Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.
Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.
Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.
Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?
I’m currently rebuilding my math foundation and part of that process was tracking down high quality educational resources with passionate instructors, rigor, and entertainment factor (because I want stuff to recommend to parents). I did eventually find something that was better than what I got in grade school, but I have to say that the Pythagorean Theorem just isn’t going to be as interesting as social media feeds and entertainment products custom tailored to my preferences. No teacher is realistically going to be able to compete with the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry for attention and tech companies are abusing psychology research to make their shit as addictive as possible. It’s not the biggest problem with the US educational system, but it is one of many, so I’m down with restricting smartphone access at schools.
Based on my interactions with teachers, the administrative class that runs these schools are cowards who don’t want to deal with angry parents, nor the liability if the phones get confiscated and then stolen/damaged. There’s also a lot of parents who want to text their kids during the school day and get mad when they can’t. A lot of teachers have given up since the higher ups won’t back them up. This happened around 2015 or so, when smartphones became ubiquitous.
Firefox has been great since Quantum released. They finally fixed the performance issues and it’s still more flexible in what it can do than the Chromium browsers.
I’d say that the Indie game experience can still match that. Doesn’t have to be old titles.
I would say that the decentralized nature of the platform means that the demographics that don’t get along don’t have to share the same space. Reddit is full of communities that fucking hate each other and the centralized nature of the site means that those userbases have to occupy a lot of the same subreddits; those users have a low barrier to entry to go troll each other and pick fights. In the Fediverse, these communities are separate instances and will just defederate from each other, putting an end to it. Instead, like-minded communities and instances can congregate together. The federation model also provides incentive for users to behave, since instances can be cut off from everyone else if they’re deemed too toxic/annoying.
Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.
Something that has become very apparent to me over the past year of migrating away from the big 6 sites into the dark forest is that, no honestly, the internet isn’t that; the big 6 sites are that. Places like Neocities still exist and have lots of traffic and you can go there and have an interesting time. I’ve encountered more cultural diversity on the Fediverse than I had in the past decade of using Reddit. There’s still cool stuff and interesting communities; it’s just hard to find because search engines are increasingly useless. We need better discoverability; if we fix that, then we’re golden.
It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.
We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
There will probably be mounting pressure to deanonymize the internet, like with what we’re seeing via age verification legislation in various places.
Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I’ve definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we’ll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that’s open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.
Finally, pokemon taken to its logical conclusion.
Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…
Well, something that can be done is having search engines that grab from a wide variety of sources. The go-to FOSS example of this would be SearXNG, so if someone is interested in a project like that, then this would be a good starting point.
I agree with the author for the most part, but I don’t think it’s just “us.” I would say that discoverability in general is just a lot worse now due to SEO gentrification and search engines facing enshittification. There’s still cool projects like Neocities around, but if it weren’t for networking I’d have no idea they exist. When I type “build a website” into DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I just get links to squarespace, wix, godaddy, and a few listicles. In order to curate cool stuff, you have to be able to find it first; have new tools popped up that facilitate this? What are the new heuristics for discovery?
I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME a couple years ago and there hasn’t been any issues with that. Especially now that a lot of stuff that used to be desktop apps has moved to the browser, it’s more viable than ever.
Clearly the wizards at Nintendo know something about optimizing games for the Switch that others don’t.
Could someone share this information with GameFreak? The beats shouldn’t drop as hard as the FPS.
This comment chain is superb discourse to start off today’s internetting with.
Sounds like it’d improve interop. Make it so that there’s a curation system where communities can choose specific users/instances to watch for this content.