Remind me, who owns WhatsApp?

It may sound a little silly but when I get good feedback on something, I pop it in my journal under a specific tag so I can revisit it from time to time.

It’s unfortunate that people are unfair to you, possibly they are younger or otherwise have incorrect expectations about your fallibility as a human.

I used to respond to things like that but these days I let the positive comments speak for themselves. Just remember to ask for feedback- a lot of people otherwise won’t do it unless they’ve got something negative to say.

I guess I’m late to reading about this. As a 19 year old, he met a British 12 year old online, plied them with alcohol, raped them, pled guilty, and was punished for this.

What’s interesting is he was convicted in Britain, and then was sent to serve his sentence in the Netherlands. When he arrived, his sentence was reduced and the crime was changed because Dutch law didn’t recognise his crime as rape if force or violence wasn’t involved (they changed that this year).

Despite that I’m still astonished he was even considered to represent his country in this way. Even though the law and rules allowed it, surely common sense wouldn’t.

I have been thinking about this idea for some time also but a couple of things have always bugged me-

Firstly, how does this interact with privacy? For vote delegation to work, I think the votes would have to be public, or you can’t make a decision on who to delegate your vote to- someone could claim to have one set of views but vote contrary to that. People could come under pressure to vote one way or another.

Also, who crafts the legislation that is voted on? How do you prevent bill rolling (two unrelated ideas are boiled down to a single binary choice) and splitting (a new service is voted through but the taxes to fund it are not)?

You said local government at least so a national or state government could help craft these things, but what if the proposed legislation doesn’t actually hurt local people, but doesn’t take into account the actual problems they have locally? For example, what if it would help to allow building in a particular area, but the state government doesn’t know that and it never becomes a priority?

It’s still an emerging technology so it makes sense that many of the early adopters are IT nerds. Early Reddit was the same- the most active communities were IT, programming or video game related. More diversity will appear in time.

Passkeys (depending on implementation) are more resistant to info stealer viruses.

The private key portion can be in your OS’s credential store and can be used to sign the challenge without being revealed to the calling application.

Of course this doesn’t work if you got rooted, but a lot of viruses of this kind try to steal what they can get as a regular user, and you can get a lot, ie AWS credentials, saved browser passwords etc.

In my view it’s cheap defense in depth.

And no mention of what happens to their API but knowing google it either goes away entirely or totally changes with significant rework required.

Related, the reason I no longer use any google API: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc

Hacker News, a link aggregator similar to oldschool reddit before subreddits were introduced. I find it often has some interesting discussions but it’s not for everybody.

Precisely, you don’t have to be deeply technical to understand this, you just have to be willing to put in a little bit of work.

I also found it a little complex and daunting at first as it was my first contact with the fedirverse, and I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start.

We’ll make it a great place to be, and other people will see the benefits and put in the same work too.

Precisely. Investors like apps because users cannot change their user experience, disable telemetry, block ads easily, and so on. They receive push notifications which drive engagement and allow easier tracking across accounts.

I could be tempted but none of that is going to happen. Even though this move will kill the community, it won’t kill it fast enough to cause a problem. There’s just too much money to be made.

I don’t see a problem so long as they do so in good faith - for example publishing full event contents to ActivityPub instead of adding a link back to the Facebook Threads app, which is basically what a lot of news sites do with their RSS feeds to get advertising money.

So long as they do that, it’s not really possible to do a rug-pull. There are far more Facebook users than Fediverse users after all, so it’s going to be advertising for the Fediverse for as long as this lasts and if users would like to remain part of it they’ll have to move to another server. That is, assuming it ends.

To answer the question though, I don’t care for microblogging personally and I don’t like Meta as a company so I won’t use it. I appreciate the scepticism but I feel optimistic.

Yes, looking at the docs linked from a sibling comment I see that upvotes and downvotes are part of the protocol, which is good to see. To prevent vote stuffing however, it does seem that all instances will have a database of upvotes and downvotes and who did them. They were never really secret anyway but it’s interesting that any server can see this, it’ll be an interesting development to be able to track vote brigading.

It is yes, but there is an (unrelated) Android client called Jerboa if that is the OS you use.

I would very much like the Apollo developer to do this but possibly he’s burnt out on social media and would like to work on something else. He has developed a series of other unrelated apps that make him a decent income also.

Well, they want to do something and he wants them to not do it so he is the enemy and must be destroyed. I’ve seen this in many companies over the years.

What frustrates me is that nobody from that side is telling the truth: Third party developers were once useful but are now a liability and they have to go because a future buyer or investor will not understand the value of a vibrant development community and see something that cannot be controlled. The timeline for the IPO is ticking down and there is no time to come up with a way to formally integrate these clients, either by buyout or agreeing some sort of advertisement or subscription SDK. It’s unpleasant but I’d have more respect for the truth than lying and slandering the character of a good guy in the process.

Thank goodness he had recordings or this could have been career limiting for him, not that this occurred to the people with dollar signs in their eyes.

I expect it’s accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.

However, an architecture I’ve seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don’t know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don’t see how there is a meaningful difference.

Haha, that’s a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.

Yes, I loved that sub too, even though I have nothing to do with the food service industry it has been interesting reading about one of the more challenging and somewhat thankless market segments and the passion and camaraderie of those who work in it. I do hope that something equivalent is started here.

E-introverts represent, it has been a change really. I found that in Reddit, the sheer number of participants led me to only contribute meaningfully in smaller subreddits. I think I’ve made more comments today than in the last year on Reddit.

Furthermore it was quite computationally expensive. Modern CPUs have special instructions to work with AES and other algorithms, but back then it had to be done with individual instructions and with slow clock speeds.