"… the App Store’s financial success is the worst thing that’s happened to Apple this century. It’s a distraction at best, and a profound corruption at worst." — John Gruber @gruber@mastodon.social
Gruber raises a good point here. The App Store, and general locked-down nature of the iPhone, is Apple at its controlling worst. I should have a right to install whatever software I want on my iPhone, repair it or pay someone else to do so, and modify it however I like, or pay someone else to do so. The limits on my ability to control my phone should be the law and public safety. Apple should not be allowed to make the rules here.
And don’t accuse me of going full Elon here. A phone is not a social network.
Mastodon is getting popular enough that it’s going to start attracting litigation and regulation. — Amanda Hoover on Ars Technica
Why Would Anyone Use Another Centralized Social Media Service After This? — Mike Masnick at Techdirt @mmasnick@mastodon.social.
I’m asking myself the same question. I’m heavily active on Facebook but not looking to get involved in another proprietary social media service.
We don’t need a new global town square to replace Twitter. We already have one: The Web.
The web is the world’s town square.I t’s been right there along along, and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., are all just layers on top of that web.
Nobody owns the web. If somebody like Twitter or Facebook puts a fence around their part of the web, that fence is just two feet tall. You can easily climb over it. If you’re not doing that, it’s because you’re choosing not to.
Mastodon is a great service. It’s not that hard to use. If you can figure out Facebook, you can figure out Mastodon. Learning to drive is harder and most of the people complaining about Mastodon being hard to use can already drive.
Mastodon is part of the much larger “fediverse,” which includes other services, which are less popular than Mastodon.1 Services join the fediverse by supporting a protocol called “ActivityPub.” It’s all very much like the way different email services interconnect with each other, and you can message from your Gmail account to another person’s Microsoft Outlook account without any difficulty.2 Already, we see WordPress blogs can be part of the fediverse, and a small blogging service called micro.blog, which I use, communicates with Mastodon using ActivityPub.
Right now, we’re not seeing a fediverse boom—we’re seeing a Mastodon boom. That needs to change. For the good of the web town square, people need to embrace that they can choose a variety of services that can all talk with one another.3 Mastodon is just one of those services.
@manuelmoreale makes similar points.
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And Mastodon itself is pretty unpopular, compared with Twitter, which is in turn unpopular compared with Facebook or YouTube.) ↩︎
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For an even better comparison, imagine if WhatsApp and Apple Messages could talk with each other. They’re similar but not identical—you’d lose some features but mostly you could communicate just fine. ↩︎
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Kind of like the way your can read a Substack newsletter in email or on the web, and likewise you can get email updates on WordPress blogs. ↩︎
I like that micro.blog doesn’t support likes or reblogs. On Facebook, Tumblr, and Mastodon, I’m trying to pay very little attention to my likes and reblogs without comment.
Likes and commentless reblogs are sometimes useful. Sometimes a friend I haven’t heard from in a while likes one of my posts, or somebody famous likes or reblogs something, both of which are good to know. But most days, likes and reblogs without comment are just noise.
I wish Facebook, and Mastodon would just give me a daily report on likes and reblogs that don’t have comments. I don’t need or want that information in realtime. Tumblr lets me set something like that up with filters, but it could be easier.
micro.blog’s intentional lack of support for likes and reblogs is just one way it’s different from Mastodon. Here’s a good article from @manton describing why micro.blog is not Mastodon, even though you can connect between micro.blog and Mastodon.
Hi, @manton! Feature request for micro.blog: Let me import my Mastodon follower list, which I can already do when switching Mastodon instances. Right now, I’m syndicating my micro.blog posts to my mastodon.social account. Importing my follower list would be even better.
Daring Fireball @gruber@mastodon.social: Quora is beta testing an AI chatbot.
Shouldn’t be that big a change for Quora, many of whose participants already fail the Voight-Kampff test.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How Apple could open its App Store without really opening its App Store.
Apple will be required to open the iPhone to competing app stores, according to reliable reports, which is a huge deal and runs completely counter to Apple’s iPhone strategy since 2007. But Apple could still pull a fast one, unless regulators are smart, says Cory.
Apple “fights for its users when doing so is good for its shareholders. But when something is good for Apple shareholders and bad for its customers, the shareholders win, every time.”
Hearing Wendell Pierce say “fuuuuuck” in an early scene of S3E1 of “Jack Ryan” makes me want to watch “The Wire” again.
While walking, the dog and I saw this mobile axe-throwing setup. Because is it really the holidays without axe-throwing?
Soon as I saw the headline cross Mastodon, I checked my twitter account. Still active. I feel snubbed.
Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists — Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
“… it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new ‘free speech absolutist’ Twitter have really come off.”
How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face – Cory Doctorow
“No matter how hard conservative culture-war cannon-fodder love big business, it will never love them back.”
While out walking the dog late this afternoon I saw a little four-year-old girl wearing a beautiful green Christmas dress with a red bow on it. She was getting out of the car with her Dad, coming home from daycare I guess.
This was the same little girl I’d seen one morning a week or two ago, getting into the same car with her Dad. That morning she was wearing an elf costume, and was delighted to show it off for me.
So today I said to her, “Don’t you look pretty!” The dog, meanwhile, wanted to say hello, so I took a step or two slowly toward the girl and her father, keeping an eye on the situation.
This time, the girl was not delighted. Her face slowly started to crumple, and she clutched for her Dad’s leg and started to wail. So I backed away.
I don’t think she was afraid. I think she had just had a busy day, with a lot of stimuli and was overwhelmed.
“Kid,” I wanted to say. “A lot of the time I feel just like that.”
Years ago, two friends of mine, one at the CIA, one at the Pentagon, advised me to delete the app. So I don’t want to position the concerns about TikTok as an extreme position. Having a Chinese-owned social media app embedding itself into our lives is not without risk. But it’s worth noting that the things we fear from Chinese software companies—privacy invasions, data selling, democracy disruptions—are things that American social media companies have been doing with our full cooperation. It’s also worth noting that American social media companies have a particular interest in reducing competition from global players, and they’ve never faced this kind of a domestic business threat from a China-based company. In other words, the pressure to ban this outside app could be coming from inside players.
— Dave Pell, NextDraft, Tok Bottom
… a conservative is someone who believes that some of us were born to rule, and the rest of us were born to be ruled over.
— Cory Doctorow, @pluralistic@mamot.fr Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.
The idea that “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product” is utter nonsense. The factor that determines whether a company will treat you like the product is whether they can get away with treating you like the product. A company that is disciplined by neither competition nor regulation will extract value from you in every way it can get away with.
— Cory Doctorow, Plato Would Ban Ad-Blockers. He was a dick.