what’s wrong with just texting

If you have friends in another country, it might cost a quarter every time you send a message.

In regions of the world (e.g. Europe, and a lot of Asia) where some countries are the size of a large city (or perhaps the entire country is one city), that’s a problem. You’d be sending international texts all day every day.

It’s a Memmy problem.

However, good luck getting a towel draped onto your body - you’ll look like you’re in a sack.

Hooded towels are totally a thing. And they’re awesome.

they can’t fire you for wearing shorts.

True, but they can disrespect you for failing to fit in with the corporate culture. Honestly, I’d rather be fired.

There are plenty of workplaces where you can wear “whatever you want”, and I’m happy to work at one of those… But the clothes you choose to wear still has consequences. I can totally turn up to work in a full suit/tie/etc if I want. But I’d stick out like a sore thumb.

Look in a big box clothing store and you’ll see that the women’s section is almost always 2 to nearly 3x larger

What do they sell in the men’s section? Genuinely curious because as a man I never shop for clothes…

Years ago, I found a brand and model (yes, they have a model number) of pants that fit well and have lots of pockets. I have them in long/short, and black/blue/tan. I wear a uniform shirt at work (it’s totally optional, but about half the staff wear them and I find they puts me in “work mode” mentally). My partner buys my shirts, because she tolerates me owning half a dozen pairs of the same pants but will not tolerate it for shirts.

My fashion choices are my shoes, my watch, my glasses, my phone, and my haircut. All four are the same every day but every six months or so I change one. That’s enough for me. I think it’s incredibly freeing to not have to worry about what I look like every day.

When you cut off a cancer, it dies. When you defederate a social network orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than you… it doesn’t even notice and continues to thrive.

This isn’t going to harm Threads or protect Lemmy.ml.

Just because they won’t use Mastodon now, doesn’t mean they never will in the future. Especially when (not if) Mastodon sorts out some of their usability issues around signup and interacting with posts from other instances.

It would be nice to give them the option.

Reddit “shut down” API access by disabling the ability to authenticate users. Everything else on the API is still fully functional. Of course, without being logged in it’s a read only API.

RIF is never going to pay $0.24 per 1,000 API requests. Which means Reddit isn’t going to allow those API requests to continue for long. They will shut it down even when you’re logged out.

Yes, they mean that one.

Comparing Signal to the fediverse is pretty silly. That’s like comparing fire to water. Signal is all about private messaging and the fediverse is all about public messaging.

If someone is one of the best engineers at facebook, they can get a work visa somewhere else.

Threads already has over 30 million daily active users and growing fast - I’m tipping it will be over a billion in a year or two.

The fediverse has 2 million monthly active users. Sorry, but we’ve already lost the content battle. Like it or not, Threads is king king and Lemmy/Mastodon are ants.

Regarding “two taps and you’re signed up”… that’s just never going to happen. If anything, it probably needs to be a bit harder to sign up. We don’t want people using throwaway accounts.

Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.

They absolutely have limits. For example Threads isn’t in the EU yet, because of strict controls that severely limit what Meta can do.

As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user.

Small instances are already undesirable to the general public and always will be.

Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them.

No they can’t. The EU will only allow them to “ethically” defederate.

When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved

If Threads is slow, people will switch to another service that is fast.

This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.

If they ask their best engineers to do something evil, most of them will quit. Why work for an evil corp when you can work almost anywhere you want?

Also they don’t have the best in the world - those already left (or refused to work there in the first place).

Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.

At least on iOS, that type of cross app tracking doesn’t work anymore (unless the user opts into it, which nobody ever does). Apple’s change to how tracking works is costing Meta billions of dollars… and protecting the privacy of about a billion people. Yay Apple.

But more to the point, people who are worried about privacy will only install Threads if it’s the only way to reach thier friends/family. Since Threads will be federated, they won’t ahve that reason.

I have Facebook and Facebook Messenger on my phone and once Threads is federated I will be enouraging all my friends to sign up for Threads, so I can reach them. If my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, I’ll be leaving that instance (Lemmy, on the other hand, I might not care so much).

My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp.

Better in what way? One of my metrics is being able to contact people who will not sign up for Mastodon.

I love the fediverse specifically because it allows me to reach people on other instances. Defederating should be limited to harmful content (and I don’t see any evidence of harm in Thread).

We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.

Even I won’t use Signal. Talk to me when I can install it on both my phones, instead of just one of them (using the same account on both phones).

Finishing on a more positive note - Threads is going to be full of ads. I think a lot of people won’t be OK with that… and if threads is federated, then people will sign up for small instances like this one. I think we’ll be fine.

Personally I use Bitwarden (paid account even) but I’ve also recommended 1pass to apple only users because it fits well in that ecosystem.

Bitwarden works perfectly “in the apple ecosystem” these days, but personally I prefer 1Password - it’s quite a bit better on all platforms. It has a few features I couldn’t live without and a million little things that are just… nicer.

On the other hand, Bitwarden is either free or very cheap, and it’s a great password manager.

… running a crawler would be far easier than running the largest instance in the fediverse …

Isn’t all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don’t need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.

Frankly, there are other instances out there that I’m more worried about than Threads.

There definitely were good bots on Reddit - they were just drowned out by a million shitty ones.

Humans do lots of crazy things. Why do people like to jump out of airplanes for example?

Why do we smoke cigarettes?

Google has always been pretty terrible at ranking websites that haven’t been around for a while. They are absolutely already indexing every post, they just aren’t ranking high enough.

Google will fix it, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Some people might do that. But lemmy.world is a very well run community that has never done anything offensive, and yet it’s still defederated by some of the biggest lemmy instances.

That proves defederation is for more than just spam/illegal content/harassment. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s pretty disruptive. Like a strike.

Striking will just be replaced with defederation. For example lemmy.world has been defederated by a bunch of instances because it allows anyone to sign up for an account.