Recovering skooma addict.
I missed the Internet Archive yesterday when @pluralistic@mamot.fr casually mentioned “Keppler illustrations for Puck” as if we’d all know what that meant and the best-looking link that came up on search was to a collection of them there.
This helps protect our community.
Ah, so it’s not you coming up with the stupid excuse that they have legit reasons to think the user might be a nefarious “bot”, you’re just passing along the stupid excuse as you interpret it from the meaningless message direct from Google. That explains where you got the idea that “viewbots” had anything to do with it, I guess.
It’s not just you. I’m tired of the whole team of people who are always standing by to bring out similar excuses any time someone decides that in their quest to stop invidious from existing — or whatever google is actually aiming at — it’s acceptable to just mass-block all the VPN users as collateral damage.
I suspect the VPN was used to bot
There are plenty of sources, including even in this thread, indicating that that this is not the problem. Quit making excuses for them.
… but you know, it’s not difficult to think of possibilities. They could have a shiny new line of business providing hosting, spam detection, admin, support, moderation, and other services for whatever new and improved flavour of fedi instances they can create in accordance with all the principles they used to talk about. They could use their marketing team, their money and connections, to become the provider of choice for corporations, governments, and NGOs who don’t yet realize that they need their own instance.
Would’ve been worth a try. Instead, after so much fanfare, they ran a small mastodon instance for a little while and then cancelled the project. I suppose it’s likely that the same kind of fate will befall the new ad tracking stuff before too long.
Not really. It’s just an aside for the bean-counters.
It serves here as an example of what an Internet without ads might look like. Mozilla has the kind of resources that could’ve really helped its development if they’d been capable and determined enough to succeed in turning whatever crazy project they had in mind when they launched mozilla.social into something practical. If they’d built something good it could have earned them much goodwill and prestige, maybe brought in a little money somehow or other, and gone some way to ridding the Internet of the infestation of adtech that currently afflicts it.
Meh. It’s not a problem of scale. It’s a problem of we have no idea how the fuck to do that. Scaling up existing techniques is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Spare a moment to think of the poor technofeudalist serf working hard to put food on her family.
I think the fediverse has a better chance of doing more good, and Mozilla should’ve stuck with it.
Mozilla: For the foreseeable future, there’s a lot of money in advertising, and we want some of it. It’s all over the Internet. Why shouldn’t some of the profit go to people like us, people who wish things were different even while bravely facing the harsh reality that there is no other choice but to devote ourselves to commercial advertising?
We know that everyone in our community will hate the idea, but surely this too is a sign that we are on the right path. By doing unpopular things, we demonstrate the courage that’s needed to save the Internet from the kind of future where Mozilla can’t get a piece of the biggest market on the Internet, the only one that matters, the market for advertising.
What was the problem again?
That’s generous of you. If I’d mistakenly bought one that wouldn’t work without ever having a network connection, I’d be returning it and demanding my money back. Hasn’t happened yet, though.
They are presumably referring to SimpleX. Although I don’t actually see anyone blaming it for the existence of Nazis.
You’d be correct to point out that not all of them waste energy like Ethereum did until later in 2022 and Bitcoin still does, but wrong to pick Monero as an example of one that doesn’t.
The discourse about Mozilla is ridiculous, here and most everywhere. You’ve got people taking every perceived opportunity to attack them for things they do, things they didn’t do, and things it’s imagined they might’ve done. And then another crowd of equally determined people doggedly defending them for every idiotic blunder they make, such as this one.
Meanwhile Mozilla itself has nothing substantial to say. This is not the first time a prominent extension has mysteriously gone missing from amo with Mozilla telling us nothing about its role in the incident. @mozilla@mozilla.social needs to be in the discussion giving us a real explanation of what happened, why they got it wrong, and what they’re doing to improve things.
If you can’t handle the shocking reality of someone choosing unusual pronouns to refer to themselves, fediverse may not be the social media for you.
Fortunately, the page did its job just fine and was able to tell me to use javascript blocking without needing javascript to do it.