OneRedFox
@OneRedFox@beehaw.org
- Comment on She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook. 2 weeks ago:
BTW, the Fediverse equivalent is called Friendica and it also supports more platform protocols than just ActivityPub.
- Comment on Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of AI Datasets Now [404 Media] 2 weeks ago:
If you post in public, it can be scraped; that’s true on Bluesky as well as the Fediverse and also on the centralized corporate platforms. It’s something you have to be mindful of when posting. Using privacy-conscious walled chat apps is the better option for people who want to avoid that, but even those can have leakers in the group chat.
- Comment on Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web 1 month ago:
Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.
- Comment on Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers 1 month ago:
Occasionally when I’m searching for something, I’ll check out some Reddit links and honestly it’s a crapshoot as to whether half of the comments have been deleted or not. Useful search results are getting to be a pain to come by.
- Comment on Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers 1 month ago:
Yeah, it’s really weird that people keep acting like Reddit hasn’t been astroturfed to shit for years at this point. I wouldn’t trust the product reviews I see there.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn’t very much, but if they’re paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 months ago:
That’s a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.
- Comment on Nintendo and Pokémon are suing Palworld maker Pocketpair 2 months ago:
Hopefully Pocketpair wins, because they made the better monster catching game. I’m still reeling from how bad the performance is in Scarlet/Violet.
- Comment on Google violated antitrust laws to dominate online search, rules US judge | Google 4 months ago:
Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.
- Comment on Google violated antitrust laws to dominate online search, rules US judge | Google 4 months ago:
Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.
Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?
- Comment on Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools? 5 months ago:
I’m currently rebuilding my math foundation and part of that process was tracking down high quality educational resources with passionate instructors, rigor, and entertainment factor (because I want stuff to recommend to parents). I did eventually find something that was better than what I got in grade school, but I have to say that the Pythagorean Theorem just isn’t going to be as interesting as social media feeds and entertainment products custom tailored to my preferences. No teacher is realistically going to be able to compete with the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry for attention and tech companies are abusing psychology research to make their shit as addictive as possible. It’s not the biggest problem with the US educational system, but it is one of many, so I’m down with restricting smartphone access at schools.
- Comment on Why are US states, school districts banning smartphones in schools? 5 months ago:
Based on my interactions with teachers, the administrative class that runs these schools are cowards who don’t want to deal with angry parents, nor the liability if the phones get confiscated and then stolen/damaged. There’s also a lot of parents who want to text their kids during the school day and get mad when they can’t. A lot of teachers have given up since the higher ups won’t back them up. This happened around 2015 or so, when smartphones became ubiquitous.
- Comment on Here's what's happening to ad blockers in Google Chrome (and other browsers) 5 months ago:
Firefox has been great since Quantum released. They finally fixed the performance issues and it’s still more flexible in what it can do than the Chromium browsers.
- Comment on Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better? 7 months ago:
I’d say that the Indie game experience can still match that. Doesn’t have to be old titles.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.
Something that has become very apparent to me over the past year of migrating away from the big 6 sites into the dark forest is that, no honestly, the internet isn’t that; the big 6 sites are that. Places like Neocities still exist and have lots of traffic and you can go there and have an interesting time. I’ve encountered more cultural diversity on the Fediverse than I had in the past decade of using Reddit. There’s still cool stuff and interesting communities; it’s just hard to find because search engines are increasingly useless. We need better discoverability; if we fix that, then we’re golden.
- Comment on Are We Watching The Internet Die? 9 months ago:
It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.
- Comment on Are We Watching The Internet Die? 9 months ago:
We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
- Comment on Where have all the websites gone? 11 months ago:
Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…
Well, something that can be done is having search engines that grab from a wide variety of sources. The go-to FOSS example of this would be SearXNG, so if someone is interested in a project like that, then this would be a good starting point.
- Comment on Where have all the websites gone? 11 months ago:
I agree with the author for the most part, but I don’t think it’s just “us.” I would say that discoverability in general is just a lot worse now due to SEO gentrification and search engines facing enshittification. There’s still cool projects like Neocities around, but if it weren’t for networking I’d have no idea they exist. When I type “build a website” into DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I just get links to squarespace, wix, godaddy, and a few listicles. In order to curate cool stuff, you have to be able to find it first; have new tools popped up that facilitate this? What are the new heuristics for discovery?
- Comment on Why Linux is Best for Most People 11 months ago:
I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME a couple years ago and there hasn’t been any issues with that. Especially now that a lot of stuff that used to be desktop apps has moved to the browser, it’s more viable than ever.
- Comment on 8BitDo stuffed 16 buttons into its hand-crampingly small Micro controller 1 year ago:
But why? Nintendo controllers are already pretty small.