I can't imagine how something like this might exist solely to boost engagement and draw additional user accounts. I'm sure that would be incredibly shocking (or just obvious as hell with user numbers being boosted by numerous bot accounts, as well as increased user time on site). "Reddit migration? What migration? Just look at how many users are coming back."
It's comically tragic how utterly gullible people are in general.
No kidding. It's always cute when people who made a webpage one time try to explain (make up) how user accounting must be working in a publicly traded company.
Gee, who could have thought that allowing html in posts could be bad idea? -Every developer that has ever looked a OWASP.
So you're saying they are going out of their way to commit fraud on a scale that would trigger an SEC investigation of a publicly traded company, rather than you just making up the way something works? You do understand how you can have such placeholders not be included in the number of active users...right?
Wait... You mean to tell me that you don't drink 100 Diet drinks at a time?
Because why would a business buy a computer for $1k that they can write off by depreciating the value of, when they can not own a less useful, less powerful one that only works when there is internet for only $100 per month instead?
Yup. That’s just how people can be. If presented with statements they consider plausible regardless of accuracy and fits a narrative they would rather believe, it is nearly impossible to change someones mind with fact. Cognitive dissonance is powerful tool that can be exploited by wanting groups to believe the “other side” must be some great evil fighting against them to make their lives worse. When marinated in that for your entire life it becomes easy to believe just about anything.
It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.
Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.
It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.
This sounds both made up but factually accurate.
I'm not sure the distinction would make enough of a difference, and focusing only on XMPP might be doing yourself a disservice. There was nothing social about Office, but the OP points out how the same strategy worked there as well. Users, overall, tend to go where the other users are. Some people left Digg for Reddit because they were unhappy with Digg, but the vast majority simply followed because it was where the users (therefore activity) went. Reddit wasn't even the best of the many options at that time; what was important was the inflow of users. Once that kicks off, others tend to flock like moths to flame.
As you point out, Reddit was not where you interacted socially, yet it became where you congregated because that was where everyone else was and therefore where the easiest access to content and engagement was. If a Meta product becomes the most popular way to consume ActivityPub content, and therefore becomes the primary Source for that content, independent servers will become barren with just a Meta Thanos-snap of disconnecting their API. They only need to implement Meta-only features that ActivityPub can't interact or compete with, and the largest portion of users will be drawn away from public servers to the "better" experience with more direct activity. (And that's without mentioning their ability to craft better messaging, build an easier on-boarding experience, and put their significant coffers to work on marketing.)
Sure, there will still be ActivityPub platforms in the aftermath. Openoffice/Libreoffice still exists, XMPP clients and servers still exist, there are still plenty of forums and even BBS systems. But, there is a reason why none of those things are the overwhelmingly "popular" option, and the strategy they will employ to make sure that happens is the focus of the article, not so much XMPP.
Exactly right. Human greed doesn’t only come from money.
- “It will be free advertisement and will help the project grow!”
- “Look how many people are using my server. MY server. I’m popular now!”
- And the more obvious, “If I make my server big enough, maybe I can cash out by being bought by this big company!”
In the end and from whatever the source, that bus always ends up in the same place once they convince themselves to get on it.
A luke-warm summary with comical references that only summarizes the first few paragraphs. I hope people don’t only read that summary and think “but that was Google”.
The article is a warning that given a chance, based on the past actions of Microsoft, Google, other corporations and even Meta itself, allowing Meta to participate in any way with ActivityPub will most likely kill ActivityPub. There is no easier way to ensure profits than by killing any hint of competition that might take users away from their services. This is almost always achieved by seemingly “bearing gifts” in the form of users or financial backing. By participating, they will really be trying to prevent users from exploring other options at all. Once they have prevented the majority of users from leaving their platform, and have become “the” largest player in the ActivityPub space, they will have successfully made alternatives irrelevant. The fact that people are even considering this might be a good thing is proof that the strategy works, which is why they use it.
I'd recommend that you make the changes more slowly, changing things to gibberish (random words), rather than using an app to do them all at one time. It is possibly for them to undo your edits and your deletes if you end up on their radar.
Over the course of days/week(s), you should slowly edit all of your old comments and posts into gibberish, and mark your posts as NSFW. Later, slowly start deleting posts/comments so that you won't be a target of their rollbacks.
I agree. Many people are fixated on GPT because it is shiny and novel, but it is certainly not the pinnacle of what AI could be, or even close. One day, we will look back on calling GPT an “AI” like we would someone calling the first two tin cans on a string a “phone”. Accurate enough, but certainly a far cry from any modern phone.
AI has the capacity to be the most impactful overall to our daily lives, but like most things, advancement will continue to be limited by hardware.
Sadly, it’s probably going to be exactly what happens over time, since that is almost always what regulation does. Some company (Amazon or Meta or Microsoft or Google) will back door legislation via campaign donations to you know who’s, to make sure large regulated companies are the only ones who can run advanced AI models, out of “responsibility” and “safety”. And by seeding all these doom and gloom headlines of a “AI will take over the world” narrative, the public will be just so happy to give up the rights of other people for a thing “they weren’t going to do anyway”, like usual.
I'm quite glad that you find missing the entire point fascinating.
Yes, I concede that you're right. You can certainly use lemmy/kbin only as a forum. You could certainly use Reddit as your "chat" platform too.
My entire point was that this person asked a question about trying to aggregate content; your toxic response was instead to talk about how terrible wanting that is and that they should just not want the thing that they were happy with. This is the type of high-quality "discussions" one can expect to bubble to the top in these silos.
This is the sort of echo-chamber romanticism you can expect in miniature silos. Fostering meaningful heartfelt individual conversations, person-to-person relationships, and small communities was never the intention. Its first-order focus has always been about a singular aggregated place for links on topics of interest, voted on by the followers of a tag/community, and sometimes spawning interesting discussions about those links in a peer-voted manner. Kbin and lemmy are both "aggregators", like Reddit, not "social networks" or "forums". [Edit: ability is not the same as intention]
Subscribing to hundreds of forums and RSS feeds with slightly different foci just to try to find the actual interesting stories, in most peoples opinions given Reddit and Diggs success, was decidedly not the "best" experience.
No one is preventing you from using things how you want, to seek our miniature echo-chambers so that your personal voice can be louder, but it is hardly the appropriate response to espouse how "great" microcosms are when someone is asking about how to better aggregate in a... checks notes... a "content aggregation" system.