I joined. I don't think the decision hurt their user-count. It definitely helped distinguish their culture from the rest of the Fediverse.

Five , 4 months ago

Congratulations!

Five , 4 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Hello!

Five , 4 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Fediverse links to current communities:

• !piefed_meta
• !piefed_help

Five , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I’m really happy for Eugen’s success, and am grateful for his essential contribution to widespread adoption of the ActivityPub protocol, even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things.

https://kolektiva.social/system/cache/media_attachments/files/111/579/525/703/060/701/original/6bb5d6fc8a787133.jpg

I think it was honest for him to acknowledge Google’s role in sidelining the XMPP protocol, and while I don’t want to quibble about the other mitigating factors, I do take issue with him comparing the trajectory of ActivityPub with SMTP with the visible adoption and mutually assured destruction of major corporations in maintaining email’s nominal interoperability.

If people haven’t read it yet, they should check out (already Fedi-famous for his article on Enshittification) Cory Doctorow’s article Dead Letters – about how it is impossible for even a well-known public figure with access to the best server infrastructure and technical know-how to run a small private email server hosting completely legal content serving nothing resembling spam in the age of Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft Outlook. There are several ways that federating with Meta can kill this movement, and ActivityPub becoming the new email is one of them.

Basically, if we allow Meta, BlueSky, and Twitter to federate, the very network effects Eugen mentions make it more valuable for them to federate with each other than any smaller server. Predictably they will underfund moderation staff who make errors or their faulty algorithms automatically de-federate smaller servers due to false-flagging spam. Small operators will have to work harder and harder until it is basically impossible for them to overcome the error or fix the problem and re-federate. Eventually small groups that aren’t directly sponsored by one of the giants will be weeded out, as their users migrate to more reliable services. Even if the disconnections and undelivered messages are not the fault of the sysops, they will be scapegoated, and eventually more and more will throw up their hands and leave the rigged game.

While having a protocol you championed become the defacto web standard may feel like a great accomplishment, the Fediverse will never be a “Social Web” until the tools we use to communicate are incapable of being taken from us by corporations. Eugen’s vision of a social media ecosystem where any small developer can write a platform and have access to the entire ActivityPub network is at odds with his enthusiasm for the emailification of ActivityPub.

There are social obstacles to building the “Social Web” and as good as the Activity Pub protocol is, the true technical solution is Solidarity.

Five OP , 5 months ago

It’s an instance of Invidious, which does not use ActivityPub. Invidious is software you can host to portal to YouTube while preventing most of google’s ability to track and advertise.

Five , 6 months ago

Some required reading whenever journalists uncritically report retailer’s narratives:

• The Great Shoplifting Freak-Out
• What the Shoplifting Panic Reveals About U.S. Crime Policy

Five OP , 6 months ago

That’s correct. @aral discovered and boosted the post, and it snowballed across the Tootiverse. They’re all pinging @Five because that’s how Mastodon does post replies.