pleroma.debian.social

pleroma.debian.social

jlines | @jlines@pleroma.debian.social

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If your business model doesn’t work without breaking the law, you’re not in busiess — you’re in organized crime.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-ai-lawsuit

@johncarlosbaez @mansr Time for a new list of highly cited researchers caught engaging in bad practice - or would that just encourage them ?

@mikebroberts For me the issue is that Slack/Discord and the like act, in ecological terms, like an invasive species, such as Ground Elder "It can pose an ecological threat owing to its invasive nature, with potential to crowd out native species." Once they have a foothold they are hard to dislodge.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled ... was convincing internet communities to switch from email lists / IRC / another open standard to Slack / Discord. The latest example of a “it's only free while we say it's free" is CNCF’s / Kubernetes's Slack - https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/communication/slack-migration-faq.md - who it appears have *4 days* to backup their history (for a server with 100,000s of users)

Neither Slack nor Discord are reasonable, serious, professional, options for open community discussion. They are either too expensive, and/or involve inappropriate advertising. And who knows when Discord will start pulling this kind of behaviour, too, requiring large communities to pay?

The problem is today when anyone says "can't we just use an email list?" they are pooh-pooh'ed as being horribly out of touch. Hence why even the linked FAQ describes Discord as the only likely exit plan for Kubernetes. What a mess.

@bkuhn I spent far more time than I should have done reading Groklaw - It was fascinating to be able to follow a complex case in such detail.

@OpenTech_AUC I suggest investigating #XMPP, but in particular snikket as the Instant Messenger/chat equivalent to WhatsApp. It is fully open source, and built out of standard components. You can run up your own server quickly and federate with all the other XMPP servers. Note that WhatsApp is basically an XMPP server (eJabberd) which does not federate. For a University College running your own XMPP server(s) lets you undertsand IM by doing

How to tell that you're valued as a customer in 2025: if you need to wait 45 minutes to be connected to a representative, you know they're not using an LLM

'Forced to adapt your workflow to software, should be other way around
Loss of agency, record levels of burnout
Spending extra time didn’t anger her. The pointlessness did
Different users have different needs, centralized development can’t possibly address
Shift control into hands of users?
Beyond direct productivity benefit, physicians felt more in control of their tools—antidote to burnout
With closed-source software no assistant can help much'
heard in https://inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software
cc @geoffreylitt

Really, @EUCommission? It's great that you are here on Mastodon, but why not show it proudly instead of linking out only to those Big-Tech-Silos?

@_elena, me and other people at thought, you should change that please.

Will you?

Screenshot from European commission website showing share buttons to Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn and a Link button.

"Yet beneath their ideological differences, the American and Chinese models are converging in function. One is driven by market logic, the other by political imperatives—but both prioritize efficiency over accountability, control over consent, and scale over individual rights. In a world where authority accrues to those who control the digital space, it may matter less whether power resides in public or private hands than how effectively it can be centralized."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/technopolar-paradox-ian-bremmer-fusion-tech-state-power

@amy certainly agree on your points, and also concerned at the way that SMTP is becoming/has become defederated in practice. I believe an effort to educate the law makers would be more productive than asking Meta to be nice. I wish the tech giants who do not have a stake in the Instant Messaging and Social Media spaces would see that there can be value to them in promoting the open standards. Ideally the foundations would have financial support from more than 1 company.

@fencepost @GossiTheDog It is a very poor UI decision to hide information from a user for the sake of convenience which would allow them to make security decisions. This is not restricted to Instant Messengers.

@fencepost @GossiTheDog I think the inherent 'flatness' of Signal, and other non-federated IM systems is a weakness in that it fails to make use of the information you get for free from the tree structured nature of the DNS. If the other members of the group had all been on the republican.org, or whitehouse.gov server (or a mixture), then the presence of a jeffrey.goldberg@theatlantic.com would/should have been glaring obvious.

@Viss so if your internet is down you wont be able to, for example "Alexa turn the light on", turn the heating up or down etc.

@ireneista @contrapunctus @grimalkina @Lunaphied Clicking on the ellipsis at the bottom right of Daniel's post and selecting 'Expand this post' show other replies, but the one from @winfriedtilanus is the most useful.

@adamhotep @snopes rather than using Signal, I suggest self hosting an #XMPP server with accounts for key people. Create a group for sharing MFA keys and keep this sensitive information under your control. If your xmpp server was, say chat.snopes.com, then you can leverage DNS security to have confidential discussions with external people too. See [It is good to be a tree}(https://wordpress.debian.social/jlines/2021/01/12/it-is-good-to-be-a-tree/)

@ireneista @contrapunctus @grimalkina @Lunaphied There is an interesting thread here on Federated Metadata privacy

@thevril @contrapunctus @snikket_im @grimalkina I do like that list too, and use Conversations (via #fdroid and donate via @mastadon.xyz@liberapay). My aim is to inform people that alternatives to monolithic Instant Messengers exist, and encourage more mainstream use.

@ireneista @contrapunctus @grimalkina @Lunaphied I am concerned about the risks associated with metadata for some time, specifically in the context of Who pays for WhatsApp, but any centralised system, e.g. Signal, or Telegram - even if well intentioned, will be vulnerable to insiders being bribed of coerced. Federation limits the insider information scope.

@grimalkina @contrapunctus I suggest actually trying XMPP - there are links to Free Clients and servers at https://xmpp.org/getting-started/, but you might find the 14 day trial at https://snikket.org/ (and then about $6 per month for up to about 10 people) worth a go. They are a friendly interface on real XMPP, and I like their transparency, and that they are on the Fediversse @snikket_im

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