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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If it survives a month you can buy another $500 clunker instead of losing the same to a new car loan, though they are far more rare these days (the example clunker typically now costs closer to $2-$4k now, or ~4 months of new car loan payments that you’d be stuck paying for 6 more years). The sweet spot is 10-15 year old cars under 200k miles and using small loans if you can’t pay cash. New cars are for idiots and the financially independent, but newer cars 5-10 years old can be worth the price/stress tradeoffs for some once you can afford one.

    You’ll also get far more savings primarily riding a bike (and ebikes make this far easier once you can afford one) since most of your trips are likely under 5 miles, and your old car will last a lot longer for when you really need it. You might even find you can get by without owning a car.


  • I hope more governments and institutions start self hosting their own AP publishing, at least for microblogging.

    I also hope we get more multiparidgm app platforms like friendica and mbin.

    Loops and Peertube are super promising, especially with peered hosting to manage bandwidth hits. It’d be smart for major creators to have a delayed archive in self or group hosted instances to help with discoverability and fight risk of content loss. Canadian Civil is paving the way.

    I predict there will be more integration with tipping / patreoning platforms.

    I predict there will be some ATpro features like federated identity and moderation extended into AP, or a blessed version of ATpro from the W3C’s Social Web group (Bluesky is already working on transferring ownership of the protocol to IETF). Either way apps will simply migrate or find bridges and the wider fediverse will grow.










  • Open source software might not directly be used in the workplace but if someone can’t adapt from LibreOffice to MS Office they won’t be able to adapt to MS Office updates either. It’s been decades since productivity software had significantly different feature sets for most users. That weird legacy Excel formula the Finance Department uses will need training no matter how many years of Office experience a new hire has.



  • YouTube still pays creators pretty high comparatively (55% of ad revenue according to https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-influencers-get-paid-on-instagram-tiktok-youtube). You are simply getting a service (hosted, searchable, collection of the largest collection of web videos in an extremely nice interface) that costs money even outside of the creator’s cost. For creators they are allowing that 45% cut of ad revenue to get access to the YouTube audience, paid hosting that simply works, nice creator tools, etc.

    You can state that it’s a valueless thing that anyone could replicate, but the evidence is that there aren’t many alternatives that do better. Today we do have things like PeerTube (which I think all creators should consider selfhosting with ads/subscriptions and federating the free stuff after a delay) and joining creator owned video services like Nebula (which could be made even better with federation). Unfortunately, with both you run into the discoverability problem, something creators and their audiences are paying to solve when you are hosting on YouTube.

    I’d take your argument further back on the sourcing of getting content to you - why should you pay for internet service when it’s the content of the videos you watch not the wires that deliver it that have value? If you hacked around your neighbors WIFI to get some free network access, you could zero-cost get something you might not necessarily want to budget for, and you get quite a nice service out of it. Why shouldn’t that be okay when you still Patreon the creators of your videos given your reasoning about YouTube providing no value?


  • I totally agree we can’t simply drop SMS immediately, but what am I missing in supporting backwards compatibility (for example via my pseudo number solution, like how VOIP works) preventing us from moving forward during a stagged shutdown in the span of decades? MMS and RCS both would also fail under cellular data loss, and SMS itself hasn’t always been available during major disasters. I’m not sure I buy the argument you can’t have similarly low energy towers (even with net neutrality states, you can still cap all bandwidth per user), and a simpler tower that only does data should be far more reliable than a tower that provides multiple carrier services given the simplicity (and it’s very rare to have towers that only do voice + SMS anymore).


  • Why should anyone care about RCS? The trend has been to get everything into data instead of carrier owned services for two decades now, we don’t need another SMS (it will likely always be a fallback). What we should move onto is a carrier and device type angnostic universal standard protocol over TCP / QUIC like XMPP or Matrix, with SMS as the backup.

    When you get a phone you can get an phone system account and a telephone number already. Modern apps in the Google ecosystem should already recognize you are already signed in with Google and sync your contacts. Since almost everyone is already in the Google ecosystem, if Google supported it they could have extended their XMPP implementation in Hangouts to allow messaging directly via XMPP to those contacts and SMS for anyone not yet in the system (similar to how Signal did, Apple does, and Google does now with RCS). Unlike Apple, since its just XMPP, users can still add friends and be added by friends on other XMPP servers (ex. their ISPs, their own, or a third party). They could have supported or jumpstarted a new very simple open source alternative app for that portion for AOSP if the EU complained. Eventually Carriers could have supported passthroughs for those still on feature phones and other users of SMS to use the number@carrier accounts to hit XMPP users with generated SMS numbers for non-SMS users (pushed either by business necessity or part of a government / teleco org like GSMA staged removal of SMS and telephone numbers). It’s all data at the end of the day.

    Instead, they developed a whole new protocol to fluff the telecos and keep the now badly managed telephone number system even more necessary allowing spammers and allow the problems of legacy SMS to continue.

    Apple, Google, and Samsung should all be shamed for not supporting fully open protocols and necessitating dependency on user harming stacks.


  • What would be nest is a feed aggregatior that combos as a lemmy / larger fedi client. When reading your feed, there can be a comments button. The button would do a quick lookup to see if there has been any discussions tracked on your instance for that link and if so let you choose on of the results to join a discussion and a start new thread button that has a workflow for posting the link in a community you select.