I said its one of the reasons behind the network effect, not the network effect itself. github can offer more freebies, which attracts more users, which makes it more attractive to other users and for existing users to stick around.

Which is one of the reasons behind github’s network effect.

I’m happy to see Mozilla narrowing its focus to making just a damn browser

but thats not what theyre doing. im on mobile so dont have the link handy, but they mention in a different article that they think Pocket has been superseded by AI and tab groups. theyve harvested the bits of it they want and have no use for the consumer service now but its not about narrowing their focus.

The point I was making here is you start sabotaging & can end up harming people that may have been allies

How? The call to sabotage was against fascist programs, like surveillance, illegal arrests, etc. How would sabotaging those hurt people who could have been allies?

Second, the more you start demanding people do what you want else you’ll sabotage, attack them, etc

That is nowhere near what is happening here. We have a system of laws that is being broken. Nobody was calling for sabotage when those laws were followed. But people who use less aggressive methods to combat fascism, i.e. writing op-eds, speaking publicly against administration policies, leading protests, have started facing punishments. They are preventing the normal exercise of civilian power, so we have to escalate to sabotage or similar actions. That doesn’t make us like fascists because we are not the ones defying and breaking existing social norms and laws. This is a ridiculous argument.

The post didn’t promote consumerism in any way. It said, if you’re a tech worker you should unionize and sabotage authoritarian work where you can

so, now, Firefox detects if you are on a page that has search capability

Didn’t Firefox have this years ago through OpenSearch and Mozilla removed it.

Moving the shortcuts at the bottom of the URL bar dropdown into a more prominent position

They’re moving always visible icons into a menu that takes an extra click. Years ago these used to be actual buttons that you could click to perform the search with that engine.

It’s like they’re bragging about their feature regressions.

I’m In South Carolina, U.S and I call them ground cherries, though I’ve heard others around here call them goldenberries

Self hosting isn’t really compatible with viral content

The post I was replying to claimed virality and self hosting are at odds with one another because it causes skyrocketing expense. My point was that maybe someone selfhosting a server in the fediverse is not as interested in virality. And I doubt even the most viral posts in the fediverse would break the bank of a selfhoster

Virality is nowhere near the only reason for posting videos. People post them to make jokes, teach something, reply to someone else, etc, or all the same reasons someone might make a blogpost or a post on a link aggregator.

Theres no web app? That seems short sighted. You apparently cant access anything without logging either. I dont expect these shorts to get much viewership if you have to register and download an app to see anything. It also doesnt seem in the spirit of the fediverse

Maybe the problem in that equation is the expectation of virality and not self hosting?

That’s not a contradiction, it’s maybe an incomplete argument. And I was relying on my previous sentence that mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations to imply that they would do it again and were already warning about that. But none of this even matters; I’ve made a follow up comment that lays it out more explicitly.

I didn’t cherry pick a statement. I included the part where they said the very first draft.

I did fail to explain how its a power grab, but that’s was only because I thought it was a fairly obvious one-to-one point. I’ve also added another example. But lemme try again.

1. Mastodon has a history of pushing features that affect interop with other implementations without seeking feedback from other implementations or outright ignoring the feedback they do receive.
2. A member of the mastodon team wrote a FEP to formalize a setting related to search indexing. This was the right way to go about it. yey Mastodon was working with other implementations. But that FEP didn’t receive positive feedback and it seems like it was abandoned.
3. Now mastodon is trying to standardize something using the ideas from that FEP, outside of the FEP process (which is the agreed upon way to collaborate between implementers).
4. They’re warning on their site that they have deadlines and may not incorporate feedback if they can’t resolve it without breaking deadlines.
5. They are under no obligation to incorporate it after their initial draft and, historically, mastodon is unwilling to update their work to incorporate other implementers’ feedback.

A more collaborative way to do this would have been to seek feedback before making a grant proposal and making the grant proposal jointly with other projects so they weren’t the only ones getting paid for it.

Mastodon has a history of steamrolling other implementations.

This means we might not always be able to incorporate all the feedback we get into the very first draft of everything we publish

The site even warns that theyre on a deadline and may not incorporate feedback.

EDIT: they also mention a “setting” that determines if a user/post is searchable. theyve presented a FEP to formalize this setting but nearly everyone else had issues with their proposal. as usual for mastodon, this looks like them sidestepping external feedback and just doing what they want

I feel you but i dont think podcasters point to youtube for video feeds because of a supposed limitation of RSS. They do it because of the storage and bandwidth costs of hosting video.

chat apps and systems like Twitter and Mastodon aren’t a good place for journalism

Super agree with that. Framing this feature as specific to journalism was a poor choice. The feature is useful for any writer/blogger/joe schmoe on the web

It’s a cool feature, but it sucks that (once again) the mastodon team is taking control of fediverse-wide features and ignoring outside criticism.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30398

Doing an AMA on mastodon would be a horrible experience for everyone. Others have pointed out the obvious difference in reach, blocks/defederation means some ppl may not even be able to participate, participants might never receive questions, users from different instances wouldn’t be able to see sibling comments, etc.

PWAs were not liked when they came out.

By some ppl. There were also ppl who did like them. As soon as the desktop support was axed, fans of the feature started complaining immediately.

at the time, people in general did not like PWAs as a concept. Independent of the browser

Again, I think this is a sampling issue, because my experience was the complete opposite.

And one of the key parts of PWA features was the “Progressive” part. The site works without those features and you don’t have to use them so removing the support never made much sense to me.

South Carolina, in the US Southeast