In the few short hours since I started using #Threads, #DuckDuckGo has already blocked over 200 data tracking attempts. These include things like "headphone status" and "screen density."
This happened to me this morning. And because the link was from a work email but I was logged in on my personal account, Edge wanted me to sign in to view it, requiring time-wasted on a 2FA process for no good reason whatsoever (obv I just closed Edge and copied the link over to Firefox).
The loss of productivity is large regardless of which method you choose to view the link. May this be the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I am fuming.
It's difficult to get China and India off coal because they're doing most of the world's manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But 'we' exported manufacturing to Asia and 'we' buy the products the coal is used for. 'We' don't get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for 'our' excessive consumption.
EEE is the risk, and surely their intent. But pre-emptive defederation from an instance that already has 1.6bn sign-ons is doing to ourselves exactly what google did to XMPP. If there are no independent instances allowing access to the mega-network, people who want the mega-network have nowhere else to go.
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore...
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
Mass defederation is just giving up before the fight starts. The fight may not be winnable, of course. But making the fediverse invisible to Meta users is exactly how google killed XMPP.
And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.
It won't kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.
There isn't a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.
That happens whether they are defederated or not. They have 1.6bn users, the rest of the fediverse is a rounding error.
This is what happened with XMPP:
In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. ...
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
Even if the entire fediverse defederates from the Meta instance, they have a huge network which already exists. And people who want the things that a huge network brings will want to be part of it. Mass defederation will just push some people onto the Meta instance because it's the only place a huge network is operating (and many already have an Insta account so they're already on it anyway).
That's not to say that federating with them is necessarily better. Some users will prefer a smaller network. Some instances will want better moderation than Meta are likely to provide. Moderation issues might make it nigh on impossible for most instances to federate anyway.
But you can't stop them dominating the fediverse by universally defederating. That is not an option. Gmail got big enough to not need XMPP federation; Meta and other potential mega-corp instances are already huge, they don't need us at all.
The best hope might be for several mega-corp instances to hold each other hostage. Google could kill XMPP because none of its users understood that they were part of a federation and barely noticed when the tiny proportion of non-google users disappeared. But if there's a Meta instance and a Google instance and a Mozilla instance ... it's hard for one of them to unilaterally withdraw without handing their users over to a competitor.
More sense than what? No one's claimed they learned it from us and we've only just found out about it, so we didn't learn it from them.
It isn't really nature vs nurture, it's nature interacting with nurture. Steve Jones, the biologist explained it beautifully with reference to Siamese cats:
Siamese cats are light brown with dark brown fur at the tips of their ears, feet and tail. But if you raise one in a very warm environment, they will be light brown all over. A very cold environment, they will be dark brown all over. There's a gene switching the fur colour but its action depends on the temperature.
There are many different ways genes and environment interact, there's no real 'argument' here. It is simply true and, because genes and environment are often so closely linked, it's often complicated and sometimes impossible to tease out what's causing what.
I might. But ferry companies are not generally allowed to.
The dose makes the poison. It is carcinogenic but current estimates are that you'd need to drink several litres a day to meaningfully increase your risk.
There are other good reasons to find a healthier drink but this isn't one of them. Most artificial sweeteners have some kind of risk attached so there is no point switching to a different diet soda.
Google killed XMPP by being the vast majority of the network and then defederating from the rest. Most of the gmail users didn't even notice anything had happened.
I see a couple of differences here. One is that it should be obvious to even the most casual of users that other instances exist. And the second is that other mega-corps have said they'll build instances too. With multiple very large instances, they may end up holding each other hostage, for fear of losing users to each other when so many people have multiple logins just because they have an account with one of the mega-corps.
One thing is for sure. Insta has 1.6bn users and it doesn't need to federate with anyone at all; the fediverse is a rounding error to them. Some people will want the massiveness of the network, others will want better moderation than the mega-corps are likely to offer, and some will prefer smaller networks anyway. There will be as many reactions as there are instances to react. And that will have to be fine.
You wouldn't stop to think about it. But how is it even possible for a 7 year old to fall overboard in the first place? Ferries are full of kids running around, something must have been very wrong for this to happen at all?
What fuck up? If we were doing our own manufacturing, we'd be using the coal instead. We just wouldn't be able to blame other countries for our consumption.