One of my favorite things to do with chat gpt is having it rewrite things as Trump. I wasn't interested in rereading the constitution a second ago, but it's going to be tremendous, you wouldn't believe how great it's going to be

Those things don't sound mutually exclusive

Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.

They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference

Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies...as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS

Leave the bad... Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they'll go for it

And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It's social media without an agenda - that's both rare and pretty damn important for all of us

They can't stop. There's a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can't stop - that's just what a corporation is. I'll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it'd still act like an amoral cancer on society

It's not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they're freaking huge...

As a late millennial and a programmer, I've got you.

So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

100s means you asked for metadata

200s mean it went ok

300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

400s mean you messed up

500s mean I messed up

So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you've probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn't there. And maybe 405, which means you're not allowed to see this

418 means you asked for coffee, but I'm a teapot

I can't speak for everyone, but when I say lol I usually am trying to soften a self disparaging statement or expressing the absurdity of the situation... Or just lighten the tone because I feel like my message is too serious and I'm coming off like an asshole

I share your priorities, but I don't think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us... The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they'll ask "how can we extract value from this investment?". That's what a corporation is, it can't help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media

There's also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it's possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?

I'm actually working on this haha.

It's definitely a v2 feature, but it's in the works

That's certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back... Without showing numbers

I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there's no competitor for them to jump to

I think they're about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they're no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere

That's certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back... Without showing numbers

I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there's no competitor for them to jump to

I think they're about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they're no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere

What in an account? It's not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

If it's your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I'm building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn't do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

But I love decentralization, I think it's the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring... But I'm pretty sure I've got it down, I just need sleep.

You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I've got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought "that sounds like a bad idea, let's try it out". You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it'll tell your server to start pulling it in

I've also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

Centralization makes everything way easier, so it's a constant temptation. But we'll get more and more decentralized as time goes on.. I'll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to... This is too important to just let it become just

Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we're asking what we can do to take it further

Here's the other thing - he's maybe a millionaire, not a billionaire. That's middle class, maybe upper middle class if he's got other income

This is a normal person who just lost his job with little notice because of a greedy company, and, to add insult to injury, now has to come up with money for refunds out of the blue

I know I wouldn't feel good taking back that money, whether he can afford it or not