I honestly get it. Apple has been excruciatingly stubborn to adopt RCS.
I think in the past this was excusable because RCS has been such a moving target. First it was the carriers disagreeing about how to implement, and dragging their feet, then Google got tired of waiting for carriers and sort of bypassed them. But even then RCS is messy when it’s part carrier, part Google, etc. Even Google Fi doesn’t support RCS if you want its text-from-computer function working! Then came e2e encryption, which has been haphazard.
At this point though, it is starting to solidify. Apple should implement it, and if Apple drags their feet, regulators should intervene. Don’t rule out that happening in the EU, either.
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’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.
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.
I'm tempted to say it's better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it's not.
What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that's anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.
And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There's no shift+select, ban.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to be here, and Lemmy's great, and there's far less toxicity (so far). All I'm saying is, (1) there's work to do, (2) don't gloat.
“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.