Mozilla 2012: We're winning the browser war and saving the web. You're welcome.
Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?
Mozilla 2021: Through inclusiveness and the power of positive thinking we will facilitate leadership towards in-depth studies of what we can do to improve social media.
Mozilla 2024: Running a small mastodon instance is just too hard, we give up.
Do you remember the first time you were aroused by language?
I do! Hadn't thought about it in at least twenty years. Thanks for the reminder, creepy chatbot that inspired this post. Thinking that an LLM could develop "its own sense of desire" was naive and seems ridiculous today, but I suppose their intentions were honorable as well as erotic.
Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don't trust it at all, I'm worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me...
It is a fair position in the sense that it's technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should've had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.
If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now "it’s an ongoing process" as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.
If you were a threads user, you'd be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.
It's interesting to see that Linux has gotten popular enough that a few of the most user-hostile devs are going out of their way specifically to stop people using it. Other than ignorance it's unclear what their motivations could be. I for one will remember the names of the studios that do it and try my best never to buy or talk about their games.
It makes sense. I just wasn't sure how likely it would be for species to evolve in significant ways over a long time without obvious changes to the shape of their fossils. Difficult to spot evolution happens a lot, apparently:
Cryptic, or sibling, species are discrete species that are difficult, or sometimes impossible, to distinguish morphologically and thus have been incorrectly classified as a single taxon. Cryptic species are found from the poles to the Equator and in all major terrestrial and aquatic taxonomic groups [2, 3]. For example, a recent meta-analysis yielded 2,207 articles reporting cryptic species in all metazoan phyla and classes, including 996 new species in insects, 267 in mammals, 151 in fishes and 94 in birds [2].
In my years of using mullvad (before they took away port forwarding) I found probably half a dozen websites that blocked me based on that but it may be more common now. Often I found it was easy to get around it using Tor. Some of the smaller and better-run sites might fix the problem if you report it to them through the proper channels.
It does not require compromising your free software ideals
By which of course I mean what I think of as free software ideals, which I've come to understand in large part through the teachings of Richard Stallman even though I'm not personally such an idealist as he is. He Sometimes he even goes so far as to recommend people to services with non-free software on the server side, so long as it requires only free software on systems that the user controls. Your standards may differ. But anyway, if you had to quit fedi because someone set up a fediverse/telegram bridge I think it would not be a practical way to live. Where you draw the line is of course up to you, but I wouldn't expect many people to follow you that far from the usual FOSS positions.
You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client
ohhhh so that's how normal people do it. I sort of felt stupid for not figuring out the easy way when I wrote an overly-complicated shell script for it.
I don't think even RMS himself would refuse to participate in something on the grounds that Telegram users are also able to do so. It does not require compromising your free software ideals. By all means point out to them that you believe them to be doing something wrong, but the method you've chosen to try and get them to change their ways seems very likely to be ineffective and also counterproductive. It does further divide the community, even if others have already done even worse.
kbal @ kbal @fedia.io Posts 13Comments 1,112Joined 2 yr. ago 
It might contribute in some small aesthetic way to deterring them, which seems a much better ambition.