• Dharma Curious (he/him)
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        205 months ago

        I’m not on tiktok, but I’ll admit to using YouTube as a search engine a lot. Also googling something and immediately hitting the video tab before reading any of the results.

          • @[email protected]
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            265 months ago

            I must be a dinosaur because for most things I am looking up I want concise textual information. I’ll look for videos to explain larger complicated concepts

            • @[email protected]
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              115 months ago

              If it’s something like taking apart hardware, videos are great because there are a lot of little details that it’s hard to capture in even a picture.

            • @[email protected]
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              25 months ago

              Sure, video has it’s place. I was just wondering that some people get their info primarily from video. Guess it’s something with abstraction vs. imagination.

          • @[email protected]
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            115 months ago

            I only find videos useful if I’m trying to figure out something that’s procedural. Seeing the procedures and steps done in front of me helps me grasp the concept much faster than text.

            For just information though, text is golden and video is a waste of time.

          • @[email protected]
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            55 months ago

            i hate it, but i just cant find decent written resulta anymore outside of reddit and such

            • @[email protected]
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              5 months ago

              Depends on field. Some meth math and programming stuff exists only in PDF. Try find videos on Bounding Interval Hierarchy. At least there are decent videos on BSP trees

              • JackbyDev
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                5 months ago

                PDFs break my brain. It’s 2024. Unless you truly intend for something to be primarily and only read in print why use PDF? And I know everybody is able to host HTML because usually everyone is grabbing these PDFs from a webpage.

                Edit: down voters, convince me on valid uses of PDFs for things that aren’t meant to be printed. At least list some. I’m aware this is an extreme opinion. It’s one I’ve thought about a lot, but I just can’t think of any. For things that are meant to be printed then I agree they’re the best. Everything else I think HTML is better for because it can be resized arbitrarily and isn’t bound to a specific layout. Also copying text from PDFs is bonkers.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 months ago

          I liken using groogle for finding factual information to using the yellowpages for doing the same. YT isn’t much better but it suffers many of the conflicts of interest traditional media outlets also had, depending on the corporation. In this case the almighty algorithm is the conflict of interest, though there are clever content creators out there making some good stuff, they’ll always be beholden to the owners of the platform and the true customers - the advertisers. As an advertising platform which can direct punters to actual long form content directly supported by watchers via patreon or similar, I understand why it is used : the sheer numbers using it.

          • @[email protected]
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            65 months ago

            Why? All it’s going to do is output some words that have a statistical correlation to your input words

            • @[email protected]
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              15 months ago

              Well, that is mostly what I need and it summarises the search results as well.

              Of course, you have to apply your critical thinking skills, but you gotta do that always everywhere. Normal humans talk as much trash as LLMs do, in my experience.

    • @[email protected]
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      405 months ago

      If it’s a private company that con do what it wants, like blocking political opponents, it should not be under safe harbor protections.

      That’s the point in yelling about this. If Elon wants a private forum for him and his mates, he should also be fully responsible when his mates posts child porn on his servers.

    • Logi
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      65 months ago

      The EU has declared Twitter and a few others to be gate-keepers and they will now be held to a higher standard. But I don’t think the EU is going to use this power to save US democracy.

  • @[email protected]
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    1475 months ago

    Imagine trying winning chess when the board itself plays against you. Twitter/X must be dropped immediately, it’s a censorship-propaganda machine which is now only works for those who control it.

    • @[email protected]
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      65 months ago

      Wasn’t that the case when progressives controlled it? Either way, fk X and all other social media services.

        • @[email protected]
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          75 months ago

          Anything left of “pretend minorities don’t exist” is progressive to certain people.

        • @[email protected]
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          5 months ago

          Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: I ‘fully admit’ our bias is ‘more left-leaning’

          Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Saturday that he “fully admit[s]” Twitter employees share a largely left-leaning bias after facing accusations that conservatives are discriminated against on the social media platform.

          In an interview that aired Saturday on CNN, Dorsey said his company has a responsibility to be open about its political viewpoints, but to operate without bias when applying content policies to users.

          ”We need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is … is more left-leaning,” Dorsey says.

          • @[email protected]
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            5 months ago

            Ah.

            So you’re a “Libs of TikTok” guy. Conservatives call themselves Liberal and you believe them.

            Jack Dorsey is Libertarian, which is Republican-leaning.

            • @[email protected]
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              5 months ago

              lol… Libertarians are classical liberals. They don’t align to a specific side.

              Libertarians nominated a degenerate Democrat.

              And why the FK are we talking about Jack anyway? I said Twitter was controlled by progressives… as in the majority of the org were leftists operating biasedly against their opposition.

              • @[email protected]
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                5 months ago

                Defending the Libs of TikTok isn’t the flex you think it is.

                I’m only responding in the hopes you recognize this eventually and grow a bit of self-reflection over this situation. Good luck man.

                • @[email protected]
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                  15 months ago

                  I support anyone and everyone that exposes any and all facets of evil. So should you and any other sane human being.

  • KⒶMⒶLⒶ WⒶLZ 2Ⓐ24
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    1045 months ago

    If only the federal government could implement some sort of server that would allow them to self-host social media for officials and prominent candidates. I wish there were some well-known and tested service that other governments were using and they could just implement in the USA.

    • Cethin
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      65 months ago

      I don’t think legally the Federal Government is allowed to do that. Maybe if the service is available to everyone. Now that option would be pretty cool. I’m fine with nationalized federated social media hosts.

      • @[email protected]
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        115 months ago

        That sounds pretty shakey. Federal employees have their own email addresses, but you can’t just go ask for a .gov email address, you have to get a job with the government for one. The federal government has plenty of places that only some are allowed to post to. Now, if they were to say, only allow certain people to have accounts with no apperent rhyme or reason that would be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit, but they could simply say “any verified current or former federal elected official, federal department head, or state governor is allowed an account” and expand or shrink the scope as needed. The fediverse honestly makes that so much cleaner than something they host themselves with all of the nuances of what is and isn’t federated, the government could simply configure the federation to meet their legal and liability needs while users can stream in from any fediverse instance

        • Cethin
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          45 months ago

          If they’re using it for campaigning, I think it’d have to be written as “… or any party nominee” or “… or anyone running for elected office.”

          But yeah, the fediverse would be perfect for it.

  • Lucidity 🪷
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    Sigh. Not surprised… given that Musk is a hypocrite on free speech completely. It’s getting wild. I use this place now because after years of no issues… suddenly I’m shadow banned on Reddit. Instead of getting mad I just left. Screw those who would stifle others but pretend to believe the opposite.

  • mox
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    825 months ago

    Yet another reason to ditch that platform.

  • @[email protected]
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    725 months ago

    What are these fucking people doing on Twitter anyway? Why they hanging out with the Nazis? You’re still on Twitter this point I have some healthy suspicions about your character.

    • @[email protected]
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      295 months ago

      People go where they think the people are. X is still the closest thing to Twitter since Elon came along. I deleted my account, but feel like I’m in the minority.

      • @[email protected]
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        45 months ago

        You know I once read this really amazing book called They Thought They Were Free. It was written by a journalist right after World War II who went to Germany and talked to normal Germans just German citizens. About how they allowed Nazis to take over how they lived in a Nazi Society how they were okay with it how they kind of joined in on it. A lot of the things they said being said in this thread. It’s all the same fucking logic.

    • @[email protected]
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      285 months ago

      They are on Twitter because nothing has displaced Twitter for what it is. That’s tricky because people follow the content, so the content generators, the heavy hitters, have to choose en masse to go somewhere else.

      • @[email protected]
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        45 months ago

        I think that’s what that Dulles brother said about why he kept doing business with the Nazis even into the 1940s. Even when the rest of the heads of his business said you should stop doing this we don’t need to be invested with the Nazis they just invaded Poland he said no money still there I want to hang out with Nazis.

        Cuz here’s the thing if everyone who wasn’t one left that site it wouldn’t be a problem anymore, a different site would be used.

    • @[email protected]
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      Not all parts of twitter is chock full of Nazis. The parts I follow probably won’t ever move over to Mastodon, so I’m stuck with Twitter. The good thing is that part barely has any Nazis.

      Good job on brushing everyone on Twitter with the same broad stroke, though. Really shows how progressive you can be.

        • @[email protected]
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          75 months ago

          It’s a website that purposely and specifically endorses Nazis. Yes you are tainted by association.

          And this is a site run by developers that purposely and specifically endorses Tankies, yet it’s still stupid to call everyone on this site a Tankie.

          That’s what I think of anyone who hangs out with Nazis. Why you doing that? Why you hanging out with Nazis?

          Because we don’t, we kick them out of the circle, that’s why there’s few of them amongst those I follow. The fact that you can’t comprehend such a simple concept is the problem.

          • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼
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            65 months ago

            And this is a site run by developers that purposely and specifically endorses Tankies, yet it’s still stupid to call everyone on this site a Tankie.

            The software is partially written by Tankies, but most instances aren’t run by Tankies. Since it is free & open source software under the AGPLv3, anyone can freely use it. Lemmy also uses ActivityPub, an open standard, and is fully compatible with other Fediverse software like Kbin/Mbin and Piefed. Using lemmy.ml or other instances means that you’re associated with Tankies, but using Lemmy the FOSS software doesn’t. Since Twitter is proprietary, the only option is using twitter.com which is run by a Nazi and actively supports Nazis.

            • @[email protected]
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              55 months ago

              The main dev is a Tankie, so not just partially written. And you’re missing the point. Even on lemmy.ml there are plenty of non-Tankies. There are reasons for people to be there other than to support the Tankie devs. In the same vein, there are plenty of reason for people to be on Twitter other than to support the Nazis.

              Being this pedantic in an effort to defend broad brushing groups of people together when they don’t have that much in common is, frankly, pathetic.

                • @[email protected]
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                  25 months ago

                  No, I meant that amongst the community that I follow, there are few Nazis. At the end of the day, you cannot be sure that there are 0 Nazis in any community that you follow, that’s just unrealistic.

                  You’re just being pedantic and making so much mental gymnastics in order to call me a Nazi. That shows just how fucked up your mindset is. You’re pretty much trying to demonize a group of people using broken logic to justify your hate. Why are you trying to emulate the Nazi thought process?

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months ago

        The good thing is that part barely has any Nazis.

        What was that saying about letting a few nazis into your bar as long as they stay on the side and don’t cause trouble?

        • @[email protected]
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          35 months ago

          We don’t let them into our bar, that’s why the part has so few Nazis. The Nazis are running rampant in other parts of the site, but not on the part that I frequent, from my observation at least. That’s why it’s stupid to group everyone using Twitter as Nazi adjacent.

          • @[email protected]
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            Maybe you’re just not identifying them as Nazis? What part do you hang out on where there aren’t insane propagandists and bots?

            • @[email protected]
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              25 months ago

              Does a Nazi infested group calls out whenever people is being racist or openly makes fun of Elon Musk?

              I’m sure you can always just argue that they are being Nazis secretly or something, but to call out a group of people to be suspicious of being a Nazi, I would prefer if you have more proof than just conjecture.

    • @[email protected]
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      115 months ago

      I’m on Twitter because all the OSINT people who track the invasion/war in Ukraine basically only use Twitter. I like following OSINT info to get a real perspective on what’s going on.

      • @[email protected]
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        35 months ago

        Maybe it would behoove you to remind those people that they’re on a website run by someone who has a material and vested interest in the destruction of Ukraine. That they should change to another website.

      • @[email protected]
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        35 months ago

        I’d like in on that perspective but I’m not going to twitter for anyone. Shit is toxic and stupid.

        On Ukraine, got any non twitter suggestions for perspective? Also, not familiar with OSINT. Care to enlighten me? Open source intel tools?

        • BombOmOm
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          On Ukraine, got any non twitter suggestions for perspective?

          not familiar with OSINT

          Exactly what you said! Open Source INTelegence. Basically people taking publicly available data and using it to confirm attacks. Things like NASA FIRMS data can be used to verify where fires are; and when combined with videos of a fire in the direction of an airfield, for example, can be used to confirm that yes, on this specific date, these parts of an airfield are on fire.

        • @[email protected]
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          Understandable, I don’t know of anyone off of Twitter but maybe some of the people I follow are on Mastodon. I’ll try and find out sometime and get back if they are.

          And yea pretty much, just stands for open source intelligence, people just use publicly available data (mostly drone videos, and paid satellite imagery) to analyze progress from both parties in the conflict giving a real, semi live perspective on advances on the ground, what kind of equipment and quantity of that equipment that have been destroyed.

          This site by oryx is the main one I know of that tracks destroyed Russian equipment that’s confirmed through imagery, so the numbers are likely fairly lower than reality, and the destruction numbers are still staggering.

          Ops I see someone below already linked oryx and some other good sources!

    • @[email protected]
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      75 months ago

      Unfortunately Twitter is the absolute best source for the most up to date breaking sports news and nothing that I’m aware of comes close.

      • @[email protected]
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        85 months ago

        If you can’t porn from Pornhub because of silly age verification laws. Twitter is the next best place, I guess?

  • @[email protected]
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    535 months ago

    Good. They should abandon twitter and all other racist, misogynist, transphobic, xenophobic, homophobic bigoted platforms. I hope they have a bad time there.

    • FarraigePlaisteach
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      125 months ago

      I tend to feel the same but at the same time, the shadowy figures involved there would love it to see the ratio of extremist increase. An exodus of more sane members might play straight into their hands.

      That said, I can’t understand why anyone without an official state role is still on that platform.

  • @[email protected]
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    475 months ago

    This reminds me that someone set up a donation link via actblue where donations via that link come with the message that she and her campaign should set up their own mastodon server.

    They are up to $40,000 as I type this.

    So if you were thinking of donating anyway, you can go through here to point that money to a “cause” you want her to consider. May not happen, but at least we might get it on their radar.

    https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mastodon-for-harris

    The originator of this started with this Masto post:

    https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/112831902073897712

    • @[email protected]
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      75 months ago

      This has the opportunity to be a great battle.

      Harris, backed by Mastodon users vs Trump, backed by Twitter bots.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 months ago

          Yeah he couldn’t come up with his own software so they just spun up a Mastodon instance and passed it off as their own product.

    • @[email protected]
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      55 months ago

      The VP having control over the platform they announce things?

      What a novel idea /s

      So dumb how much power twitter got for politics. Fediverse for life!

      • @[email protected]
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        575 months ago

        It pisses me off how twitter went to fuck. People cried that we need something not owned by some rich cunt. We told everyone to join mastodon so that wouldn’t happen again. What did people do? Wait for another rich cunt (mark suckerberg) to start a clone and the original creator of twitter to make another one and join that…

        People are dumb as shit… I’m sick of it.

        • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє
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          5 months ago

          Yeah, I don’t get it.

          Kind of unrelated, but a parallel I experienced recently.

          Yesterday I was annoyed by SplitWise. We had a small trip over the weekend and were adding expenses to it, and it turns out that there’s now a limit to how many entries you can put in per day. Even with ads. So we decided to find another platform, and a friend suggested another closed product which is probably gonna get as shitty as SplitWise soon. Anyway, I was able to convince them to use Spliit instead. If the hosted service goes to shit, at least I can self host it and keep all the data.


          • @[email protected]
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            45 months ago

            Glad you were able to convince them :) I love self hosting stuff. I like having control.

        • @[email protected]
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          45 months ago

          Musk started removing links and even references to Mastodon from Twitter.

          If a high profile politician (particularly one Elon disagrees with) promoted Mastodon, they’d have an account ban lickety split.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months ago

        Makes me curious if you get more attention on mastodon though. Like if I pitched something on Lemmy there’s a good chance I get the same number of eye balls compared to Reddit, not counting ads. (Although if Kamala posted about Linux and/or Star Trek that’s front page, no ad money needed! Lol)

      • KⒶMⒶLⒶ WⒶLZ 2Ⓐ24
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        35 months ago

        in november of 23, i had a client that let me schedule mastodon posts. this was not made by someone who uses mastodon.

        • Stern
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          475 months ago

          We’re not doing a research paper. We’re commenting on a internet post. Calm down.

          • KryptonBlur
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            35 months ago

            Yeah but because Wikipedia articles, to an extent, ephemeral it is good practise to use the sources at the bottom of the article as your source, rather than the Wikipedia article itself. It makes finding the origin of the information easier.

            If it is something more permanent like a paper or a published article, then that doesn’t suffer from the same issues

        • Fushuan [he/him]
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          25 months ago

          You can argue the veracity of looking the user count of the platforms on wikipedia, but it is a source.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 months ago

        Nice graphic! But this data seems wildly out of date. For example, LinkedIn has over 1 billion users. Unless this is referring to weekly active users or something, but the row just says “users”.

    • @[email protected]
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      75 months ago

      It’s not about the campaigns not using Mastodon, it is about the voters. They are on Twitter still so that is where the campaign wants to meet them.

      Mastodon needs to be more widely known for that to be a realistic option.

  • @[email protected]
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    I’m not down with the perpetual victim-blaming against X/Twitter users here on Lemmy.

    Sources like campaigns, news outlets, authors, studios, engineers, actors, comedians, etc. post on there because they basically have to – if they want to get the word out, that is.

    Consumers go there to read from the sources because they basically have to. While each source may have their own separate blog or whatever, X/Twitter is pretty much the only place that unifies those feeds. (I know, I miss the heyday of RSS too.)

    Expecting people to just “take the hit” and go dark on their communications so we can build up alternatives to X/Twitter is not an acceptable recommendation.

    What we need to do is:

    • Make it illegal to block third-party clients from interoperating with services
    • Compel providers of a certain size to expose a first-party API
    • Make it legal to reverse-engineer APIs so they can’t just make the first-party API suck and call it a day
    • Then we integrate X/Twitter into the fediverse, so you can start using something else and still keep your X/Twitter stuff
    • @[email protected]OP
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      285 months ago

      Victim blaming is a little extreme way to describe it, but yeah I don’t blame politicians for using it, but I absolutely will blame them for exclusively using it and letting their media be controlled by a private entity, especially one that is no longer publicly accessible.

      POSSE (publish [on your] own site, syndicate everywhere) is the way to go. Don’t assume everyone is just using a platform, especially if you’re providing a public or essential service.

      re your points, I think the EU’s gatekeeper law was pretty good.

    • @[email protected]
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      125 months ago

      Twitter isn’t a service. It is a useful platform and should not be ignored, but it is a larger, worldwide version of r/conservative at this point. Go in expecting hostility and “untraceable account bugs that tHeY juST cANt seEm tO ResOLve!”.

    • @[email protected]
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      What we need to do is: Make it illegal to run a business

      Twitter doesn’t owe anyone anything. Kamala could go post anywhere else but she’s not even though the left hates Elon.

      The idea that we should pass laws to force twitter to show certain info and expose endpoints to support third party apps is ridiculous. It’s their data and they aren’t putting a gun to anyone’s head.

      Passing a law forcing the government to use only FLOSS software for day-to-day activities solves this problem, actually makes sense on a principle level and isn’t a ridiculous overreach of power.

      • @[email protected]
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        25 months ago

        Well, I gotta ask then… How do you feel about HP’s printer business model? The fact that you can only use it with HP-approved ink, in HP-approved ways. Do you think that’s a fair business model which will stand or fall on its own merits, or an abusive one that prevents consumers from using their own stuff the way they want to? Should it be legal?

        • @[email protected]
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          I don’t like it and wouldn’t buy an HP as my next printer for software reasons alone. I’d suggest supporting another company or getting a used HP for free or next to nothing and buying refilled cartridges from aliexpress or amazon for 30-40% of what HP charges (this is what I do). It’s a shitty practice but it doesn’t make me want to get daddy government involved.

          “Right to Repair” is different. If I buy a printer and the ink chassis breaks and I’m capable of sourcing a part and fixing it myself then I have a right to do that on my own because it’s mine.

          Edit: As an aside if we explanded my initial proposal to encompass FLOSS hardware as well as software this wouldn’t be a problem because companies would be tripping over themselves for the government contracts.

        • @[email protected]
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          25 months ago

          ‘Lol’ Three simple characters. “FLOSS software? Ridiculous. So DUMB.” He says to himself. Finally a single tap and his snarky comment begins it’s instantaneous travail through countless GPL licensed unix systems to reach his victim - an ignorant commenter on an open-source, federated lemmy instance.

  • r00ty
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    325 months ago

    Yeah, I have a problem too! No, wait. It’s because I don’t have an X/Twitter/whatever account.

  • @[email protected]
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    305 months ago

    I used to think “Elon Musk” was some type of fancy French perfume. I miss those days.