Not that I'm ever going to use the app, but I'd like to point out as to why the collection of this specific dataset is particularly dangerous.
Threads scrapes Health and Fitness information. Why is this a problem? Because Meta is already illegally scraping hospital websites for your records. Speaking as a data analyst, it doesn't take much (like one line of code in some cases) to match your Threads account to your hospital records in a database. To assume Meta isn't attempting to do so as we speak is naive - there's simply too much money to be made.
In an age where we've had to start underground railroads to help women across state lines to keep the right to choose, combined with the push from the far right to criminalize helping them, this sets up a frightening scenario:
Meta finds that you've scheduled an abortion through the hospital across state lines. With Threads on your phone, they can now track you as you travel to that appointment. It only takes one more step, or a law like this one tailored towards abortion, to notify law enforcement to pick you up enroute.
Combined with Meta's overall right-leaning politics, it just doesn't make sense to make yourself vulnerable to them, especially if you're a member of a minority population or have any sort of health condition. There's simply too much potential for abuse, and Meta has shown itself more than willing to abuse its users.
Because Meta is already illegally scraping hospital websites for your records.
Sorry, but this is just bad web design from the hospitals. This pixel tool doesn't magically appear on websites without being put there deliberately. Literally any tracking tool can capture this stuff on any page that a developer puts it on. This is 100% the fault of the programmer at the hospital (or the admin that made them do it) that decided to put tracking cookies on sensitive pages.
The hospital administrators decided it was more important to get their precious reports on usage from Meta's portal than protecting their patients.
I'm pissed that I've had to defend Meta here, but this one isn't on them.
If I leave my door unlocked while I'm gone, and you come in and steal my laptop, it's still theft. Yes, I'm an idiot, but you're still a criminal.
That being said, I fully agree with you that the hospitals should bear equal fault - the lack of protections around patient records is criminal, and I'd really like to see those whose records were exposed sue both the hospitals at fault and Meta, or better yet, a criminal case from the FTC and the Department of Health.
Not trying to be a hater, but that analogy isn't quite right. The web designers didn't leave their door unlocked. They invited Meta in, put their laptop in Meta's hands, and then said "Please take this. Enjoy." They weren't idiots. They chose to give Meta that data deliberately.
Medical institutions need to be held to account as much as Meta does for everything they do. I agree with that completely.
So now you got me digging into this because I take an absurd amount of pride in my analogies, and it looks like the Meta Pixel tech they embedded was basically like the standard Google Analytics tracking tag on most websites. The hospitals were stupid to install it on their password protected pages, but they were also misled in the fact that Meta's Pixel took far more data than a standard tracking tag, claimed they weren't tracking sensitive data when they were, then claimed to filter the data even though their engineers admitted they couldn't:
The Markup was unable to confirm whether any of the data referenced in this story was in fact removed before being stored by Meta. However, a recent joint investigation with Reveal found that Meta’s sensitive health information filtering system didn’t block information about appointments a reporter requested with crisis pregnancy centers.
Internally, Facebook employees have been blunt about how well—or not so well—the company generally protects sensitive data.
“We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ ” Facebook engineers on the ad and business product team wrote in a 2021 privacy overview that was leaked to Vice.
So, to perfect the analogy, this would be like a hotel installing security cameras in their rooms, and then finding out the company that makes the cameras and runs the network is selling porn starring its customers. Not only that, now that the porn is in their system, it can't be adequately filtered or removed.
The hotel is stupid and liable, but the security company is just flat out vile.
Ok, I'm done. Have an upvote for putting up with that ;)
Someone on my Mastodon feed put this best: People who aren't tech saavy STILL deserve privacy, security and safety.
Hospitals are full of people who understand medicine, not tech. Because that's what they are. Administrators don't even know what to ask to hire a good tech person, and when a tech person gets in there any change they make has a danger of disrupting livesaving systems so they can't do anything anyway. It sucks, but HIPAA still says those records are private and you're not supposed to be looking at them without having a good reason to. The hospitals are liable for not protecting them properly, but Meta is still in the wrong and still breaking the law by scarping for them.
Ultimately, this is everyone's fault but the patients and the patients are the people who are wronged by it.
Honestly, it does not look like Facebook did something wrong when you read the article. A pregnant woman used a medicine to trigger a miscarriage, then she and her mother got rid of the body. Police knew that they've discussed this in Facebook messenger. They contacted Facebook and received chat messages. Then police used those messages to incriminate women according to existing law. The only problem here is that a woman could go to an abortion clinic and do it properly and legally if not for obnoxious laws in some states. But that's a completely different issue
Read this somewhere "If something is banned in EU it likely violates human rights, but if something is banned in a republican state it probably is a human right."
Abortion at the point of pregnancy in this story is illegal in almost the entire EU. Using the drug in this story without any medical consultation or oversight is illegal in all of the EU. I would also be surprised if disposing of a stillborn body by attempting to burn it and then lying to police about it is likely illegal in the EU as well. Pre-Dobbs this would still be a crime in the entire US.
"Since the reversal of Roe, Facebook’s parent company Meta and other Big Tech companies have made lofty promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare,” Caitlin Seeley George, managing director of nonprofit Fight for our Future, said in a statement. “At the same time, these companies’ hypocritical surveillance practices make them complicit in the criminalization of people seeking, facilitating, and providing abortions.”
It is not a different issue. It is an issue of basic human rights.
A woman's right to agency over her body is an unalienable human right. The existing laws violate her human right.
Then police used those messages to incriminate women according to existing law.
"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws. " - Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)
It is not a different issue. It is an issue of basic human rights.
I don’t believe it’s a basic human right to murder a late term foetus. That’s not a right enshrined in any UN convention or national constitution. That’s something you want.
Voters in many states have decided that’s not a priority for them. They’re too busy whining about imaginary college level classes taught in grade schools
It was a right until a few hand picked Catholic activist judges, chosen by a Christian Dominionist think tank and corruptly paid off by billionaires, decided it wasn't a right anymore.
Don't know why you are getting mad at me, I replied to a person against abortion, which I disagree with. Not you, who said it was a human right, which I agree with. So I do care about making sure abortion is legal, I don't care to listen to the religious extremist horseshit ideals on why it should be illegal.
I assume you just got the notification because it's your post and assumed I was talking to you when I am not saying your opinion does not matter, just peoples opinion that want's to take away human rights.
I mean, I’m pro-choice and I downvoted you because you would rather troll this person and add to the negativity than state your case. I downvoted them too, for the record.
Why make a case to people who have no want to hear said case, have probably heard all the cases already and continue to want to control people? I am done talking to people that want to decide others lives and put them at risk, they don't care about them so why should I care about the person trying to retain control?
I am willing to explain myself to you, but you as stated do not intend to steal rights and you being pro choice already know all the reasons why I am against people taking others rights so I don't have to explain it because it is falling either on ears that know or ears that don't want to hear.
I am sick off pretending malice is ignorance.
I am just telling them to get lost as we should with all people that want to take others rights.
Thanks for your explanation. While I get what you’re saying, the way I see it, a counterpoint against a person who is clearly adamantly anti-choice isn’t about changing the mind of that person you are talking with but, rather, the person looking in and reading the discussion on this case about a hot-button issue. Their minds may be swayed by the tone and evidence from one side or the other. Of course, you can chose to conduct yourself online however you’d like. I just don’t think it furthers the pro-choice cause.
I understand your reasoning and have practiced it before with minimal success, they do not want civil discussion nor do they care about rights or facts, they think you are a murder sympathizer and have no interest in listening to you because reasoning does not matter to them.
IMO teaching people to have and improve the cognitive skills needed to determine facts and to find accurate information is more important in fighting things like this. Which basically mean better schooling, when you can have more of an impact on teaching good behaviors and skills.
Sorry to tell you a comment on a website with all the facts in the world is unlikely to sway a lot of peoples minds on abortions rights when they could already look up all those facts and opinions. it is kinda hard to sway people set in an idea based on emotion when the facts are already out there and they don't care.
Also all of that is again assuming they are not malicious but just misguided, tbh I thing we tend to give a lot of leeway by saying "oh they are just ignorant" eventually ignorance turns to malice if you are unwilling to change it after being told multiple times.
Most do not care to change or care about what helps people with no intent to change, rather just tell them to leave us alone and move on without the trash.
Do any constitutions or UN conventions give you the right to use the internet? Shouldn't this count as healthcare, for which there are at least 6 UN conventions? Don't 13 states ban all forms of abortion including early, in which not even the heart has formed?
There is no such thing as a late term abortion. The fetus would be viable. No person seeking an abortion would wait seven to nine months, bullshit laws or no bullshit laws. An abortion is a termination of a pregnancy, not a fetus. Abortions are typically performed before the embryo even has a chance to develop into a fetus (10 weeks).
As of 2015 in the United States, more than 90% of abortions occur before the 13th week, 1.3% of abortions in the United States took place after the 21st week,[4] and less than 1% occur after 24 weeks.[5][6]
No one is terminating viable fetuses in the third trimester.
The human right to agency is every human beings right to consent over what happens to and in their body. Denying that right to a woman is against her basic & unalienable human right. Anyone denying a woman that basic right rejects women as human beings.
Human rights are not subject to your belief system.
The takeaway from this article, IMHO, isn't "Facebook did something terrible" so much as "when you live in a world where the government is terrible, services which compromise your privacy can be exploited against you." It no longer becomes a matter of "advertisers have access to my intimate details" but "people with the power to jail me unjustly have access to my intimate details."
I mean, it's reprehensible for Facebook to have done that, but we kind of never expected them to be the good guys. It's more "the compromise of our basic privacy is more dangerous than you might have thought when it was just being used to advertise to us."
Regardless of the politics surrounding abortion, Facebook chat never claims to be encrypted nor secure. Users should be aware that their chats are available in this capacity and should also be aware that platforms like Signal exist which are encrypted and secure.
Except it is encrypted, and pretty secure. That's not really related to the issue. Facebook complied with a subpoena as they are legally required to do so. Signal would have to do the same. The only difference there is that Signal doesn't retain decryption keys for your data so subpoenaing them would be pretty pointless except to prove that some conversation happened.
it does not look like Facebook did something wrong
Illegal. You mean to say it doesn't look like Facebook did something illegal. It's undeniable (unless you hate women) that Facebook did something wrong in helping a fascist state oppress women.
It would also be literally illegal for Facebook to have not done this. They were given a legally binding warrant.
If you honestly would personally go to jail rather than comply with a warrant, that speaks pretty highly to your credit, but I don't think most people would find Facebook to be particularly culpable here. Facebook Messenger does actually offer an encrypted messaging service that, to my knowledge, has never been turned over to law enforcement because it is technically impossible for them to do that. That isn't the default setting though, and it's unfortunate that the people involved here weren't aware of it.
Just to be very clear, these laws are reprehensible. However, my anger is largely reserved for the politicians and voters responsible for them. It's a pretty big ask to demand someone personally risk jail time by refusing to comply with a valid warrant.
I'd genuinely be curious what you'd do if police showed up to your door with a warrant ready to take you to jail if you didn't comply.
Maybe you'd actually refuse, I don't know. But I think there are a whole lot more people who want to think that they would refuse and suffer very real consequences of it than would actually do it.
Thanks to Citizens United, corporations are people. But people are not corporations.
They do not have an army of corporate attorneys, nor do they employ lobbying firms to buy political support, nor do they have enormous wealth to fall back on. People simply do not enjoy the protections corporations do. Yet its regular people who frequently take a stand against wrong, and not multi-billion corporations.
Facebook/Meta, a corporate with tremendous resources, made promises about defending access to reproductive healthcare in a post-Roe world and it should be questioned for failing to keep their word. Getting personal (like you just did with @Kichae) just shifts responsibility away from facebook/meta for its actions.
Regardless, there are very much actual people within Meta that can and would be held legally liable for refusing to comply with a valid warrant, up to and including going to jail.
I agree that there are plenty to things to criticize Meta for. They could do a lot more to educate users about what privacy they do or don't have and the legal consequences of that. They could direct more people to Messenger's private mode, which is end-to-end encrypted. I don't think the act of complying with a warrant is something that I would really hold against them though, because 99% of people would do the same thing.
If you honestly would personally go to jail rather than comply with a warrant, that speaks pretty highly to your credit, but I don't think most people would find Facebook to be particularly culpable here.
This would be more compelling point if FB were a person capable of going to jail and/or did not have a history of taking the user-hostile side of privacy situations, regardless of whether the law agreed with them.
That isn't the default setting though, and it's unfortunate that the people involved here weren't aware of it.
This right here is why I personally believe FB deserves and flak they get from this situation. They could avoid the whole conversation about whether they should turn over the conversations if they made it so they couldn't. They've chosen their data mine over user privacy, and people are right to judge them accordingly.
Facebook may not be a person, but there are people within Facebook who absolutely can and would be held personally liable for refusing to comply with a warrant, up to and including going to jail.
That Facebook Messenger isn't E2E encrypted definitely is something that can and should be criticized, and they could absolutely do a lot more to educate users on how safe their information is or isn't. On the flip-side, to their credit, WhatsApp is, by default, E2E encrypted. I'd honestly be curious how much value they really get out of Messenger not being encrypted, since if it's really that high, the value from WhatsApp would be significantly higher.
I'm not saying that this is the only reason - because I'm sure they do get some financial value out of it as well - but if you wanted to be charitable, you could say that users generally expect Facebook Messenger to be equally available across devices with full message history, which isn't really feasible when you're signing messages with device-specific keys.
Why do so many people find it so hard to understand the position of anti-abortionists and invent a fantasy about misogynist fascists?
To them fetuses are babies (which is correct at some point before birth, when is another debate) and therefore subjects of rights, so from their position they are defending a much greater right, the right to life. Essentially, from their perspective they are defending human rights, is it that hard for you to empathize with that?
It's undeniable (unless you hate women)
Oh yep, you seem to have a flexible mentality, open to debate and not demonizing others, the opposite of what fascists typically do.
All the pro life arguments are new. Theyre disingenuous and hypocritical. The modern pro life movement was cooked up by hardcore right wingers when they lost the fight against civil rights , in a transparent attempt to create a new voting bloc. Before the 1960s, the Baptists and Methodists were pro abortion and called it a Catholic issue.
Person hood is a red herring. Even if you accept fetal person hood, no one owes another person the use of their body.
Lastly, legislators have no place in medical decisions. Doctors are not terminating viable fetuses in the third trimester and never have. There were less than 10 third trimester abortions in the US per year and all we're either to save the life of the mother or to remove a fetus that had a fatal defect. Banning the procedure will only have deleterious effects and keep doctors from performing vital life saving procedures. We have already seen this in Ireland and central America.
They are not pro-life. If they were pro-life they would work to make life good/ better for those who they insist birth children and for those who they should be born.
They are pro-slavery, Forcing/ coercing women to be incubators against their will is sexual slavery. They refuse to consider women as equal human beings with equal rights to men, and seek to diminsh women's independence by forcing on her (and only her, men are not held accountable) to the unwanted burden of gestating, birthing, and caring for children, even at the cosf of her physical and mental well-being.
Their call of "fetal personhood" is a tool to emotionally manipulate people ("won't you think of the children?"), while they deny actual living persons their personhood. All their actions & words are geared towards dehumanizing women.
Tellingly, they also are not against child labour ("wont you think of the billionaire's profits?"), once a child is born. Their goal is to deny women their personhood, bind women to sexual slavery, and ensure the wealthy have a supply of cheap & easily available labour.
Oh yep, you seem to have a flexible mentality, open to debate and not demonizing others, the opposite of what fascists typically do.
And there's the DARVO. That didn't take much time.
If foetuses are babies to anti-abortionists (you've dropped the pro-life facade) then anti-abortionists need science lessons, because foetuses are not babies.
Since anti-abortionists don't consider women as human beings possessing equal human rights, they don't care about any baby born or unborn from her. Indeed, they think they have the right to dictate to women on what her rights should be, ignoring that she is born with inalienable basic rights. "Born with" not 'unborn/ in-utero' with.
A right to life without right to agency is slavery. Do you understand that anti-abortionists want women to be slaves?
It's probably a waste of time, but okay, I will be kind enough not to delve into your ignorant slander, delusions, straw men and ad hominems.
Since anti-abortionists don't consider women as human beings possessing equal human rights (...) A right to life without right to agency is slavery. Do you understand that anti-abortionists want women to be slaves?
Let us come to the main issue. As I mentioned, this is a difference of importance, not all rights are equal and when there is a conflict one should prevail over the other. Although nothing is written it is easy in some cases, for example, the right not to be tortured is more important than the right to marry.
If for a moment you are able to consider the premise that fetuses are subjects of rights (say one of 42-week to make it easier), tell me, which is more important, the temporary and partial suspension of the right of agency or the right to life?
(I do not include slavery because I find it fucking absurd, as well as a trivialization of something very serious. You could have said something more coherent like reproductive freedom.)
This is not something like seeing the woman as property to be controlled, only considering the rights and interests of "both". Let us also not forget that it is a self-imposed situation, and the cases in which it is "imposed by third parties" abortion is allowed all over the world.
*Sigh. As I guessed, your reading comprehension is nil and you are not capable of debate or simple mental work, you can only use fallacies. Well, at least I tried.
Better to use uBlock Origin (which you should use anyway), and just enable the “Block outsider intrusion into lan” filter list, as pointed out by ch1cken. - Thanks!
I know I'm practically begging for downvotes here, but it is also possible that some people are perfectly aware of the tradeoffs, pros, and cons of social media, and have decided that the positives outweigh the negatives. That you have different priorities doesn't necessarily mean that everyone else is stupid or ignorant.
It's ironic how the Fediverse on the one hand celebrates the fact that anyone can join and instances can all do their own things and hold their own views, and then it goes "but not like that" in this case.
It's ironic how the Fediverse on the one hand celebrates the fact that anyone can join and instances can all do their own things and hold their own views
Yes, all in contrast to corporate enshittification and algorithmic spyware.
and then it goes "but not like that" in this case.
Yes, because its corporate social media waiting for enshittification with algorithmic spyware.
If some instance wants to enshittify itself it's free to do so. The Fediverse makes it straightforward for its users to move to other instances when that happens.
If Reddit had been magically federated with the rest of the threadiverse, for example, it would have made reacting to their recent API decisions much easier.
I dont really see your point. Sure, instances can do that. But instances and its users can also not do that, and right now its just instance users arguing that we shouldnt do that.
Thankfully, "we" are not a monolith. People who don't mind some level of interaction with Meta can do that, those who want zero contact with it can do that, and all is well.
I think it moreso has to do with the fact that as soon as Fediverse networking became more popular, Meta immediately comes along and creates another social media platform that uses Fediverse as more of a flashy buzzword.
The point of the Fediverse seems to be "content where you want to see it, how you want to see it, when you want to see it". Promoting a more open ecosystem of specially tailored instances for what an individual user wants as their content.
Meta comes along with Threads, the nearly perfect antithesis of what the Fediverse is. Immediately gobbling up users due to both brand recognition and by seizing a customer base fleeing Reddit trying to figure out what the Fediverse is and not wanting to "miss out" on their communities and content as it migrates here.
@BraveSirZaphod I mean, if they're not, then that means that they're fine with hate speech and run away bigotry, and to be honest, that's not a truth I want to face
People don't care about principles when it comes to a social media site (or really anything for that matter). They want something easy to use, that everyone is on.
I'm almost certain there's a first to market FOMO kinda thing happening with influencers/scammers/advertisers. Everyone with that disgusting "grindset" mentality on Instagram just got a blank slate on an entirely new platform with a lot of media attention.
Its happening with every new Twitter replacement. Twitter for all its faults was actually a widely used resource for brands, companies and influencers. Now that it is so erratic they're all trying to jump on anything with a hint of success to replace Twitter.
Brands and government accounts are going to flock to Threads. They want a place for general announcements that has some consistency in moderation and stability. Musk has largely destroyed that on twitter.
I can see it for those types of accounts. The National Weather Service for example doesn't want to deal with random tweet limits and pricing changes and all that. All they need is a stable platform that is popular. If Threads can give them that, I can see it taking off. Already it seems to have more hype and activity than any other alternative in the last few months.
I didn't even think about the porn aspect. You're probably right. Although I'm sure people are going to test it and see how close Meta will let them get.
I personally can't wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren't consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it's happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.
Automation in the realm of customer service drives so much of the enshitified experiences. If I'm not talking to a robot/chat engine, I'm talking to a human with such overbearing rules/scripts they might as well be a robot. And I know they hate it as much as I do.
The otherside of this, is that when I encounter a kind human who has actually been empowered to solve problems I tend to leave glowing feedback and share the experience.
Office Space got it right 24 years ago. "I'm a goddamn people person." First people they cut, and it just got harder for the customers.
It's so sad how awful the end user support has gotten. Even when you're paying Big Money to big hardware makers who make you pay for support packages, you're talking to Malaysia or India or a few in South America. Pinching pennies into dust when they're making money hand over fist for the support contracts. When most end user engineers are only opening tickets when it's dire problems due to how awful the experience is.
Irrespective of the popular success which Bluesky / Mastodon may receive, I am simply glad that enough platforms exist for anyone to seek refuge in if the rapacity by these giants becomes the norm.
I believe they opened things up to developers recently. I do think they will become decentralized, but am more concerned it will become a "no censorship" aka "no moderation" mess pretty quickly. It relies quite heavily on filters and aggregators rather than moderators.
bluesky is crap. it requires an invite and id verification. 100% will turn into a fascist navel-gazing network.
The rest of the platforms which will still be using anonymous access will be invaded by AI's astroturfing their stuff into your face. Which one do you prefer?
It's literally impossible for any social network to ever under any circumstances be relevant/important enough that asking for an ID could theoretically be forgivable under any circumstances, let alone valid.
There are very few scenarios where any website asking for an ID should even be legal. It's a massive and inexcusable privacy issue.
No. It's decentralized like the Fediverse, but it doesn't use ActivityPub. I think there are some 3rd party developers working on an ActivityPub-Bluesky bridge, but nothing concrete yet.
Isn't it also just not open to federation at the moment? So the federated/decentralized aspect could just be vaporware and never happen. I don't even begin to take their word for it until it stops being de-facto centralized.
The more I read about BS’s protocol, the more I think this is done on purpose.
Why? Because it allows BS to pay lip service to decentralization, without actually giving away the power in the system.
[..]
Another pretty good sign that BS’s decentralization is actually b.s. is the fact that the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) used by BlueSky are currently “temporarily” not actually decentralized. The protocol uses something imaginatively called “DID Placeholder”. If I were a betting man I would bet that in five years it will keep on using the centralized DID Placeholder, and that that will be a root cause of a lot of shenanigans.
[..]
it decentralizes the cost to the central authority by pushing data load onto volunteers, while planning to keep control by being the biggest kid on the “reach” block.
They’re making their own federation. They brought in Mastodon consultants and have set up their own AT Protocol and of course we’re activitypub. To federate everyone their would need to be a bridge between AT and activitypub
The majority of social media sites (with the exception of youtube imo) don't provide anything of value. A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend. The only thing these websites have to offer is their large user base.
EDIT: OK, I apparently upset some people. I was exagerating when I said it could be done in a weekend, but my point stands that it's pretty easy to make a twitter clone/reddit clone, and the challenge in succeeding for twitter is getting a user base. The tech is incredibly easy to build.
A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend
This is a pretty good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Twitter is much more than the simple frontend you see when you click on the website, there is absolutely no way a single person could recreate it in a month, less alone a weekend.
“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for age verification, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video.
What a personal data <strikethrough> goldmine </strikethrough>. I mean we must protect the kids ... from everything, everywhere, every time, at any cost.
Apollo is getting a spiritual successor for kbin in the form of https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp, so you may not have to remember all the formatting rules for long
There can be more than one threat... The bigger hypocrisy is banning good sex education from schools. The way kids are learning about sex and realationships from sites like PornHub is harmful to their future realationships and respect for each other.....but these laws are not going to stop that
All of it doesn't matter till it happens to you specifically. Just like the only moral abortion is the one I get. These people are basically regressives in every aspect of society.
What I find kind of hilarious is that many people, like me, are upset the in-app experience is gonna get severely downgraded when third-party apps get pushed into closing, and are reacting by... moving to a place like kbin that doesn't have an app at all.
It really shows that the broader issue is much bigger than usability. What kbin has that Reddit has lost is user confidence that improvements will come and will be driven by community needs and not profit.
I think a part of it is the principal, and a part of it is that Reddit is so hostile to Web traffic on mobile in addition to the official app being awful.
Kbin on the browser is a significantly better experience than Reddit on the official app.
Yeah, it's honestly ridiculous how much the mobile website pushes you to use the app. Even basic things like viewing NSFW posts or expanding comment threads give a popup to download the app.
Yeah, it used to be possible to change the URL to i.reddit.com to get around the NSFW thing but they got rid of that 2 months ago. It was then that I knew reddit was really going down the shitter.
The only downside for kbin is that people now have this weird phobia of using a web browser to browse the web instead of some specific app even if it's just an electron wrapper. So I guess do that first, make a dumb kbin electron wrapper app to placate the masses!
That always seemed weird to me. I'd much rather use a website than download an app, unless the app has a much better UI than the website (which is usually not the case). It probably all comes down to the convenience of clicking on an app compared to typing in a URL.
That, and you don't need to deal with browser features getting in the way. Like, if I scroll up, the url bar in Firefox pops up. Plus, apps can add features that the sites themselves don't have. As an example, Boost! for reddit had quick account switching.
If you are on iOS you can add a shortcut to your home screen that will open a self-contained web app for kbin (no url bar or browser buttons, it’s own entry in the app switcher, etc.)
On Firefox for iOS, click on the hamburger menu in the bottom right, then click “Share”, then select “Add to Home Screen”
I’ve heard that android has an app for kbin, however I do not have an android device so I can’t verify if that’s true/if it’s any good
I didn't see the Add to Home Screen option on Firefox, but it was present in Safari. Did you mean Safari? Anyways that's very useful, thanks for letting me know!
It's in the "3 dots menu" on Firefox mobile for sure, I just used it myself. But it doesn't open anything in a container like Safari does, it just opens it in a new tab in Firefox.
I’m typing this from a Home Screen shortcut that I created from Firefox (iOS). Make sure that your Firefox is up to date, I believe it’s something they added support for within the past few versions
I don't know what windmill you are tilting against, but for me mobile apps are useful for things I do very frequently, if not daily. I don't need an app for something I'm going to visit once or twice, but apps can do things a web browser simply cannot replicate. Those features are very much appreciated once you spend enough time in one place.
I though about this as well and you are right it is about confidence that reddit will just continue to get worse. Whole Kbin doesn't have a app yet I'm sure we will start getting some soon when the API is opened. Also Kbin is so much more light weight in user experience that it doesn't feel as bad to use compared to Reddit official app.
I don’t know about Android, but on iPhone you can use the share button from Safari to add a web app of many sites to your Home Screen. It works with kbin and it’s what I’ve done. Functions almost just like an app, but doesn’t have any of the permissions and background functions that apps can abuse.
Frankly kbin is usable in the mobile browser and in iOS I can just open it in safari and hit “add to Home Screen” and that makes it an “app” of sorts. It works well and I have a few sites I do this with, including my personal RSS feed instance.
Reddit was once the same upstart in the shadow of digg. We hope that Apollo and other such Devs will pivot to kbin or other fediverse apps quickly. We just need to be clear on the direction of where we are going. Right now the messaging is not clear. I was on Lemmy before I heard about more questionable areas there which is what led me to kbin.
The main issue is that the devs (and, until this exodus started, a large chunk of the community) are apparently apologists for authoritarian regimes. Specifically China, Russia, and North Korea. "Tankies" is the common term.
I'm not too concerned since it's open source, but it's good to have kbin and other alternative implementations regardless.
I mean, you can reach some the more questionable areas from here, too. Lemmy is both a website and server software, as is kbin, and websites running lemmy can exchange content with websites running kbin.
Oh shit really? I loved that app, I'll reinstall incase they update it. I have to say though, KBin works way better on the mobile site than Reddit ever did
I mean, honestly, old.reddit is a relic, new.reddit is a piece of shit. It's high time reddit died. I hope this rexxit is the end of reddit for good, even if, in the very unlikely circumstance that they revert their API changes, I still hope it dies. They've arse fucked their users one too many times.
I’m an Apollo-only user from Reddit and on an iPad Pro. kbin as a progressive web app works better and makes better use of screen real estate on my device, and Reddit’s website is miserably designed for me - “show more comments” everywhere, very little information density, ads intermixed with content that make me question what subreddit I’m in, and more. I was also an Alien Blue user for years before the app was purchased, and Reddit had every opportunity to take that app, leave it alone, and make it the official app (and it was the best client I ever used for Reddit by far). I just… can’t. This is my second go around with this bull and I’m done. I have no problem with companies making money, especially those that provide a good service, but Reddit paid significant sums to make my experience worse, and when I went to find an alternative, they destroyed that too.
I didn’t need “improvements”. Things were fine. Literally, they could have just changed the app name from Alien Blue to Reddit and I would have been thrilled. I don’t want Reddit’s “improvements”. Sometimes a mature app is a mature app and you don’t need to muck with the UI. I’m also furious at the treatment of third-party developers throughout this - not just Apollo’s developer, though that’s an extra special type of anger I have for that, but for everyone. 30 days notice for this kind of price increase? That is absolutely not realistic. I want nothing to do with Reddit right now as a company - these are not a kind of people I want to support.
It really bewilders me how a big site like Reddit decides to alienate a good chunk of their membership. Redditors ARE Reddit - if they leave, you don't have Reddit. And what's going to happen to the IPO when the users and mods leave enmasse??? Is it going the way of VOAT, which was overtaken by the alt-right?
Right, it's not about the app. It's about the realization that they can shaft you at any time for any reason and they will if they think that Reddit can make even 0.001c per year more per user. The only reason Reddit doesn't have unskippable full screen ads is because it's not yet financially positive for them.
It was a great investment for the people on the top of the pyramid. So it worked as it was supposed to. Suck it up and learn your lesson, idiots. It wasn’t for lack of warning.
and there's still a lot of people on the windows side not using a package manager
I think "lots of people" here can just be simplified to "nearly everyone". Anyone that is ware of a package manager and why it's useful and thinks to look for an equivalent for Windows is not going to be bothered by a few extra configuration steps.
I run it secondary to Firefox when I need to use IPFS, have been for about 6 months now. I also occasionally use it because it also blocks Youtube ads by default, AND when combined with privacy badger, it is the only browser that still works while giving half decent anti-fingerprinting. Firefox, Chrome, nothing else even gets close. They just straight up lie about your screen rez and plugins to keep you from being fingerprinted.
Their account sync is pretty nice. Encrypted P2P syncing of configs and bookmarks. No need to make an account with them to store your settings.
Yeah, if you use their new tab page, there's an crypto option there which you can remove. Their new tab page sucks and I don't use it anyway.
There is ONE crypto button to the right of the URL bar, which you can right click and hide. The other stuff is actually the controls for their PWA install , share and privacy/ad block settings. You can just run full block everywhere and flick off the extra blocking for a site if it's a problem.
I also refuse to use their search, but it does work really well last time I tried it. DDG is good enough and the smaller the company selling my data, the better.
Updates don't generate any crypto popups for me, perhaps because I don't use their front page.
It's open source, so they at the very least aren't hiding what they're doing.
The fact that they offer shitty crypto with hideable buttons should be the least of your objections.
They replaced webpage ads with their own when you enable bat. (I don't crypto so I don't see those)
They swapped referrer links on unreferred things to make money. (which is sunset now, but is an indicator of how they DGAF)
They used their crypto as a pyramid scheme to sell to investors, even got in trouble over it with the Government.
Once their crypto pyramid scheme fails, They'll either fold up, or double down on selling data passed through them.
They have an insecure TOR implementation
They are likely to sell your data
They are likely to sell your data to AI projects.
Their CEO is a POS, but that's hardly unusual these days.
If a product creator’s ideologies are the deciding factor on whether you use that product… That’s OK. I think there’s some interesting territory for conversation with that attitude, but I’m sympathetic.
But just say that. It’s enough reason to not use something. Stop there.
When you have to also make a bunch of bad faith arguments about the actual functionality that just don’t hold up it undermines what I think is the more valid (though still murky, as you pointed out) concern of supporting harmful attitudes.
Brave as a product seems fine. It’s not the second coming of privacy jesus. It’s not the absolute dumpster fire of browser purgatory. It’s fine.
Apparently one of the main developers of GrapheneOS is a bit unhinged (see the Louis Rossmann video about that if interested), but he makes quality software so I highly recommend other people use it.
I’m never going to agree with everyone who makes software I use, I only care about the quality of the software. In fact, I very much disagree with the politics espoused by those who make lemmy, yet I’ve contributed code and spend a lot of time here.
Firefox is my main browser, but I use Brave when I need a chromium-based browser. I disagree with the politics of a lot of people at Mozilla, and I disagree with Brendan Eich as well. Both are high quality browsers, so I use them.
In this case it makes a difference because there has been an alarming increase in harmful lies made by the far right. This is a purposeful spread of misinformation that many people hesitate to get involved with in any way, and for good reason.
I do not trust the creator of Brave to be aligned with the far right and to still be guided by ethical conduct that I can trust. If you align yourself with people who lie and put others in danger for profit and control, you're condoning such behavior and may be capable of it yourself.
I always recommend brave to less tech-savvy people,
Why exactly? The tricks like "optional things to click" are explicitly targeted on less tech savvy people and defeat the point of privacy focused browsers.
I've literally installed Firefox and uBlock Origin for elderly people, and walked some other elderly people through installing them. In, like, 2 minutes. This is not difficult.
Just getting somebody on Firefox with ublock origin is enough IMO. I’m not going to also remove their ability to use Google search. Especially if they’re older. I am very privacy oriented but you have to make some compromises for people lol.
Those are choices, not requirements. Using Firefox is better than using Chrome. Doing the extra stuff is even better, but if doing that means someone gives up and goes back to Chrome, that doesn't help, either.
If these people really want to ban technology based on the views of the author then they might as well live in the stone age. And even then the tools they used was probably invented by some nasty people. The US space program was built by literal Nazi scientist. Most of the research on how humans survive in space was based on experiments done to Jews. The first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research are the HeLa cells taken from a black woman named Henrietta Lacks. She did not consent to have those cells taken nor was she or her family compensated. Are we gonna boycott cancer research because of this injustice? No? Only the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
You mentioned that politics should not be mentioned with software. Consider Hans Reiser, the author of reiserfs. He murdered his wife and was sent to prison. Would you be okay with running code written by a murderer on your computer? How about a vase made by a murderer in your house? Would you enjoy the voice of a murderer in music?
It is an extreme example, for sure. I thought I’d mention it to test your moral boundaries with open-ended questions. Everything is subjective, and morality is fluid. There are quite a few people that decided not to use reiserfs from the circumstances, though. Even though it wouldn’t make as much of a difference to you personally, I’m sure you could probably see how this matters to some.
Go look up all the nasty stuff stallman's said and firmly believes in. I don't see people boycotting gnu which is a vital part of linux as a result of this
People are already aware of the shit Stallman does. Hell, you don't need to read the shit he writes, dude's a real-life creep.
And besides: GNU project's tools have continued popularity despite him. Do I need to remind you of XEmacs? EGLIBC? EGCS? A whole lot of projects that reminded GNU equivalents to "oh yeah, maybe we should get gud instead of being an inferiour code base" (XEmacs) or "oh yeah, this fork is clearly superiour, we should merge and call it official" (EGLIBC, EGCS). And now people are like "Hey guys, I just found this compiler called Clang and-" and GNU is like "FFFFF-"
[Ad experiments and crypto] is opt in.
If you download an ad blocker, I'm pretty certain that you don't want to "opt in" to any advertisements by default.
Hey, you thought that was easy to debunk? How about this: When Brave advertises that content creators are able to accept BAT crypto tokens as donations, should the content creators themselves first opt in? They most certainly didn't. Brave specifically said that they would accept donations on behalf of all content creators and held the donations on their behalf until they would opt in.
If these content creators never would actually opt in, what then, I wonder? Did they just deceive the fans of those content creators?
This is dangerously close to the whole rhetoric NFT bros had during the peak. "Why, someone made illegitimate NFTs of your creations? Well you SHOULD have minted those NFTs while you had the chance. Oh, you prefer to NOT participate in this whole NFT ecosystem on principle? Have fun staying poor!"
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