You meet them online, but they’re a vocal minority. Especially when a smaller phone means a smaller battery and worse camera system, two of the consistently top priorities for consumers.

They are not conflicting. Yes oil production is higher but that’s mostly in response to OPEC producing less.

Overall fossil fuel use is in decline. Probably not enough decline to arrest the greenhouse effect, but that ship has already sailed.

Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.

But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.

Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

Maybe you don’t care, but the OSI definition does.

In fairness, they didn’t release anything open at all.

Well it definitely does. But it’s still a dark pattern, especially because you usually have no warning about it when you buy the device.

There’s still shovelware with non-carrier phones.

Of course not. Google is a competitor to Facebook.

But much of the long tail of Android phones bundle Facebook shovelware.

Posting your band’s tour dates on Facebook doesn’t really even change your privacy status that much.

Whether you have a Facebook account or not, Facebook tracks you around the web. Data brokers sell your data. Your cell phone company sells your location and browsing history, etc.

People over-estimate how much not using any given social media app really matters.

Now granted, installing it on your phone gives them a level of data they wouldn’t have from a web browser. That’s probably why Threads is phone-only.

They will do it to us, not just Threads users.

Do, what, specifically? How will they affect that your instance shows you?

Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea ^.

Should a listserv block people who are subscribed to another listserv then?

Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users ^.

An email is a message from a user at a domain. A fediverse post is a message from a user at a domain.

Content is public, but to a big email provider, it’s not much more data. Gmail filters based on identical-looking messages from an “unestablished” domain. If you came up with a way to filter spam on the fediverse, it would likely look very similar.

If Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever picks up critical mass, I can guarantee you there will be a shit ton of spam, misinformation, disinformation, and scammy nonesense coming from a long tail of instances. Much of the garbage will, thanks to large language models, look pretty human, too. The only real roadblock to it will be defederation from “unestablished” instances and even that will be unreliable at best.

There really isn’t a good solution to it, at least one that isn’t invasive in ways we won’t like.

They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.

It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse. That is true with or without trouble from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. If you wrote a machine learning algorithm to find spam, your ML would come to the same conclusion. There’s no obvious solution to that.

Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.

Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.

This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools ^.

Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.

ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.

ISPs and Instances both offer you access to a wider network. That one exists on a network level is another matter. If there were a multitude of ISPs, like there was in the dialup era, would you have wanted them to decide what domains resolve?

its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam

That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.

What email is really suffering from is a failure of the network to combat abuse. That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.

I disagree.

Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP “take a stand” against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.

“Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app,” the Reddit worker said.

This reminds me of the “average user” Comcast would talk about when they introduced price discrimination metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.

Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there’s a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It’s hard to “monetize” users through someone else’s app, so they’ve basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.

How do they determine you evaded anyway?