@[email protected] is the author of the SMBC webcomic and he posts funny stuff pretty frequently.
@[email protected] does art with open source tools, including the open source Pepper and Carrot comic.
@[email protected] posts dumb memes constantly.
@[email protected] posts smartassed yet accurate commentary on current legal news.
This article’s evidence that the #TwitterMigration failed is that when he shut down his server, 25% of the servers he notified didn’t respond back. I’m not sure that means what the author seems to think it means. It’s not like every user has their own server. And when you let anybody build a server in a network you’re going to see a lot of failed launches. Honestly, with the explosive growth Mastodon had, retaining 75% of all those new servers is pretty impressive to me.
Mastodon did not immediately replace Twitter worldwide. That’s fine, growing that fast wouldn’t be sustainable. But it did get a ton of new users, a lot of visibility, and enough activity to provide content for anybody who signs up. Onboarding kinda sucks, but once you follow enough people and hashtags it absolutely scratches the same itch Twitter did for me. I’d hardly call that a failure just because it didn’t instantly become the next social media monolith.
Most of these companies are just arguing that they shouldn’t have to license the works they’re using because that would be hard and inconvenient, which isn’t terribly compelling to me. But Adobe actually has a novel take I hadn’t heard before: they equate AI development to reverse engineering software, which also involves copying things you don’t own in order to create a compatible thing you do own. They even cited a related legal case, which is unusual in this pile of sour grapes. I don’t know that I’m convinced by Adobe’s argument, I still think the artists should have a say in whether their works go into an AI and a chance to get paid for it, but it’s the first argument I’ve seen for a long while that’s actually given me something to think about.