These companies seem to forget that the main thing holding them afloat is the ability to watch it simply at a low cost. Pirating is very easy and there are plenty of tools to achieve this same goal if prices keep going up.

I’ve already abandoned Netflix. I would rather pirate shows I hear are good than mindlessly scroll on that platform while paying $240 a year or whatever.

This is wonderful to hear. I hope this helps move people away from google and their products.

I prefer Rectangle. Free and fast.

My thought exactly. Really enjoyed this article. Thanks OP! I’m excited they are releasing more about their findings. I would also like to know what questions the new technology has answered beyond more dynamic pictures. I guess this photo wasn’t possible with Hubble?

Pay moderators and app developers that help make communities thrive? Hell no. Pay people to contribute content? Yes! That’s the way! Force the community with money. Yes!

I feel old when I think “kids these days” but I do wonder if there is a deep, fundamental problem with TikTok, Reels, YouTube shorts, and such. I taught in the HS for awhile this past year and I felt like the students had a very short attention span. How are they supposed to give sustained focus to learn something when they are training their brain for short, 90 second (or shorter) bursts?

I’m glad it’s not only me that feels this. Google has lost a lot of my trust. I am not inclined to try something new that launches as it’s likely to be short lived. Why invest in something they will shut off in a year or two or change the name (what’s it now, Google Talk, Hangouts, Duo, or some other shit?).

This article is well written, but the intense focus on TikTok is strange. I don’t understand how TikTok can be a source of true information or a town square for that matter. The videos are incredibly short and then the next one comes. You see a lot of dumb shit and stupid memes. It’s sometimes good at making people feel like they are learning something, but when you ask those people what they learned, they can’t synthesize or explain what it was they supposedly digested. To me, TikTok seems like pure dopamine hits without any sustainability.

Twitter, with its short character count, wasn’t any good for debate or sustained learning either. It was good for being a dunk tank—a place where people try to dunk on each other. It also became an echo chamber that helped polarize people politically. I don’t really understand the appeal of Twitter.

The interviewed protesters sound a little whacky. Maybe the cars are doing surveillance with the police, but that idea seems far fetched and unrealistic. Maybe I’m wrong.

I agree with more public transportation, bikes, and so forth, but I also agree with self driving cars. I dream of a future in which all cars are driven automatically without human drivers. Humans are very fallible and we all know, in almost every city, how many shitty drivers there are. Autonomous vehicles could fix this.

Would love to see a similar guide for Hugo. Having more sites with mastodon/fediverse comments would also improve adoption of the fediverse.

Maybe I’m missing something, but who would want a self driving car that monitors your eyes, forcing you to look at the road? The purpose of self driving cars should be that you don’t have to look at the road.

Regulators: “We will approve self driving cars, but only if there is a driver acting like they are driving.”

This is a strange take from Chris Christie. Maybe Chris pretends he is President? Then again, Trump doesn’t seem like he’s got it all together.

Do we “nerds” who care about the freedom of the fediverse care whether we can or cannot integrate with a big corporation full of users that don’t care about freedom? I suppose the fediverse is nice in part because it’s users are likely to be more technically literate and motivated than your average Instagram scroller.

I’d rather not as I’m done talking about COVID in my life. It’s evident, I think, that there were a lot of disagreements on what the response should be at various times. I think we can also agree, no matter which side of the political spectrum we fall, that COVID was not, on the whole, handled extremely well.

Great article. I especially liked the conclusion paragraph:

Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

This makes sense to me. But why would they want to defederate? I get the whole EEE thing, to an extent, but how would defederating accomplish that as it would simply disconnect them from a big world.

Interesting take! This idea might play out in the courts if Twitter sues.

I’ve heard arguments for federating and defederating with Instagram, I mean Threads.

Ultimately, Meta is going to do whatever drives their profit. So if they challenge Twitter, we need to know what will drive their profit, federating, or defederating. I’m sure there will be a lot of good content on Threads over time, just like Reddit. It’s going to be interesting in the next few years…

It’s easy for Threads to take off because a bunch of people are posting about it on Instagram, which is extremely popular.

Watching so many people get threads on Instagram is, for me at least, like watching the millions of people blindly accept all of the whacky government requirements during covid.

The vast majority of people aren’t critical thinkers.

I’m wondering what their motivation was for building it so that it could join the fediverse. I guess they recognize that the fediverse is the future, and they want their hand in that space.