We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo... Now it's just Google, or slightly worse versions.
I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.
I guess if you're mostly happy with how something is then you've no reason to bring it up.
Nobody is writing long articles, posting tweets or appearing on TV shows to talk about it being quite nice that they can currently go and buy a beer from a shop. But someone could easily decide that they want to rile people up about the easiness of buying beer. And it all goes from there.
So, it's a the beginning of a 3D printer that constructs things at an atomic level. A quantum printer then. Just stuff it with dirt, tell it what you want it to turn those dirt molecules into, and then it rearranges the atoms into new materials.
A lot of people on Twitter have a "well we were here first, why should we be forced out just because these pricks are now here trying to take over?" attitude. And besides, if the only thing you use it for is to chat with your own mutuals, and keep away from the Trending stuff then it's still a usable place.
It's like Reddit used to be - If you curate your feed and stick to that rather than diving into the All view then you can still have a good time.
Why just admit defeat and give it over to the bullies and grifters instead of sticking around and fighting for it?
Trakt is great because there's loads of apps that use the API for it but your history is stored on Trakt so even if you swap to a different app you can still access that history.
That happens when it mis-hears a trigger word. You can enable and audible 'ping' noise to play when you activate Google Assistant. It's in the accessibility settings. Worth doing so you know when it's actually been triggered.
Whether anyone is manually connecting to specific phones to listen in live to conversations is a very different topic. I'd say it's a more important one then whether Google are recording everything so they can advertise things at you.
I don't know why people keep thinking that phones are listening in on every conversation just so they can advertise 'Volvo' at you.
they don't need to - we give them loads of data voluntarily based on location data, what we search for, things we buy, things we 'like' on social media..
they'd be stung for huge fines and reputational damage if caught doing it.
it'd take enormous storage and processing power to manage all that data.
Just think about how many things you talk about every day that you've never then seen an advert for (confirmation bias)
my Google Home can't understand me when I'm actually talking directly at it asking it a question, so the idea it can seripticiously pick out words while listening through my pocket is implausible.
How would they know that because you mentioned a thing, that it means you're then worth targeting a ad for? "I wish i could find my fork", or "I saw someone eating a Mars Bar" or "My mate Phil just got the new Lego Batmobile" or all sorts of conversations that just mention a product in passing. What, do they have a secret set of phrases that they're listening out for that is linked to an intent to want to buy it?
It's just so far-fetched that I'm baffled that people truly believe this is actually happening.
Just because technically something might be possible, doesn't mean that there's actually a valid reason for anyone to actually do it. What is actually in it for Google to do this? Their regular, not unethical or illegal advertising processes already work so spectacularly well that they've killed off entire advertising industries already.
There's a big difference between some people at a company unlawfully accessing customer data (which is basically what this is), compared to it being a secret company policy to harvest all that data to use for their other secret business practices.
Security of those microphones is a genuine and legitimate security concern. But that's a very different situation to the conspiracy theory that 'Google / Alexa is listening in to everything we say so that they can put an ad in-front of us based on the name of a product that they overheard',
While a tech solution to replace Twitter is possible, the tech is only about 5% of what makes Twitter Twitter - the other 95% is the userbase. Which again counts in Threads favour because they already have a huge Instagram userbase. They could release any old hastily put together system and still get 30m users... Hmm.
Regardless, there are multiple reasons why they wouldn't / aren't listening in, and maybe 1 reason they would - to target you with ads? Why would they bother? Hell, my Google Home can't even understand me when I explicitly talk to it to ask it something. Even if they could listen in to everything, they wouldn't get any accuracy.
People just find it a fun conspiracy theory. But if you sit back and think about it for longer then 10 seconds you realise how ludicrously unlikely it is
Yeah, people who believe that Google is listening in to their conversations just to sell ads really don't understand a) how pointless that is considering how much they already know about you from the stuff you voluntarily give them, and b) why it's legally not even something they'd consider. If they were doing it and someone discovered proof then the company would be sued out of business. Why would they risk the damage to their rep and finances just to sell ads, when they can already sell ads accurately based on data they've legally acquired
And not to mention the amount of storage and processing power it would take to record everyone's conversations, 24/7.
It's more different than people expect it do be, I think. So once people have gotten past the 'what is an instance/ server, how do I actually join Mastodon...' stuff that puts people off, they're then in the infrastructure that kind of looks and acts like Twitter but in different ways that you don't realise until you've delved into things. It's just more barriers really.
There is Bluesky as an alternative, but that's not ActivityPub, it's it's own protocol. Personally I think that's the best option - it's open source and decentralised - but I think some people have reservations because Jack Dorsey is / was involved. Plus it's still on beta so is invite-only for the time being.
Mastodon is very good for following topics. But it's a pain trying to find and follow people. And even when you do have a good selection of people, the culture there is very Boost-heavy (because that's how you discover people, not really via search) so your timeline ends up being full of boosted posts written by people you don't follow, often about things you aren't interested in.
Yeah, the privacy, tech, scalability etc is great. But it's not a direct replacement for Twitter. And that's what a lot of folks are looking for. Which is sadly why Threads will do so well.
We had some good variety of search engines back in the day. Alta vista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Yahoo... Now it's just Google, or slightly worse versions.
I know people say to use DuckDuckGo but I never get as useful results there as on Google. I just have to scroll past a lot more ads on Google to get to the actual links.