tallshipMay 8, 2024

I'm often inspired to share my thoughts, expound upon something I've read that sparks that inspiration, or pose a bit of socratric reasoning in discourse. Sometimes we actually edjumacate ourselves by asking the tough questions rhetorically. Sometimes it's even more effective if we share those quests with others. It can be a phrase, a paragraph, or a sentence that ignites that quest for understanding within me, and whether I'm simply working it through it myself for my own sake or a genuine desire to share some kind of enlightenment or wisdom with others, I usually feel better doing it in the public eye at the end of the day when all is said and done.

There's a bit of a stir in the Fediverse. Darnell offers us some valuable considerations and specifics in the link to his blog post below.

For me, I think the most interesting part when you read between the lines is, ...

> This latest move could be a way for Meta to use Threads to thwart any potential ActivityPub powered rivals in the Fediverse (like Pixelfed, Friendica & WordPress).

Note that nowhere is masto even listed there - it's insignificant. The #ActivityPub powered rivals in the #Fediverse cited are what have been considered for many years the direct corollaries to #InstaSPAM and #Faceplant, respectively, which of course are the exceedingly capable platforms #Pixelfed and #Friendica.

In all of that, considering that #WordPress is the big game changer here of most recent repute, enjoying a 42% market share of all websites worldwide certainly blows away anything Meta has to offer, but even though it is past the 4th of May, Faceplant and InstaSPAM still do comprise the #phantom_menace flavor of this week.

- Pixelfed has a very nice interface for browsing images. Unlike InstaSPAM however, there isn't this overwhelming nausea attending user accounts with duck-ass selfie-kisses blown into bacteria laden bathroom mirrors, or the overwhelming shitposting of memes scraped from other non-verbal teenage neanderthals. So yes, there's less traffic, typically, but actual photos of things that are actually important and relevant to the people posting them, and more so, liked and boosted by people who appreciate such sentimentalism or professional art. On the downside, is Pixelfed's relatively lackluster editor that fails to provide the poster with paragraph breaks in the WebUI with any reliability, it's mastocrap-like paltry 500 character limit per post, and a complete lack of formatting capabilities (i.e., Markdown or BBCode, Etc.). Having said that, the 500 character limit is easily remedied in a single entry of a config file, which is a blessing to many who have resorted to using the #A11Y alt-text fields to provide the descriptions and narratives for images uploaded, but the other sophomoric qualities of the editor leave massively huge run on paragraphs for the reader to endure - like this one, for example :p

Other awesome projects either spawned directly from, or inspired by the success of Pixelfed are the FediDB research database, which although pretty, leaves much to be desired with respect to completeness; Sup, a client/server federated chat app model; Loops, a closed beta service that aims to position itself as a replacement for, and similar to YouTube shorts; and PubKit, a tool service in closed beta at this time that attempts to service the same or similar tests that the production https://funfedi.dev/ resource does.

- Friendica was once a platform that closely mimicked the look and feel of Faceplant. And then it wasn't, as the Faceplant monoverse continued to evolve in look and feel, and Friendica lagged in what I typically refer to as "Prettiness". Those days are long past, Friendica looks better and better with each and every successive release, and there's an obvious effort on improving the UX for users, making it much more intuitive, and the UI, tending to the "Prettiness" that I do indeed place so much emphasis on.

Once the original darling of the Fediverse, Friendica is once again at the top of the heap with a few others. This does not include the increasingly marginalized masto brand, as more and more adoptees continue to turn their backs to that has-been flagship.

After increasingly pervasive betrayals of both the #FOSS and #DeSoc philosophies and advocates for the past couple of years, eventually revealing it's own EEE aspirations by actively conflating it's masto brand and registered trademarks with that of Fediverse. Even worse, overtly engaging in an onboarding scheme that actively funnels new #Fedizens to one masto machine in particular, in grand, deprecated silo fashion, the masto corporation has populated one of the largest monolithic vertical gardens in the Fediverse itself. The sad part is that, being just another twitter clone, it still has no sense of community and offers nearly a million users a single point of failure. Ouch!

This masto mega-silo problem becomes even less relevant when you visit the Friendica page above, and gloss over the phenomenal feature set and attention given to interoperability with a shopping list of other platforms, protocols, and clients, including:

RSS/Atom, StatusNet, GNU social, Diaspora, SMTP/IMAP, Bluesky, Tumblr, GNU Social, pump.io, Libertree, Blogger, WordPress, Twidere, AndStatus, Bitlbee, Choqok, Frentcl, Gwibber, Hotot, IdentiCurse, Pidgin/Purple, Mustard, Pino, TTYtter.

Now, you might note that Twitter/X has walled off its deprecated monolithic garden, but that doesn't mean that the client and other toolsets that work with those APIs don't still work just fine with Friendica. And we're not even stating the obvious here - ActivityPub clients like Husky, Fedilab, and Sengi work just fine with Friendica, including Friendiqa and Relatica - two fine examples among the numerous choices you have for native Friendica apps for Android and desktop.

For more of an in-depth read on Relatica, here's an article I published a while back

The second most interesting thing that Darnell mentions, I think, has to do with the verbiage in which he characterizes Existing and traditional Fediverse powered platforms. Rivals. He calls them, "...ActivityPub powered rivals". Hmmmm....

I do believe that's the first time I've actually heard it put quite like that. But it's true. to be certain, it wasn't, not by a longshot, just a little while ago, but now? Well, it's nothing that we've done here in the Fediverse, except for continue to just ignore what's going on with the #subjugated_chattel that have all but succumbed to the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome, and get on with the good work of building and #dogfooding FOSS. But, ...

It's got a lot to do with what you might call interlopers, carpetbaggers, snakeoil salesmen, infestation, or maybe just plain old encroachment of aged and abusive #dreadnoughts into the Fediverse that stubbornly adhere to their deprecated, monolithic silo model of privacy farming technologies.

Hitherto all of these ActivityPub refits and forays into a Privacy mindful and respecting network of social communications systems, people kept using terms like Alternatives, for ActivityPub powered platforms such as the three main platforms mentioned in Darnell's blog article.

Now, they're being elevated to the rank of Rivals? But we, we, didn't do anything!

Neither did the GPL'd Linux Kernel - it just continued to do what FOSS does. It doesn't care what thinks it may be in competition with, or what considers it a threat, or rival or yes, REPLACEMENT for things like Faceplant and InstaSPAM.

Yes, FOSS just lumbers and chugs right along, relatively oblivious to whatever the proprietary, closed source contemporaries think of it - with respect to Linux, It actually entered the jurisdiction of a market dominated by Microsoft, IBM, and a couple of others, was lampooned and ridiculed, until it was considered a Cancer, by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, but this wasn't Microsoft or others encroaching into a space where only Linux and the BSDs resided...

This time it is different, because it's the other way around, but the end result will be the same. In the meantime, the perceived hostile invader, at the moment, is Zuckerberg's Meta. This isn't an EEE in the works, it's a desperate attempt to reach and hold onto the the coping that lines the deep end of a swimming pool which InstaSPAM and Faceplant must learn to swim in, and yet cannot - in the meantime, until it is able to tread those waters, it is feebly dog-paddling toward the edge where a handhold can be made while it is fitted with water-wings.

Even though both Tom (everyone's friend) and Eugen are happily traveling around the world snapping photographs and flirting with photography as a hobby, #Mark_Zuckerberg really doesn't wanna be #Myspaced.

If you don't move, you atrophy.

But Friendica, WordPress, and Pixelfed? Well, they're just FOSS, and they're just doing what FOSS does - exist, improve, and evolve. independently and irrespective of commercial threats by would be competitors.

Existing Fediverse platforms continue to onboard new Fedizens hourly, that's not slowing down, and it isn't going to either. Some of these n00bs are straddling the fence until they get their sea legs, existing in both worlds, while others are just cutting ties with the deprecated monolithic silos and jumping into the pool head first.

This phenomena of adoption and the logarithmic increase in onboarding and the deployment of new Fediverse instances is only going to pick up pace as the masses of users on platforms like #Threads and #Bluesky continue to become aware of the Fediverse, and the freedoms they can enjoy in social communication through leveraging WordPress, Pixelfed, and Friendica (and it goes without saying, all the rest of the wonderful platforms too).

With a community facade that pretended to hold the reigns of masto having been dropped, leaving a new 501(c)(3) masto corporation in the US steered by the likes of Twitter founders themselves, the steam is running out on that brand, and although Meta, via Threads, is certainly welcome to participate in the #FEP process (they actually are), there's really no foothold with which they can insert a toe and dictate very much at all that the community itself isn't inclined to adopt already, independently and without concern of capture by well funded special interest groups - like the new US masto corp.

But in closing, let's get back to why all of this doesn't even really matter where existing traditional Fediverse platforms are concerned - or the millions of users actively engaged on those thousands of hubs and instances:

Because it's FOSS, it evolves organically, and just doesn't care about that kind of stuff, lolz.

#tallship

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RE: https://one.darnell.one/users/darnell/statuses/112405069391666443

@darnell

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Show threadtallshipApr 20, 2024

@coffeegeek

Hi Mark,

I've got a follow up here for you :)

A few items, but for the tl;dr please scroll down towards the end. The first few appear to be precisely what you asked for, the third is my rather enthusiastic recommendation.

I believe this first one is the plugin I mentioned, and was found to be quite lacking, further, frustrating to most - This showcases the glaring problem associated with conflating mastodon with that of the #Fediverse - most things break, early and often, over and over again.

- A simple share button that breaks about a fourth of share attempts:

Here's Terrence Eden's article on the Share on Mastodon plugin. I thought a link to this article best, as it leaves you lots of breadcrumbs to pick up along the way to the plugins page at WordPress. Including Jan's blog article. I believe this was the one with the least utility, that caused the most problems with people, which is quite a bit more than frustrating for a lot of people, angering many. masto isn't even the big man on campus anymore - those days have passed, and are in the past; it's just one of many increasingly popular platforms that people use in the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse.

I believe Jan is incorrect on the number of images that masto can accommodate - yes it used to be four, but lately, when authoring articles in the Fediverse with platforms that accommodate inline media in the posts, I've noticed that masto actually will include 5 images, the rest it summarily discards, making for an even more confusing event for those on masto (NGI Zero funding has just been secured BTW, to at least bring masto into the 21st century with Quote Posts - like pretty much everyone else has had for a long time, some for a decade now).

Perhaps in time this will improve, or you can get into it with the aid of some of the others below, or just move past all that and install the plugin at the end of it all which performs famously ;)

- Conflating mastopub with the Fediverse is a Bad thing:

I've heard a few good testimonies of how well the Fediverse share button performs. Note that no where in the description or documentation is the word mastodon used; no one is mislead to believe that there is such a thing as a mastodon network - because there isn't.

- People should be offered the opportunity to share interesting content into (and throughout) the Fediverse, not some small slice of the available platform choices existing there:

This next option was heavily inspired by the old AddToAny plugin back when a kazillion different silos were popular and extant. I remember using that plugin to support sharing across upwards of 30 or so various social networking, bookmarking, link aggregation, and other types of obscure sites in far flung places of the world. I've also heard some good things about this solution too - please take note of all the certified platforms that it supports, and yes, mastopub is one of those ;)

If you do choose this method, do please join us in the Fediverse-City Matrix room to offer a review / evaluation as to how well Fediverse Share works for you. Several project leads there are always interested in viable solutions that are inclusive and accommodate the wider community at large without any marginalization through misleading brand recognition.

I do like the colorful buttons too in the demo here. I also like the non-traditional "Lorem ipsum" example prose too. I find it refreshing :)

- Either through simple naivety or conscious exclusionary arrogance, here's some other masto branded share options, at least one, IIRC, was much less than satisfactory, but I typically don't traffic mastodon branded things anymore when the insinuation is that the product represents the Fediverse. You may find, however, that one of these is just what you need, and that with a little bit of tweaking will fit nicely into your website's business processes. A little branding can go a long way, but sometimes a solution depends on, for example, a "share API endpoint", not strictly compliant with the W3C's published specifications, that serves to marginalize all other platforms by excluding them (that's commonly regarded as EEE). I'll just post the links w/o commentary:
- mastodon share button
- Share on mastodon button
- MastodonShare
- Toot Proxy
- Yet another mastodon share button
*Share to mastodon

There's another utility by Nikita Karamov (creator of the Toot Proxy above) that doesn't embrace the predatory branding of a diluted trademark:

- Share₂Fedi - Share₂Fedi isn't a button, exactly, but the functionality is there and it is inclusive of the larger diaspora of the ActivityPub powered portions of the Fediverse, avoiding any sort of marginalization as a result of marketing through leveraging overt, and predatory branding campaigns.

Alright, I know you're interested in getting to the good part. Yes, I'm guilty of that same sort of mindset that makes you scroll down to the bottom of the ToS before you can click on the submit button. But before we get to the tl;dr:, we have one more which in spirit at the very least, is promising, I encourage you to read it:

- Honorable mention goes to shareOnFediverse, which works even with GNU Social, Diaspora, PixelFed, Hubzilla, Lemmy, Friendica, Kbin, Misskey, Pleroma, Etc.

# tl;dr:

That bit of markdown above (the H1) may not show up on your platform, depending. Regardless, you've arrived. Here's the solution that I personally recommend, a very fine solution that not only allows one to share their content into the Fediverse by providing links back to their website, but providing the gateway for people in the Fediverse, #Fedizens, if you will, to engage the authors of news and blog and lifestyle and cookbook style tutorial and HowTo sites, directly, with two way commenting and sharing of dialog in true open and participatory fashion:

First, (and it has indeed come a long way since the post of this article), a page on how exceedingly simple it is to install and configure this, the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin:

- Making the Social Web a Better Place: ActivityPub for WordPress Joins the Automattic Family

Bear in mind that the plugin was in beta at the time, so never mind the sourpusses in the comments who wanted it, and yet couldn't have it because they weren't self-hosting #WordPress. I must reiterate that development has come a long way, the plugin is in general production release and available for any WordPress site, managed, self-hosted, or otherwise, and it's got a powerful feature set.

Posting links back to clear-net websites on the open Internet is fine, it's not like clicking a share to Faceplant or InstaSPAM button when you share an article that you like into the Fediverse, After all, it's every blogger's mission to drive traffic to their own site (not Faceplant or InstaSPAM), but then your visitors are limited to offering comment replies in the manner of a form submission on the site that really only allows you to subscribe your email for subsequent comment notifications for the article or thread that your commenters spawned.

What the #ActivityPub plugin enables for those who engage with you, is to provide an instant audience of several million MAU (monthly active users) throughout the Fediverse who will be able to directly participate and engage in the conversation from their own native Fediverse platforms, receiving replies as well.

I've called this, A Game Changer, before. A few times, actually. @[email protected] @pfefferle and his small team of developers created and curated this plugin that enables this hitherto (mostly) inaccessible feature set for the masses. Literally anyone in the ActivityPub portion of the Fediverse can now comment and reply to the comments of others on WordPress sites, which is pretty much like 40% of the entire word wide web nowadays, and you can check this out for yourself right now by visiting his blog at https://notiz.blog/ in the comment section of any one of his articles.

There were some issues, which could be attributed to the predatory marketing practices by Mastodon gGmbH, whereby a lot of what is actually ActivityPub or Fediverse centric was being referred to, and worse, attributed to mastodon in one sense or another, further diluting their trademark which places it in jeopardy of losing its registration (the first item in mastodon's general guidelines states, "Only use the Mastodon marks to accurately identify those goods or services that are built using the Mastodon software." - but the defense of trademarks themselves is another matter entirely, although the discussion has come up many times with the responsible parties, often, in very heated, public, forums.

Anyway, Mattias and his team have become incrementally more mindful of placing emphasis upon #Fediverse, the brand, instead of masto, the brand, and that's a good thing because it goes a long way toward correcting the existing confusion that exists due to the abuse certain marketing personalities have, and continue to pursue. Indeed, the plugin itself is named ActivityPub, which is appropriate - and it certainly is not an exclusive tool for mastopub.

You can download the latest and greatest version of the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin HERE, which was released just 3 days ago, and I know because I was on the periphery of an issue that was resolved, making this an even more relevant and quickly becoming (IMO) essential tool for #DeSoC and Fediverse aware bloggers, journalists, chefs, and anyone else that knows they can benefit from deploying their own WordPress site for business or personal use in communicating with the world beyond the walls of the deprecated, proprietary, privacy mining monolithic silos.

In wrapping things up here, it goes without saying that one of the very most powerful aspects of the #WordPress_ActivityPub_Plugin isn't actually that people can respond to your published articles from the comfort of myriad clients such as #FediLab, #Husky, #Phanpy, or the native web or desktop interface for their Fediverse instance, but the reality that they can simply follow you, on your blog, and receive your blog or news or HowTo articles in their streams whenever you publish a new item. From there, they can boost (more exposure for your published works), reply (of course), and even offer a bit of narrative introducing your work with a #Quote_Post. It's like a butterfly affect, or concentric circles emanating from one little plop of a pebble into a pond.

Oh, one more thing, there's nothing preventing you from including one of the pretty little Fediverse Share buttons either, in conjunction with the ActivityPub plugin. After all, some folks like to comment and let you know their thoughts, while others prefer to simply share it with others who will also tell two friends or themselves offer comments to your articles - it's a win win for everyone on both sides of the line that divides the Fediverse from those so-called Big Tech institutions comprising the walled gardens of subjugation by the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome.

I hope you've found this helpful, I didn't want to send you on an errand of discovery without making sure that there's been some decent coverage of several different alternatives currently available for you.

All the best!

#tallship #FOSS, #Automattic @pfefferle

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Better sharing of WordPress posts to Mastodon

Terence Eden’s Blog
tallshipMar 30, 2024
More than anything, the following isn't any sort of treatise on threads itself. In fact, Threads is largely irrelevant - this is an impeachment on the state of the (deprecated, monolithic silo) mentality that is somewhat pervasive in the Fediverse: That you switch one Satan for another Satan. You swap out #Sunnyvale_Syndrome silos managed by people who in no way have your best interests in mind for some masto admin you don't know anything about, regardless of their stated mission.

You're not consulted, at all, about blocks and mutes of remote users and domains (instances) that you may or may not have interests in following, connecting with, or otherwise engage. Such is indeed the prerogative of the instance admin and their so-called staff members, and truth be told, all without due consideration of your particular feelings.

A couple of notions, ...

First, Fediverse development is in a state where you can choose to migrate your account elsewhere - well, not really the history of your posts, includng graphics, etc., intact, but certainly, your follows and followers lists. Masto no longer can monopolize on keeping you put and under the thumb of what could very well be eventually revealed as some, immature, juvenile, tyrannical despot who wears the clothes of some benevolent dictator as their disguise.

Next, even with respect to the most feature complete platforms, you easily can self-host the most comprehensive amongst those - if you can install a WordPress Website, then you can install a Hubzilla or Friendica Server. You can invite your friends and family, or just leave it as a single-user instance.

If you do that, no one can tell you what is appropriate - it's your world. You make your own rules. you decide what and who you want to see and allow through your machine - Want Threads? kewl. Don't want to interact with the big bad zuckerberg wolf? Kewl - block it. It's your world.

Similarly, and I cover this often, there's no real community in selecting an existing server to join. Sure, you can choose to only watch the "local" stream, revealing just how limited and how little in common you share with most of those folks, or you can build your own streams by following the things that interest you and allow people to connect with you on your own terms. The community you have, is always ultimately going to be the community you build for yourself - not some recommended antennae designed by some admin on a Misskey fork that purports to know what you want.

Some added benefits of Hubzilla and Friendica instances are built in interoperability with other Fediverse network protocols. No, Threads is not one of those. Threads is ActivityPub. I'm talking about native communication between your account and Bluesky, or Diaspora - two very vibrant and active networks of Fediverse instances that don't even speak the same language as the old, feature starved masto platform.

I'll also post real quick, just a mention (with links this time, I've been asked to always do this) of single-user-by-design Fediverse platforms you might find quite to your liking. They vary in features and even the bells and whistles that their respective developers felt that they wanted to address, but the basic functionality is there - again, you decide for yourself what sort of community you want and what kind of blocks or mutes at the domain or user level you're interested in.

Now, let me just say, smolweb, instead of single-user Fediverse platforms, because as suitable as they are for self-hosting (often in your home on an old laptop or Raspberry Pi) as single-user instances, that doesn't have to strictly be the case with some of these:

* Snac - #^https://comam.es/snac-doc/README.html
* Bovine - #^https://codeberg.org/helge/bovine/src/branch/dev/README.md
* #^https://docs.microblog.pub/

I'm going to keep this short enough to put the emphasis on the boost of my previous post below - the important concept being that in coming to the Fediverse, it is you, who should be in charge of what and who you interact with, and not somebody else who (as evidenced recently) will pull the rug out from under you and tell you what you can and cannot do, who you can and cannot talk to, or worse than all of that, ... Will judge you.

You shouldn't take that kind of shit from anybody. You be you. You're fine just the way you are :)

tallship wrote the following post Sat, 30 Mar 2024 05:28:37 +0000
@onepict

> On any online space, you should consider who you give power to. Who has the control over who you choose to associate with?

I concur 100% with this assertion.

> All that the instances who sign the fedipact are doing is signalling to some of us that somewhere is safe for folk who don't want to engage with Facebook at all.

I don't think that's all, and actually, What those instances may (inadvertently) be signalling is that they will take it upon themselves to remove the Freedom of Association from the user themselves, without prior expectation or consultation.

I don't know where "Freedom of Speech" entered the conversation, but the notion of "Freedom of Association" has indeed been taken from those who have chosen to excercise those privileges belonging to the users themselves. Waking up and realizing that you can no longer communicate and share recipes with grandma, without evern having been consulted, is an affront to the Freedom of Association - it's inclusive of an even larger issue surrounding the reasons that *smolweb and single-user and self-hosted platforms are protective of such principles Freedom of Association.

Further, it serves to create an environment (especially when so many platforms now support migration ingress) where one's Fediverse accounts are considered ever more transient, as the realization that having an account on a silo based Fediverse instance is the antipathy of #Fediverse and #DeSoc philosophies.

It also erodes the trust between the average user and administrators that you thought you could entrust with respecting your freedom of association with.

> This is a Freedom of Association issue, ...

it is indeed, and a betrayal of trust for anyone who realizes that it is the overreach by someone else to decide that you should not have the Freedom of Association that likely brought most folks to the Fediverse in the first place.

I did a little non-scientific, anecdotal survey by contacting people I know on many of the instances that arbitrarily decided to remove those freedoms from their users overnight, and discovered that many have already migrated to other instances, or are contemplating it - the interesting thing? Many of my acquaintances had already decided to, or even configured their accounts to block #Threads; but to have someone else tell them what they're allowed, or not allowed to do, is a violation of someone's freedom to choose for themselves by despot personalities who dismiss the relevance of a right to choose for oneself.

It's a simple matter, to block instances, at the domain level, from one's own user account, and on most Fediverse platforms, there's actually an announcement utility (usually only used to beg for donations) whereby administrative staff can inform their user base of their own ability to control how they themselves choose to exercise their own preferences with respect to #Freedom_of_Association.

Ironically, when perusing the stats, it's the very largest (deprecated, monolithic silo oriented) Fediverse instances (in terms of the # of user accounts and MAU) that have chosen NOT to trample upon the individual user's Freedom to Associate with whom they themselves decide.

NOTE to Fediverse instance admins: Please take under consideration the trust that has been placed in you with respect to the freedoms all individuals are entitled to determine for themselves - reach out to your user base, deploy surveys, collect votes, whatever, but please don't just decide for someone else what you decide is good for people who are NOT YOU.

Subjugation and assimilation into the Borg Collective goes both ways folks.

#AYBABTU (All Your Base Are Belong To Us)

#tallship #despotism #dystopian #authoritarianism

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Zotum

tallshipMar 13, 2024

This is really messed up stuffs...

I call it despotic overreach via subjugation through state sponsored industrial surveillance systems.... It has nothing to do with capitalism but rather, that thing that Thomas Jefferson gave us... you know, the thing.

Been to a grocery store lately? You've been complaining for decades now, that they artificially inflate the prices of items so that they can offer you steep discounts on a rotating list of them - If, and only if, you consent to being a "club member". Personally, I've consented many a times; Rite-Aid, Albertson's, Wallgreens, CVS,Von's, and many others, as Brittney Spears, Charles Manson, Joseph Stalin, and even John Rambo, another obvious #nom_de_guerre to combat what would follow as spam but worse, industrial surveillance and privacy mining (of course, you also need to use a fake phone number and a /dev/null email addy).

Have you tried to buy things at Jack in the Box or 7/11 or Mcdonald's lately? ... They have an app for that. Why do you suppose that is? They could just as easily and more efficiently deliver their content via PWS/webapps through your regular browser experience (they don't want to be counter-measured with uBlock Origin or integrated anti-tracking measures on the more sensible web browsers).

They're working really hard to deliver you to evil. I walked into a Smart & Final the other day and saw an unbelievable price for a 30 pack of Natural Light Beer - you had to use a "digital coupon" (just like you do at 7/11 to pay the regular, competitive price for an item). I asked the cashier where in their weekly rag the "digital coupon" was located, and she informed me that one needs to install an app to be eligible for the discount. Fuck that noise. Homey don't play dat.

China has WeChat ... Resistance is Futile.

When you install an app, it's a whole different ballpark of invasiveness, intrusions, data farming, and privacy mining, it's like it's your first day in #Pelican_Bay and you announce that you're going to drop the soap as you shower.

So the next time someone says, "Thank you for shopping at Walmart!", or synonymously, "Go Fuck Yourself", just smile, and offer, "Yes, there's an app for that".

What follows below in the #boost I've shared, that so inspired me to address this issue, is not a simple inconvenience - it's a new beginning :p In #Communist_Red_China, you do everything on your #WeChat app - you submit your elementary school homework, you buy stuffs at the local market, you inform on yourself and your friends to their state equivalent of the #Stazi, and you tell them exactly where to come and arrest, perhaps even disappear you. #Falun_Gong? Healthy? awesome! Now your a live organ donor too - you can thank #Meg_Whitman for that one.

You have been assimilated 🖖

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

#tallship #Sunnyvale_Syndrome #Industrial_Surveillance #Privacy_Mining #Data_Farming #Tracking #Despotism #AYBABTU h/t to @gabriel for bringing this to us via his #LibreSolutions_Network

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RE: https://mk.gabe.rocks/notes/9qreb3vsod

@lsn

After U.S. scrutiny of WeChat, Chinese conglomerate Tencent Holdings spent millions on federal lobbying - OpenSecrets News

Chinese conglomerate Tencent has spent $6.3 million lobbying the federal government since 2020, the year former President Donald Trump tried to ban its WeChat app.

OpenSecrets News
tallshipJan 7, 2024

I'm seeing an awful lot of Threads sourced nuggets espousing the virtues of, along with optimism surrounding, the #Fediverse lately.

This seems a bit sus to me, like a concerted outreach effort on the part of Meta/Faceplant and a few other largish, commercial actors to popularize their ulterior motives of domination by... Ahem, normalizing the concepts of #DeSoc and more specifically, the ActivityPub powered spaces in the Fediverse.

I actually dunno who MDBHD or John Oliver are, but I'm certain that they're no Oprah, although it would be nice if she would weigh in on the critical mass achieved to date in the adoption of Fediverse technologies that are #FOSS based, and #Privacy respecting.

To date, *Privacy has been of primary consideration and motivation in the development community surrounding the #ActivityPub powered platforms in the Fediverse, but the questionable players entering from the horizontally scaling decentralized social networking industry have, as of late, been overwhelmingly of the deprecated, privacy disrespecting, monolithic silo persuasion. These monolithic-ally inclined companies hailing from vertically thinking companies are an expected, yet suspect group of *privacy mining experts, sophomorically (sic) wading into the deep end of a demographic consisting mostly of privacy minded* individuals and notable developers of the FOSS based portions of the software world.

<tangent> These industrial surveillance engines are already back on their heels as they venture into what many warn as an #EEE incursion - but truth be told, already too late to the game to subjugate, assimilate us: #Diaspora #ZOT #nostr #Nomad #Matrix #TOR #Yggdrasil #I2P #IPFS / #IPNS and others, including blockchain based so-called #Web3 solutions with baked in privacy considerations at the protocol layer are being *Bridged to interoperate with each other and ActivityPub in the Fediverse at rates which the purveyors of industrial surveillance machinery must invariably only describe as "alarming rates" - that's good news for the average schmoes of the world like you and I. </tangent>

So why are we, just in the past few weeks, seeing so much attention given to the Fediverse by these #juggernauts, perhaps #dreadnoughts, that for so long have exhibited such great restraint and avoidance of the mere utterance of Fediverse, ActivityPub, or even alluding to the notions of Decentralization? There's certainly a particular spin in their delivery, leveraging third parties that obfuscate their participation in the dissemination of their, Great News.

Speaking of Dreadnoughts, just how was it that the great Bismarck was taken out? Remember? The outgunned and outmatched Royal Navy took out her port rudder! ⛵ 💥

It was the end of an era. A rudder post. The Bismarck was doomed to circle her watery grave.

But I digress...

Make no mistake, obscuring the lines between the privacy respecting FOSS based camps that have historically steered the direction of DeSoc has taken, and the deprecated, proprietary silo companies which have based their entire existence upon advertising and industrial surveillance models that I refer to as The Sunnyvale Syndrome family of data mining engines, is now seeping through the cracks of a clear delineation between these two prinicples - that of uncompromising privacy and open source development and that of proprietary, closed source subjugation methodologies leveraging **YOU as the product in inventory*.

Feel free to boost and share your comments at length here. A million people other than myself are here in the Fediverse and are really interested in just what kind of impact the introduction of these traditionally privacy raiding Industrialists will have upon their... scratch that, our future online safety.

tl;dr: Your very private, personal medical history and data (and that of your minor children, in violation of FERPA regulations) is being wholesaled and auctioned off by the so-called "Big-Tech" entrants and hopefuls that are at this very time knocking on the front door of the ActivityPub portions of Fediverse... Tread lightly, and consider how your every move going forward affects the unwitting consent to farm and sell your most confidential personal information.

it is up to you - it is your choice to affirm or deny - whether industrial surveillance is your birthright to embrace or your nemesis to destroy... You, We, have that power to decide.

#tallship #Privacy #Sunnyvale_Syndrome #meta #HIPAA #PHI #FERPA h/t to: @liaizon

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RT: https://social.wake.st/users/liaizon/statuses/111714899199909225

Neenster

tallshipSep 11, 2023

I've seen this on four social networks in the #Fediverse now in just over a week - #ActivityPub, #ZOT, #nostr, and #Movim/XMPP. These memes are going around, but what about those privacy disrespecting, deprecated legacy silos like #Faceplant, #Twitter, and #InstaSPAM or #Reddit - Why is it that we're preaching to the choir instead of to the sinners of the #SunnyVale_Syndrome?

Go forth, save those poor souls over on the silos, Tell them that they're pork bellies. Muahahaha!

#tallship

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tallshipAug 22, 2023

@fixatedpersonsunit

I love this #metaphor - perhaps the most accurate description of the #Sunnyvale_Syndrome that I've ever read.

#tallship #chattel #subjugation

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Show threadtallshipJun 9, 2023

@hn50

Yet the reality that you and I know, is that these are the death throes of their quest to revert what has already passed.

#tallship #thoughts #Sunnyvale_Syndrome #remote_work #telecommute

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tallshipMar 18, 2023

@gneilyo @briankrebs

Yes indeed! Frightening, isn't it?

As Ellen Ripley once said:

"Be afraid. Be very afraid!"

#tallship #infosec #privacy #data_farming #Sunnyvale_Syndrome #subjugation #deprecated_silos

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tallshipJan 20, 2023

takahē - A new Fediverse paradigm

https://write.as/tallship/takahe-a-new-fediverse-paradigm

takahē - A new Fediverse paradigm

Fresh out of the oven is #Takahē, introducing a very interesting basic functional motive for development and delivering a beautiful #UX. It also derives inspiration in th...

tallship