Hello comrades, I'm new to this and looking for resources to explain the fediverse to a dummy, hopefully with simplistic drawings. I understand it is essentially an "open source social media format" created for ease of moderation and to protect user data from corporate use, but I don't understand the concept of federation vs de federation of other social media site data.

https://archive.is/AMYV4

It's a wonder it's been puttering along at all ever since the bazinga buyout.

https://archive.ph/mnI8k

https://archive.is/q5WPL

Updates ALWAYS break my laptop and I need to hard reset during them when the screen literally tells you NOT to turn off your pc.

I'm afraid one of these days it's just going to brick.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19628702

image transcript

screenshot of this bluesky post (which you can read without logging in here) from ‪@comraderobot.bsky.social‬ ("Notorious RBMK") saying:

my friend who still lives in palo alto gave me permission to share this mailer he got.

there’s unhinged and then there’s tech unhinged

image in post has two photos of people wearing EEG electrodes, one xray of a human head, an EEG data plot over a silhouette of a head, and this text:

REM sleep is the next Al

The upcoming era of physical reality integrated with dream worlds advanced by the REMspace startup

• Controlling a smart home from dreams
• Transferring speech from dreams
• Controlling virtual cars from dreams
• Interacting with dream worlds using brain implants
• Social media for sharing dream journals
• Smart sleep masks powered by Al
• Many other breakthroughs from our lab (videos and tech)

Don't miss the pitch of the year for potential partners and investors

Aug 29th Palo Alto

Above the image is an (inaccurate) BlueSky label saying "Possible tumblr screenshot" with a "hide" button.

--

the guy behind this startup:

• (CW bloody photos) "I confirm the information published in the Daily Mail. On May 17, 2023, I performed by myself trepanation, electrode implantation, and electrical stimulation of my brain's motor cortex. I needed it to test brain stimulation during lucid dreaming"
• https://www.newsweek.com/russian-implants-chip-brain-control-dreams-hospital-1814256

Sites like Hexbear source scripts from only one domain (hexbear.net). I like those sites.

Other sites loop in a few JavaScript libraries. They have a few domains asking for permissions. That's okay. A little lazy, but acceptable.

Then you have the corporate websites with, like, sixty JavaScript domains. Holy crap! What are scripts from facebook, pinterest, and amazon doing on this news article about jellyfish? And the website is perfectly functional with just a couple domains enabled.

In late 2022, long before multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, rumors swirled that he was getting ready to shake up the platform's verification system.

His proposal: charge each subscriber for the privilege of being verified without ever doing the homework of actually verifying their identity — a short-sighted and ultimately disastrous decision that Musk reportedly regretted almost immediately.

As detailed in an upcoming book titled "Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter," reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger lay out in detail how Musk's blue checkmark scheme, called Twitter Blue, collapsed in on itself and compounded the company's financial crisis. (The pair recently published a story adapted from their new book in the New York Times.)

The 2022 US midterm elections took place on November 8, a day before Musk started charging users for a blue checkmark.

When the switch was made, all hell broke loose, with countless newly verified accounts masquerading as politicians, celebrities, and companies. One account parading as Nintendo shared a viral image of Super Mario giving the finger.

Advertisers, who had gotten wind of the mayhem, started reaching out to Twitter's sales teams, threatening to pull their ads. According to Mac and Conger's sources, Nike executives threatened to never advertise on the platform again.

And Musk was terrified of the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue.

"Turn it off," he reportedly told an engineer. "Turn it off!"

Twitter Blue, a $8-a-month subscription service, was unlikely to stem all the bleeding. The company was already dealing with considerable debt. Musk had to borrow around $13 billion for his doomed $44 billion acquisition.

And business hasn't exactly looked up since Twitter Blue launched just under two years ago. Even more advertisers have abandoned the platform over Musk's failure to reign in a tidal wave of disinformation and hate speech — something he's been actively contributing to himself.

Just last week, the Wall Street Journal called the acquisition the "worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis," with banks unable to offload their debt without incurring major losses.

Musk has bounced back and forth between telling advertisers to literally "fuck" themselves and begging them to return. Earlier this month, Musk sued a global advertising alliance out of existence, accusing it of conspiring against him.

Twitter has also gone through several rounds of mass layoffs, with Musk imploring them to come back weeks later.

In short, Musk's ill-informed takeover has left a major hole in his reputation as a successful entrepreneur. His incompetency when it comes to running a social media platform has been on full display.

Meanwhile, X-formerly-Twitter is still rife with impersonators and scammers taking advantage of Musk's poorly thought-out Twitter Blue scheme.

And engineers could only helplessly watch as the billionaire brought down the walls around them.

"It was such an obvious train wreck, that the main job of everyone on the team was to make sure it was the safest train wreck possible," one Blue worker wrote in a journal, as quoted by Mac and Conger.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-review-brick