JonEFive

Good.

Signed - a grumpy former network admin.

I’m mostly joking and for those wondering why it matters, we’re out of public IPv4 addresses and ISPs are starting to go IPv6 only in some places. From the post:

New ISPs in my country are IPv6-only because there is no new IPv4 space to be provided to them. They do have a over-shared IPv4 address by CGNAT but due to the oversharing, it is unstable and not rare to be offline. For these companies, the internet access is stable only in IPv6.

Businesses valuations and a business’ success overall unfortunately don’t always correlate to what the business seemingly has to offer. In this case, reddit is not going to be sold as a community website, but rather a marketing tool.

It’s as the saying goes - if the service is free, you’re the product. I think there will be a decline in active users and overall engagement, which I suspect might lead to fewer ad impressions. Spez is banking on the fact that eliminating third party apps will make up for that.

So long as there is a critical mass of users - which there will be for the foreseeable future, and so long as Spez only goes half Musk and doesn’t turn the site into an alt-right paradise, I see reddit potentially becoming profitable. Advertisers who have been scared away from Twitter/X might be looking to go somewhere safer and might find that in Reddit once all this controversy blows over.

And it will blow over in terms of relevance to advertisers. The API controversy doesn’t concern the average person. Even a CEO being a petulant child is barely worth mentioning to most.

Reddit users assumed that the site was for them. Spez has made it clear that it is not, that it is for advertisers. As much as I hate to say it, there will be plenty of people jumping on the Reddit IPO from that perspective.

Oh awesome that’s good to know

I still haven’t found my favorite way to manage 3rd party games. Heroic seems to be more solid than others but only supports GOG and Epic.

Lutris is very hit or miss for me. It’s been useful for some games in my Amazon library.

I’ve also tried Bottles and it seems overcomplicated unless there was something that I was missing. It might be useful for certain use cases, but may not be necessary.

I’m going to try nonsteamlaunchers next.

I’d say a significant decrease in valuation just before IPO is some consequence. Not enough to truly impact Spez personally mind you, but it’s something.

I’m more satisfied with my experience here personally. I don’t scroll for hours, I read a couple articles, maybe comment on them and move on. If I come across something interesting that isn’t already posted in my community here, I’ll actually post it because it might actually get some engagement.

One reddit, my post would either be removed by overzealous mods or generally ignored. I had one instance where I posted a question on r/askScience. I searched before I posted but couldn’t find a post that asked the same question. A mod removed it saying that it was too similar to other posts. When I asked which post it was similar to, the mod said “You need to search for yourself, we aren’t librarians” then muted me for 10 days so I couldn’t respond. The sheer ego trip of the matter just appalled me. I thought that a community about scientific inquiry would be a bit more open, but nope - just as toxic as every other sub.

Valid theory. Twitter was getting a lot of attention for their work to reduce the spread of misinformation and blatant racism. Both things that the republican party and their supporters seem to be firmly opposed to. It might therfore make sense to delegitimize the platform while giving a megaphone to the people who were previously being censored or fact checked.

I always say “follow the money” which is why I couldn’t figure out Elon’s motives in all this. It doesn’t make sense to buy a company then intentionally tank it’s value. But it might make sense in terms of people in power controlling another media outlet to broadcast and reinforce their narrative.

The real point is doing something that gets attention. Buying beer just to pour it down the drain is dumb. Buying beer to make a video of you pouring it down the drain then posting that video to social media is protest. The difference is all about how many people see/hear you, and how many other people decide to join your cause.

Likewise, continuing to buy the product after all the protest is hypocritical showmanship, but buying a single 12 pack as a prop and never buying that product again for is boycotting. Keep in mind that the type of people who buy a case or two of bud light at a time are often the type of people who buy that much every week. If enough of those people switch brands, it might create a blip on on the company’s radar at the very least.

Now my cynical point of view is that major companies no longer care very much about negative publicity. No matter how many shitty things the company does and no matter how shitty those acts are, people will still buy their product. Boycotting works on smaller companies because you can meaningfully impact their bottom line. That’s rarely the case with massive corporations.

It all started as a stock market manipulation scheme. Now that “Daddy” told him he had to make good on his commitments, he’s throwing a tantrum and saying “well, if I’m forced to buy it, I own it. And if I own it, I can do whatever I want with it. So I guess I will can just do this!” and he proceeds to destroy it. Just another spoiled brat rich kid who doesn’t like being told what to do.

This got me thinking a bit, and I had this whole long post written out. Turns out someone else had a very similar idea to what I was about to discuss regarding public/private keys:

https://aumetra.xyz/posts/fediverse-nomadic-identities#introduction

This approach is interesting because I was thinking that you would need a trusted server to host the public certificate. But maybe that isn’t the case so long as you keep a copy of your public key. As long as you have your private key, you would always have proof that a post made using your public key was from you. Even if someone tried to impersonate you, they wouldn’t be able to sign a post with your private key, which means they wouldn’t be able to link their profile to your account. Your public key certificate effectively becomes your identity and your private key signature is your “password” proof that you are the person associated with that public key.

If your main instance goes down, you could use your keys to create an account on another instance (assuming that’s permitted). Or you can create other accounts like the article describes.

On its own, this keeps your identity intact, but not your post history. It could be designed that your account on one instance references your account on all the other instances it knows about where you have an account. Then a post history could display data from multiple servers, or at least link back to your profile on your other servers.

But if a server goes offline, your posts do too. I just don’t think there’s a great way to manage that.

True. It makes me at least think about what other options there are in terms of resiliency for user accounts. Right now we’re back to the wild west days of the internet where you might not be 100% sure that your provider is in it for the long haul. There were so many random email hosts in the 90s and early 2000s with vanity domains. Now, it’s rare to see anything other than Gmail, outlook, iCloud, or hotmail for personal emails. People congregated around the big companies. That’s what worries me about companies like Meta and Twitter getting into the fediverse

While it isn’t practical for most users, if you’re really that concerned about maintaining control of your user account, you could create your own Kbin instance that’s basically just for you. There are hosting services available where you could probably do it for a few bucks a month plus the cost of the domain name. I’ve considered setting something like this up myself.

Obviously this isn’t a viable solution for most people, but it is an option.

They literally tried to postpone it until after November 2024. The DOJ wanted to start in December this year. Canon seems to have split the difference.

It’s an interesting conundrum for sure, but I think a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. People seem to want what they used to have on reddit: one massive community for each topic. In reality, federated services like Kbin and Lemmy are like lots of small reddits. Each instance has its own group of users and it’s own magazines/communities.

This is a bit like how things used to be before gigantic sites like reddit were around. If there was a particular interest you wanted to follow or discuss, you would seek out a forum site that catered specifically to that interest. You might have a few different sites that you would log into to see new posts, add comments, etc. This fostered some pretty tight knit communities where you might actually get to know other users because they’re might only be a couple hundred active users or even less.

And there might have been some overlap between those forums. If you’re into cars, you might participate in one forum specifically for corvette owners and also a more general car enthusiast forum. Both of those sites might have boards dedicated to a particular model of corvette. The difference now is that you only need one account to participate in both forums.

And when a forum site would shut down, either the owners would give notice ahead of time so that users could relocate, or if the site disappeared, users were left to find new places to congregate on their own.

Kbin.social is a general forum whose purpose is to provide users with a centralized place to log in to to discuss a variety of topics. I think as the fediverse continues to spread, we’ll see more specialized instances. Midwest.social is a good example of that that I am aware of.

So as it pertains to magazine ownership and faith in moderators and admins, is it really all that different from what we’ve been doing? If a magazine owner starts doing something that the community doesn’t like, someone can create a new magazine and users can migrate if they choose. The same is true of an instance owner. In this case, I have faith that if Ernest decides to shut down the Kbin.social instance, they’ll give us fair warning. And if the instance disappears overnight, I’ll have to start over on another instance. The nice thing is that the communities that I participate in might be spread out. So just because this instance goes away, that doesn’t mean that all my content and communities are gone with it. Merely those that were hosted on this particular instance.

I think the better approach would be something akin to multireddits where you could collect posts in similar communities from multiple instances into a single place. I believe magazines already have a feature sort of like that, but I’m not positive. That way, community posts would naturally be spread around to multiple instances and one instance going down wouldn’t be the end of the world.

They don’t care about the users who are making a fuss. In fact, they want those users to leave. They want the complacent social media users who can be easily monitized.

It isn’t “arbitrary” though. ActivityPub is just a baseline protocol that supports interoperability. Apps like Lemmy and Kbin build upon that framework, but also implement their own unique features and interfaces.

There’s definitely value to being able to specifically search for Lemmy instances or things coming from Lemmy as much as any other fediverse app. But to your point, that could be handled through a filter on a much larger whatever set of data.

The stance from this author sounds like someone who doesn’t want to have a dozen social media accounts. If only there was a way to have one account that could participate across a wide variety of sites. We could call it… The togethercosmos!

Is this particular individual the unfit mother?

I don’t know who Twitter thinks they’re fooling with this. Pretty sure Meta already had the knowledge on how to build a successful social media platform or two. I haven’t downloaded Threads yet and don’t plan to because Meta, but I imagine it’s basically Instagram without the picture requirement and some fancy url handling.

Hey cool, my first opportunity to block a troll on the fediverse!