It’s probably not wise to try and annoy a being not bound by causality, physics, or conservation of anything. Especially when said entity has previously near-eliminated our population and discarded essentially all of us to our own folly.

(Thankfully She got bored, picked the most stubborn group She could find to remember Her, spent a thousand years trying to teach them to be good, and finally said “oh fuck it, just watch Me”)

That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.

As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.

Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.

I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.

The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.

My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.

It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.

You’re right about the effect (lawsuits and the threat of the same are more common in America than Canada or the UK) but not at all about the cause.

The USA has had a decades-long choice to have our industry regulated primarily not through government bureaucracy but instead judicial liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_through_litigation

Daredevil has been a “blind batman” for so long a satirical fanfic-turned-unofficial-spinoff got a cartoon, three movies, another movie, and a CGI revival that multiversed back to the cartoon and the original.

Matt Murdock’s no more an anti-hero that Peter Parker was when he tried to break into the fantastic four’s building in hopes they would hire him. (Which they didn’t, mostly because they didn’t actually pay themselves)

“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".

Who is this “user” you’re talking about? Near every choice in a social media platform design is an engineering choice between conflicting priorities.

The troll who wants to post garbage finds it easier, but the earnest poster now needs to filter out trolls on their own.

The person wanting to co-opt a community label finds it easier, but the person who wants it to continue as-used now has no recourse.

The pervert wanting to upload PG boob-shots definitely finds self-moderation easier, but your change would force rape victims with PTSD to let that smut into their already-curated set of communities.

If you wanted to add a new layer of moderation for posters beneath instance owners and community moderators that might be plausible, but “OP posted something dumb and is getting piled on” is a it’s own force your suggestion would abandon.

(And if you think just adding more random part-time moderators to a community would improve its moderation I would encourage to try Improving your next family dinner by giving orders in the kitchen. Especially one that you didn’t plan.)

Yes, I know how one deals with bad moderators in lemmy. Mine is easier.

Easier for who? If every post is self moderated how does a semi-interested reader exclude trolling while still seeing interesting posts? If I want to avoid, say, a “vi v Emacs” flame-war, or keep a “DomeGuyFanboys” topic about me, how does poster-only moderation help me?

Also, my system makes moderation easier. Which makes for better moderators.

Easier for ***whom? *** The person wanting to post whatever they feel like, or the person who wants to browse funny cat pics at work without accidentally seeing porn?

You’re absolutely right that self-curated social media places are considerably easier to either post without fear or create your own pseduo-groups. That’s why famous people tended to be on Twitter and not Reddit.

But the people who want an ActivityPub Twitter already have Mastodon, and those who wanted an ActivityPub Reddit have Lemmy.

Maybe some hybrid interface would be worthwhile, but I don’t think we’ll find out by telling people on a topic-focused environment to be unilaterally person-focused.

If the moderators of a community are bad, you can leave or boycott that community. Nice and straightforward, easily understood, and unambiguous. Also exactly in line with how content is chosen on topic-focused social media like Lemmy or Reddit.

If you would prefer person focused social media like Facebook, Tumblr, Mastadon, and BlueSky, by all means use them!

You’re the first account I’ve seen endorse OpenOffice, and I’ve been casually looking for a better alternative to word since the copilot bullshit last year.

Do you have a good example of something they added since LibreOffice forked off that’s worth considering if choosing an alternative?

That isn’t “religion”, it’s a tenet of a fraction of Christianity.

Many religions (Judaism, Islam, Shinto, Bhuddism) do not hold faith up as a virtue, and many Christian denominations (Roman Catholic, non-evangelical Protestant) assert that your faith must include good action and rational thought.

(We could have a conversation about the good things inspired by religion or the terrible things done by irrreligious folk who share your reverence for skepticism, but I really just wanted to point out that you were using an overly broad brush)

The same places you buy pre-made hummus also sell factory-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There are a lot worse food crimes than “Food for people who dont own a blender.”

A good portion of those who left Bluesky did so for bluesky.

ATProto vs ActivityPub are very different ways to build a social network, and Bsky 's still has a fairly big asterisk, but they scale up dramatically better than Lemmy/Mastadon and aren’t quite as “not-federated” as some ActivityPub promoters want to admit.

Most notably, you can move the canonical source of your account data to a server not owned by Bluesky, and access the same massive firehouse of data via a client app or last-server option of your choice. And since the banning and safety is done mostly in either that canonical source or last-server step, moving away from the crypto-friendly founding corp is enough for many.

I’m sure there’s a big swath who moved to Mastadon or threads or even to Twitter. But BlueSky’s still got plenty of traffic for what I want from it.

A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.

Off the top of my head:

• Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
• Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
• Follow best-practices for accessibility.
• Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.

Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.

To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.

The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.

You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.

If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.

It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.

If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.

Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.

Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.

Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.

Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?

If you don’t like meta any more than I do, why are you arguing so strongly that they deserve the benefit of the doubt?

And, more interestingly, what precisely do you mean that Meta including themselves as a recipient in every WhatsApp chat would not render their E2E encryption equivalent to HTTPS?

AFAIK both are in-transit encryption that prevents casual monitoring by other entries along the network path between you and the person you’re chatting with, but expose you to undetectable monitoring on the part of the service provider.

You are assuming good behavior on the part of a corporate giant grown out of a social media site literally founded to spy on its users. A company who is literally being sued for their claims that their chat app is meaningfully encrypted

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-law/whatsapp-lawsuit-encrypted-messages-10504837/

Even if Meta isn’t currently including themselves as a hidden participant in every WhatsApp chat, you should assume that they can do so and act as if they will do so.

Odds are pretty good that their encryption usage is good enough for any lawful behavior you may engage in, but you shouldn’t trust Meta or any software they provide with anything that would destroy your life if it was revealed.

Meta using the name of a formerly independent company for their current pseudo-private messaging app does not mean said app meaningfully predates the one whose tech they use.

https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

(Please share if you have a link arguing the opposite.)

More importantly, the encryption in Whatsapp is closer to HTTPS than it is to PGP. It keeps anyone except Meta or the recipients from keeping a record of what you say, but you should absolutely assume Meta is recording what you say on WhatsApp.

(And you should also assume anyone you talk to is keeping a record as well.)