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I don't think Google cares if the Fediverse succeeds or not. All they care about is that it can be indexed and people will be able to show Google ads on their instances.

Google doesn't have a Reddit equivalent or even any other social network competitor (anymore; they killed them all). They explicitly chose to exit that entire concept of products.

The only reason XMPP mattered to Google at the time was they were trying to compete with Apple for messaging on mobile devices. XMPP meant that Android devices using Google Hangouts/Chat/Gmail could chat with users on other platforms/services while Apple's chat app could only do SMS.

I guess what I'm saying is that Google is mostly irrelevant from the perspective of the Fediverse other than the fact that it can index and maybe give priority to discussions of certain products/topics like it does with Reddit currently.

If you're trying to get ancient software to work I think "user friendliness" is the least of your concerns. Especially compared to the alternative (Windows) where the answer is just, "No: That's not going to work no matter what you do."

The majority of trips taken in the US in cars is 3 miles or less

This statistic is true but incredibly misleading. Firstly, a huge chunk of those trips are trips to the supermarket or other shopping which is not something you're going to do on a bike. You can only fit so many groceries in a bike trip... Even with a trailer. (Aside: I wonder if frozen foods would even make it safely all the way home in the South if you loaded up a bike with a trailer and had to travel 3 miles?)

The second reason why it's misleading is that it includes trips after you've gone to work. So you commute to work: 41 miles. Actually, you stop at Starbucks on the way and that's only two miles from your house so that counts as a single-destination car trip. Then for lunch you take a short trip from the office to a restaurant/fast food place. That's a single-destination car trip.

You go out to dinner some nights at a restaurant 3 miles away. That's a short trip that certainly could've been done on bike but are you really going to get the whole family on their bikes to show up at the restaurant all hot & sweaty for dinner? In the South you'd be so sweaty it'd be worthy of taking a shower and in the North you'd be trudging through snow, freezing your face off.

Then there's the fact that the weather doesn't matter when it comes to cars. Rain or snow is no issue: You're still going to the supermarket but you would not make that same trip on a bike unless it was an emergency and you had no other option.

The reality is that while the majority of trips are 3 miles are less it's also true that the majority of trips are not trips you'd want to make on a bike.

There's another problem with that statistic: The majority of people in the US live in big cities! I wonder how much that statistic would change if you removed big cities/metro areas from the data. My guess: "<3 miles" would jump to "<10 miles".

I live in Jacksonville, FL and we have two supermarkets that are ~5 miles away (in different directions) and we have bike lanes! Nobody uses them. It's just too fucking hot! For about 9 months out of the year it's >90°F with ~90% relative humidity (in the morning; late afternoon it can drop to a mere ~60% when it's not summer! haha). The only time of the year it would be comfortable to do something like ride your bike to get something done (as opposed to just for exercise) is December through February. Any other time it's just not realistic unless you plan (and have the time) to take a shower afterwards.

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Florida/humidity-annual.php

It also rains pretty much every single day in the afternoon during the summer and sometimes off/on all throughout the day. Rarely rains at all in winter though so that's a plus I guess.

On July 1st when the apps stop working.

Biking infrastructure is only useful in big cities where your distance to work could be quite short (within 5 miles or so). The average American commute distance is 41 miles. It just doesn't make sense to build out bike infrastructure very many places in the US.

Trains and changing the roads to make it easier for cars to drive themselves make a lot more sense.

IMHO: We should retain automatic federation approval but with automated de-federation for bad behavior. Thresholds could be increased for "merely very active" instances so they don't get automatically defederated while newcomers get the threshold for "plebs" 😁

Example: If your instance has just a handful of users spamming like crazy or any number of users spamming the same content/links that would put your instance over such a ban threshold pretty fast.

Kitchen sink disposals are awesome! Why fill up your trash with stuff that's going to stink when you can just reduce it into particles the size of grains of sand, complete with energy free transportation to sewage processing (or your septic system)?

They don't clog your pipes or anything; human excrement is much more sticky than the stuff you're supposed to send into the disposal. Disposals are basically small macerators which is what waste processing/sewage lines use to make sure that your poo can make it smoothly through lift stations and processing facilities.

People say things like, "if you put grease down there it can clog your pipes!" which is 100% true whether or not you use a disposal. The disposal doesn't even factor into that equation; it's irrelevant.

The closest thing to a universal word is a scream. After some experience nearly all humans--regardless of region or native languages--can tell the difference between a scream of sudden fear and the scream of a mother who's child just died.

The scream of pain is a bit cultural/regional ("ow!", "fuck!", "damnit!") but I'm guessing most humans could tell what someone means when they shout any given sound or word after accidentally banging their finger with a hammer or stepping on a lego brick while barefoot.

Building online communities takes time. Migrating from one site to another takes a little less time but it's still a long-term thing.

It's not so different from moving a retail location. Your store is moving from address A to address B down the road. You put up a sign at the old storefront telling customers, "it's just down the road!" with instructions to get there and yet businesses that do this see massive sales drops. It's not uncommon to lose half or three quarters of your customer traffic in the first three months after changing locations. It usually takes a year or more to stabilize to a new normal.

I see no reason why the migration of communities from Reddit to the Fediverse will be different since this type of migration is based on basic human behavior. We need to view it as a new location getting a great big lucky bonus surge because of people angry at our competitor and not some on/off switch.

The key is to maintain quality at the new location so the "customers" start to realize they're getting a better experience here than they did over at Reddit.

Yes, install your 25-year-old software on your 30-year-old NTFS filesystem (it's that old).

EDIT: I just looked it up and NTFS turns 30 on July 27th, 2023 LOL

/m/linuxmasterrace would like a word

Fewer than Reddit!

In 2012 a Federal court held that Zappos Terms of Service (TOS) were unenforceable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Zappos.com,_Inc.,_Customer_Data_Security_Breach_Litigation

...for two reasons:

• The agreement stated that it could be changed at any time without informing end users.
• End users never actually had to click on anything to "agree" to the TOS. In other words, since users didn't have to "agree" to the TOS to use the website it didn't count as a legal contract.

The situation of Invidious seems like it falls under the second bullet: Invidious (developers) never agreed to YouTube's TOS therefore YouTube can't claim it has a legal contract between them and Invidious.

A physical, real-world equivalent would be putting up a painting in a public space/commons (i.e. youtube.com) with a little plaque on the side with lots of tiny text saying something like, "by viewing this painting you agree to adhere to the following terms..." No reasonable person would expect people to have to abide by such rules. Especially since you have to view the painting first before you can even get close enough to view the painting's TOS.

youtube.com is in the same situation: How do you even find the TOS for YouTube's API? You have to go looking for it at youtube.com (and it's not trivial to find either). You don't have to "agree" to anything before accessing youtube.com... It just loads. It's the same with the API: You don't have to sign an agreement before you can start using it. It's right there, always accepting requests.

It seems obvious (to me) how YouTube can solve this problem. The law has loads of precedent and a very simple legal mechanism that would be (technically) trivial for YouTube to implement: Require users sign up/make an account and "agree" to their TOS before they're allowed to view anything or access the API. Now they can go after individual users using tools like Invidious to their heart's content. They still wouldn't be able to go after the developers though since it would be difficult to prove that they agreed to the TOS.

So... it would have the same level of security as browser-based password managers 😁

You can display what you're listening to on these $500 (estimated) designer headphones that you'll never wear anywhere but at home, alone.

Pro tip: If you're just a regular office worker and your employer messages you or sends you an email after work hours just don't respond to it until you're back at work. If your boss gives you shit about it that's the best-case scenario! Why? Because then you can demand that they document in writing that they expect you to work when you're not at work and you can send that shit right to HR (who's job is to protect the company from idiots like your boss). It could be a promotion opportunity to fill the void left by your fired boss 😁.

Always demand everything in writing. An email or instant message is fine! Bosses know that making (young) people work after hours is sketchy AF and will suddenly decide that it's way too risky to abuse you anymore. This isn't the type of thing that'll hurt your career! If it were that's not the type of place you want to be working at anyway.

Remember folks: The most sure-fire way to make more money and get a promotion is to go work somewhere else. "Rising up the ranks" just doesn't happen anymore and raises will never be as much as you'd get going to work somewhere else.

Big companies really don't like managers pushing people around, making them do more work than they're paid for. Not only is it a potential very expensive lawsuit (and really bad PR) it's also an indicator that they've got an employee (your boss/manager) that likes to bend the rules and potentially do illegal shit. If they start digging around they often find the very same people who abuse their employees are the ones that embezzle money, make false expense claims, form secret partnerships with their friends outside of work (i.e. corrupt vendor selection), etc.

Small companies are a different story and medium-sized companies often just haven't learned such lessons yet or are just such terrible employers that they just expect extremely high turnover (and take advantage of it by abusing people for as long as they can).

In 2002 I was working for an Internet company (Genuity), had a cell phone in my pocket at all times (this one: https://mobile-review.com/phonemodels/sonyericsson/image/t68i-1.jpg), and had cable broadband (1.5MBs) at home. When I bought my first house (condo) at the time I specifically selected a location that had high speed Internet because being without it would be unbearable! I remember telling the real estate agent that I would only buy a house that had high speed Internet and she looked at me like I was crazy! I'm sure she was thinking, "Like that's important. What a weirdo!"

I guess what I'm saying here is that the people mentioned in the article were out-of-touch scrubs! It wasn't as bad as they described. My friends and I would all chat with each other online to coordinate and we'd show up at various events/locations (people's houses, concerts, theaters, etc) with tickets already paid for (usually over the phone though because not every venue had it but TicketMaster let you buy tickets over the phone since like the 1980s).

It definitely did feel like a VIP experience a lot of the time showing up with your group of friends (all in our early 20s)--bypassing the often enormous ticket line--then proceeding to walk up to the bouncer/ticket people and just giving them our names which they would verify by checking a printed list that was attached to a clipboard with a white sheet of blank paper over it to hide the names (so people couldn't just glance at it and say, "that's me!"). A few years after 2002 such tickets finally started getting bar codes and it became a bit less, "VIP" hehe.

What I'm saying was that all these things and more were available to the people in the article and they weren't expensive "luxury" features that only the rich could afford. They were available and advertised extensively for everyone to use. It's just that these folks in the article were just like soooooo many people at the time and just refused to explore or try things out on the Internet. They saw URLs (and AOL keywords, LOL) in ads and it probably didn't even register in their brains. They were probably also afraid to buy things online (a very, very common attitude back then).

These people were the early Gen Xers that would be dumbfounded when you'd ask them for their address to get to their party/event/whatever and you'd have to interrupt them when they'd start rambling off complicated landmark-based directions, "No... I just need the address." (because you were going to just print out directions using MapQuest). Then you'd be the only person to show up to the party on time because you were the only one that didn't have to navigate via landmarks ("Go three stoplights and make a right after the Sunoco station...").

Edit: I just remembered that in 2002 I was subscribed to Netflix's 3-DVD plan. DVD players were not luxury items by then. My girlfriend and I had watched so many movies thanks to Netflix we were had long since run out of good things to watch and ended up getting DVDs like, "Jack Frost" LOL!

I'm not having any problems at all with my dopamine fix. The Fediverse has reached that critical threshold where there's no shortage of typos to make fun of with snarky replies and people willingly walking into dad jokes.

So yeah, I'm good 👍

most Reddit employees spend most of their time playing Freecell and jerking off

To be fair, if that's all they did Reddit wouldn't be in this dumpster fire of a situation right now.