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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I’m not a fan of votes being so public either. It almost seems to guarantee potential harassment as the platform grows. Hiding the “more” button on kbin only kicks the can down the road if this is a natural part of federating instances. The problem just comes back once a single instance makes the information available.

    Without a change to the protocol, I think we’re stuck with education. Maximize the awareness from users that votes behave differently here, and are entirely public.

    People have moved from reddit expecting a 1:1 copy of the features, and for the most part it delivers. The comment system has all of the friendliness of upvoting, but if you click the arrows you’re stuck committing to more of a retweet. This could really bite users who reuse their account name everywhere, and those that use their real name online.

    People getting started should learn about this as soon as possible and really consider how it will affect them. Do they really want to engage with the NSFW content, or maybe a new username is in order?

    It would be horrible if users were to arrive with the wrong impression, have a negative experience and regret showing up at all.




  • When you place all that journalistic work in the hands of a corporation to control and manipulate … it is a real danger to democracy. Google, Meta and any other corporation should never be allowed to exercise any kind of control, manipulation or effect to any of the work that journalists produce and share

    It could be said that this happened years ago in Canada. Much of what is considered under this bill as Canadian journalism is largely owned by non-Canadian entities.

    For example, Postmedia, who publishes the de-facto daily newspaper for many of the larger Canadian cities, is 66% owned by one american hedge fund. The papers have a Canadian presence, but their brand and ownership are much like a modern Tim Hortons, all Canadian trappings but profits that leave the country for an international investment firm.

    So, at best, even if the bill redistributes some profits from tech-bros to their umbrella of qualifying Canadian news outlets, two-thirds of any amount paid would still return to the control of stakeholders in the United States anyway.





  • Edit: Been corrected, the following is NOT how it works! Original Text follows
    Someone correct me if I’m getting details wrong, but from reading this post it appears as if fediverse admins are provided both the username and email accounts registered by those users that have visited their instances.

    If that’s true, one problematic scenario I can imagine is when someone has registered on the fediverse with a pseudonym, but has an e-mail address they also use on their real-life Facebook profile. Visiting a Facebook-run ActivityPub instance while logged in would give Facebook enough data to link both the pseudonymous account (with past and future post history), and the real-life Facebook profile.

    So, even if you’re not signed up for Facebook’s version of ActivityPub, engaging with it could still be giving Facebook a source of ongoing data for building personal profiles and targeted advertisement that people would not provide on their own.


  • To try and give context, Homestar Runner was made in Adobe Flash and in its time rectangles were notoriously uncool in web design. Flash sites weren’t limited to the rigid structure of a typical webpage, so you would often be mousing over and finding objects to interact with in whatever whimsical shape the designer wanted. Homestar makes lots of use of hovering the mouse, so if you’re on mobile you might be missing half of the experience.

    On this loading page, the small blue flag is the important part, which takes you to the main page that people remember