I think overall it’s not a bad suggestion, and yes Photon looks very sleek, and I have even contributed a language translation for it.

However, my main concern is: what would happen if the main dev loses interest and drops support of the interface? Lemmy backend may add a new feature that either breaks Photon, or Photon can’t make use of it until updated. If the development of this frontend could be more integrated with the Lemmy project team and funded, I would be less concerned.

A lot of the comments including yours sound gatekeep-y to me but I have to say I kind of feel the same way.

Everyone who has come here and stuck around found their way through the jank and is joining an exclusive club of high-quality discussion. Like Linux, once you can get past the basics, you can customize your experience nearly limitlessly, but it takes effort, trial and error to get to something you like.

Yours to make, yours to break.

Ngl, it’s kind of cool! I put one of the two public facing images I have published of myself and it’s trying to guess some details, some right, a few hilariously wrong.

A human or AI sleuth could probably figure out where I live within 10km with information on the internet, but I just have to live with that. It’s a tricky balance between putting enough out there to show you’re not just an AI vs. not giving out so much info that an AI could convincingly impersonate you.

Information about me is scattered across the Net like horcruxes, and you’d have to know someone I know to easily piece things together. I am worried that AI has the ability to analyze these large datasets faster than ever before, whether it is my writing style or anything else, but it will still be computationally intensive with a large dataset to be able discern any details with confidence.

Hehehe, we all know how that’s like. I’m sure this income will truly be used to improve their services and support robust and reliable API infrastructure.

Ha! Hahaha! Hahahahaha!

Do you want AI to push garbage/useless code to push garbage/useless metrics? Because this is how you get your most skilled employees to do that.

Perhaps, but it all depends on the judge’s decision whether X corp’s argument is completely bullshit or not.

For your Valve example, in the Subscriber Agreement you can terminate the agreement, or Valve can terminate it for a violation of the Agreement rules, with no refunds. For a termination without a valid reason, “no refunds” does not necessarily apply. I’m not saying it would be hard for Valve to come up with a bullshit reason to cancel anyone’s account on a whim or to change the terms so that they get broken easily, but it’s not automatic and courts can assign value to a specific license you have access to, based on the jurisdiction, in particular in places like Quebec, Australia, and the EU.

9C. Termination by Valve

Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.

Addendum: I wasn’t totally serious with the second paragraph, nothing may stop X from banning The Onion/Infowars or whatever after the transfer is complete. But trying to disrupt the transfer itself over it seems a little ridiculous.

Ok. The accounts can be withheld, suspended or whatever.

The Onion is therefore entitled to due compensation from X Corp., as this was considered to be included in the bid. X can have that NFT for just 47 billion dollars, what a deal! /s

Technology like the loom, the steam shovel, the aeroplane, rocketry, computers, nuclear energy, the internet, and now AI, are each tools that have really changed our world, and put many different people out of work, but it has also reduced a lot of back-breaking, time-consuming work, so it has allowed our world to go a lot faster. From an excavator being able to move a lot more dirt in a day than 5 men with shovels, AI can help with getting the initial ideas of the creative process, can help with parsing initial queries from customers, a first pass filter of a huge repository of legal documents, be a patient teacher for beginner programming or other subjects, and so on. Each tool can have been overpromised to do everything, but that doesn’t mean it had no purpose.

With that said, any of these tools and technologies can be used for bad as much as they can be used for good. And combatting that doesn’t just mean waiting around hoping for the people entrenched in power using tech to satiate their own personal gain, to suddenly reject their gains to commit them for the good of society. It means organizing to protect your neighbour. It means sharing the benefit of these tools with others, using them for good, and improving them for others.

My point is that it’s not AI that will cause society to crash, it’s greed and corporate greed, who are being assisted by the unrealistic hype over AI.

That’s the spirit!

The whole point of Strava is getting in data from you, other riders and other companies’ gear and putting it together.

These new terms say that same data that they got from other sources they now can only keep it to themselves, and show you only what they specifically permit to show you.

Tick tock, the hundreds of billions of dollars tossed into the AI hole is looking for its return, any second now…

I use misskey too, but I wouldn’t call user recommendations the same as BlueSky Starter Packs or this. It’s more of a starting point for specific topics rather than just generally popular users or algorithmically determined recommendations. Instead it’s a set of lists of curated users for people to get their feed started, who will then follow more people that those users boost.

Unrelated: Maybe it’s just my Japanese misskey instance and followings, but most people there just say they woke up, had a nice meal, came back from work, or just the random thought on their mind, and a lot of supporting reactions under each.

Heck yeah! This is what I love about the Fediverse, we all don’t have to wait for one team to figure it out.

Since Multi-Communities seem a ways away, Lemmy could do something similar with Community Subscription packs, where people with different niche interests could follow a number of communities related to a topic. Right now it’s not always easy to find which instance has the most active ones.

This process is indeed much clunkier than bluesky and not really accessible to a new user, but it’s a good start and perhaps some servers or 3rd party apps could streamline this eventually? Even just going account-by-account in the list a dozen times and following each one manually would fill an empty feed pretty well.

Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.

When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.

Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount of things that could be better about Mastodon, Lemmy and other Fediverse software and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could “buy” Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.

Interesting choice… Musk has a bone to pick with Microsoft so even if the FTC gets hobbled, this investigation may get to survive the changing of the administration.

I mean old, un-Musked Twitter was what people wanted. Mastodon is similar, and I like it but it’s not Twitter (which personally I couldn’t get into even in its heyday).

That is what we have now, but clearly people are averse to making a choice that they are not technically inclined to know how big or small the consequences of that are. My solution is a spitball one with obvious flaws, but essentially it is that the instance is picked randomly out of a group of very closely, if not identically aligned servers.

You’d have different domain names to get people used to the concept. John Doe would sign up, and become john.doe@apple.server.hostname, Jane Doe would sign up and become jane.doe@banana.server.hostname