Boz (he/him)

Thank you for your hard work, and for keeping us updated on the situation.

Thanks, I’m glad at least someone isn’t judging me.

I meant identifying details about my education and career, not details about my perspective. I wouldn’t have commented if I had nothing to say. :3

And when all you have is a Phillips head screw, you might overlook who’s holding the handle of the exact size screwdriver you need.

I don’t know, I think Musk might actually have an inferiority complex. He’s obsessed with himself, but he puts an awful lot of effort into trying to prove that he’s cool. But yeah, they’re both terrible, it doesn’t really matter who’s worse.

Non-tech person, though I would prefer not to go into detail on a public forum. I do get along well with tech people, and I run into some fairly technical issues while trying to do other things, but I’m rarely interested in technology for its own sake. I will listen to someone talk about what they do, or read an article, and I will always try to read the manual, but I am also the kind of person who’s like, “if I can’t solve this problem on my own in 15 minutes, I am going to call tech support.” (In my defense, if I can’t solve the problem in 15 minutes with the manual, I am not going to manage it on my own without human intervention, and I don’t want to bother my friends and family if I can get someone whose actual job is to ask if the machine is plugged in, and who won’t tease me about it for the next three weeks if it was, in fact, not plugged in. I am always polite with tech support, but I can tell they sometimes think I should have been able to figure it out on my own).

I’m fine with not really understanding how Lemmy works, since it does work, and it’s easy to find help if I get stuck. I am picking stuff up here and there as I go, which is usually what happens with stuff I use often, but at a certain point it’s just a black box to me.

ETA: when I say “not going into detail,” I mean about my background. That didn’t come across the first time, lol, sorry about that.

I mean, shouldn’t is more applicable for “male prostitute.” Really depends on the gig, and how closely the client examines your assets.

Does this mean we can say “welcome to the fediverse, we have cake”?

Yeah, but unironically, mailing a check is great if you don’t want to install an app or sign a digital “monetize me, Daddy” agreement just to make a one-time payment to a company that already knows your mailing address. I usually pay rent and utilities that way, because I can just drop it through the office mail slot, and I don’t have to pay a processing fee to use their sketchy online payment system. Cheaper for me, probably a good laugh for the staff, and not difficult.

Probably the shirtless pic was a carefully calculated move to short-circuit theories about his lack of humanity, by showing that he has a navel. [/s]

…for real, though, at least the man utilizes his paid PR staff.

I personally wouldn’t trust the website, either. It might be possible to block all the direct trackers, but they can learn a lot about you by what you do on the service, from who you follow to how long you spend on the site. If you have an account, you’re paying for it in data.

…if you’re okay with paying in data, that’s your business, not mine, but don’t assume blocking trackers is full protection.

No, they’ll start raising rates for people with weight loss apps on their phone, or refusing coverage for people who made too many phone calls to an oncologist, or got a lot of texts from their pharmacy saying “X prescription is ready.” Companies collecting medical data is very, very scary for a lot of people.

If you have a smart light bulb or thermostat you control through your phone, they probably know when you went to bed last night, and approximately what your electric bill was last month–unless you get electric bills by email, in which case they might know exactly what your electric bill was last month.

Confirmed, unless they have done it in the past few days, not yet. TechCrunch quoted the head of Instagram as saying that they haven’t implemented ActivityPub yet. There was no specific reason why not, and no timeline for adding that functionality. I think we have at least a few months, since there are a lot of other missing features that should be higher on the to-do list.

Wait, are there people who aren’t advertisers who do prefer Threads over Mastodon or Lemmy? Most of the reviews I have seen are bad, and the good ones seem to be from people who haven’t tried the fediverse, though I couldn’t swear to that.

Possibly. Apparently there are some possible issues with interconnection between instance admins that would give Threads information your local instance has about you. I understand that there are ways to change the code so that doesn’t happen, but as of right now, there’s more risk of data transfer than just posts/comments.

…Wayyyyy less than if you actually install their app, of course. But there’s room for improvement.

I agree that social interactions are good! I just learned forum etiquette at a time when the default state of any forum was everyone socializing all the time, and no topical discussion. Even communities with fewer than 20 people had to make rules about staying on-topic in topical threads, and the rules were made by and for the community, not by corporations or algorithms. Coming from that background, I feel like it’s rude to OP if I don’t stay on the topic they chose. I suppose it’s a different internet, now.

Very cool. I think you can see by my display name that I like showing pronouns, lol. I remember when putting pronouns on a name tag was like waving a trans flag. It wasn’t very long ago. And I also appreciate the heads-up on politics. I’m far left enough that I usually feel comfortable with the level of disagreement I have with communists and anarchists, but the feeling is not always mutual, so it depends on specifics. I will take a look at the communities when I have a little time to go in depth.

Anyway, I think we’re a bit off topic, except that issues with bigotry etc are part of why figuring out how to manage vote history is important.

Thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out! The issue isn’t my local instance, though, it’s that clearly marked safe spaces always attract people who want to make those spaces unsafe. It’s kind of a “Trolls? Must be Wednesday” kind of thing for me, after a lot of years online, but it never stops hurting. The only thing downvoting does to trolls is allow non-trolls to communicate to one another that the space is still supposed to be safe, which offers a little comfort, but it doesn’t actually make the space safe. Banning the trolls is much more effective.

I agree that a lot of information can be inferred from vote history, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry if I came across as trying to minimize the risk there.

What I meant is that exponentially more information of the type you describe can be inferred from post history, particularly for those of us who use this space to connect with other members of marginalized groups we belong to. Voting history is a minor risk to me when just the fact that I have replied with “I have also had this experience” to a certain post or posted a meme in a certain group could cause serious trouble for me in my offline life. I don’t understand the use case where someone would become concerned about privacy because they found out their vote history could be accessed by unknown parties if they weren’t already concerned about privacy because their posts and comments are visible to anyone and everyone.

I guess the tl;dr is that I just don’t understand how the hyper focus on the risks associated with voting history is consistent with an assessment of personal risk in a broader sense. I am conscious of taking a huge risk by being on the fediverse, and I decided it was worth it. The stakes were high enough to begin with that I just assumed that the only source of privacy I had would come from anonymity, not the technology, which might be why I am confused by some of the responses I am seeing.