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Perry

@ Perry @kbin.social

Posts
31
Comments
23
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Weekly Crowdfunding Roundup: October 29 2023

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  • A quick disclaimer regarding Backerkit: They have redesigned their website again, which of course broke the crawler. I will try to get it working again as soon as possible, but until then, there won't be any Backerkit projects included in the lists.

  • Weekly Crowdfunding Roundup: July 30 2023

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  • It still looks a bit quirky in Kbin sadly (especially on mobile where it gets very squished), but at least it should work in Lemmy now.

  • Weekly Crowdfunding Roundup: July 30 2023

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  • So it seems like the table formatting bug as finally been fixed in Kbin. In other words, the inline lists are back!

  • Twitter now blocking all DMs from non-Twitter Blue subscribers by default

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  • This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the "free" web that we are used to.

    No, I'm not saying that selling out one's personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn't sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.

  • Alphabetically sorted months. But WHY?

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  • They are probably reusing a component that happens to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it's happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It's also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn't have test coverage or wasn't actually part of the specification.

  • Removed

    Lawyers using ChatGPT cite 6 fake cases

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  • Repeat after me: ChatGPT is a language model not a digital librarian.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won't. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.

  • Reddit is replacing / modifying the Reddit gold feature, what are your thoughts ?

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  • So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

    Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

    It's funny, I'm not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.

  • Big Tech can transfer Europeans’ data to US in win for Facebook and Google

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  • I guess it depends on how this "Data Protection Review Court" actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn't seem to really matter much to US agencies so we'll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

    Nevertheless, it's good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We've had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.

  • Weekly Crowdfunding Roundup: July 9 2023

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  • So for some reason the inlined tables didn't format at all in this post. I'm generating them automatically, so I have no idea why they didn't work this time. Probably some project that contained some invalid character in the name or description.

    The Google Docs still works however. Meanwhile, I'm gonna see if I can find what the issue could be.

    Edit: It seems like there's a bug in Kbin that somehow breaks the tables (even when posting to a Lemmy instance). Until that is fixed, I guess the Google Docs will have to do, sadly.

  • Meta’s Threads app is a privacy nightmare that won’t launch in EU yet

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  • I know that is a popular narrative in the Fediverse community right now, but I honestly find it unreasonable. Google and Meta didn't kill XMPP, they abandoned it and without them it went right back to where it was originally: barely used whatsoever. The Fediverse already has a small, but relatively healthy user base. Meta can abandon ActivityPub or twist it into something unacceptable, but all that will do is bring us back to where we are right now.

    All that is irrelevant, though, because the difference is that Meta is legally required to incorporate interoperability with other services and that's why they are going with ActivityPub. Not from the good of their hearts, but because they need to and is in their own self interest to keep alive.

    Right now, they are early adopters of ActivityPub and have a very early strong position there. When they federate they will be by several magnitudes the largest instance on the network. Whether we like it or not, they will inevitably be a major player in dictating the future of ActivityPub. Thus, they want to keep ActivityPub alive because they want to make sure that becomes the future EU mandated industry standard for SoMe. Otherwise, some other technology will be chosen, one that might not be lead by Meta, but by Google, Apple or ByteDance.

    Note, that I'm not arguing whether this is good or bad, but only what I predict is happening.

  • Meta’s Threads app is a privacy nightmare that won’t launch in EU yet

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  • Interestingly it seems like the main reason is not the enormous data gathering list that has been posted a few times, but rather the connection to Instagram and whether the two services are allowed to share user data.

    Meta is also using Threads as a test bench for the Digital Markets Act, so they are probably holding off the launch until they can get federation going.

  • Threads already has over 95 million posts, 30 million signups

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  • Meta has several billion active users across their platforms. 30M is nothing to them.

    Also don’t forget that we’re talking about a microblog, so it will inherently generate a large amount of individual posts, much more so than e.g Instagram. The quality is however likely very low initially and a lot of users are probably just trying out the current talk of the day.

    I do suspect that Threads will probably grow to a few hundred million users before the end of the year; anything less would probably be regarded as a colossal failure for Meta.

  • Stop using Google Analytics, warns Sweden's privacy watchdog, as it issues over $1M in fines

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  • We migrated to Matomo, which has very similar functionality as GA, but can be self hosted and is GDPR compatible. It can even be configured to run without consent since it doesn’t build a third party ad profile, which should actually improve the data coverage a bit.

    The tracking API is a little different than GA so we had to redo some things to get all the events to trigger properly (especially for e-commerce), but for basic usage statistics it’s relatively plug and play in the tag manager.

    https://matomo.org/

  • Threads attracts 30M users in 24 hours despite design flaws, privacy concerns | Ars Technica

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  • I'm guessing it's a poorly worded way to say that Threads will reach 1 billion users before Twitter. Otherwise, I don't know. Facebook has almost 3 billion users.

  • Threads attracts 30M users in 24 hours despite design flaws, privacy concerns | Ars Technica

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  • You use an Instagram account to register a Threads account, but they are two different services. After the Threads account is linked, there is however no way to remove that account without also removing the Instagram account.

    Just for comparison, there are something like 2.3 BILLION Instagram accounts.

  • I don't get people that are here in the fediverse and want to bring over the content that is on FB, IG, TikTok, etc.

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  • I don't want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.

    But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger "main" network, and everything in-between.

  • Threads gained 10 million new users in seven hours

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  • Just to put it in perspective, there are about 15 million users total in the entire Fediverse, of which ~9 million are on Mastodon.

  • What will Meta gain from fediversing?

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  • There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.

    I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.

    Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.

    If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.

    I don't think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.