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schnurrito

@schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de

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schnurrito ,

Yes. But we have all gotten pretty used to things on the Internet not costing money. If they start costing money, many people will either not want to or be able to use them.

schnurrito ,

Freely licensed works will be preserved a lot better because there will be more copies of them.

Likewise the fediverse is a step in that direction: this message will be federated to hundreds of servers so is more likely to survive longer than if I posted it to reddit.

schnurrito ,

https://xkcd.com/1989/

schnurrito ,

When public transportation was first introduced in most places, it was run by private companies for profit. This changed mostly because it wasn't profitable to compete with cars when those became popular.

Of course there still are private companies running public transport: long distance buses and trains in many places, and commercial aviation is really also a form of public transportation.

So there is nothing novel about buses being run by private companies for profit.

schnurrito ,

It still gives better results than DDG for many queries.

schnurrito ,

Messages that people post on Stack Exchange sites are literally licensed CC-BY-SA, the whole point of which is to enable them to be shared and used by anyone for any purpose. One of the purposes of such a license is to make sure knowledge is preserved by allowing everyone to make and share copies.

schnurrito ,

12! is a really high number tho

Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites (www.theverge.com)

In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...

schnurrito ,

The Internet is so big nowadays that you pretty much need to have some kind of algorithm. A list of all websites in "the right category" would have way too many items in it most of which would be useless. We live in an attention economy: lots of people want as many people as possible to pay attention to them, but everyone's attention is obviously limited.

No I don't know how to fix this.

schnurrito ,

Linux on an Intel-based MacBook Air was my daily driver for years. It worked perfectly fine; battery life was lower than on macOS though.

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    schnurrito ,

    It doesn't really matter because Russians have never really had a mature democracy and so, I think, do not really know how it should/could be different. They are used to various forms of authoritarian rule; whether the leader is called a Tsar, or a General Secretary of the Communist Party, or a President of the Russian Federation doesn't make that much difference.

    schnurrito ,

    Wikis were invented as a way, and are a good solution when the goal is, to crowdsource objective facts about the world.

    The great thing about a wiki is that as long as one person once added any given fact, it is in the wiki.

    On all contentious issues, by definition there are not too few people wanting to write about them, but instead there are too many, so this is why wikis are just not a suitable mechanism for writing about anything contentious: they're a solution to a nonexistent problem and there is no rational reason why truth about any given issue should be determined by "who has managed to edit the page last".

    schnurrito ,

    Of course it is possible and I hope they eventually develop into a mature democracy. Point is, it has not happened yet.

    schnurrito ,

    I'm familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that, yeah. I am also familiar enough with Wikipedia to know that there are topic areas (such as Israel/Palestine and the Holocaust in Poland on the English-language version) where the shortcomings of the wiki system are completely evident. Once you have to restrict editing to users with more than 500 edits and make special rules how to handle sourcing, it's clear that the wiki just isn't a suitable mechanism: if there are so many people wanting to write about a topic that you have to do that, then why not abandon the wiki concept altogether?

    The greatest success story of the wiki principle isn't Wikipedia, nor any other Wikimedia project. The greatest success story of the wiki principle is OpenStreetMap, which does limit itself to objective facts and is used not just by people, but also organizations. I work as a software developer and I've encountered usages of OpenStreetMap data many times, but of anything on Wikimedia projects? Wikipedia is great for teenagers to get an overview of the world, but everyone who actually needs the information in it has better sources for it anyway.

    schnurrito ,

    I am saying that if there are so many people wanting to write (and influence public opinion) about a topic that you have to go into endless arguments what the article should say, then there is no reason why it has to be "quick" that the article gets published with whatever new ideas anyone has had.

    As it is now, Wikipedia is what we have and I am not saying you shouldn't read it.

    schnurrito ,

    Since the 80’s, Linux has been using a display server called the X Window System

    This is, of course, not true, given that Linux did not yet exist in the 1980s.

    Unix-like systems that predate Linux did already use it in the 1980s.

    schnurrito ,

    Looking through the ones I have installed, I think these are useful to most people:

    • AnySoftKeyboard
    • Calculator++
    • K-9 Mail
    • Open Camera
    • Orbot
    • OsmAnd~
    • VLC
    schnurrito ,

    I thought Mozilla was a FOSS organization whose goal it was to defend an open Internet with free communication?

    Here they are putting out a blog post that says "WhatsApp should use the power it has over its users to implement antifeatures that their users might not want and could remove if it were FOSS".

    What the hell kind of world are we living in again?

    schnurrito ,

    I suspect that I am; I am not omnipresent and not aware of everything happening everywhere.

    Am I right that the logic is approximately like this: FOSS is a left-wing anti-business cause, misinformation tends to help right-wing parties win elections, therefore it is compatible with FOSS values and principles to want to use the power that proprietary software developers have in order to censor ("stop the spread of") misinformation?

    schnurrito ,

    by default yes, this can be changed back though

    schnurrito ,

    Something like that already exists, look up Freedom Phone

    schnurrito ,

    Because DOS and later Windows used to be the only OS that was relevant for IBM PC compatible systems. Only later were eg. Unix-like systems developed for them.

    schnurrito ,

    Nearly all open source map apps (definitely OsmAnd and Organic Maps) use openstreetmap.org as a data source which is literally a wiki, ie. anyone can edit it. If there is a lot missing in your area on OSM, then please add those things yourself. It is exactly as good as volunteers made it.

    Apple Removes WhatsApp, Threads, Telegram, and Signal from China App Store, says it complied with orders from the Chinese government (arstechnica.com)

    Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China....

    schnurrito ,

    App stores were a mistake. We used to get software from its developer or from a source we chose. Now that we expect there to be a central app store, it can be used for censorship.

    schnurrito ,

    This is why I also mentioned "a source we chose". On GNU/Linux package managers and F-Droid I can add additional package sources which can be managed by the developer.

    Point is, it shouldn't be a thing that Apple or Google or anyone has this kind of power.

    schnurrito ,

    X was a window system for Unix-like operating systems long before Elon Musk decided that would be a good name for the social media platform he bought.

    schnurrito ,

    Government just days from taking over the country, warns /u/schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de

    schnurrito ,

    Out of all the occupying Israel is doing, I find that of former East Jerusalem most harmless. To my understanding, the Palestinians there are entitled to Israeli citizenship, there is no apartheid system like in the remaining West Bank, there is no blockade like in Gaza. If Gaza or the remaining West Bank were ruled like former East Jerusalem, I would find Israel a lot easier to defend.

    schnurrito ,

    The Internet has never been as large and diverse as it is now. In the 2000s Wikipedia was often the only place where you could find generally useful information about the world on the Internet, now everything in it plus many other things can be found on many other websites competing for algorithmic attention.

    The real thing about today's Internet is that on it, censorship happens not by having too little information, but too much, much of which will never be shown to very many people because of the algorithms of search engines or social media recommendation systems. I don't do a lot of "social media" and always find it weird to hear about personalities there who apparently have thousands or millions of followers but whom I have never heard of before.

    schnurrito ,

    It is supposed to believe that climate change is a … scam?!

    You can believe that climate change is not real, but a "scam", how does that even work?

    schnurrito ,

    Lots of problems that used to exist in this area no longer do.

    Used to be that the de facto standard office format was doc/xls/ppt, now both MS Office and LibreOffice support both ODF and OOXML both of which are open standards.

    Used to be that internal software was mostly written for the Windows API, now it is mostly written for web browsers (between which there are no longer any significant differences in terms of standards compatibility).

    The world really is slowly getting better. I would like to help accelerate this, but don't really have any ideas where to start.

    schnurrito ,

    Of course they are not equally good, no question about it. They are still both (technically) open standards and the main point is that they are both supported by both pieces of software, i.e. the practical difference between them is mainly in the UI, you don't need to get the other one just to read files created by one of them.

    schnurrito ,

    Chrome has 65% market share (according to Statcounter), far from a near monopoly. Even if you add Edge (which you shouldn't because Microsoft could fork Blink at any time), you only get 70% for their web engine. Around 2003 or 2004, IE had like 95% market share (and many websites required Flash Player) and we now know that that was eventually defeated.

    I am all for worrying about the decline of good things, but your scenario isn't something I'm worrying that much about.

    schnurrito ,

    As I said I got these numbers from https://gs.statcounter.com/

    schnurrito ,

    https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

    schnurrito ,

    That was well below 18 for most of the time I have used the Internet. People born on that day were toddlers when I started to seriously use the Internet.

    I could nowadays enter my real DOB and get through all checks but I usually still pick something in the 1970s or 1980s.

    schnurrito ,

    Power to young people. Politicians who propose things like this, may you lose all elections.

    If you are a teenager, I am so sorry for my fellow adults who think we have any business deciding how you guys live your lives. I assure you we are not all like this.

    schnurrito ,

    2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication where we exchange ideas with each other without corporate media being gatekeepers telling us what to read, write and think!

    2024: Hi, I'm Meta and everyone gets their information from my platforms and I can decide what ideas to allow there. What do you mean we weren't supposed to have that anymore by now, whoever told you that kind of nonsense.

    schnurrito ,

    I am too young to remember that. Of course browsers are now free (at least as in beer, many also as in speech) again and that is a good thing. In my childhood, computers were pretty much synonymous with Windows and the web was mostly unusable without Flash Player and it's a good thing that that has changed. Still, we don't live in the utopian society I imagined the Internet would lead to.

    schnurrito ,

    I have no idea how government regulation of the Internet has become so normalized.

    https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

    schnurrito ,

    From your article:

    Despite this, KOSA enjoys bipartisan support, including a July endorsement from President Joe Biden.

    The worst laws in the US are usually supported by both parties.

    schnurrito ,

    My childhood was before smartphones but when the Internet already existed.

    In my preteen and teen years, the Internet was more or less my only escape from my horrible offline life. I envy today's kids that they can access it everywhere.

    Everyone who wants to take that possibility away from any children, go have sexual intercourse with yourself.

    schnurrito ,

    What has changed significantly since 2015?

    schnurrito ,

    Ah true, censorship really wasn't quite as bad in 2015 yet, point taken

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    schnurrito ,

    Remember when reddit was a free speech platform where pretty much everything legal was ok except doxing?

    What went wrong that we can't have places like that on the Internet anymore?

    schnurrito ,

    I think the line is easy to draw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

    I oppose most censorship, but I do not oppose moderation. If you don't want to see certain people speaking freely, you shouldn't have to, but you shouldn't be allowed to keep them from speaking freely to each other.

    schnurrito ,

    It appears I am getting bored with the entire Internet.

    When we had web forums with thread bumping, I got an endless stream of interesting and entertaining things to react to despite there being relatively few users.

    schnurrito ,

    historically a "PC" is a machine compatible with the "IBM PC" and the only OS available for that was DOS or later Windows

    Of course then Unix-like operating systems started to become available for the same machines, and Apple switched to Intel processors for a while too.

    schnurrito ,

    Platforms actually have one significant advantage over personal websites, blogs, disconnected forums: You only have to go to one website (open one app) in order to read everything you find interesting. You don't have to remember to go to 5 different forums and read 15 different blogs.

    Of course the disadvantage is that they are a lot easier to censor because they're a single point of failure.

    ActivityPub should in theory be the best of both worlds, but I am not too optimistic; people, organizations, governments wanting to censor people they don't like will always find a way. :(

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