Mastodon is not the Fediverse. There is plenty of alternatives out there. What you describe sounds a lot like freedom. Instead of only one entity controlling what is said in their platform, now you have many entities, and the user can pick which community to join, based on the federation links, topics, server performance, etc... or start their own (with a single-user blogging platform like microblog.pub). There is no need for governance, if you like A, then you go to an instance with people who like A. If you are the type of person who prefer to be told what to do,then I'm sure there are also instances for that as well. And again, Mastodon is not the Fediverse.
The feds have been working hard to push the "freedom isn't free" agenda in order to persuade the public that Chinese style is acceptable if we are the ones doing it.
You can see the effort on YouTube(through major podcasts and channels), TikTok, now the New York Times, among other places (for example, the ex-CIA guy that trended in YT for a while, who claims the government needs to surveil us to "keep us safe", and the CIA is "good", Snowden is a traitor, and all the deep state talking points, etc...).
Straight propaganda, such as the one coming from Tass or XinHua news, is insane.
Privacy is not a "protest", is a right. You are safer if your privacy, is preserved, not the other way around. The "freedom isn't free" argument for surveillance doesn't really fly.
Another pattern I hear people use to justify their laziness is "Why should I hide every detail of my life from Google when the government already knows everything?
They must also make money, right?
so that they can continue to provide their services for free."
I don't mind if someone wants to give up their privacy; what I find ridiculous is people arguing for others to do the same.
Is simply xenophobia, as it is with Russians or Russia-related issues.
This is how the internet works in the Western world.
When you point it out, they simply downvote you; if your account is new, they will claim it is a bot or that you are an agent/collaborator, and so on.
Why can't all of the graphs and budgeting calculations be done in the front-end?
Why should I put my data in your hands? What service do you provide that a native, offline first app like Money in MacOS does not?
Great news. Law enforcement needs to find better ways to caught the bad guys. My data , is my business. I hope Apple doesn't implement a backdoor or something, and for real don't store encryption keys on their servers.
Good for you. Most people don't want Microsoft to own their data. You get that? User's data belong to them, if you are set to share all your personal data with Microsoft , then it should be an opt-in process (maybe they can entice you with Bing points or some sort of rewards?). It should be offline by default. As customer are already paying for the operating system. You can also use many syncing solutions from Google drive to dropbox, and many others. Regarding the "amount of time I spend worrying about hard drive failure" , never have I had a hard drive that just dies, is possible , but extremely unlikely, I make a backup of my important stuffs to other hard drives or the cloud. Cloud sign-on is just another way to track users and violates their basic privacy rights.
Many companies in South Florida (for example) ask trivia questions about frameworks or programming languages when interviewing junior/mid software devs. Many just "trust" you if you come from another "known" company like Ultimate Software, Akamai, etc.
The closest thing I can relate to that, is the Google engineer that claimed the AI was sentient. Everything for he clicks and likes. Long live the content gods.
It looks good, very similar to Emery. I have a few suggestions:
- I want this to work offline, or I will never pay for it. Many reasons:
-- No way I'm sharing my work calendar with you(your service) my dude, is actually against company(Google) policy. Many engineers at FAANG and FAANG like (big tech ) companies will love to use such tool(at least I will), they can afford it, and many of them have a strong online presence and can advertise your product for free ( the same way they do it for Obsidian, for example). So you pretty much dropping a huge chunk of your customer base.
-- User's data belong to them, many people organize their lives with this type of tool, and what they write there, is not our concern nor you should have access to it.
-- Is not too hard to implement client sync, and you can actually offer it as a premium feature.
- I know you are just starting up, but maybe you can offer a free trial without logins, so people can try your products without having to make a fake account?
- Also, a way to import calendars from Exchange, Apple, Google, ...
Congrats for the launch, it looks good. I will follow your journey, if the product change, I will buy it for sure. Love to support small hackers.
See my comment, indeed, I still think is useful for lets say a woke Mastodon instance that wants automated non-woke speech removal. Which is fine, the other side can come up with something similar as well.
I agree, I wonder what is your data composition? Reddit threads, blogs, HN discussions? You can see why someone could make the case for bias. But I think is pretty good project, and pretty useful for communities that want only members with the same ideology, and need an automated filter to help with undesired comments, etc.
Sure, there is plenty of ways to get someone from that company's attention, Looking for trolls in Blind is not the best way really, anyone can say anything their one, and the reporter would have no way of verifying it, then will publish something that is false, which we all know have happened many times. But if you think BBC is a extremely reliable source, then, yeah, you are right.
I forgot to screenshot the post. But I saw a post on Blind, from a BBC user (which could or could not be a reporter) asking for people to tell stories about the layoffs. I was blown away. I always assumed reporters will try to find someone and talk to them face to face (via zoom or in person) to gather intel on news stories.
Congrats on launching the feature, which I will never use.
If someone from Notion is reading this, I humbly suggest a few other features that might actually make an impact.
- Offline mode. My data is mine, my tables, templates, notes, have no reason to live in your server.
- Improve performance. Notion is getting slower with every release.
- Full Text Workspace Search.
This are features customers actually want. Show some customer obsession and cut the crap with that GPT-3 non-sense. You are helping spammers to automate their workflow, on creating irrelevant posts that match search keys.We already have copy.ai and a ton of other services that do just that.
I like him, even bought his first Flask book. I just don't agree with him on this one. He (I hope is he, correct me OP) tries to make the short term scaling issues of one Fediverse project (Mastodon) the reason of why decentralization is bad or not feasible.
The author claims decentralization is a questionable goal, but fail at explaining why. Claims we need something in the middle, like what?
He tries to link decentralization to cryptocurrencies and defis, etc... very sneaky, but lazy argument. Decentralization means freedom, self determination and power, power to host your content on your own terms, or in a place that is friendly to you, and exchange ideas with people in other communities, where they also own their data. You can have people on @socialist.social talking with @billionaries.social , but one party can't make the other disappear just because. His other argument is against Mastodon technical design, I agree , I wouldn't pick the stack the Mastodon team chose, that said, there are many activitypub enabled projects, GoToSocial, Misskey, etc... which are more resource efficient, so the failure of one project , is just a learning opportunity for another newer projects. Regarding "unpaid labor and opsec", people can rent a server from a provider that guarantees updates and uptime, or host their own, in the same way is done across the industry. I'm not claiming this is what the author is saying, but most of the criticism I see of the Fediverse comes in the flavor of "Look all those people I don't like and can't get banned, how dare them to share their ideas, let me start complaining to make them disappear".