Mussolini wasn't an American Democrat, he was an Italian fascist.

Don't be taken in by... People who make good arguments?

"Anyone who calls me out for using a dog whistle must be a dog."

Can you actually justify that claim? How are Democrats fascist? A definition broad enough to include American Democrats as fascist will presumably include just about ever major party in every western democracy.

As far as I know, the Xbox One and PS4 started the trend of reading nothing from the disc after install. The disc just acts as instalation media and a physical authenticator.

They set daily read limits that were comically low. Read limits obviously don't help with spam. They do help with scraping but it's again so low, it seems like it would pretty much just disable scraping rather than control it. 600 tweets A DAY?

I really thought this was a unique story I was going to have but now there's at least 3 of us!

Is this Homophobic?

I kind of wonder if we'll see more interest focused instances continue to be a relatively regular occurances. I could see communities around specific games deciding to make a new home for themselves if for no other reason than everyone gets a new @myfavorite.game handle and you can customize a little more to their tastes. I think it might still lean more heavily towards generalized instances but maybe the main reason to run a new instance will be to be interest focused.

To risk being serious here for a second- when Google+ launched, I remember being super bumbed out about how empty it felt and the fact that my friends couldn't be on it yet because it was invite only. All the way back then, I had the idea that it would be really cool if there was a way for different social media websites to talk to each other directly instead of just users sharing links, so I could kind of take my friend group with me to Google+ even though they were still on Facebook. At the time I didn't recognize either of them as really evil, I just though Google+ had a better interface. So all the way back then, 10+ years ago, I personally felt the lock in that established social networks had was way too strong for even well funded newcomers to overcome, and if there was some kind of standard for them to communicate with eachother, it would allow for a lot more innovation.

Today, not only is my vague idea a reality in the form of ActivityPub, the largest social media company in the world is actually embracing that open standard and funneling it's users towards it. In the future, other huge corporate backed social media companies might feel pressured to build around it as well. We might be heading towards the commodification of social media, where you give put your social handle like an email address, and anyone who wants to follow you can do so from Kbin, Mastodon, Peertube, Threads, Tumblr, etc...

Today, I really do think of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg as genuinely evil. But I don't look with suspicion on everything they do just because of that. For example, they typically do pay some amount of taxes. While I am suspicious that they aren't paying enough, I don't think theirs something inherently tainted about the money they pay with. That's how I think about threads. It's not currently federated. If I was suspicious of anything, it would be that being federated was a bold claim that brought a lot of attention to them, and that they might stall and even back out of ever doing it. That's the play if you're evil. If they actually federate, I view it as the fediverse has created such a great value proposition that supporting it enhances the value of Threads. Just because they are evil, it doesn't mean everything they do is wrong and the opposite is right. Them being evil means they don't do right reliably.

I think we need to accept the fact that we live in a world with Big Companies and think about how they can be better than they were before. Right now, I think Meta is actually making a socially good decision to support ActivityPub. And it might also be good for them. But just because it's good for them, it doesn't mean it's bad for us. If we can find a way to structure incentives so big company's interests end up aligning with ours, we'll be in a much better place. Better than just saying anything Meta does is automatically wrong and nothing will be good until they are totally gone.

Dude that's awesome!