Meta is developing its own web search engine to make itself more independent of Google and Microsoft’s Bing. The technology will primarily be used to feed the company’s own AI chatbot with up-to-date information.

More competition against Google is good, but man another AI focused search engine is not what I would be hoping for.

No I mean things like sponsored by pocket and sponsored search results.

Firefox has ads by pocket on your homescreen and sponsored search results to name the two that come to my mind.

Brave did the affiliate link injection in 2020, but reversed and apologized shortly after. Similar to Mozilla’s Mr robot thing, it seems to be a one off fuck up that they reversed and apologised for.

Mozilla has made donations to the Mack group who have expressed hatred towards people who are white. It’s certainly less dangerous for a minority to spread hateful rhetoric to a majority, but rasicm is still racism, which is bad.

As sad as it is, the Brave and Mozilla issues are unfortunately nearly 1:1

• Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
• Both try to upsell you on services
• Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
• Both have made fringe political donations

So now it comes down do you want Chromium to support Google’s monopoly while having better performance, compatibility, and privacy defaults. Or do you want to buck their monopoly but have more tracking (unless LibreWolf), PPA, and worse performance/compatibility.

Most are just picking what they consider the less bad for their use case.

I’m sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.

Nobody’s going to save us unfortunately. Unless maybe Servo or Ladybird become a thing.

1 Get random error or have other tech issue

2 Certainly private search engines will be able to find a solution (they cannot)

3 Certainly non private search engines can find the solution (they can not)

4 “Chat GPT, the heck is this [error code or something]” Then usually I get a correct and well explained answer.

Read the article by wired previously and it rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t doubt that there are Nazis using it, but I also don’t doubt that there are Nazis driving ford cars and I know a big chunk of fediverse traffic is Nazis. Outside of the comment from the SimpleX developers there wasn’t any mention of it just being a tool, with plenty of traffic not even going through SimpleX hosted servers. Seems like it was meant to make readers think Nazi when they heard SimpleX. As apposed to reporting on Nazis moving from one tool to a better tool, e.g. Chevys got recalled so many people, some Nazis, bought fords instead.

Unfortunately, if everybody goes there the bots will follow.

What, disinformation from a government? I’m shocked, shocked I say.

There was already a wave of bots identified iirc. They were identified only because:

1 the bots had random letters for usernames

2 the bots did nothing but downvote, instantly downvoting every post by specific people who held specific opinions

Turned into a flamware, by the time I learned about it I think the mods had deleted a lot of the discussion. But, like the big tech platforms, the plan for bots likely is going to be “oh crap, we have no idea how to solve this issue.” I don’t intend to did the admins, bots are just a pain in the ass to stop.

Depends on your price point, but the 8a might be a good middle ground. It’s got the 8 year update support and is second to newest so it’s a tad cheaper.

https://kbin.earth/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/376830/Add-any-RSS-feed-to-any-Lemmy-community

You might be able to integrate into lemmy by adding your podcast rss into a lemmy community made for your podcast. Lemmy users could subscribe to the community and follow/discuss there. Feels like a redundant suggestion if your cms already supports activity pub, but as far as lemmy integration that’s the only way I can think might work.

I don’t know if you can or not, although I can confirm you can use Google Maps in a web browser if you grant the google maps website location access, and it’s pretty one to one with the app I believe. It does require you burn through mobile data if you don’t have unlimited since you can’t download offline maps, but the web version has gotten me out of a jam when open source map apps fail and if you don’t worry about data it might be worth trying.

If you are looking for a generic phone with good privacy and usability I would highly recommend a Pixel with Graphene OS. If you’ve never flashed a phone before, you can install Graphene within a web browser and never need to do any of the more complicated flashing stuff like most other setups require. It also allows you to optionally install Sandboxed Google Play Services (on the main profile or isolated on a second one), letting you access normal apps while still having some of the privacy and performance benefits of an otherwise de-Googled phone.

Twitter had 271 million monthly active users a decade ago

Mastodon was around for a while, slowly being built up until 2022 when the big twitter surge happened. They had the perfect foundation to make it the next big thing and all they had to do was keep the people who joined, make it slightly easier to join, and develop a few features like quote posts.

• They banned and defederated everyone who wasn’t in a very narrow sliver of political and technological opinions.

Mastodon lost it’s momentum, but had a second shot a year or two later. Threads joined the network offering a massive user base that could talk with Mastodon users. Then Bluesky blew up and that was bridged so Mastodon could talk with those people too. Mastodon may not have been the center of things anymore, but it could be fully integrated into the other two.

• Most servers defederated with threads and bridges.

There are other things that I’m sure play a roll as well. Luck, discoverability, easiness to join, people getting board, people looking at the next shiny thing, you name it. But it does look to be in many ways self inflicted.

I’d be afraid of wearing out a battery super fast. Outside of super long trips that require recharging to arrive, I’d much rather leave a car plugged in overnight rather than need to pay to replace batteries. Also, like @stoy@lemmy.zip said, it’s a lot of power at once that could get dangerous if something goes wrong or overload grids if lots of people start fast charging their cars.

Though of course I’m sure it’s a great achievement and hopefully the research is useful.

Potentially, but in different ways. You could argue that mass defederation and hostility between communities are the beginning of a fediverse specific enshittification process. And instead of running out of money and then swamping platforms with ads, the big servers could run out of money or get a bored admin and instances could dissapear. Constantly dissapearing instances could also be a fediverse specific enshittification process.

Sorry, not sure if you intended to reply to my post or if it was intended for another comment. If you were intending to reply to me, I doubt they’ll ban the Israeli flag, although they also haven’t banned the Palestinian flag either. They started removing one emoji when used as a representation of something that violated their rules and wanted to clarify the slightly misleading headline on The Intercept’s part.

Again, though, as I said above I’m still not a fan of the rule. Meta has made a lot decisions (moderation and otherwise) that I’m not a fan of.

I think the ublock origin lite thing was a legitimate mistake, though I understand Mozilla’s depleting benefit of the doubt.

Systems used by courts and governments across the US riddled with vulnerabilities