Appreciate the updates! Thanks for the hard work!

haha actually yes. I created my sona to be a representation of another side of me over a year before I came out. Now my sona has gone through a name change and now she is fully me. I love her to death!

So this is a huge thing that will have a massive impact on the Fediverse as a whole. I find myself torn because on one hand, it would bring additional visibility and viability to the Fediverse as well as introduce people who haven't had a chance to get involved in the protocol. If it were that simple, it would be a good thing overall!

But the catch is, it's META.... and knowing the privacy issues that already exist with them and the other big tech giants, it makes me more hesitant to say yes.

The toss up is really hard though, because META will do this first, then others will follow and if everyone commits to keep them out, the growth of Lemmy and Mastodon will slow if not stop entirely because the big tech companies don't care about the little guys. They'll just create their own implementation if we push them out and just interact with each other keeping users locked to their platforms and not giving other instances the chance to grow because people won't be incentivized to see what all the chatter is about elsewhere. It all sucks more because essentially it's a catch 22. We either reject them and possibly see a decrease or a complete loss of growth, or accept them and potentially run into privacy and other problems that come with big tech companies trying to profit off of the Fediverse.

So as for my response to join or ignore the pact. I think this doesn't need to be an all or nothing situation. I think we should approach it cautiously optimistic. Considering letting things be as they are for the time being. Allow them for now, but if it gets to a point where its either too toxic or is starting to ruin the integrity of the community, block them. There is nothing stopping this or any other instance from blocking META or any other big tech company in the future. So I think seeing what will happen and then making a more educated judgement call may be the better approach rather than just rejecting it all together. As much as we all may expect them to take advantage of what has been built in the Fediverse, I think we should maybe see what kind of positive growth can come from it as well as negative outcomes and then make a more fully formed judgement call on if we should block them from these instances.

I remember there was/is a reddit that had more realistically sized anime tiddies and I often enjoyed it. maybe there's one floating around on a Lemmy instance somewhere :)

I think it helps me feel more safe being who I am. If it honestly wasn't for my female sona, I would never have had the courage to come out. I started to realize I identified with her a lot more than I originally was willing to admit. As I discovered more of my past with my therapist, I found out there were many things in my life that led me to where I am and showed I was trans the whole time, but my sona was a vehicle for coming out as I was able to 'be her' and get more comfortable with who I am.

Now I just consider myself a cute lil' puppy girl :3

So with Bing chat, which is more or less ChatGPT (just a model made specifically for Microsoft), it has the ability to crawl the web and get information into one place. So if you ask for reviews of a product, it’s able to curate them and give summaries so you can get an overviews. Granted, it’s still in super early beta and will sometimes give bad information, but a bit of fact checking is doable. I’ve played around with it for a bit and it’s fascinating. It works pretty well too but it’s not always right since it’s an AI attempting to learn. Hopefully that all makes sense 😅

That’s true! And maybe that’s what allows for the return of those times!

This is what I’m most excited about. I’m much younger so didn’t get to experience it like it was back in the day, but I heavily admire how decentralized things used to be where we didn’t have Silicon Valley running the internet. The hard part is I don’t see the masses moving over. But those who do will get a more community centric experience would be my guess rather than feeling like you’re another user in a sea of people

I’ve honestly thought about trying bing search with the new bing chat. It’s just a large change from searching now. It might be a good option thought for helping to curate answers more directly.