Yeah, I find that the point is rarely well made and it’s often because the whole argument is a bit confused. People want to present it as being easier than it is.

Open registrations on the fediverse is a problem in general. Trolls abuse it to make accounts specifically to harass specific users. Those not being harassed will not notice this - before the “fetch all replies” feature was introduced they wouldn’t even see the replies. And because it seems so much better than other platforms unless you’re actively being targeted, you’ll have minority women or whatever raising the problem and a bunch of white men will respond that they have no idea what they’re talking about and that there is no problem and that they should just block the trolls. Blocking the trolls is just not efficient if they keep popping up all over the place.

One way to avoid this as a server admin is to defederate instances with open registrations that are being used in this way. But Mastodon.social is too big for this strategy to really be viable.

Of course, open registrations is also key to people bothering signing up in the first place. People are not used to resistance, and they don’t want to write a letter of motivation to sign up for social media. So the issue is not easily solved. Mastodon is working on better moderation tools. Hopefully they’ll manage to address it that way.

relies on the supplier being truthful with their documentation for their production

So the supermarket needs documentation and to take precautions, because they are to a certain extent responsible for the legality of the stuff they are selling.

In the real world supermarkets don’t just pick up carrots from some random guy showing up with a trailer full of them. In online markets, this is closer to how it works. Those running and profiting off online platforms should be accountable for what they sell. If Amazon lists electrical products that don’t meet fire safety standards on their website they should be held accountable for selling these products, even if they only act as middle men.

If companies can just take the money without any responsibility we’re fucked.

I think it would be reasonable if this was a problem of small indie titles that do not have a publisher and basically wouldn’t exist without Steam. If Valve allows for content on their platform they have an obligation to ensure this content is legal. If a supermarket cooperates with a local farmer to sell their produce directly without middle men, it’s partly their responsible if the produce is made using illegal pesticides.

However, it seems unreasonable when it’s about stuff like Forza and FIFA. Then sue Microsoft and EA, for fucks sake. These games have publishers.

My most recent ThinkPad also overheated an insane amount at whatever use I could put it through, and the fan was constantly running full speed. It was like that from day one, and there was no dust or anything, it was just a terrible machine.

In six years I have burnt through two Lenovo ThinkPads. In the first the USB C charging port malfunctioned, and it turns out the charging port is soldered directly to the motherboard so they had to replace the whole thing. Ever since I got it back from repairs it enters into kernel panics all the time, no matter which distro I install.

I was in the middle of writing my thesis so I had no time for repairs when it broke, so I ordered mysef a new ThinkPad. I had to choose between pre-assembled models, and I wanted a high resolution display, a good processor, and some other things. I got one with not quite as much RAM as I really needed, and found out when I wanted to upgrade that they had rendered upgrading RAM completely impossible in that model of ThinkPad. It wasn’t even one of the new slim ones, but a pretty traditional bulky one. Complete bullshit.

Both of these laptops are recent enough that had they not sucked I would still be using them years from now. I’m happy Lenovo appear to be changing their ways, but I wouldn’t touch another ThinkPad with a stick after my experiences with them.

Currently I’m using a Framework 13. Hopefully it’ll last me decades.

And every Ubuntu Touch device with support for external monitors for the last ten years or so. Here’s a demonstration running on a Fairphone 4.

I don’t even mind subscribing to 404media, as I feel like their operation makes sense. But there’s no way I’m going to pay to read some sponsored content on a page riddled with trackers.

Yeah. Sites like CNET and TechRadar seems completely uninteresting at this point. Wired and the Verge seem to have done a better job at transitioning into reporting on how tech affects society, which is much more interesting. 404media seems to be doing well in that business.

The leading article of the Verge at the moment is on what is real in the age of deepfakes, relating to war and disinformation. Wired writes about “All the ways big tech fuels ICE and CBP”. 404media runs a story about how “CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements”. Meanwhile, CNET is headlining how “Apple’s new MacBook Air is faster. It also costs $100 more”, and TechRadar tells us about “the seven best gadgets we have seen today”. I cannot even imagine caring. I wouldn’t even have cared back when I did care.

Besides, if a tech site does their job these days their readers will not be using Google any more at all.

Gaël Duval, the lead developer behind /e/OS, has been recommending an app called Zettle on his blog. It at least work on degoogled /e/OS, probably GrapheneOS as well. I have no personal experience as I prefer sticking to cards.

This is probably a much more efficient “mention of the fediverse” than if the journalist had started trying to explain that there is this federated network of independent social media sites bla bla bla.

The people reading this are looking for something they can understand. I expect naming Mastodon and leaving it to them to check it out will convert more people than if they started trying to explain what it is.

I’m a bit weirded out by all the attention given to w-social.eu by mainstream media, though. First of all it doesn’t exist yet, second we have no reason to believe it will actually be decent, third we have good reason to believe it won’t be.

The neat thing about algorithmic social media is that content relating to suicide and self-harm inspires a lot of interaction among teenagers, causing it to be shoved in their faces whether they search for it or not.

Suicidal teenagers are not searching for suicide material on Instagram; Instagram is feeding suicide material to regular teenagers for ad views.

They have been on Mastodon for many years already. As for why it takes so long to leave Twitter I guess it’s the same reason as everyone else - giving up on reaching the people there seems like a big loss to some.

Yeah, I think it’s reasonably run and invite-only now, so the ban should probably be lifted. @[email protected] , something to consider? :)

Yeah, they are looking for “early twitter”, without reflecting too much on why “early twitter” that they loved turned into what it is today. I think many are forgetting that it took a turn for the worse long before Musk bought it.

I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.

I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.

I can imagine he has access to crazy surveillance of them and their mothers.

I don’t fully understand this shit out of a lack of really caring, but wouldn’t it be fully possible for an “AI agent” to create a crypto wallet on its own, scam some people to get money into it, and then just lose access and have the money pretty much just lost?

And if that happens, where does the money go? Into crypto “stock” in whichever coin it invests in?

What a stupid future we’re building.

He does some good things and some bad things. Don’t fall for simplistic thinking where everything and everyone is either good or evil.

When fighting to tax the rich, Macron is not an ally. When fighting to regulate American big tech he can be an ally, and it would be stupid not to use him as such.

Gives me a nice flashback to this interaction, which caused me to be banned from [email protected] for the following (since deleted) comment, which I backed up with reliable sources in the part of the thread that remains online:

insufficient avenues for engagement beyond voting.

Funny what banning protests does to a country.

The reason given was that I “derailed the conversation”, though I’d argue the following discussion was extremely on-topic for a post about how young people in Germany “feel disillusioned with politics” and consider there to be “insufficient avenues for engagement”.

Funny what banning discussion does to an instance, I guess.

Oh well, /rant

It’s all about the marketing and nothing about the technology or company.

I opened google for the first time in months (years?) to check out the results for “best private browser”. Predictably, the AI overview confidently responds as follows:

The best private browsers in 2026 for enhancing online anonymity and blocking trackers are Tor Browser, Brave, and Mullvad Browser. For maximum privacy with high security, Tor is top, while Brave is best for daily, fast browsing. Mullvad is ideal for anti-fingerprinting, and LibreWolf offers excellent privacy for Firefox users.

I would be very surprised if Brave did not at least at some point sponsor content to position itself as privacy oriented. This hidden advertisement then bleeds into both AI and human armchair experts with no deeper understanding of the tech they’re commenting on. And so the myth that Brave has good privacy becomes self-enforcing.

Unrelated edit: Answering “why is firefox bad for privacy”, Google AI becomes oddly self-hating:

Firefox is often considered “bad” for privacy by privacy-conscious users because, despite its pro-privacy marketing,
it collects significant user data by default via telemetry, relies on Google as its default search engine, and has updated its privacy policy to allow broader use of user data. While superior to Chrome, its default settings are not “privacy-maximalist,” necessitating manual configuration.