Draconic NEO

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The point is that people think that it’s effective. It’s the illusion of security, which does actually keep some of the more stupid spammers and bad actors at bay. It doesn’t stop the ones that are determined though, nothing does.

Advertising these days is less of a way for websites and services to make free money.

Of course websites and services that serve ads will deny this vehemently because advertisers who become aware of such practices (typically known as click fraud) will cut off those websites from ad revenue very quickly and stop serving ads there.

The idea is to trick the advertising companies into thinking that we are there and we are watching, and we care, so that they will pay money to the website to display ads there.

Let’s not forget about the fact that there need to be general purpose viewer instances that users can sign up to for watching content, because uh while accessing through Mastodon or Lemmy is a cool feature people want to be able to save Video lists and have watch history, things that don’t work at all or well when using a Link aggregator or a Microblogging service to access the content.

Second law of thermodynamics:

II. Total amount of entropy in a closed system always increases with time. Entropy can never be negative.

Entropy and disorder tends to increase with time.

It is sad, really thought they were trying to do something good but I guess they were just trying to chase trends, they’re pursuing the AI trend now heavily, and a lot of Firefox users are pissed about it, many think they are shutting down because they don’t get the positive feedback and enthusiasm about AI that they were hoping to on Mastodon, as they do on other platforms like twitter and threads.

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It’s because they are simpler devices which are much less infrastructure dependent, and also less power hungry. A single battery charge in a pager will last you much longer than a single battery charge on a smartphone.

Also due to their lower infrastructure requirements they can function even if cellular networks are not functioning, at all or optimally.

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Mastodon has the ability to blacklist certain email providers, and I think also email IP addresses.

That’s one thing that nobody really ever talks about when it comes to discussing payment verification. The fact that the people who are willing to commit scams and fraud are also willing to steal credit or debit cards.

They usually get found out pretty easily and then defederated by everyone. There’s a service called fediseer which allows instance admins to flag instances as harmful, which other admins can use to determine if they should block an instance.

In order for that to really work they would have to rotate between a lot of domain names either by changing their own instance’s domain or using a proxy. Either way they’d run out of domains rather quickly.

It’s way easier for them to just get accounts on the big servers and hide there as if they were normal lurking users.

I think it’s unreasonable to call every instance that doesn’t update immediately with every release “unmaintained” if anything a lot of these bleeding edge instances which update to the latest version immediately without waiting at all are kind of reckless.

After all everyone remembers the Federation bugs that were present in one of the releases and ended up being very bad for a lot of the instances, it caused content to fail to be federated between the instances. Not good.

So I’m really not into the idea of trying to force or incentivize updates to unstable and untested versions if admins are unwilling to do it. And I’m especially not into the idea of criticizing admins who prefer to hold off on updating until they are sure the versions are stable.

I mean if a new account or an account with no content on it starts downvoting a lot of things or upvoting a lot of things that’s generally a red flag that it’s a vote manipulation account. It’s not always but it’s usually pretty obvious when it actually is. A person who spends their entire time downvoting everything they see, or downvoting things randomly is likely one of those bots.

Could they come up with ways around it? Sure by participating and looking like real users with post and comment history. Though that requires effort and would slow them down majorly, so it’s something that they’re very unlikely to do.

I think it’s to be expected with their current decisions of chasing the AI trend and buying an advertising company, but mostly from chasing the AI trend. After all as much as the few AI-bros here would like to claim most of Firefox users are not happy about the idea of AI chatbot integration into Firefox, and especially aren’t happy about AI search history integration into Firefox.

Many people think that Mozilla is trying to cut off communication with their customers or move to more corporate social media like threads or Twitter since their AI efforts are not being well received in this community. And will I definitely can say it’s more complicated than that, that’s not a wrong idea either, since their AI efforts are absolutely not well received by this community.

They’re going to continue chasing the AI trend right up until the bubble bursts. At which point they’ll continue wasting money on the next big trend, assuming that the bubble bursting doesn’t kill Mozilla in the process.

Think like Microsoft recall for your browser history. Yeah that sounds awful, it’s not surprising why people would not want it. Just goes to show that Mozilla is dumb and blind like all other companies.

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I have a feeling it’s so they can use the money for more AI garbage. They’ve been heading in that direction lately, so it wouldn’t surprise me.

Honestly I’m starting to think that their “experiments” are more about chasing trends than actually trying to provide good products and services for their users.

That’s true it has relaxed a lot more, though Musk still does comply when it comes to some of the really extreme stuff that other platforms would allow (they still do remove blatant antisemitism, and threats).