That's not true. Instagram has 1.6bn users and all can use their Instagram logins to sign in to Threads. The roughly 1% who have signed up already have chosen to activate Threads, it's not done automatically.
Ah yes, those well known scientists with absolutely no agenda.
Come the fuck on, this is ridiculous.
I doubt he's ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it's a little unfair to bash him for this.
Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn't need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it's done.
The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.
The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.
Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won't do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.
This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I'm starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.
In solidarity with Naples' economic losses, we must force every port to ban super yachts. Apart from Blackpool, which needs the cash.
The Mosuo (a Himalayan Chinese ethnic group) and the Himba (the Namibia and Angola border region) are both very interesting in this respect.
The Mosuo do not have marriage (although their now extinct aristocracy and nearly extinct priesthood did/do). They live in their family home all their lives. Mosuo women have sexual freedom; no one cares how many partners they have or whether there's more than one relationship ongoing simultaneously, and it's not always certain who someone's father is (the matriarchs keep tabs on relationships to help ward off accidental incest). Fathers are not expected to contribute; they raise the children of their sisters and contribute financially to their birth-family household. But, despite the freedom to have many partners on the go with no adverse social consequences at all, most Mosuo tend towards serial monogamy, with some relationships lasting years, others for a lifetime. Those that move to urban China for work tend to adopt traditional marriage because the Mosuo lifestyle is not practical without a whole household to help care for the children.
The Himba, on the other hand, do have marriage and, polyamory for men who are wealthy enough to support more than one wife. But wives are free to have as many other partners as they wish and many women, married or unmarried, will have several on the go at the same time. If a woman wants to sleep with a married man, she gets permission from his wife. Women will often have children before they get married and those they have after marriage are not necessarily fathered by their husbands. It's not an issue because they're herders; children are a source of wealth (more goats can be herded) so the men do not care who the fathers of their children are.
I'm no anthropologist, and I hope I've done these groups justice with my brief descriptions. It's a fascinating topic, especially with respect to polyamory in a rich world context.
Your knee jerked you right out of context.
C'mon, this is the NYPost. Their own link to the wayback machine shows the ad's been up since 2020.
Voat died because it was landed with a big chunk of the toxicity ejected from reddit. This isn't the same thing at all.
The risk to the Fediverse from huge commercial players is described well here: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
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. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that).
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.
And it's not an accident:
What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market."
Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba.
This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book "Rebel Code" and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never caused by bad luck.
Misleading title.
Reddit only handed over the details of one user
Reddit pointed out that the anonymous speech rights of its users shouldn’t be violated, as long as the filmmakers have other ways to obtain the information.
It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company
Uh huh.
It's a term that originates with the left. Specifically, those who broke with the USSR over imperialist invasions, referring to those who did not. More broadly, it refers to the authoritarian left (as opposed to the anarchist left).