🦊 OneRedFox 🦊

Well that’s a game changer, because I’ve been using ffmpeg directly to trim the files and it’s very clunky by comparison.

Firefox has been great since Quantum released. They finally fixed the performance issues and it’s still more flexible in what it can do than the Chromium browsers.

Steam with Proton works OOTB for me if you enable the option in the system config.

Not a video, but I always use this EFF article to introduce the concept.

I’d say that the Indie game experience can still match that. Doesn’t have to be old titles.

I would say that the decentralized nature of the platform means that the demographics that don’t get along don’t have to share the same space. Reddit is full of communities that fucking hate each other and the centralized nature of the site means that those userbases have to occupy a lot of the same subreddits; those users have a low barrier to entry to go troll each other and pick fights. In the Fediverse, these communities are separate instances and will just defederate from each other, putting an end to it. Instead, like-minded communities and instances can congregate together. The federation model also provides incentive for users to behave, since instances can be cut off from everyone else if they’re deemed too toxic/annoying.

Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.

Something that has become very apparent to me over the past year of migrating away from the big 6 sites into the dark forest is that, no honestly, the internet isn’t that; the big 6 sites are that. Places like Neocities still exist and have lots of traffic and you can go there and have an interesting time. I’ve encountered more cultural diversity on the Fediverse than I had in the past decade of using Reddit. There’s still cool stuff and interesting communities; it’s just hard to find because search engines are increasingly useless. We need better discoverability; if we fix that, then we’re golden.

Well if it’s any consolation, the Fediverse is basically the spiritual successor to that time period on the internet: now with interesting tech improvements.

OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.

The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.

Will this be impacted by browsers killing third-party cookies?

The MissKey forks like Sharkey/Iceshrimp/Catodon all have better featuresets and UI/UX than Mastodon IMO. If you don’t already have a Mastodon instance that you’re extremely pleased with, I would pick one of them instead. I can’t comment on the app situation though.

It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.

We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.

I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.

There will probably be mounting pressure to deanonymize the internet, like with what we’re seeing via age verification legislation in various places.

Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I’ve definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we’ll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that’s open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.

Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber

IMO these were their best products. 🙁

Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

Ugh, god damn it.

As a small keyboard user myself, I made the switch because I wasn’t using those keys anyways and the few that I were could easily be handled with layers. I have one of those desks with the sliding tray where the keyboard sits, so being able to free up space so the keyboard fits comfortably is nice.

Finally, pokemon taken to its logical conclusion.

Perhaps we need a federated search engine - one you can add custom algorithms to…

Well, something that can be done is having search engines that grab from a wide variety of sources. The go-to FOSS example of this would be SearXNG, so if someone is interested in a project like that, then this would be a good starting point.

I agree with the author for the most part, but I don’t think it’s just “us.” I would say that discoverability in general is just a lot worse now due to SEO gentrification and search engines facing enshittification. There’s still cool projects like Neocities around, but if it weren’t for networking I’d have no idea they exist. When I type “build a website” into DuckDuckGo and StartPage, I just get links to squarespace, wix, godaddy, and a few listicles. In order to curate cool stuff, you have to be able to find it first; have new tools popped up that facilitate this? What are the new heuristics for discovery?