Social media sites live as advertising vehicles. Being able to show numbers related to users showing links helps them sell advertisements.

It’s reportedly why Bluesky redirects links in the app to a referrer – so websites can see how much traffic they get from there and have a reason to post on the network.

Whether or not this is a good thing, and how much tracking is acceptable, is an entirely separate discussion. (Which should really include words like “I regularly donate to my Lemmy instance” or their equivalent…)

Literally anyone who reduces the USA federal budget down to household size should be derisively ignored unless they also replace “dollars” with “chore coupons” and place said household in a post apoctalyptic wasteland where there’s no government.

If a household cannot pay its bills their only choices are to earn more, spend less, or declare bankruptcy. The fed, in contrast, is constitutionally forbidden from declaring bankruptcy and instead can (and does) just create money from nothing on demand.

(Not to mention that most households can’t unilaterally say “pay me 10% of the coupon value when you bring lunch home.”.)

!

“I vibe-engineered a new car and it accelerates at what would be 0-60 in four hours if it’s top speed wasn’t 0.05 mph. (1 mile per 20 hours.)”

Wage theft as only “not paid what was owed according to current law” is already the biggest form of theft and the least prosecuted.

Please don’t help perpetuate capitalist exploitation by blurring it with the “value theft” inherent to capitalism

That’s why bsky’s pseudo-federation isn’t as big a deal as some ActivityPub boosters claim.

As I understand it, if lemmy.world shuts down or starts demanding cash my only resource would be the same as if Facebook decides I’m too critical of billionaires – start all over elsewhere with a new account. Sure, I could get close to the same experience with a different node, but I’d be a brand new account with no history. I might as well go someplace else entirely.

Bsky’s “portable user” idea fixes that. There are accounts my bsky account follows who switched to blacksky, and if they hadn’t said they’d changed I wouldn’t have noticed. The essential identity of their account shifted almost seamlessly, and they “federate” with everyone else, aside that their appview shows accounts that bsky’s ordinary moderation hides.

I don’t have any illusions about how altruistic the cryptobro VC’s are. But the entirely of their value proposition is that “leaving bsky” should be about as painless as porting your number from Verizon to AT&T.

The claimed reason for that is to highlight “referrer” links for the sites people go to from bsky.

My understanding is that if you click like https://www.themarysue.com/ the website operators would see a “feddit.org” or “lemmy.world” referer if you’re using a web browser and don’t have a defeating option enabled, but not if your browser is locked down or you use an app. The immediate redirects, however, do consistently show in the web site’s access logs.

It’s possible bsky could fuck around with this in the future, but doing so risks just sending users to a pseudo-fork like blacksky.

You’re right about the effect (lawsuits and the threat of the same are more common in America than Canada or the UK) but not at all about the cause.

The USA has had a decades-long choice to have our industry regulated primarily not through government bureaucracy but instead judicial liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_through_litigation

“Actual coverage is less than what’s theoretically possible” is a hell of a way of saying "these things aren’t good enough (yet) to actually replace real people ".

You are not the first person to say this.

And as I understand it, trans men are as a group kida sick of being volintold to put themselves in harms way. It’s great that you recognize that they are men and are treated as such in your “men should do danger” sexism, but don’t suggest someone else do what you’re not willing to do yourself.

Get few skirts and maybe some makeup, dress yourself in drag, and then make a habit of asking every restaurant or shopping mall or store what bathroom you should use.

(Sure, you’d likely get harassed and banned and maybe arrested, but there’s a minority being oppressed and standing beside them is what strong allies do.)

Cop staffing is already below minimum levels.

In a world where a literal police strike led to a lower rate of violent crime, this is not a claim that should be accepted without extraordinary evidence.

At the very least, a city whose “cop staffing” is below their minimum should have an obvious increase in crime relative to comparable jurisdictions.

You’re the first account I’ve seen endorse OpenOffice, and I’ve been casually looking for a better alternative to word since the copilot bullshit last year.

Do you have a good example of something they added since LibreOffice forked off that’s worth considering if choosing an alternative?

A better question is what sort of legislation should apply to every website on the planet, without exception.

Off the top of my head:

• Do not store user information in an unsecure or identifiable mechanism.
• Be transparent as to what parts of the page are ads and which aren’t.
• Follow best-practices for accessibility.
• Give @DomeGuy a lollipop if he asks.

Just because they are a distasteful company, doesn’t give us free reign to spread lies about them.

To be pedantic, I’m spreading alarmist rumors at worst. In English a “lie” has to be something the speaker doesn’t actually believe. And I honestly believe that users of WhatsApp should assume that Meta can read their messages.

The signal protocol and encryption explicitly prevents the transit server decrypting messages. That a theoretical hidden third person … in the chat doesn’t change that is e2e encrypted.

You’re splitting a hair that’s not even worth curling.

If I ship you a locked box via courier, and the courier can get a copy of the key without talking to either of us, we should presume that the courier may have looked inside and take appropriate measures. Like, inventorying the contents of said box before and after, and not shipping things we don’t want the courier to know about.

It doesn’t matter if the courier keeps the box locks, doesn’t habitually carry a key, or even promises that they won’t get a key. We don’t even have to assume that they actually looked in the box, or use a slower or more-expensive courier.

If there’s a plausible way they can open the box, we should start with the presumption that they did and then go from there.

Websites that break in Firefox are websites that should not be used.

Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.

Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.

Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?

If you don’t like meta any more than I do, why are you arguing so strongly that they deserve the benefit of the doubt?

And, more interestingly, what precisely do you mean that Meta including themselves as a recipient in every WhatsApp chat would not render their E2E encryption equivalent to HTTPS?

AFAIK both are in-transit encryption that prevents casual monitoring by other entries along the network path between you and the person you’re chatting with, but expose you to undetectable monitoring on the part of the service provider.

You are assuming good behavior on the part of a corporate giant grown out of a social media site literally founded to spy on its users. A company who is literally being sued for their claims that their chat app is meaningfully encrypted

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-law/whatsapp-lawsuit-encrypted-messages-10504837/

Even if Meta isn’t currently including themselves as a hidden participant in every WhatsApp chat, you should assume that they can do so and act as if they will do so.

Odds are pretty good that their encryption usage is good enough for any lawful behavior you may engage in, but you shouldn’t trust Meta or any software they provide with anything that would destroy your life if it was revealed.

Meta using the name of a formerly independent company for their current pseudo-private messaging app does not mean said app meaningfully predates the one whose tech they use.

https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

(Please share if you have a link arguing the opposite.)

More importantly, the encryption in Whatsapp is closer to HTTPS than it is to PGP. It keeps anyone except Meta or the recipients from keeping a record of what you say, but you should absolutely assume Meta is recording what you say on WhatsApp.

(And you should also assume anyone you talk to is keeping a record as well.)

Most of the people I know have largely abandoned personal email. Way back before everyone had a personal number it made sense to share your email with your friends, but nowadays ‘contact that goes directly to them’ is good enough for casual purposes.

(And as understand it, WhatsApp is a cancerous fork of Signal created by Meta as a response to people abandoning their social media site for private communication or discord. Plain carrier messages for casual communication, signal for avoiding third-party interception, and social media for folk you don’t trust with your phone number.)

If we ignore setting and presume an international audience, then it makes sense to also ignore the minimums in laws and reduce it to base principles. Which makes grind culture even worse.

If you regularly work more than 40 hours a week you are being exploited. Regardless of your profession, wage, ownership stake, or what claims your local laws would let you pursue.

This extends very nicely to monthly and annual labor statistics. 72 hour weeks for certain irregular situations like “bringing in the harvest” may not be exploitive, so long as the ratio of hours worked to hours elapsed drops beneath 24%. (5/7/3).