FriendOfDeSoto

I can't remember. As you can tell from my lengthy historical summary, I'm old enough to use that as an excuse.

I have recorded songs off the radio onto cassette. I have made mix tapes. First off records, later CDs. There was a general trade going on at school among friends. Somebody would get a new album on tape or on CD and when the owner had listened to it enough times it would make the rounds so people could record it for themselves. Musical socialism.

I have made Minidisc mix tapes as well. I went as far as recording concerts from VHS onto Minidisc. Adding track names was harder than T9 texting and took fucking ages.

I ripped and burned CDs, some of them are still stashed away in an attic somewhere.

I don't remember the infancy torrenting service that we used around the turn of the century. It wasn't Napster. I also made mix tapes of downloaded songs onto CD. To play more easily because there weren't any iPods yet but everyone had a stereo.

Now I stream the music I used to steal. Can't feel great about it because I know the artists get next to nothing for it.

I miss having a good stereo. Now it's crappy phone speakers or compressed Bluetooth shit.

I don't think the author likes mastodon dot social...

I couldn't get through all of this blog post because it's repeating the same point 500 times. I get the theoretical threat scenario they are painting; what's missing are the receipts. Is moderation on that instance actually getting worse? Have we talked with admins on the record how they don't dare defederate from that alleged wretched hive of scum and villainy? And two other angles are missing: (1) a name brand instance might be a good starting point on the fediverse. It's still better than Xwitter. And (2) people are not donating enough to their instances, who are then run on dedication and held together by duct tape. The fear of having one's instance shut down because the admin is out of money and duct tape makes people gravitate towards the bigger instances.

I'm not opposed to recommending people to find other, smaller instances - that is a good idea. It's just this blog post reads more like a hit piece.

This is sign that Google is worried that a market of 500 million people could decide to move away from the US tech giants. Very worried, judging by this flimsy fear-driven argument. Good.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram's encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I'll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn't mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It's annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It's only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn't happen a lot.

Don't engage with anybody you don't know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

I don't think that what you are envisioning and the fediverse are necessarily a good fit. The fediverse is potentially able to network with every other instance operating on the same protocol. With every instance you add more potential to have bad actors within reach.

a system for stricter content moderation, especially something that would automatically delete NSFW/NSFL posts,

There is no tool that can automatically remove everything. There is also the Scunthorpe problem. And there aren't enough moderators in the world to do this job safely for children that don't also expect remuneration for their services. And then you need to add in the cross cultural differences in what constitutes NSF anything. Maybe in a few years you can train a model to do a decent job with this.

The protocol can probably be adapted to fit most of your requirements. But the fediverse is held together by donations, sweat, and duct tape. It's having a hard enough time attracting adults; I don't think a kids version is in the works. Plus, there are now real legal hurdles like in Australia.

Personally, I wouldn't want my kids to social network until they are 15-16. Before that I'd try to keep them in services and settings where I'm the moderator. And only after having not only the birds and the bees talk but also the know about grooming, no nudes, and no bullying talks you can slowly release them into the wild. And at that age they will not want to sit at the kids table any more.

You'd be surprised how many people don't take the time to read a long article like that but will have a quick glance at the comments.

Again, our proposal isn’t that we should cover all of this land in solar panels, or that it could easily power the world on its own. We don’t account for the fact that we’d need energy storage and other options to make sure that power is available where and when it’s needed (not just when the sun is shining).

This is a thought experiment more than a plan.

You are your own algorithm. If you see a lot of propaganda or whatever, it's because you chose that content at one point or another. And you can just as easily stop seeing it by unfollowing and blocking.

Also, evidence. I see no signs of rampant propaganda on the fediverse, not on Lemmy or on Mastodon. Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But that's where you should provide examples so I can check for myself.

To be fair to the lad, he didn't peddle his wares. He just says if there isn't a European strategy to develop their own models it is very likely that Europe would run on Chinese made ones that are more open source, whereas American ones become increasingly closed source and expensive to license. Now, that's his prediction and I don't really believe him. But this article at least doesn't make it seem he wrapped his doom and gloom prediction in a Gemini sales pitch.

I'm not an Apple user so I cannot answer your question there. I just wanted to add another way to get ad-free podcasts. If the podcast offers a patreon feed, any RSS-based podcatcher anywhere will be able to do this.