I hope I’m wrong too. But I’m pretty pessimistic.

Even if the tools are not yet there, “they” want to know exactly who asks for code to things like a DIY radar station or autonomous drone control. We’re well into “first they came” territory.

Many password manager generators already do (use the “memorable” type).

If you’re deliberating between Apple Maps and Google Maps, the only advantage Apple ever had was the lack of ads. Apple’s data is worse, routing is worse, navigation UI is worse (which of the lanes should you be in right now for your next turn), etc. It’s astounding that Apple would enshittify this right now when they’re not even close to being a decent replacement for the primary competition.

This is a good time to refer back to a Forbes piece on Brian Acton from a few years back:

The Facebook-WhatsApp pairing had been a head-scratcher from the start. Facebook has one of the world’s biggest advertising networks; Koum and Acton hated ads. Facebook’s added value for advertisers is how much it knows about its users; WhatsApp’s founders were pro-privacy zealots who felt their vaunted encryption had been integral to their nearly unprecedented global growth.

This dissonance frustrated Zuckerberg. Facebook, Acton says, had decided to pursue two ways of making money from WhatsApp. First, by showing targeted ads in WhatsApp’s new Status feature, which Acton felt broke a social compact with its users. “Targeted advertising is what makes me unhappy,” he says. His motto at WhatsApp had been “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”—a direct contrast with a parent company that derived 98% of its revenue from advertising. Another motto had been “Take the time to get it right,” a stark contrast to “Move fast and break things.”

Facebook also wanted to sell businesses tools to chat with WhatsApp users. Once businesses were on board, Facebook hoped to sell them analytics tools, too. The challenge was WhatsApp’s watertight end-to-end encryption, which stopped both WhatsApp and Facebook from reading messages. While Facebook didn’t plan to break the encryption, Acton says, its managers did question and “probe” ways to offer businesses analytical insights on WhatsApp users in an encrypted environment.

Long live Signal!

Lemmy is way better than Reddit on several fronts. Reddit is a profit-motivated corporation domiciled in a fascist country and their administrative actions reflect that.

“Don’t be dumb” can be interpreted in many ways.

You can accidentally dox yourself anywhere, especially as you build up a large comment history for a person (or LLM) to analyze. You can deduce my age to a pretty narrow range because I’ve written about growing up with modems calling local BBSes. I’ve tried not to write much about my location, but there are probably many clues out there. The totality of my comments may be very good at filtering down who I could possibly be. Similar for anyone else.

One nice thing about Lemmy is that you can make alt accounts on different instances and then limit your community participation accordingly, to choose your own self-doxxing exposure. One account could be great for location-divulging commentary, such as regional politics or the weather involved in your gardening. Another could be great for your porn habits, although lemmynsfw recently went dark.

Reddit has spent a lot of effort building internal tools to correlate your access habits and such so that they can group all of your alts together to try to prevent ban evasion. The Fediverse design makes that much more difficult unless you get colluding instance operators.

Instead of ads here (and their associated surveillance), we have occasional pleas from instance admins to kick in some donations. It’s too bad that we don’t have good anonymous micro transactions yet, but maybe a cryptobro will tell me how easy that is if I would just use their preferred tech. At least you can donate to an instance without disclosing your account (although lemmynsfw was obvious in its purpose).

Lemmy is better, but it’s still public. Don’t be dumb.

Even Reddit had third parties tracking everything, with some of them republishing data. There was a long era where sites like Removeddit let you read deleted and removed posts.

In Lemmy it’s structurally different, but there are still plenty of third parties doing similar stuff. For instance, LemVotes is tracking and republishing everyone’s votes (looks like you’ve recently been on a downvote tear, OP).

I have to assume that by now all of the major and aspiring LLM companies are quietly drinking the full firehose of posts and comments (and ignoring delete messages), and will use the data however they want, indefinitely. That probably includes at least one entity happy to give it to law enforcement.

In other words, it’s all public, deletes are only best effort, and the policies of your instance are mostly irrelevant with respect to other parties retaining your data. There are a few things that only your instance knows, such as your IP addresses, but that’s relatively little comfort.

Don’t be dumb.

Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of kite photography. Modern camera tech should make it especially light and awesome.

I’ve heard this rumor before but I’ve never found a mute button on a single pump. I’ve pressed them all.

Kermit, so fancy! I remember the excitement of discovering ZMODEM and how much better it was than the old standard of XMODEM.

Each alias has a configured delivery destination. Aliases that only point externally never reach the main account inbox.

You are limited to replying from the gmail unless you jump through more advanced hoops. Those include telling gmail in its settings that it can “Send mail as” something else, and also giving gmail authorization to send mail for your domain by adding them into your SPF and DKIM records. Those are more complicated than I want to describe here, and it will be complicated to merge both mailbox.org and gmail into them, so if you don’t already know about them, let’s just say yes, you can only reply as the gmail user.

I don’t know about mailbox.org, but with Fastmail I use a combination of explicit aliases and a catchall alias. The catchall and some individuals direct to me, but other individuals go to me and my spouse@gmail, while others go only to spouse@gmail. The per-user fee is about how many distinct mailboxes with different passwords exist in the service, so I’m only paying for one for me, and the aliases are configurable to resend incoming mail externally.

And if you start getting spam at one of your addresses, likely because one of your service providers either sells your info or gets their database stolen, you can tell fastmail to blackhole that one specific address.

I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.

???

I don’t think I’m being particularly rude here, but the reason why I’m engaging is that OP didn’t do anything wrong and I’m glad they made the post.

I dislike paywalls and registrationwalls as much as most people, but the overall lemmyverse isn’t large enough to discourage posters who link to interesting on topic content. That is rude.

At the time I’m submitting this one, this post has 77 comments, including a few with OP engaging in replies. There are several distinct healthy discussions that occurred in this post long before you complained that OP didn’t put in enough effort by violating 404’s copyright because you feel entitled to have a low-effort doomscrolling experience. OP isn’t the one hurting the community here.

It’s nuts to me that you can’t see the nuance in the difference between “please don’t [post]” and “maybe copy [the article text] into the post”.

The “maybe” in there is doing a lot of work converting that into a suggested guideline rather than being a hard rule, and a polite request to follow the guideline is appropriate. But the nuance of “don’t post unless” is distinctly discouraging participation, and not appropriate.

Providing the text or an archive link separately may be polite, but your request goes too far. If somebody shares a paywalled link that is on topic for the community, you have several options. You can ignore it and miss out, and be no worse off. You can find an archive copy yourself, and even share it in a comment to receive fake internet points. You can enjoy the discussion in the comments and maybe find other relevant links there. But you’re suggesting that the community is better off with fewer posts and less participation (“please don’t [post] unless”).

The community rules include

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post

That’s a much nicer way of stating a preference to have OPs do the legwork. Please don’t discourage community participation.

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing!