Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday lashed out at his Western backers on Thursday over what he said was inaction over the reports of North Korean troops being sent to Russia. "Putin is checking the reaction of the West ...
Peoples Dispatch spoke to the prominent Palestinian politician regarding the impact of the Biden administration and the upcoming presidential elections on the Palestinian cause.
Veteran US diplomat Ambassador Victoria Nuland is joining the NED Board of Directors, bringing a wealth of knowledge that will contribute to NED’s mission.
How does Israel's economy come into play here? This is about Middle Eastern people boycotting a bunch of American franchises and other stuff in (sometimes misguided) solidarity with Gaza.
Oh my mistake. I took the article’s title to mean that this is about US restaurants in Israel itself. The website was down when I wrote it, so I couldn’t read the article and didn’t know any better.
Supporting genocide in Gaza; Supporting starvation wages; Slave labor in supply chains; Animal cruelty; Decimation of local businesses; Unhealthy processed food; And so on ...
Moshe Ya'alon, a member of Netanyahu's Likud party throughout his political career, said the prime minister has put his political survival over Israel's national interests
The latest dossier from Tricontinental discusses the roots of the movement in the Global South for a just international order, and the attempt of the Global North to suppress the rise the periphery which challenges its hegemonic structures.
I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will. […] Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.
In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.
That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be
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I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will. […] Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make.
In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself.
That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server.
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you. […] Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it.
That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital.
Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service.
A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).
It's probably more fair to call its claim of being decentralized fake or disingenuous. There doesn't seem to be any way to participate in the ecosystem without going through the Bluesky relay, a central point of failure with strong incentives to eventually do something shitty.
can import your exported posts from Mastodon and most of its forks, Pleroma / Akkoma, Misskey / Firefish and forks, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, including attachments (threading may not work perfectly, and other people’s replies to your posts may not get imported)
This is exactly why I'm also not that interested in Bluesky. It's not decentralized in a way that makes it resilient to a Musk-style takeover.
PDSs are cool, Mastodon can learn something from Bluesky's tech stack. But Mastodon made the right choices from the beginning to be decentralized for resiliency.
I don't want to sound like I'm just correcting you for the sake of it, but it's actually important. Mastodon is the most popular right now, but Mastodon actually wasn't around at the beginning! Before that was StatusNet, and before that was identi.ca and laconi.ca
So those services already existed, they were the ones built for federation, and so Mastodon was started as another compatible implementation of an existing network protocol. All of that is to say that Mastodon didn't need to make the right choices at the beginning, and they have already benefitted from this kind of network dynamic! The system has already worked once!
It’s not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it’s leverage that enshittifies a service.
Technically more precise, but for companies the leverage doesn't really exist without the outside capital. Musk taking over twitter was the use of capital to get the leverage.
I can't think of any business where the owner did a 180 without catering to outside capital or the company being bought out by outside capital.
The entire protocol design of BlueSky reeks of bait&switch, but yes right now it is mainly the intensified expectation that it will happen sooner or later.
Gotcha. Yeah I choose to use Mastodon, I'd much rather support the open community built option than the option built by a company with a profit motive, I just try to stay in the loop about stuff
No, but the whole point of Doctorow's Enshittification essay is that it inevitably will. In the same way animals keep evolving into crabs due to convergent evolution, social media companies will keep turning into shit because the market incentives push them that way.
But here's the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they'd never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.
They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.
My god it doesn't have to be so "on or off"! There are plenty of ways to create a post and it sends it directly to Mastodon AND Bluesky. Build both audiences because there's a good chance that you'll be connecting with very different groups of people.
What does that have to do with Cory's concerns? They don't want to build an audience on Bluesky because that promotes Bluesky, a dangerous place to build up, in the view given by the article. It would be neglectful to let it gain enough power to become a Twitter 2.0, we have an opportunity to prevent us repeating history.
I'll use it for now while it's good and ditch it if/when it enshittifies just as I ditched Reddit and Twitter. The mistake I won't repeat is relying on it. If I have to bail, it won't be difficult this time.
One of the big turning points for Facebook for them to increase the difficulty of switching was cutting off RSS as a way to syndicate content into Facebook. After that, content had to be manually created in Facebook, instead of automatically imported from a third party source based on standard protocols. This forced people away from their chosen content authoring system into Facebook's opinionated, inflexible, ad infested walled garden.
Oh phew, I don't have flowers on my blanket either. I guess I'm safe too. Otherwise I'm in exactly the same position as this meme, and that would make me have to think about my life choices.
I can't remember who does a more comprehensive survey, but the overall Linux gaming share is ≈4%. So, Steam users are about half of that, if I'm understanding correctly.
Some people prefer GOG, some people do itch.io or FOSS games, some people only do emulation. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting the data, too, but Steam having 50% of the gaming share with the other 50% spread amongst other platforms and activities doesn't seem that outlandish to me.
The statistic isn't saying that 50% of Linux gamers use steam, it's saying that Linux gamers are ~1/2 as likely to use steam for games when compared to gamers on other platforms. these are very different things.
~50% of Linux gamers using steam is only true if you assumed every gamer on the other platforms used steam
btw i hate the term 'gamer' but it's just convenient to use here :(
Overall gaming share is 4%? I think you mean linux useragents account for about 4% of website traffic at measured points- which is not indicative of anything because my crawler also pretends to be things it isn't.
No, I mean 4% of the overall Linux desktop share does some amount of gaming. This is based on a survey, and I can't for the life of me remember who does it. It will show up again, with updated totals, on one of these communities eventually.
Probably not, but at least olive oil doesn't cause climate change and can be grown in most places w horticultural technological assistance instead of concentrated patches with future genocide survivors living above them.
The delivery ceremony for the payloads of the Shijian-19, China's first reusable and returnable test satellite, was hosted on Thursday in Beijing by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which marks the successful completion of the satellit…
Americans are getting dental implants more than ever — and at costs reaching tens of thousands of dollars. Experts worry some dentists have lost sight of the soul of dentistry: preserving and fixing teeth.
I'm sure that's a big part of it coupled with the fact that it's becoming impossible to pretend the war is in a stalemate when Ukraine is losing kilometres of territory on daily basis.
At what point was this a stalemate? The eventual outcome was obvious about 2 weeks in. I remember thinking that surely Russia's capacity to actually do the production needed for this war was more important than American financial dominance, but I kept hearing otherwise from all of the news. I was shocked to see that I was clearly right and I was being lied to, again.
This happens to me all of the time. It's like when the news kept telling me that any day now the ghettos of Caracas would rise up and demand the privatization of Venezuela's oil fields. I kept thinking it didn't make any sense and I must be missing something. Turns out I was right again.
It was never a stalemate, but while the war was in the attrition phase calling it a stalemate was a convenient narrative to keep drumming up support for it.
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