stormbrew

Almost all coal plants in Alberta have been shut down and it's a small minority of net generation now. Natural gas has taken up most of the slack, but there's actually quite a lot of solar and wind generation in Alberta considering the politics (though that's likely to slow down now).

http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle...

17.577 million hectares have burned so far this year. If 2023 were on that graph it would be a skyscraper towering over every big fire year in the 80s and 90s.

This year is unprecedented. And it isn't even over yet and the fires are still burning.

I think that's true, though I also think the fediverse (but not necessarily Mastodon specifically) will outlive threads.

But I think the really big question will be: in 3-6 months is meta putting out DAU and/or MAU numbers for threads separate from Instagram's?

Until then you can only guess how "big" it really is. I don't personally find the numbers so far all that impressive: it's a sub-10% conversion rate from insta daily active users and I think behind the celebratory face they're putting forward that might not be what they were hoping for.

But mostly I see this trend everywhere where people give a lot of latitude to things like threads and Twitter and then give the most pessimistic read of the state of Mastodon.

If Mastodon were a startup and "centralized" its growth, bumpy as it is, would be the darling of the tech press. This is really obvious because every article about the fall of Twitter lists at least one and often several networks that have worse numbers and worse growth than Mastodon as if they're the next big thing.

Though maybe that'll change now that threads has bought its first 100m users.

The Mastodon corner of the fediverse is also ridiculously more well run and diverse than xmpp outside the big players ever was.

Like, when threads joins it's far far more likely to be a net contributor of spam and abuse towards the rest of the network because the people who run Mastodon instances generally actually care.

Even Mastodon.social (the biggest instance currently) routinely gets silenced or blocked temporarily by other instances when it lets spam get out of control, and that is generally considered a good thing by users.

Honestly that's gonna be the main reason threads gets defederated after the first round of ideological blocks: self-defence against abuse.

Threads has 100m total users (that number is based on userid badges on Instagram afaik).

The fediverse has somewhere around 10-13m total users, about 8-10m of those are on the main Mastodon network, and around 2-4m MAU. It's hard to pin these down precisely because different counters disagree (it's hard), but if you're going to take the most optimistic number from Meta (the only one you'll ever see), you should take the most optimistic from the other "side" as well.

Threads doesn't have an MAU yet because it hasn't existed for a month, but it will not be anywhere near 100%. Most people I've seen on it seem to have bounced day one and user growth has stalled a lot (roughly halving every day).

Sources for fediverse/mastodon numbers:

- fedidb.org

- the-federation.info (includes some things that aren't activitypub based)

- https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount

Threads numbers (only total users, pulled from badges on Instagram)

- https://www.quiverquant.com/threadstracker/

I'm sure all the script kiddies who loved to take over channels in netsplits are gonna be disappointed that they never actually did that now.

More seriously, this is the second time I've seen someone on here characterize IRC in this (very wrong) way in the last day. Where is this coming from?

IRC networks are made up of servers that relay (hence Internet Relay Chat) with each other. You connect to one server and you can communicate both with people local to that server and people on other servers that are part of the same network (including ones that server is not directly connected to). Channels prefixed with # are shared across all servers in the network, while channels starting with & are local to that server (though rarely used).

> And perhaps you need to reverse your thinking and realize that huge success without hard work work, intelligence is very unlikely even if some luck is also involved.

I said none of these things you're reading in to my argument.

> buying only like 10 tickets in their whole life

Did he reset his wealth, connections, etc. between each of those 'tickets'? No. Each one was built off the previous success. Without paypal there is no tesla (or at least not involving him). Without tesla there is no spacex. These are not independent events in the way that lottery ticket wins are. The analogy is not perfect, but the way it falls apart is not favourable to your interpretation.

And we will never know if those companies would have succeeded or been created without him. We can't test the counterfactual. His success is only evident in hindsight and the only proof that it's somehow unique to him is the fact that it happened.

> Who are you talking about? Tesla and SpaceX dominate the markets they operate in. He didn’t take some family wealth and just maintain it with a business. He grew multiple companies from sub million dollar values to hundreds of billions.

The claim here is that Musk is uniquely intelligent and that somehow explains his outsized success. That implies the people who don't have his success are not as smart as he is.

Unless... perhaps... there's more to this than intelligence or hard work.

Winning the lottery once increases your ability to win it in the future because you can (if you want) buy more tickets. Success creates conditions for more success in pretty mundane ways.

If someone wins the lottery, does that mean "they're a genius at picking numbers?" How many people with musk's starting wealth have started businesses? Do you think every single one of them is less of a genius than he is?

Musk's success story is just anecdata, as almost all wealth stories are.

Go check out Mixer and Facebook's game streaming if you want to see how well buying influencers onto your platform works.

It doesn't. No one's ever made it work. You need users and creators and users are considerably more stubborn than creators.

In Canada Disney+ is where most of the stuff on Hulu or FX eventually ends up, among some other things, and at this point I think it's actually probably the streaming service with the deepest library because of that, which is kind of funny. It's probably the one I'd be least likely to drop, while Netflix has been on the verge a few times now.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that come into existence now honestly.

This is also my perception. There's a cynicism that permeates this industry about what people are capable of understanding or using if given a little time and some motivation, to the point that listening to a forum like HN you'd think no one who sits in front of a computer can even type, let alone aim a mouse at a button.

Twitter was once considered pretty obtuse compared to facebook, at any rate. Once upon a time people didn't know what a retweet was or how to "at" someone. They didn't learn because twitter was "so easy" they learned because the people they wanted to talk to were there.

Network effects always trump all on these things.

You can just put that full name in the search bar on your own instance and follow them from it. You don't have to go to their instance at all.

I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is.

If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if you have an id@domain the flow is really simple and basically the same as other similar things (ie. put it in your email client).

The topic is playing games "legally." I think you can assume people who are talking about that are aware of the concept of getting them "illegally" as well.

Yeah and for Nike I think that'd be true here too. But for, say, Wired? Probably more active/useful.

That's the biggest corporate comms use of Twitter anyways, outside "Twitter as support short line" which is honestly both incredibly obnoxious and really unfair to users not on Twitter so I think it's a good thing it might die.

The fixed selection of games on them means that if your goal is to play the games legally, the cost is either very reasonable or effectively infinity, depending on what you want to play.

Post-composite and pre-cd hardware doesn't really need to be all that expensive, if you don't go wild with modding (and use something like a retrotink to upscale composite directly, regardless of console). But of course some games are quite expensive. CD consoles and games do fail a lot more, though.

I really don't know what in my post made you feel like I was giving the GP any credit at all. This is a weirdly combative reply for a vehement agreement?

Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it like any other corporate resource, integrated into their ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what their employees could do on it.

Ya know, like their email servers.

> having my data "read" by a non-sentient advertising model, while irritating, is nowhere near the same as having it read by a human being. that is a false equivalence.

I agree they're not equivalent.

One is a small harm guaranteed to be perpetrated every day against every single person using Twitter, numbering in the hundreds of millions of people, largely without those people knowing or consenting to it.

The other is a large harm sometimes inflicted on a small number of people, and when it does happen is isolated to a small community where people can find out about it and act on that knowledge how they see fit.

I've been around a long time. I've seen power abused on irc and forums and even small social networks. To me, the idea that we need supposedly benevolent megacorporations to keep us from doing harm to each other is a repulsive idea, far and away above "my instance admin might read something I wrote on their server."

If we've forgotten how to exist in community with each other, we should relearn that skill.

I believe there have been studies where they've transplanted hair from and to different parts of the body and found that they largely continue to grow the way they did at their original site, implying that follicles from different parts of the body just respond to hormonal environment differently.

Also the current understanding is that it's specifically DHT (a second order type of testosterone) that causes head hair follicles, and hormone treatments that modulate conversion of T into DHT one way or the other have fairly predictable effects on hair loss patterns.

There probably isn't just one single cause here, but hormones are definitely a big part of it.

Go look at that PR and read the details and ask yourself who you have to trust with a list of device keys you're encrypting your dm for.

You might be surprised to discover that you're still trusting an instance admin.

It does improve some things, potentially, in terms of intermediaries being able to read things, but there are a lot of things that are still reliant on trusting your admin, or are outright unclear how they'll work in practice.

That said, I take back that "no one has begun to explain..." - they've begun. But so far they've kinda just thrown some well established protocols at it but not done much to explain how it really helps the "trust your admin" problem.

Eh, if you don't trust your masto instance admin to not read your DMs do you really trust them to not break the "your password never leaves the client" guarantees that protonmail for eg. promises?

This is the thing about this argument: Either you trust your instance admins or not. If they promise you e2e and you don't trust them, you should rightly look at that as snakeoil.

> Mastodon is supposed to be better than those, right?

Here are the ways mastodon is better than twitter:

- It can't be bought by a billionaire man baby

- It can't be coerced into hosting awful people because they drive revenue

- It doesn't require advertising in order to continue existing

- Because of that I'm not being endlessly datamined by adtech every moment I'm using it.

- It can't die because one website goes down, and everyone on it doesn't experience awful performance just because one instance is falling over.

- If I don't like the admins of the instance I'm on, I can move to another instance and bring much of my data with me without having to exfiltrate it with tools that violate the TOS.

- I can use whatever clients I like with it and I never have to worry about the company deciding it doesn't like third party apps and killing them slowly with api rate limits.

There are also a lot of ways it's worse than twitter, though they're mostly along the lines of "some of my friends aren't on it". Things don't have to be "better in every way" than other things to be "better for me (or you)". There are always tradeoffs.

Re. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and iMessage are all apps you run on your phone. And if you can read the messages on them from a website (as you can if you turn on a feature for imessage), then the admins of the service also have access to your messages.

Again, we're talking about a website here.

I think the latter (manipulating the client) is far more likely than the former, and I think it would also be pretty difficult to detect in practice. But the point is less "I think they will do this" than "there is still an element of trust here, even if it is a much harder hoop to jump through." I don't think any situation where signal does anything like this is likely.

Signal is not a "hosted website," which is more the context we're talking about here. But even on those services, yes, there are ways that the owners of the service could tap or impersonate you through exploiting their own key exchange service. You are trusting that they won't do that.

This might be less true for matrix, since you could in theory be using an open source client where you have somehow guaranteed it will alert you to an attempt to add an unwanted device key to your e2e chat, but on signal you're running a binary you didn't compile against a service you can't see.

I don't think you shouldn't trust them. But you are doing so to some extent.

> it's pretty easy to assume that decentralized means there aren't admins who can read private messages.

I'm not sure why you would assume that? It's not something you run on your computer, it's still a website (or set of websites). Admins of your email can also read your email, if they want, and even with gmail in the mix it's probably one of the most "federated" systems ever built.

> I would certainly assume that in 2022 it would built using encryption for the parts that are private, and aren't DM's private? Why would admins be able to read them? Is there a justification for that?

They could potentially be encrypted at rest, in the database, but that doesn't really help much. The owner of the site would have the keys to decrypt them, and on smaller sites it's very unlikely that there'd be any real chain of custody involved.

If you've ever sent a DM on a forum did you think that was encrypted? It wasn't. Or twitter or facebook for that matter. It's not really practical for any data stored on a central server to be encrypted in a way that irrevocably prevents the owner of the service from accessing it.

> No for micro-blogging, but Mastodon supports direct messaging, and if you support direct messaging, you should support end-to-end.

No other microblogging service with DM support has e2e anything. Because they're websites. To have meaningful e2e you need to have key exchange and device keys, and if you have a website you can look at your DMs on then the website has to have a key. If the website has a key the owner of the website can look at your DMs. This is just fundamental to hosted web services, and it's why if you use icloud messaging with imessage you're no longer guaranteed e2e, and why signal just doesn't even have a website for you to use.

> Sure, but I trust https://letsencrypt.org/ more than I trust some random running a server.

LE has nothing to do with this? The key exchange I'm talking about is the end keys. User keys. LE doesn't provide those. For e2e IM systems a server has to manage user/device:key mappings, and are a central point of trust. They can potentially inject a "listening key" into your recipient list without you knowing and tap you or even impersonate you (but only in a forward way).

E2E is not a panacea, but it's also largely irrelevant to websites.

Others have pointed out that this is fallacious -- even on big services sometimes employees are creepy stalkers, sometimes they're malicious actors of other sorts -- but even if you ignore that on twitter you are a target of advertising and if you think they aren't slurping up all the data they can about you and storing it in a database somewhere, you're fooling yourself.

Anyways, down this logic path is an internet where we somehow put all our trust in megacorporations and absolutely none in our fellow human beings and I dunno about you but one of those sounds a lot more dystopian to me than the other.