What is the current wisdom about having an android device always plugged in? Some people say that it will kill and pillow the battery, but does it really?

WordPerfect really comes from a different time. Good look reading the stuff from your iOS notes app that saves everything somewhere in the cloud and that has no export option in 10 years.

It’s not just about upgrading. It’s also about being able to repair your computer. RAM likes to go bad and on a normal PC, you can replace it easily. Buy a cheap stick, take out the old RAM, put in the new one and you’ll have a working computer again. Quick & easy and even your grandpa is able to run Memtest and do a quick switch. But if you solder down everything, the whole PC becomes electronic waste as most people won’t be able to solder RAM.

I think that we need to talk about the history of software and social software here, because the current status is kind of crazy:

• Most of the big platforms didn’t invent what they are currently doing. Reddit is basically a forum. They had a great innovation with their voting idea, but functionally there is little difference between the many webforums we had before and Reddit
• Twitter is a microblog, which already tells you about its origins. There were blogs before twitter, on their own servers, talking to each other with pingbacks and RSS
• YouTube, well, basically just shows you videos, which of course was done before by people on their own servers

So basically most fediverse is not emulating existing platforms, but trying to go back to an internet we had before the big platforms took everything over. And with ActivityPub we have the protocol to ease some of the pains that the decentralized internet before the web 2.0 era had. F.e. you had to create an account for each individual webforum, which really sucked if you just wanted to ask a question or share something. Reddit with its one login totally took over, because you could participate in many subforums. It was easier to just hop into /r/cooking to ask a question about your lasagna then to find the relevant lasagna forum and register there.

The fediverse offers a noncommercial alternative and that can be a draw. A “normal” Reddit user might not want to join us, but there will be users fed up with all the ads on Reddit, some of Reddits policies, tolerance of nazis and abuse and so on. Mastodon always was in the shadow of Twitter, a nice, but blew up when Musk started to destroy it. It offered a way out and that is worthwhile. And if Zuckerberg is starting to transform Instagram into a rightwing horror show, Pixelfed is there as an alternative. And if you want out of YouTube, PeerTube is working and ready for you.

Those fake download buttons go way back - they were around in the late 90s. In a quarter century the ad industry hasn’t managed to block this easy to detect scam. I mean - how hard can it be to not allow ads that are just a big button with “download” on them? Therefore I never will deactivate my adblocker. Fuck them.

This shows how unfair the tech landscape is. The Kickstarter is currently at 45000$. Meta & Co generate that in seconds through their advertising or some billionaire gains that through investments in under a second.

Never use a “for-profit adblocker”. Ublock Origin is free, open source and therefore won’t fuck you over. You can guess where this “profit” is coming from when you’re not paying for your “for-profit” adblocker

Here is the data they are forced to report to the EU:

Logged In X Users 61.8M Logged Out Guests 49.6M Total 111.4M

https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/amars-in-the-eu/amars-in-the-eu-aug-24

“Logged out Guests” is everyone who gets linked to a thread, who was send an video on Twitter and so on. And also take a look at the definition of the logged in users:

EU Active Recipients of the Service - Average between August 1st 2023 - January 31 2024

So you do count as active EU user if you have logged in between August and January with an IP address from the EU. That should even include some tourists.

I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.

So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.