Notices by Daniel Schildt (autiomaa@mastodon.social)

@simounet Firefox gets funded increasingly from the commercial SaaS integrations, and product placements on the search tools. Previously it was Google paying for the search visibility via browser UI, but those days are mostly gone.

@aral

@simounet @aral As people from Mozilla have said (at events), it's just a company with a bit more complex ownership structure. Business focused on producing profits.

Reading blog post https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-bots-tout-slavery-genocide written by Avram Piltch about what kinds of crap are automatically generated by Google's chatbot assistants.

"Because it plagiarizes from other peoples’ content, [Google] SGE doesn’t have any sense of proprietary, morality, or even logical consistency."

"Google is no longer acting as a librarian that curates content, but has turned itself into a publisher with a loud-mouthed opinion columnist it can’t control."

@aral I remember when friend told that he met multiple Google employees at large ICANN event. They were very quietly there since didn't want to show any visible signs about how many decisions are influenced by the giant corporations.

Google employees were mostly attending closed doors meetings there.

@aral @Gargron For sure, the current default behaviour of Mastodon application can easily lead to a lot of unwanted attention. Problem with the current situation is that it enables (way too effective) Dogpiling attacks against people...

@aral @krzysztofdrozdowski 'Unlisted' reduces visibility from the Public feed (from people who don't even follow an account), but those replies are visible for people who follow you. But when logged out, posts starting with @ mention are still public.

If you switch to "Mentioned people only", post goes to "Direct messages", but since people might not get notified about those, they might not see the reply. Inconsistencies in the usability of Mastodon are confusing many.

"To reduce energy use, we opted for a back to basics web design, using a static site instead of a database driven content management system."
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

@johanvc @aral Self-owned digital identities have been reality for a long long time. But also, not really, as domain names are rented, not owned. Identity that is binded to domain names is vulnerable to various types of security problems. Eventually there will be more reliable multi-channel identity verification systems that could avoid some of the issues.

@aral Micro.blog is a commercial service, but their implementation of ActivityPub is somehow more nicer than that of Mastodon. But the blog side is technically based on Hugo static site generator, while the added value from their own systems is easier UIs for people moving from larger platforms. Export formats include WordPress, and that can be imported to most FOSS publishing tools (either directly or via conversion).

@aral Architectural issues of Mastodon are largely caused by it mirroring the same design decisions as the biggest commercial platforms. 💯

Wrote before about it:
Current limitation of Mastodon is that since user accounts are on sub-directory on each of the services/servers, people don't own their own identity. Problem with the export is that as each of the user accounts is mapped to the server, it's not possible to simply change the hosting platform.
https://mastodon.social/@autiomaa/109552972635674629