Thanks, I appreciate it! It took a stupidly long time. :V
On some level, it’s probably not that important that people understand all this stuff, but I think the most dangerous thing is people believing that their data will be protected if Threads gets defederated. Any other confusion is basically harmless, but that’s the one thing where people have a false sense of security, because Meta has exactly the same access to your data whether or not they get defederated.
No, I don’t want to? Weird take.
Meta is categorically evil, but the pretty obvious gain from federation is the same as it is federating with anything else: content. Threads has people posting on it, some of those people say interesting things … the end.
That’s not to say that outweighs the downsides, like some of that content will also undoubtedly be hateful bigoted trash, and the moderation load of suddenly dealing with an order of magnitude more posts will be a huge strain on fediverse admins who choose to federate, but there’s undeniably something to gain.
This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there’d be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.
In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don’t matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it’s tough to pin down an exact start date because “When did it become the fediverse?”), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There’s any number of things Meta might want, but I don’t think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.
I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn’t threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we’re not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they’re not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU’s new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse–which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr–and saying “See, we’re all on equal footing! We don’t control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users.”
It comes from Fortune, they can’t conceive of something that’s not a business.
Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
If nobody has ever subscribed to a foreign instance’s community/magazine before, it won’t show up on your home instance. Currently, the best way to pull it into your local instance is to copy its web address on the other site into your local search.
e.g. If you wanted to pull in kbin.social’s AskKbin from lemmy.world you’d find its URL, https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin, and paste that address into your home instance’s search box. As long as somebody has done this once, AskKbin will now show up in regular community lists, searches, etc.
Yeah, they can vote and reply and all of that and others who remain federated will see their interactions, but you or any other server who defederates them won’t.
Yeah, my understanding is that defederation prevents any incoming communication, so you won’t see any posts or comments that come from lemmy.bullshit, however users from lemmy.bullshit will still see all of your comments and posts from lemmy.world unless they choose to defederate you back.
Does EarthBound count? It’s sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There’s ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there’s several cities to explore.
It’s such a shame we don’t get many modern indie interpretations of these single-screen racers. There’s a clone on Wii U and Switch (and probably other platforms) called Rock 'N Racing Off Road DX which I played to completion even though it was buggier, uglier and less fun than Super Off Road just because I’ve already played SOR so much. The game crashed immediately after the final race and I promptly deleted it.
The last one I know that was really great was Konami’s super underrated Driift Mania for the original Wii. Great handling, fun tracks and colorful visuals made it one of my favorite WiiWare games, which sadly today means you can’t legally get it anywhere. The craziest feature was the 8-way multiplayer using four Wii Remotes and four Classic Controllers, so each player is tethered to another by the Classic Controller cable. Worth tracking down if you want to play a “modern” (14 years old, pff) single-screen racer.
It’s a bit self-serving of me to phrase it this way, but I do think the Reddit debacle shaved off a disproportionately not-terrible segment of the Reddit userbase. I think you could make your comment about Redditors instead and it would still be fair. There’s obviously a lot of Twitter users we don’t want here, but if we got the top 0.1% of Twitter users by quality? That’s not bad.
Busted! I have been thinking about how “threadiverse” is complicated a lot by Threads existing. It could easily mean “the part of the fediverse that is attached to Threads” (uppercase) rather than “the part of the fediverse that revolves around threads” (lowercase). Maybe we already need a new name. Eggheadiverse?
We can definitely debate the merits of the term scammer, but at this point it’s definitely undeniable that Molyneux is a liar. The Project Milo demonstration at E3 2009 is just a series of deliberate falsehoods, from the actor hired to behave as if she’s interacting with Milo improvisationally, to claims that Milo can identify subtle changes in human users’ moods by analyzing their facial expressions to the repeated claim that “this technology works now” even though the entire thing is pre-recorded.
If he wasn’t stating things like “This is true technology that science-fiction hasn’t even written about, and this works today, now,” you could pass it off as him just being enthusiastic about what they can achieve. But he openly and repeatedly stated that they had already achieved all of this, which he knew was not true. Again, we can say E3 or any other PR presentations are all lies on some scale–there’s kind of a line you have to ride in marketing where you present things in the best possible light–but Molyneux consistently steps way over that line by making obviously, verifiably false claims.
It’s easy to say there’s no malice behind it, but the fact is he’s a businessman selling a product, and it benefits him personally if people buy his product. He’s not some innocent childlike imp creature whose motives are always selfless, he’s a human being who likes money and is sometimes willing to say things that aren’t true to secure more of it. Is that “malice”? I don’t know. It’s at least “avarice”.
I think the portmanteau “threadiverse” works for this situation and it’s what I’ve been using to refer to anything in the general Lemmy/kbin side of the fediverse, but I think people just referring to the platform is inevitable. People talk about posts “on Mastodon” even though there’s like 15 different services you can use to post to the blogging side of the fediverse, like Pleroma, pump.io, etc. It’s worth thinking about in situations where you’re like “Hi Lemmy” because you’re definitely talking to more than just Lemmy, but any time you’re talking about your personal experience of where you saw a thread I think it’s perfectly accurate to use the name of that platform rather than having to say you saw it “on the fediverse”.
Based on the article, they’re not sure if this is the same game he’s had in development since 2019, Legacy, which is some kind of business sim where you have to buy your land as NFTs then create more NFTs to sell to other players.
Bit of a downer, but it is an Android news site. kbin currently doesn’t really merit much of a mention in that context. The PWA is nice, but by its nature barely related to Android, since it also runs on Windows, MacOS and everything else under the sun.
People self-host all kinds of things on Raspberry Pis, from web and other servers to home automation hubs. Web serving is extremely cheap in terms of CPU time, even moreso when you’re only hosting for yourself and perhaps family/friends. I wouldn’t recommend running an open web service like a Lemmy instance on a Raspberry Pi, but hosting something like this would have a minimal impact on a Pi. I have a multiple-generations-old Pi 3 which hosts an IRC bouncer, DNS-level ad blocker, Matrix chat bridge, web server and probably more stuff I’ve already forgotten and I can still use it for media playback or retro emulation concurrent to the rest, if the mood strikes.
For the most part, Threads content just wouldn’t appear on Lemmy at all. It’s like how you can’t see Mastodon users’ timelines on Lemmy. e.g. Jeri Ryan from Star Trek is on
mastodon.world, but you can’t read her blog from Lemmy because it just doesn’t display microblog content, only stuff that’s sorted into groups (communities).The one exception is that Jeri Ryan can track down the equivalent group on her Mastodon instance and “microblog” directly into the group. Mastodon has some hacky tweaks to do things like reading the first sentence as a heading, the second line as a URL, and the third line as the post body, so if you’re especially dedicated you can post to Lemmy from Mastodon. If Threads cares enough, they could add similar functionality to Threads to make it technically possible to post to Lemmy as long as you try hard enough, but just regular people’s blog posts on Threads won’t display on Lemmy at all.