icydefiance

icydefiance, 10 months ago

Why do you think a large corporation would just share their content to people who aren't viewing their ads?

They're not just being generous. Corporations are not benevolent. So what are they expecting to get from it?

Here's the answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

icydefiance, 10 months ago

EEE wouldn't work on something that is popular. The whole point is to destroy it before it becomes popular. Furthermore, corporations aren't okay with smaller alternatives existing at all. Their goal is to have a monopoly. Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.

The "gatekeeper" theory has some merit too, but not in that way. You can find the definition of a "gatekeeper" on the European Commission's website and I don't see how federation would affect it at all. That said, gatekeepers are required to "allow end users to install third party apps or app stores that use or interoperate with the operating system of the gatekeeper", and federation would meet that criteria.

Still, we already saw Twitter and Reddit move to paid APIs, and apparently that doesn't violate the DMA, so it's hard to believe that Meta would use a more open protocol without some other motivation.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

I can't see why they would. Apple doesn't care about you, but they probably do care about retaliation from the French government.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they're irrelevant.

We know what Meta's goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn't matter. We shouldn't give them the opportunity to try anything.

We should be scared of Meta, and we should keep them as far away as possible. Anything else is reckless and stupid at best.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation

Yes, it is. Read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising.

They can do that without integrating with the fediverse. The reason they're going to integrate with the fediverse is to embrace, extend, and extinguish.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

It's not easier for them, and once there's enough people to matter then it's too late to kill it. The fediverse is growing, and they want to stop that before the fediverse is big enough to matter.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

Packages are always up to date, so I don't need to hunt down alternative downloads to get the latest version of the software I use.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

Antitheists oppose religion, not gods. I'm an atheist because there's no reason to believe that anything supernatural exists, and I'm an antitheist because I think belief without evidence is inherently harmful.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

Trump removes inspector general overseeing $2 trillion coronavirus relief package days after he was appointed: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-relief-trump-removes-inspector-general-overseeing-2-trillion-package.html

Inspectors general warn that Trump administration is blocking scrutiny of coronavirus rescue programs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector-general-oversight-mnuchin-cares-act/

icydefiance, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

• Most corners are more rounded by default, especially buttons, which are pills now instead of rectangles. You could make them pills before and they offered examples showing how to do it, but hardly anyone did.
• Buttons are a little bigger, and there's a little more padding between most things.
• There are more transition effects, making apps feel a bit more fluid and "interesting", in a good way, I think.
• Nav bars and rails do a much better job of highlighting the active item, by adding a pill-shaped background behind it. (This one addresses a frequent complaint that I received when using material components on websites.)
• The rest is somewhere between "exactly the same" and "really minor", but the minor changes vaguely contribute to a different feel from before.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

Allowing bad actors to advertise themselves is highlighting them. Banning them and deleting their communities is the opposite of highlighting them.

icydefiance, 10 months ago

Unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to support Nvidia on Linux unless you have a large enough team to test each of their GPUs individually and find workarounds for all of the bugs. Their Linux drivers are really bad.

The bigger projects have been able do that, but if it's a relatively new project with only a handful of people working on it, and it's not used on the steam deck, there's basically no chance it'll support Nvidia.