Oh, interesting. I also initially read it as a thinly-veiled threat but I think you’re right it was more of a “will i be assaulted”. Still a weird thing to say.

Okay. If the article is misleading or wrong, it shouldn’t be posted. If it is found to be incorrect after posting, is it better to fix the title and let the comments sort it out or to fully delete the post?

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

It’s always interesting when someone is like “I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can’t because all of my family are on Facebook.”

Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn’t anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I’m saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it’s okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you’ve ever met. Yeah it’s more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can’t do so passively via Facebook, but that’s how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.

If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn’t need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.

I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just “look at picture, press like button”) are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you’re going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn’t switching with you, it’s important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.

When you sign up [for Mastodon], you join a server (called an “instance”), which resembles a forum and is based around a shared interest.

What an incredibly ineffective and possibly outright misleading way to describe that.

I have no illusions that if Facebook and Google had started with proprietary and non-interoperable chat systems that XMPP would be flourishing today. I think that, by and large, we’d be in the same place with it.

People chatting from XMPP to Facebook to chat with folks probably by and large would’ve gotten Facebook accounts for the non-chat functionality that was never interoperable and not part of real time chat communication. Think groups and events.

If you only interacted with Facebook people over XMPP, you were locked out of a huge portion of functionality unless you signed up for Facebook even while XMPP worked.

A lot of people are focused on “extend” in the vein of Facebook and Google playing fast and loose with the XMPP spec and implementation until the whole ecosystem got fucked and then walking away. Which is a real danger. I mean, in a lot of ways Mastodon itself has already proven that. How much fedi drama over the years has been caused by Masoton unilaterally deciding something that other AP microblogging platforms just needed to deal with? Lots of people have beef with Eugen for a reason.

But even more insidious than that will be luring people onto Threads for ancillary benefits and then cutting off that large swath of the fediverse after the drain is complete. Then we would definitely not “end up exactly where we are now.”

Imagine in 3 years. “Ohh threads supports a live chat thread feature but those threads don’t federate. My friends are gonna do one while they all watch the season finale of Marvel Bullshit Infinity. Guess I could sign up for Threads to take part. Hmm I can still follow all my friends in the broader fediverse from here, I can just make this my primary account. Scratch that I’ll make this my only account. Oh, what Threads is turning off federation? Oops sorry everyone else I have no way to reach you anymore, maybe you can switch to threads?”

Yeah that makes sense. I don’t have an insta or facebook account, so I don’t know what-all information you can fill in there. But it makes more sense than “any website or app with a freetext box must say they collect any possible data.”

I’m curious, I’ve never released a mobile app nor had to write a privacy policy.

When the privacy controls says it collects health information and sensitive info, is that because I can put that information in posts that I make and by definition of posting it, Meta has access to it? Or does it indicate specific data collection (somehow) or processing of submitted posts to collect that data from prose?

That is, if I were to post “I am an atheist and have a prescription for a daily control inhaler” does that constitute beehaw processing sensitive information and health information from me? Or does that just fall under general “user content” and the specific categories must come from somewhere specific?

Let’s say you run a moderately successful flea market. You own a moderately sized field. You employ a staff of accountable organizers to vet and select your vendors to ensure they aren’t selling anything you don’t want at your market (say Nazi paraphernalia, guns). You have security staff and volunteers at the event itself to ensure vendors and customers are safe - they ensure vendors aren’t selling anything they shouldn’t be, they ensure customers don’t try to steal or assault your vendors, they make sure nobody accidentally sets the field on fire, they manage the parking lot and portapotties.

A collective of artisans admire your success and buy up an adjacent field. While your flea market focuses on second hand and vintage goods, they want somewhere to sell handmade things. The organizers of your event work with the organizers of that event to share strategies and ensure both markets can reasonably remain safe and popular. Since they by and large hold themselves to the same standards as you, you agree to share a parking lot and build paths between your two fields.

A local farmers co-op eventually joins your meta-organization in the same way to offer fresh meat and produce.

Now you have a bustling megamarket. The billionaire that owns the local mall sees a drop in revenue due to folks going to the fields for secondhand clothes, fresh produce, and local art. People aren’t shopping with you as much anymore.

The billionaire comes up with a plan to recapture the market. Open air markets in fields are popular now? The billionaire buys the rest of the farmland around your fields and flattens it. They pour a paved parking lot with a dedicated interchange with the local highway. They promise a mix of big corporate vendors and allow smaller vendors to set up their own tents and sell right alongside everyone else.

You think, wow this is a great opportunity to grow all of our markets even more. You start building pathways from your field into the billionaire’s field so customers can easily get between your markets.

But soon, you start to notice something. People start parking at the billionaire’s field because it is paved and has easy highway access. Some of your vendors have started pulling out of your markets so they can go set up at the billionaire’s field so folks see their tent before they have spent all their money. Vendors who don’t move start having to pull out as the market is no longer worth their time or money. With fewer vendors, even more people avoid your fields and stay in the billionaire’s field.

And you start to notice something else. The billionaire started posting folks at the oath between your fields. Your markets have a few vendors the billionaire and their corporate vendors deem unsavory - erotic art, microbrewed beer, that sort of thing. They won’t allow in any customers who have bought anything from those vendors because they run a family friendly establishment. Soon, the people who still come to your side of the field are avoiding those vendors.

You notice an additional thing. The billionaire isn’t as diligent at vendor management as you are, especially with the amount of resources they’re using making sure nobody is carrying around erotic art from your market. While the side of the field near the parking lot where all the corporate vendors are is bright and shiny, you’ve noticed some questionable things happening near your side of the field. The antiques dealer is selling Nazi paraphernalia. The information tent for the local gun club has started to sell firearms with no background checks. The carnival toy vendor is secretly selling opiates. Folks who shop there keep trying to get into your markets and your security folks are having a hard time keeping a handle on things. You don’t have the resources to screen everyone who comes in. You end up having to fence off your paths to prevent folks coming from that market from causing harm to your vendors and customers.

But by this point most of your customers are accustomed to using the fancy parking lot and shopping with the corporate vendors. They’re confronted with a decision: do they just keep going to the billionaire’s field and get their clothes from the TJ Maxx tent or are they willing to make two stops so they can still peruse the cute vintage clothing?

Driving all the way around the fields to get to the other parking lot is pretty inconvenient so don’t bother. Eventually you can’t make the property tax payments for your field and you have to sell. The dream is done. The billionaire buys up the fields and expands their market.

Now rewind. You are an enthusiastic customer of the farmer’s market. How do you feel about the billionaire’s plan to buy up adjacent farmland?

(I was not able to work in a metaphor for meta “extending” activitypub with “new features” that aren’t part of the spec and forcing the rest of the fediverse to comply or get left behind)

Many of these have the same underlying external cause of money no longer being free so they can’t keep the merry-go-round going for their debt and/or their investors are no longer content to just pour more money into the engine.

did you know a release of a new fully open source LLM called OpenLLaMA just got announced by the Researchers at Berkeley AI Research?

I didn’t know that. Have you created a post about it in this community? I don’t see one.

A 45 minute “round table” with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn’t sound like enough time for the table to get very round.

It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we’ll be sure to circle back offline.