Good. The more people leave the cesspit, the better off they’ll be.

Inb4 some speciously-reasoned lawsuit from the “Department of Government Efficiency” comes for BlueSky alleging anticompetitive practices or something equally ridiculous.

Discord at least has community moderation tools. Xitter is just a town square where all the Neo-nazis and conspiracy theorists get louder megaphones than everyone else.

But the “my friends are there” is such a weak argument, imo. BlueSky exists. Spoutible exists. Mastodon exists. If they’re IRL friends, they can just regroup elsewhere. If they’re only online friends, you can make new ones pretty easily.

“My friends are there” is just a tacit admission that they don’t mind sharing space with Neo-nazis.

I know I can’t ever go back. I donate to my instance, and I actually feel good about it, because I know it’s not going into the pocket of some faceless corporation who’s beholden to its shareholders instead of its customers.

Hardly. The Fediverse spans multiple apps and services, and it existed before Elon bought Twitter and it will continue existing regardless of what the billionaires do, because it’s not run by just one person.

The whole point is decentralization, not growth, so unless the billionaires can take out every server hosting an instance, the Fediverse isn’t going anywhere.

Yeah, but you’re not a shitty billionaire who’s directly contributing to and accelerating the decline of humanity, so you get a pass.

You mean head of DOGE? Because we live in the timeline where a terminally online edgelord with the brain of a 14yo and the body of a 54yo makes meme government agencies.

Anyway, get your passport now. They’re good for ten years, enough to last at least through the tentative end of Trump’s circus.

But that’s not as exciting as promising to end something that’s barely happening in the first place.

People elected Trump to be entertaining, not for sensible governance.

You get the thing that represents all cyber truck owners: a lollipop, or as it’s also known—a “sucker.”

I’ve “convinced” ChatGPT that it was both sentient and conscious in the span of about 10min, despite it having explicit checks in place to avoid those kinds of statements. It doesn’t mean I was correct, just that it’s a “dumb” computer that has no choice but to ultimately follow the logic presented in syllogisms.

These things don’'t know what they’re saying; they’re just putting coherent sentences together based on whatever algorithm guides that process. It’s not intelligent in that it is doing something novel, it’s just a decent facsimile to human information processing. It has no mechanism to determine the reasonability or consequences of what it generates.

Okay. They fed Google’s Notebook AI a book called “The History of Philosophy Encyclopedia” and got the LLM to write a podcast about it where it “thinks” humans are useless.

Congratulations? Like, so what? It’s not like it’s a secret that its output depends on its input and training data. A “kill all humans” output is so common at this point, especially when you have a vested interest in trying to generate content, that it’s banal.

Color me unimpressed.

Old article, btw. This is from Sept 2024. I get that’s what he promised, and while I think he’s a complete asshat, let’s not discount that he and Trump said and will say anything to appear smart, capable, and as if they have a plan.

Time will tell if this actually comes to pass, but I’m not actually going to hold my breath for this one.

Yep, not an unexpected outcome. Enshittification usually has a direct correlation with profitability; most people simply love being the product, because the alternative takes a little effort.

Reddit is still hot garbage, though, and that fact is only growing worse according to my friend group that still goes there on occasion. I much prefer Fedi.

I dunno if I’d even consider them an industry leader, unless you break down their ubiquity by industry category (in which they lead graphic design and maybe video editing, iirc). They lead phone sales in the US by a lot, but their overall desktop share is still relatively small (<10%), and their global footprint is buoyed only by iOS (which is still below Windows and Android).

I would say they’re an innovator, and they push certain companies to innovate, but they don’t really lead by that many metrics.

There’s a subset of the Linux/FOSS/etc. community who are Conservative, misogynistic, racist, and/or otherwise general bigots. Compare the Ventoy-bros against the Elon-bros, and you’ll see a similar pattern of behavior.

I don’t personally understand it, since development is still sometimes seen as “work for weirdo nerds,” so you’d think they would understand what it feels like to be rejected or bullied, but here we are. They manage to stay under the radar, because there’s usually no reason to discuss politics or philosophy when you’re debugging code.