If leaking data is intentional then there are better ways than doing it in the open. Doubly so if you supposedly are in cahoots with your hosting and Chinese government.

Volcengine is a platform of cloud services released by Bytedance in 2021 to help enterprises with digital transformation. Bytedance connection to China is well established. Sensitive data or data effective for fingerprinting and tracking are in bold.

So they use a Chinese CDN or hosting? Shocking stuff. Hilarious that a company so bad at basic security beat OpenAI.

It’s a popular search engine that works with shadow libraries like Sci-Hub or Library Genesis. Shadow libraries are hosts to copies of works of literature and science. Their legal status is murky at best but it’s incredibly impractical to persecute those accessing them.

Meta stole from everyone, including those that struggle to make ends meet, so it doesn’t matter that they gave you back some of it. Any moral qualms should evaporate when you consider that they did it to create shareholder value and the rest is philanthropy (aka pretend tax). As a socialist I believe that man is owed for his work and you can’t take from him even though technology makes it so easy.

There’s also Pipilo for the horizontal scrolling weirdos although this one’s for iOS.

Pretty cool!

Twitterific was too old school, like it didn’t want to move past skeuomorphic design of old iOS. I liked it but I’m old. I should like Tapestry so I’m really bummed about this experience.

If you want this kind of aggregator then the new version of Reeder attempted it couple of months ago and it seemed much nicer to use. When I noticed that’s it’s the same idea I reinstalled it and am now trying to stick with it. It didn’t have those custom filtered views that Tapestry has before but it’s been added since. I think it wants me to set up many views and just dip into them like channels to surf on TV. Configuration was painfully slow but I understand why some of it had be done this way - you have to make sure you’re adding low noise sources. It’s also half baked honestly but much more usable, better looking and cheaper.

Apple TV is high-end / premium (AKA expensive), same as Sonos. Apple TV doesn’t suck though, unlike Sonos.

That’s a brilliant idea to keep reporting users who abandoned the service as active users.

You can keep using Windows 10 safely on your old hardware after „official” support ends, it’s just subscription based. Some individual customers will probably pay so it’s extra money on top of what they make on corporate volume licensing.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/extended-security-updates

I understand this much. I tried it and it was awful for the reasons stated above.

Reeder did a similar rebrand recently and it was similarly received. It looks pleasant (and way better than Tapestry) but doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny (same as Tapestry). I had to switch RSS app that I’ve been using since 1st gen iPod Touch so I’m a bit pissed ;) I understand Iconfactory had to reinvent itself because Musk killed Twitterific but this just doesn’t work and it’s been proven to not work already.

I don’t understand who this is for.

It’s not a good RSS client because it doesn’t offer any specialised features (pulling content beyond what’s in rss, proper reader view, caching etc).

It’s an awful microblogging platform client because you can’t see context or comments. So then maybe you could set up another account, otherwise you’re going to get every new shitpost in your Tapestry (ewww). Then you wonder why not use this account in Mastodon client when it can be a list and skip bothering with another app.

It’s not a good YouTube app or whatever else they implement. It’s not going to be a good everything app because better apps exist for individual services and this developer doesn’t seem to have capacity to implement even the basics.

It does offer some cool features when you have a bajillion news sources but then you’d be kidding yourself that this app will let you browse them all. Maybe you’ll set up some cool alerts for stuff you’ll see elsewhere anyway.

I might be missing the point but this is really undercooked for what they try to charge.

This is not BlueSky-style, it’s Activity Pub style.

I can browse a Lemmy community from Mastodon and see it in a very different way. Yes, I could sort by activity but then I’d have to keep a separate Lemmy account for those low traffic communities. In Mastodon I can make a list of groups and see only last two replies per thread effectively. Votes are irrelevant and Mastodon has that covered by not implementing that at all.

We don’t have any control over how others will view whatever communication or interactions are being sent over AP. That also means one is free to reinterpret it in whatever way they see fit.

How does this prevent anyone from participating? This kind of sort would make one engage less with some content and users they don’t want to. You could do it for efficiency, mental health or whatever reason you come up with. Having an option of increasing importance of your local instance in shaping what you see is just one more way of tweaking your experience without affecting others. It’s dangerously close to „the algorithm” but works without being a black box.

OPs issue is not solved by private instances because it cuts off contact entirely. You might as well set view to Local and ban other instances in your client.

It’s like they forgot that their monopoly is ensured by their lenience towards piracy and industry leading backwards compatibility. Being consumer hostile this way is unusual from Microsoft but I guess they hope to make it up by making Windows subscription based in the longer term.

Community has no control over who uses it except for federation policy. Random people browse communities through „All” which leads to random downvotes, ignoring community rules and so on. I believe that idea that makes Activity Pub so nice is that you can use various apps and platforms as distinct ways of browsing and communicating with people that want to do it differently.

They can change sorting and view but they will not get anywhere near their stated purpose. OP wants instances to gather people that share similar interests or beliefs so that his/her browsing experience is shaped by this choice in a natural manner.

As an very rough example, this could mean that in discussion-centric instances text posts would be ranked higher because users in those instances tend to upvote them more often. This would also mean that less interesting stuff is not filtered but lower in the ranking. Those seeking such experience (it does sound attractive to me) would have higher incentive to join smaller and more focused instances. Maybe they wouldn’t be so small then, or they’d have to vet new users and it’d be a terrible idea, or maybe it would lead to even more centralisation which would be even worse. Still worth considering imo.

OP still wants to see all federated content but through a local lens, hence suggestion it could be implemented as a sorting option.

That’s because there’s no algorithm but that’s not what OP is after, I think. We already have scaled sort which adjusts score based on community size. What’s suggested here is to have some sort of sort/scaling that would assign higher weight to votes from local instance. This is a great idea that promotes decentralisation and I wouldn’t discard it like that.

This we can expect but there’s also a trend to idolise solo developers or small firms. Reality is that everyone can be shitty and therefore everyone should be accountable. In this case a smaller developer steals user data do defraud Unity most likely because they think they’re too small to be worth investigating. When we were implementing GDPR in my country those small developers fought this law as oppressive and unnecessary.

Traditionally joining a gang or mafia requires you to commit crime that can be used to control you later on. There are rules, some unwritten and unspoken ones are now brought to the light, that’s all. This also means this overstepping of boundaries can be used against Musk once he falls out of favour.