Bilb!

Fully explain the joke. Why is it funny?

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I think that if you want BlueSky like growth for activity pub… You federate with Threads. Or another hypothetical flagship where everyone is sent. Stop worrying spreading users around so much. People who join that network on the flagship can learn about federation and instance switching later.

I’m sure many people on activitypub would prefer that it grows more like it has though.

I prefer wankie tankies

The problem, as I’m sure you know, is that a home server is not fit for purpose for the vast majority of people. Managing that is a fun project for some, but a complete non starter for most.

Personally, it’s the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.

I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.

The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.

I’m not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don’t find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it’s fine!

that’s impressive stuff, logic bomb.

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I am also helping to destroy the world

Right? If I talk about Project 2025 to most people around me they’ll be super excited and do whatever they can to make sure it happens.

I acknowledge George Santos as rightful president of the united states.

Stochastic Parrot

For what it’s worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

The term was first used in the paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜” by Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (using the pseudonym “Shmargaret Shmitchell”). The paper covered the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people. The paper and subsequent events resulted in Gebru and Mitchell losing their jobs at Google, and a subsequent protest by Google employees.

I heard they were all child murderers! 😱

Well I could have, but simply chose not to.

not voting is the same as voting for Trump.

It is not.

Yeah, and it also happens to get me access to the tool that was able to summarize this video without watching it. But most people would probably choose the $5 tier, I think.

tl;dw

• Cory Doctorow coins the term “enshittification” to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.

• Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.

• Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.

• Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.

• Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.

• Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.

• Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.

• Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.

• Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.

• Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.

I’ve been loving Kagi, but I have no particular need for their browser.

ETA: Oh, I see it’s only for iOS and macOS anyway. Maybe that ecosystem needed it, but I wouldn’t know.

You keep posting this article but it explains clearly why it’s not a big deal.