Remind me, who owns WhatsApp?

It may sound a little silly but when I get good feedback on something, I pop it in my journal under a specific tag so I can revisit it from time to time.

It’s unfortunate that people are unfair to you, possibly they are younger or otherwise have incorrect expectations about your fallibility as a human.

I used to respond to things like that but these days I let the positive comments speak for themselves. Just remember to ask for feedback- a lot of people otherwise won’t do it unless they’ve got something negative to say.

I have been thinking about this idea for some time also but a couple of things have always bugged me-

Firstly, how does this interact with privacy? For vote delegation to work, I think the votes would have to be public, or you can’t make a decision on who to delegate your vote to- someone could claim to have one set of views but vote contrary to that. People could come under pressure to vote one way or another.

Also, who crafts the legislation that is voted on? How do you prevent bill rolling (two unrelated ideas are boiled down to a single binary choice) and splitting (a new service is voted through but the taxes to fund it are not)?

You said local government at least so a national or state government could help craft these things, but what if the proposed legislation doesn’t actually hurt local people, but doesn’t take into account the actual problems they have locally? For example, what if it would help to allow building in a particular area, but the state government doesn’t know that and it never becomes a priority?

Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.

Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.

And no mention of what happens to their API but knowing google it either goes away entirely or totally changes with significant rework required.

Related, the reason I no longer use any google API: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc

I’ve been on the internet since pretty much the start so I’ve seen dozens of great communities come and go. Normally they reach some kind of malthusian breaking point where they collapse under their own weight, I think this is the first time where sheer greed caused the end though.

So yes, this is the cycle of the internet. Death is actually good for an ecosystem though, it means that new things can evolve, such as the fediverse.

I do feel sad for what will be lost though, and every time I load Apollo to remember this great app with all the care and attention put in to it will be gone at the end of the month.

I would like to hear more about the move to Voat, what caused the failure in your opinion? I was not part of that as I had other things going on at the time.

I don’t see a problem so long as they do so in good faith - for example publishing full event contents to ActivityPub instead of adding a link back to the Facebook Threads app, which is basically what a lot of news sites do with their RSS feeds to get advertising money.

So long as they do that, it’s not really possible to do a rug-pull. There are far more Facebook users than Fediverse users after all, so it’s going to be advertising for the Fediverse for as long as this lasts and if users would like to remain part of it they’ll have to move to another server. That is, assuming it ends.

To answer the question though, I don’t care for microblogging personally and I don’t like Meta as a company so I won’t use it. I appreciate the scepticism but I feel optimistic.

And we can be as mean to you as we like can you can’t even downvote us.

It depends on whether someone’s a member of the community or just because they want to scroll some epic memes. I expect many people are of the latter category and probably don’t even understand what the fuss is about.

It’s not like I’ll never look at Reddit again if there’s useful info on it but I won’t be part of the Reddit community again after the scorn and disrespect they showed it - I hope to help build something new over here.

I can’t do anything about Reddit’s decisions but I can vote with my attention and help to build a compelling alternative.

Being a member of the Fediverse is an investment in the future I feel. There’s not tons right now like on Reddit, but you can stick around and help build it by posting, commenting and voting. Alternatively, you can come back in a few years when this is the way that new communities form.

Reddit’s behaviour is a statement of intent for the future, to make money at all costs, sell up and become another advertiser friendly walled garden like Instagram. That’s fine for them, but I have no interest in being part of that.

It is yes, but there is an (unrelated) Android client called Jerboa if that is the OS you use.

I would very much like the Apollo developer to do this but possibly he’s burnt out on social media and would like to work on something else. He has developed a series of other unrelated apps that make him a decent income also.

Well, they want to do something and he wants them to not do it so he is the enemy and must be destroyed. I’ve seen this in many companies over the years.

What frustrates me is that nobody from that side is telling the truth: Third party developers were once useful but are now a liability and they have to go because a future buyer or investor will not understand the value of a vibrant development community and see something that cannot be controlled. The timeline for the IPO is ticking down and there is no time to come up with a way to formally integrate these clients, either by buyout or agreeing some sort of advertisement or subscription SDK. It’s unpleasant but I’d have more respect for the truth than lying and slandering the character of a good guy in the process.

Thank goodness he had recordings or this could have been career limiting for him, not that this occurred to the people with dollar signs in their eyes.

I expect it’s accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.

However, an architecture I’ve seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don’t know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don’t see how there is a meaningful difference.

Haha, that’s a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.

I’ve been thinking about this joke for a while and don’t feel I understand it. I expect there is a double meaning or a cultural saying that is lost on me, please can you explain it?

I like the Hacker News compromise - you have downvotes only after your account is a certain age and karma, and you can’t downvote responses to your comments.

There is an android and iOS app available for Lemmy. Please see here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/

Furthermore the mobile web app is quite nice too.

Precisely, the microblogging format really doesn’t resonate with me. I don’t feel I have anything necessarily good to announce to the world, but I enjoy a conversation or the invitation to share my own experience with something.

Furthermore it was quite computationally expensive. Modern CPUs have special instructions to work with AES and other algorithms, but back then it had to be done with individual instructions and with slow clock speeds.