Yeah, I agree. I said you wouldn’t be spamming.

It sounds like you’re grabbing posts about topics you’re interested in, knowledgeable about, and that you want to talk about. It’s almost like having a deck of cards with conversation topics on them and just drawing a random one every few days or something.

You should probably get consent from communities you want to include. I appreciate that you have good intentions and wouldn’t be spamming communities, but this is the kind of thing that people can get pretty angry about.

One Community Group document that will be moving into the Working Group is LOLA, the live data portability spec that originated in the CG’s Data Portability Task Force. LOLA lets users move from one ActivityPub server to another while retaining all their social connections, their content, and their reactions. It’s a great improvement for data portability on the social web.

Exciting stuff!

No doubt, if the goal was to be some rich, worthless scumfuck I’d be doing different things. I’d probably have to spend my days trying to suck Trump Coins out of some grifter’s dick. Or maybe I’d build a time machine to go back and make sure I popped out of a lady with a connection to an emerald mine. But… we all have our paths to walk. Mine is to toil endlessly in pursuit of purpose…

This conversation is actually a great example of complexity not mattering. You’re on an Australian server, I’m on a Canadian server. We’re replying to a post from a user on a third server to a community on a fourth server that people mistakenly think is American but is actually hosted in Germany. None of that matters because it just works. It’s indistinguishable from posts and comments – including you trying blame the whole thing on me – at the same place. You can make it seem very complicated but all anyone has to do is type words in the little box and press the button to post it.

The way too many people think about the Fediverse right now is like thinking that you need to know every minor detail about how a call could make it from a cell phone in Australia to a cell phone in Canada. You don’t need to know that to make a call. You don’t need to know all the minutia about ActivityPub or federation to use the fediverse.

I think it’s really overstated how tech savvy you have to be. I don’t do anything highly technical here. I signed up to a server, searched for things I was interested in, and subscribed to communities with the stuff I liked. I vote, comment, and post. There are great apps on the mainstream app stores. Yes, more than one thing is inherently a bit more complicated than one thing. But, lest we forget, one is also the loneliest number.

We should really be telling people how easy this shit is.

People over-react because it’s new to them, but it’s not really that complicated. It’s not like email never caught on because it’s federated.

My original claim was that, in addition to gedaliyah’s points, the TOS gives them permission to perform basic browser tasks. My last comment was about the same thing. The TOS is relevant because 1) it’s the basis of this entire discussion and 2) the changes in the TOS conclusively prove my original claim.

As to “data collection” in this context, those words do not appear in the TOS and are not rights Mozilla is asserting for use of their software. It’s a fiction you invented. That was the point of me pointing out the use of the word “use” – describing that term and distinguishing its meaning from the thing you made up.

Maximum wrongness on your part.

This is the original text that everyone flipped out about (OP: “WHY DO YOU NEED MY DATA TO MAKE FIREFOX WORK???”):

When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

It has since been changed to:

You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

Use. When you input a url, that information is used to resolve an IP then fetch a webpage. You’re granting a right to complete tasks you assign using information you input. They have permission to send your post content to a server, but they don’t own that content. This should be very obvious in the revised text.

Wasn’t the Twitter “bridge” just bot accounts though? It’s a bit different with Bluesky because they’ve said that they completely support bridges between AT and AP but just don’t have the resources to work on them themselves. Anyway, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou gave an interview yesterday where he included Bluesky as part of the Fediverse because of the bridge.

Personally, I consider them to be both part of and not part of the Fediverse, I guess. I wouldn’t send someone there and I also kind of think they’re a bunch of dicks for re-inventing the wheel instead of contributing improvements here.

I think that ATP and nostr are sometimes included as part of the Fediverse because they both have bridges that allow connection. Without the bridges they’re isolated.

Even writing a post, you’re entering data through Firefox into the post box. We just don’t consider that data. It would be pretty quiet around here if you couldn’t do that…

new users haven’t been checking it out as much – a month ago this was driven by external events (mostly Zuck turning pro-Trump, I think.)

A lot of users came over from TikTok too. There was a more organized TikTok campaign to get people to move to Pixelfed. Plus the ban and removal from stores gave people a bigger push to move.

Thanks!

I just got it on the dl instead

Anyone have a link that works for Canadians, you MONSTERS?

Yes:

One, its terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.” Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop. If nothing else, that’s further than Substack will go, and makes Ghost a better intermediate home for Platformer than our current one.

I don’t think we’re completely saved forever but they tried making podcasts Spotify-exclusive. I remember a bunch of Gimlet podcast hosts being like “please come to Spotify to listen to us – it’s better than it used to be!” They ended up caving because people didn’t listen. Podcasting is built around RSS – even though people aren’t really aware of it – and people expect to get them this way.

RSS is the hero that saved us from Spotify (et at.) walling off podcasts behind their paywall.

Google weirdly gets a lot of credit for killing things that are very much alive and well.

Yes.

For example, if you search for the old fediversenews url, you can subscribe to it: https://venera.social/profile/fediversenews/