Not that I care about TikTok one way or another, but one of the best arguments I’ve seen against banning it dealt with supposed protection of Americans’ data. And I’m pretty sure that’s the approach that lawmakers have taken with this; it’s not that Chinese propaganda is bad, it’s that China shouldn’t have this much private info on Americans. I believe that’s the primary angle they’ve taken to get around First Amendment concerns.

Anyway, the argument is, “Oh, but it’s OK for US tech companies to harvest data? That’s it’s OK that we have weak privacy and data protection laws? As long as US companies are doing it, then it’s not a problem?” Because, remember the laws says that the company becomes “unavailable” in the US if not sold to an American company. Presumably, if TikTok were sold to a US company, then the app could continue with no issue, tracking and collecting tons of data on Americans to be packaged and sold to the highest bidders.

I will admit, I was somewhat more pro-ban before hearing that argument. But now I’m more neutral. I don’t use it, so I’m not/shouldn’t be affected. But the government trying to hide behind data privacy and protection to ban TikTok does feel rather empty.

It’d be interesting if everyone “started” in the same place. For example, Mastodon.social. But then eventually, like maybe after 90 days, one was forced to choose a “home” instance to migrate to. Could be through a list of servers presented, or maybe a user has found one through friends, so they just type in the server and it kicks off a migration process. I’m almost thinking like an MMO starting area.

During that 90 days, the user has to (or should) learn about federation, why decentralization is important for privacy and security, what defederation means and blocking options, how and why instances are a thing, how to migrate an account, etc. Maybe even some info on how and why one could stand up their own instance.

And this doesn’t have to like a classroom/book setting. It doesn’t have to be “read this documentation.” Maybe some 1min video clips, brief tooltips, little reminders to read a brief paragraph of two on some Mastodon topic. Gamify it; let people collect badges and achievements.

During all this, users have full access to everything Mastodon users can do. They can interact with anyone on the entry server, plus any server that’s federated with it. Or maybe they’re an already experienced user and want to go straight to another instance; they can either skip all this and migrate or start straight at another instance.

Though I wonder if that’s still too much friction.

Because Mastodon and the Fediverse is confusing, especially at first. I’m a techy person. I work in IT. But when I started to looking at the Fediverse back in 2023, it was confusing. Where do I go to sign-up? There are different services on the Fediverse? Which do I get access to? Do I need an account for each service? How do I know that this instance for this service (Pixelfed, Lemmy, Masto, etc.) is a decent one? What happens if my friends/people I follow are on a different server? Will we be able to interact? What does it even mean to federate/defederate?

These are all the questions I asked as I was looking to all this. And it wasn’t a quick 15min look. No, I spent a few hours looking into it.

But the average person isn’t going to ask all this and research this. They just want a place to follow famous people, post about their life, and post pictures of their food and pets. When these people (myself included) signed up for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc, they just went to the appropriate site and signed-up.

It’s not nearly as simple for Mastodon. Sure, Mastodon.social acts as the flagship and “gateway,” but there are still the other questions that probably need some answers. Otherwise, a user may have a bad experience (“Oh, my friends aren’t on this Mastodon server thing? And we’re not federated? I gotta make a new account there? Ugh…”). Twitter and even Bluesky don’t require those questions. Everyone is on the same instance, all the time.

The reality is that most don’t really care for options and choice. Or even security and privacy. They want ease of accessibility. Mastodon is likely a better product (in most regards; I have and use both Mastodon and Bluesky, daily; Bluesky does a few things better), but the options Mastodon provides, especially at the start, are really more roadblocks or offramps than anything.

When I want to pirate, torrenting is my go to. I don’t do it very often, so I’m not really up-to-date on more modern methods. For some movies, I know there are those websites like 123movies or whatever. And I’ve used those. But Idek what additional methods there are anymore.

That said, I’ve tried torrenting over I2P, but it’s just slow. Not necessarily super slow, but obviously slower than doing it over the clearweb with a commercial VPN. Additionally it seems like there’s less available content with torrenting over I2P. At least in the little experience I’ve had with it.

Ah fair point. Yeah, I rarely look at political content on YouTube, Instagram, and even Bluesky. Mainly because I use my real name on these platforms.

I reserve that for reddit, Lemmy, Tildes, and Mastodon, where I use screennames. And Mastodon doesn’t have an algorithm.

On Twitter, I did engage in political content, even with my real name, but I largely stopped using Twitter daily years ago. I went from tweeting regularly, to only lurking, and just maybe once or twice a week at that. By the end, I was checking maybe once a month. The Twitter algorithm probably didn’t have enough info on me, given my weak activity levels.

Same. And I am a racial minority (though not black, so that may color things…excuse the unintentional pun). That said, on Mastodon, I mainly interact with the people on my instance. And it’s small. There’s probably only a core group of like 50 active individuals, and I’m one of them. So there I’m not surprised I don’t see racism.

Interestingly, I have the same experience on even the proprietary social media sites. I was on Twitter from 2009 to 2023. I can’t say I was ever served up far-right content by the algorithms. I’m still on YouTube; same experience. Same on Instagram. Same on Bluesky.

I’m not trying to discount other people’s experiences, and I’ve seen the horrible tweets referenced in news articles and reddit comments and such. So I know it exists, but why am I not being served this content, while so many others apparently are? I mean, I’m OK with not getting far right wing content, lol. Leave me out of it! Makes my online life easier and more enjoyable. But it’s just odd.

Ah I stand corrected on the Android side. I assumed there was some licensing going on. I’ll correct that.

Yeah because I’m sure GM’s shit will be better. Idek why I’m addressing this: we all know GM doesn’t want to pay Apple or Google. That this is really about more renting and never owning. They just want more money.

GM, just say that. We know you’re a gigantic money-hungry corp. You all don’t have to lie and pretend to care about safety. We’re not a bunch of idiots. We get it, even if you all suck for doing this.

I’d say I hope GM crashes and burns again, but then the government will just bail them out again.

People, and especially teens, still use Snapchat? That’s surprising. I remember when that was super popular in the late 00s/early 20teens with my friends (I never really used it). I don’t think anyone that I know my age (mid 30s) uses it anymore. Which I suppose makes it “cool” again.

I’ve only used Evernote sparingly over the last ~12yrs. 67 notes across 5 notebooks. Think it was one of the first apps I downloaded when I bought an iPad and iPhone. Still went ahead and exported everything, even though nothing of any serious importance. Some are just funny memories.

I would like to find something similar, maybe even self-hosted so it’s free. I keep seeing Joplin anytime someone mentions notebook programs; time to look into that.

I want to replace my 2014 13" MBP. But two things are really weighing on me:

1. I have 2 Windows laptops (one that’s more for gaming and another that’s more for productivity) that do what I need them to do perfectly well; why do I need another laptop? Plus I have two gaming desktops, a couple NUCs, a few servers, some RPIs…I really don’t need more computers, seriously.
2. Terrible base options with pricey upgrades. I’m tired of having to pay Apple extra for “premium features.” I’ve done with it iPhones over the years – wtf is 64GB (and now 128GB) base storage – At least my 2010 MBP I could upgrade aftermarket and did, but for my 2014 MBP, I had to pay the premium for more storage (base was 128GB; got 256GB).

Now I’ve never used my MBPs for anything resource-intensive. Some light-gaming – Stellaris and Eve Online, rarely – is probably the heaviest thing I’ve done it. Could I get by on 8GB RAM? Yeah, probably.

But it’s the principle of the thing. This isn’t 10yrs ago anymore, where Windows laptops from various manufacturers kinda sucked. My friend and I were looking at Windows laptops just the other day; so many nice Macbook-esque, thin, lightweight, but powerful enough laptops out there. And for the same price or less of an Macbook base model, they start at 16GB RAM, 512GB SSDs, etc. Many are still upgradable aftermarket.

I’m sure Apple Silicon is worth the premium. But not this other stuff that’s considered base on so many Windows machines.

I love Apple products, I do. But I’m not gonna keep throwing money at them for things that shouldn’t be considered upgrades. Guess I’ll keep holding out.

(I know, I know, matrix)

Getting people that you want to talk to – friends, family, etc – onto is a new platform is so difficult. No one wants to have 10 different communications apps, plus associated accounts*, just so they can talk to one or two people on each. It’s the network effect. It also doesn’t help that some of these platforms just aren’t as convenient or easy to use, especially for non-tech people.

But yeah, so many of these communities make no sense on Discord (or live chat period; IRC suffered from this too). I think troubleshooting is the worst, especially in larger, active communities. You have different conversations going on, so it’s easy to miss questions or answers. Plus, Discord’s search isn’t great, IMO. Better than reddit, but that’s not saying much. So someone probably asked the same question some time ago; good luck finding it, and even if you do, you still have to sift through the adjacent chat history to see if others responded and track that conversation.

Larger Discords remind me of the chats of large Twitch streamers, where the chat is going a million miles per hour. What’s even the point?

At least with a forum, it’s much slowed down, and there are clear divisions between topics, that give people the space to discuss those topics.

Websites are so easy to make these days, too. No coding experience even needed. I’m not saying Discord is worthless; it’s not and I use it plenty everyday. But it has its place. People need to use the right tools for the job.

*In many ways, websites suffer this issue, too. I have to make an account on this standalone separate website, just for my one question, and then after it gets answered, I’ll probably never go back to it? That’s why reddit (and Lemmy to a lesser extent) is so popular.

I’ve only gotten two strikes in my life, 7-8yrs ago. And I feel like this was because my brother was downloading then recent, popular movies (which I almost never do). But before that, never did, without a VPN, and I used to pirate a lot more. Even further back, used to have a roommate who would go on movie and show torrenting sprees. We never got strikes. And that was when commercial VPNs weren’t really a thing yet, but copyright strikes were well known. I’ve known others who’ve never gotten strikes either.

So I’d say no, not 100% necessary at all. But it’s free or cheap enough to mitigate the risk. So that’s why I use one when I do pirate, which is rare these days.

Windscribe. Mainly because I scored a cheap lifetime deal many years ago. It works well enough. Got two ISP copyright strikes before using Windscribe. Have yet to get another since using Windscribe (knock on wood). But I also don’t pirate as much as I used to.

Simple selling to BBVA was shit. Simple was never my main bank, but it was a nice, simple service. That was free. Then they moved to BBVA, which almost immediately got bought up by PNC, and then PNC started charging monthly fees. Closed my account before the first fees hit.

I still have a Varo account. Surprised that hasn’t gotten vacuumed up yet by one of the traditional banks.

Do people still say this? This seems like one of those tired things that gets passed around the Internet in the name of “Boo Apple!”

I don’t think I’ve heard any Apple products users of any tech background (or none at all) say since the early 2010s. Yet non-users keep parroting it.

Gotcha, yeah that checks out. I guess I never made that connection, even though I use TOR and torrent here and there. Probably also because I’m more concerned about download speeds over privacy when torrenting. And regular web traffic over TOR is often insanely slow compared to the clearnet.

Ever since getting a copyright strike several years ago, I’ve switched to using a commercial VPN while torrenting. I don’t know if that’s the all-in-one solution for hiding from my ISP, but it seems to work. But I also rarely torrent these days, too, so not as many opportunities for them to catch me, I suppose.

I didn’t think people torrented over TOR. Aside from the security issues (which I didn’t know about in the first place), I would think it’s gotta be insanely slow. Is it not?

Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds.

That’s what IRC used to be for. I was gonna say it was annoying to get something like mIRC installed and set up, but that’s not even true since there are plenty of one click web clients. My subreddit used to have a channel on a reddit-affiliated IRC server and we provided a link to our IRC channel. Don’t even have to register a username on most servers to join a channel and idle.

Being text only, however, means no reactions emojis and preview of images and videos and all that. Which I can understand be kinda annoying these days. Plus servers didn’t necessarily talk to each other. There wasn’t/isn’t federation, or if there is, most servers are not federated. But if you’re just dropping in for a one-off question, that shouldnt’ matter.

FYI, I think Reuters sometimes wants people go login with a free account. At least free for now…