For what it’s worth, I looked around and saw “ready to run” Mastodon hosting services starting at $6 per month, not too long ago. Tempting, but the service is the easy part, maintaining the community can be much more challenging.

I suspect Tor Browser would fork and soldier on if Firefox became an unsuitable base.

True, but everyone paying for “broadband internet” is paying that premium for the fat pipes to carry video on demand.

The communication, socialization and creation space might use less than 10% of the bandwidth, less than 0.1% if you take video out of it.

Not to mention: the old people (the ones with money) can’t see them.

Flip phones with 7 day battery life, including 20 hours of talk time?

To an extent, the enshittification of the most popular platform is inevitable.

Depends on which way the Firefox ditchers jump - jumping to Chrome, yeah… not great. Jumping to more privacy respecting options… it’s your data, you should be able to choose (if you care…)

I read the new language to mean: they are going to record your input streams and feed them to AI/LLM - thereby recording your previously private info that they used to discard and protect. Up to you, I use Chrome because it integrates well with the gmail account I’ve used for 25+ years and I appreciate the “login anywhere and get your same setup” functionality, as well as the ability to nuke remote login sessions.

Google photos has been “searchable by name” for years now. Tell it the name of a face in one photo and it can go search (pretty successfully) through all your photos for other photos containing that person. And, of course, once told, it never forgets.

Is it still a service when you are the product? Or, are you being served? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)

Depends on how you measure things. If you pie-chart the internet by bandwidth used, most of it is currently used for TV 2.0 (streaming video, mostly by subscription.)

Panama, Greenland, after that might as well take the rest of Central America, move all the people out to the Galapagos Islands and build an all inclusive ocean to ocean resort complex.

The darknets are here, have been here, but are by definition: dark, so unless you’re in one they’re useless to you.

First rule of darknet membership: don’t talk about the darknet.

This is a story about my web3 thoughts, circa 2018… https://mangocats.com/ao/IslandLife.html

Smaller communities don’t get targeted for commercial exploitation. But, then, something has to support them even if they don’t cost much to run - they still cost something, both for bandwidth/storage and moderation/curation effort.

Not all of Reddit works, but some of it does for some people, and the reason it works for them is because the moderators shape communities that the community members enjoy participating in.

Personally, I think active communities below the Dunbar number (about 150) in size are some of the most rewarding to participate in, long term. But, there are always a lot of people who flock to wherever the biggest crowds are.

I think it’s always going to be a sort of long-tail phenomenon, with most people involved in the biggest platforms, but a large number of small platforms that attract a minority of the overall population.

While I was doing OS-X stuff, I remember Darwin just being a really painfully bad implementation of the apt functionality in Debian based Linuxes… Potaytoe, Potahtoe, Darwin is like burnt house fries, IMO.

Sounds like they’re slipping cloud based AI assistance into the deal, which is the opposite of what Notepad is “good” for.

Install time? Startup time? Useless bloat?

It is, but the tellings I have heard of the Peter Principal generally have the incompetence leveling off at some lower strata where they can no longer do the job well so they don’t advance any further.

The unspoken implication of Icahn’s advancement theory is that management doesn’t really do much of importance in these companies, basically any idiot can rise to the top. Of course that’s not true, people can always actively undermine their own success, so they at least have to be smart enough to not do that.

Highly successful CEO I met over dinner once had this to say about his outstanding company growth performance: 1) it wasn’t him, it was luck of being in the right place at the right time and not screwing it up too badly. 2) The hardest thing was choosing who to hire. If at least half of his new hire choices didn’t actively make things worse, he considered that to be a good batch.