Turns out, asklemmy just banned that account for being a bot.

Posting this much isn’t normal. Looks very fishy to me.

Like a cab, but it’s your car and you take care of everything.

If you need a car only once a year when going to the airport, a cab will be cheaper. If you need to go somewhere at least once a week, driving your own car will be cheaper. Likewise, if you need only a little bit of cloud storage for your photos, free iCloud or Google Drive might be fine. If you need a whole lot of storage, self-hosting becomes cheaper.

When you take a cab, do you need to worry about maintenance, gasoline, insurance, or other things? No. The same goes for cloud storage. When you throw your photos on Google Drive, you don’t need to worry about electricity bills, security updates, or hardware maintenance.

When you drive your own car, you need to be a responsible driver and a car owner. Maintenance is your responsibility. Likewise, self-hosting means you need to be a responsible server admin.

I really like the idea of having my own server, where I could have a bunch of cool stuff like email, VPN, Nextcloud, and so much more. The primary reason why I don’t have a server like that, is because I can’t trust myself to follow the best practices. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should hire a proper professional to take care of all that.

But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.

Soo… nobody needed that tool any more? Did they ever though?

And why is it that people don’t want to see any ads at all? Some people argue that ads can help you discover products and services you might want to buy? Well, I tried that.

Got a separate computer just for this experiment. Installed Chrome, used online services that have ads etc. I exposed myself to tracking and ads for a while, and the ads I saw on that computer are still completely irrelevant. I’ve even told some sites exactly what I like, and the ad targeting still sucks.

Nobody benefits from this, except for the ad companies. Advertisers loose their money, and they get no sales in return (at least not from mme). Ad companies and related platforms get the money for showing me stuff I will never buy, while the ads infuriate me at every turn.

Even in the best case scenario where the ad companies have all of my data, they still can’t figure out what I might want to buy. The whole idea of ads is just completely broken. On my other computers where I actually do more serious stuff, I use every tool in my arsenal to block all of this digital cancer.

I asked GPT and Copilot some pride related questions, and they were both pretty supportive. GPT went into more detail, while Copilot used more rainbow emojis. Either way, I didn’t see any right-wing rhetoric.

You can mitigate that issue to some extent by making the videos short. As long as the user count remains relatively small, the storage and bandwidth costs aren’t going to spiral out of control. Eventually you’ll have so many millions of active users that you’ll also need to figure out a way to get a steady source of revenue. I wonder how Loops will tackle that issues. Some mastodon instances already have a small yearly fee, so I guess video instances could do that as well.

According to Microsoft, you can safely send your work related stuff to Copilot. Besides, most companies already use a lot of their software and cloud services, so LLM queries don’t really add very much. If you happen to be working for one of those companies, MS probably already knows what you do for a living, hosts your meeting notes, knows your calendar etc.

If you’re working for Purism, RedHat or some other company like that, you might want to host your own LLM instead.

This sounds pretty cool. Are there other types of restrictions you can have?

Oh, that’s a very good point. Makes me wonder why Mozilla doesn’t talk about donations very much. Must be a strategic decision or something.

As someone who is severely allergic to ads, I really don’t like this transition, but I understand why they’re doing it.

Mozilla seems to be facing a tough problem. How do you make money when your core audience isn’t enough to support the company, but you can’t realistically pivot to a new audience without kicking out all of the old users. Would it be better if Mozilla just faded into irrelevancy and focussed on developing Thunderbird instead? The FOSS community would have to continue to support Firefox, which would slow down development to such an extent that it probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rest of the web.

I don’t have numbers that would directly address that. However, there are lots of statistics on the number of mobile users vs desktop users when it comes to the traffic in general. This trend has been clearly visible for about 15 years now.

Here’s something I found on a short notice. link

Not that many people use real computers any more. At work, you may need to use a computer, but you probably can’t change the browser. At home, you have the PCMR folks who use a computer and probably also care about browsers. Everyone else just uses a tablet or a phone for browsing the web.

Speaking of the web, most people interact with specific websites through an app and an API, so they don’t even launch the mobile browser until they have to visit a site that doesn’t have an app. The world has changed and browsers aren’t as relevant as they used to be.

Mastodon devs were clearly aware of the quality of text people tend to write online. It’s a very fitting term IMO.

Mozilla also has a VPN, so that should provide some revenue. Might not be enough to let go of Google’s support, but at least it’s something.

Man, that is just such a cool little easter egg. Totally love it!

We should have hired him to make a scifi movie about how humanity fixed the climate change.

LOL, I recall seeing HD sunglasses somewhere roughly 15 years ago. That was the period where everything had to have an HDMI port. I guess someone must have made an HDMI compatible toaster too.

Speaking of the engine, if Mozilla ever decides to stop developing gecko, it’s going to force the community to continue that work on their own. If that ever happens, it would have a big impact on all the forks too.