Not to mention so many projects putting their support in walled garden chat services like Discord that you can’t even search via search engine.
Seeing this happen has been one of the saddest most desperate parts about watching the internet dying.
It was obvious what was going to happen years ago, that didn’t stop people from acting like I was a reactionary foolish cynic when I voiced concern about this though.
Seriously FUCK Discord (and Reddit).
What if it was as the name of a large dump next to Ireland tho
You missed England 2.0
Ok so I sounded a bit edgey, you realize we are talking about an ongoing genocide my country is funding, arming and providing diplomatic cover for?
Am I random internet guy (who is virtually powerless save for my voice) being a bit too edgey for your tastes really the thing worth focusing on here?
This is an ongoing genocide, if my tone comes off as childish that is of little concern to the discussion at hand.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a war with genocidal aspects, what is happening in Israel is genocide and nothing else. There is no war in Israel, Israel already entirely encloses Gaza and a similar process is occurring in the West Bank, Israel controls basic access to food water electricity medical care… this is in no sense a war, it is wholly an act of genocide.
Save your handwringing about this for someone else who won’t repeatedly post quotes demolishing your ridiculous narrative that the higher ups at Microsoft didn’t have a pretty obvious picture of what was happening.
What, do you think they were are all complete idiots? I don’t think so.
What did they do to turn you into their enemy here though?
Aiding and abetting genocide.
Israel is a rogue state committing a genocide, not simply “another” federal government.
If Microsoft suspects their servers are being used as part of a genocide by a government than they should immediately stop doing business with that government until further legal action and international UN action.
If Microsoft continues to do business with Israel they are complicit in the Genocide of Palestinians.
Period, end of story.
This is an overly generous take though, the important people at Microsoft knew and they need to be held accountable.
Yet the internal documents detailing Microsoft’s partnership with Unit 8200 paint a different picture of the company’s concern for Palestinians’ privacy. In fact, Palestinians were not mentioned in the documents summarizing the 2021 meeting between Sariel and Nadella, which also involved Israeli intelligence officers and senior Microsoft executives.
According to the Guardian’s reporting, Unit 8200 informed Microsoft of its intention to transfer up to “70 percent” of its data, including secret and top secret data, to Azure. And while the project’s ultimate goal (beyond “deepen[ing] the partnership”) does not appear to have been explicitly stated, an intelligence source said that executives of Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary — who worked closely with Unit 8200 personnel on the project — were given clearer indications.
“Technically, they’re not supposed to be told exactly what it is, but you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” the source noted. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
I don’t think Microsoft realizes we will never forgive or forget this.
Before I was inspired to join the Linux movement out of curiosity, open principles and fun.
Now I am a whole another level of committed against Microsoft, they have done much worse than lose me as a customer, they have turned themselves into my enemy and I never shut up or forget.
The vast amounts of data gathered on the Palestinian population, including their medical history, sex lives, and search histories, have been used for coercion and extortion. If a certain individual needed to travel across checkpoints for crucial medical treatment, permission could be suspended until they complied. Information about extramarital affairs or sexual orientation, especially homosexuality, is exploited as blackmail material. One former Unit 8200 agent recalled that he was instructed during his training to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in intercepted conversations.
Now is the time to spread your wings and try linux as a replacement for windows!
nonsense rationalizations
Bluesky theoretically has the capacity to be decentralized. I am sure people will show up in this comment thread and provide a whole lot of technical specifications about mostly proof of concept features that demonstrate that Bluesky is in some sense technically decentralized. Maybe not anymore? That seems a bit less common these days it seems.
To all of those responses theoretical or prophesized lol I ask in turn -why then has the CEO of Bluesky not ruled out serving ads to users as a way of monetizing the currently unprofitable nascient social network?
This isn’t a conversation about details no matter how much people will try to steer it there with an air of expert authority. This is a conversation about values and how we embue them in the structures of our communities.
Bluesky is a for-profit business with investors who will seek a return on their investment. Until proven otherwise we must assume they will monetize similarly to the way every other social media company has so far. The words that people who work for Bluesky are less important than this basic economic reality.
The basic idea of the Bluesky architecture at least how I understand it as it is implemented now is that yes anybody can host their own node to a network in Bluesky, and one can theoretically form alternative private networks between these nodes that are unconnected and thus decentralized from Bluesky the corporation/central servers themselves.
However, to join the main conversation, the main endorsed centralized channels of conversation all the people you want to talk to are on, you have to fully subscribe to the centralized authority of Bluesky and their servers in terms of everything, content moderation, ads, whatever when you participate in that “channel”.
This might seem like a small detail, it seems like I just said that Bluesky can be used as a decentralized social network and yes theoretically it can, but the fediverse, mastodon, lemmy, piefed, peertube and other software projects were designed to mitigate the suffocating of the periphery that the network effect creates. Communities here can grow from small pieces floating nearby other larger pieces, it isn’t an all or nothing participation in one massive commons controlled by a centralized power that allows small private alternatives to hopelessly wilt in its glare…
So then what about Threads? That is a more interesting question, but even in this case my first question is why is Meta interested fundamentally in the fediverse… and why now? If they had any interest other than a narrow attempt to hedge their bets and jump on the bandwagon so they can say they are doing so, they would have funded tiny little accelerator projects exploring this kind of thing LONG ago.
If you listen to any of this long rant, please ask yourself this question. Why are massive social media companies, with so much cash on hand they might as well be small countries, only putting serious effort into creating decentralized social media technology and building out the infrastructure NOW after the path forward was already blazed? Where were they when the fediverse was still just mostly a cute idea without practical infrastructure built out and standards agreed to?
When talking about whether a specific corporate social media platform is decentralized or not you cannot ignore this context, these foundations had already been laid and fairly well built up by a small rag tag team of developers working almost entirely as volunteers funded on a yearly budget so small it wouldn’t cover a single dinner check for the executives of Meta.
An aside… also consider the implications of the massive amount of computation that the architecture of Bluesky is set up to require for moderation of channels with the claims they are making about needing channels to processed by servers to be fed back to nodes in turn. Consider the difference in power/leverage between small nodes and massive communities in a situation where moderation is done by humans doing moderation (with automated screening tools to help maybe, but ultimately human) vs when moderation is done by applying a prohibitively expensive amount of computing power to the raw firehose of conversation. The difference is who gets to moderate public spaces and who doesn’t.
Agreed, I guess I meant it potentially had a great interface, I have memories (I SWEAR they are real -I scream into the void) that the xbox 360 had a really slick interface at one point with very clear effective panels/tabs that was progressively enshittified… but if it hadn’t… it would have been nice.
That was a different timeline, if such a one where microsoft didn’t enshittify xbox exists.
It particularly enrages me since the xbox 360 had a wonderful interface in my opinion.
Come join the community I made recently specifically for battlefield like games made by indie developers such as the superb ww2 battlefield-like Easy Red 2 !
Fuck EA
Reddit is a for profit website owned by rightwing idiots pretending to be a community space rather than a volunteer effort to help rich reddit chuds train their AI crap… so the problem isn’t inherently about the popularity here.
Regardless though, I want more people here based on the principle that when good things happen to me it is better if they happen to others and I should endeavor to destroy any barrier to seeing a fluid relationship between my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me.
Bluesky is a for profit venture with a marketing budget it uses to sell the idea the platform is decentralized.
Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no realistic business plan proposed for how to lucratively monetize a truly decentralized network. Bluesky MUST turn a profit, this isn’t an inconvenient detail, it is a crisis the company is on the clock to solve like any heavily speculative venture capital funded startup is.
The only way this works is if actual meaningful decentralization is always “on the horizon” for Bluesky as something the for profit company can periodically point to and say “look how close we are!” while never taking meaningful steps closer.
Bluesky silicon valley techbros will point to their cool blogpost about how they set up a hobbyist project on Bluesky outside of the central network and it will remain a pipedream or like the end of a rainbow for 99.9% of us, an impossible promise that flies away as fast away as we chase it.
So? There is a difference between someone using your tools for evil and actively engaging in profit seeking with said evil doer in order to make money hand over fist.
Microsoft is knowingly participating in genocide.
Act accordingly.
However, Unit 8200 sources said intelligence drawn from the enormous repositories of phone calls held in Azure had been used to research and identify bombing targets in Gaza.
Microsoft is directly profitting off of the Genocide of Palestinians.
Directly and KNOWINGLY profitting off of genocide.
Truly listen to those words and let them sink in. This is evil and we must hold those like this man Satya Narayana Nadella accountable for witnessing a genocide of tens of thousands, likely hundreds of thousands, and participating enthusiastically.
We will not forget.
I think that was probably the real reason for the block, the Internet Archive is too functional, scalable and accessible of a service for reddit’s lame excuses about needing to gatekeep access to the community created content on their website to not make reddit look totally stupid unless they came up with an excuse to block the Internet Archive.