while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.

i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.

some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.

best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.

i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎

Dear creators:

please, please, PLEASE set up your own web sites and distribute your work from there.

If you post your work only on Twitter and/or Reddit, it's gonna disappear. Soon.

Do you hand-make things that you sell? Do you wish Etsy would *disintegrate* for jacking up fees 30% after a record sales year?

Artisans Coop is on its way to becoming a very real Etsy alternative, a place for handmade goods that is owned by its members, that can put all that "record sales" into the pockets of sellers, not white collar thugs. And i do mean artisans, not assholes who steal designs and get them printed at a sweatshop.

How is that possible? Check it out: https://artisans.coop/blog/join-an-authentic-handmade-marketplace-now-enrolling-members/

#Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for #AI

An update to Google's #privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for it's AI projects

https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486

Looks like Bluesky is using a third party AI company ‘thehive .ai’ to identify post content for moderation — any data collected, Hive can provide to its other customers, to train generative AI models — so if you post your work there, it is being directly fed into training generative AI image/video/text 👎

Twitter link to original post, found via Bluesky:
https://twitter.com/oric_y/status/1675593954614706176?s=46&t=vEPIKy4E96txF3hlDI1ZAw

UPDATE — Bluesky team member has made this statement about their use of Hive: