Yawn, are we still repeating blinding repeating this utter nonsense from a year ago?

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Peak Firefox was back in 2010/2011, almost 14 years ago, it has been steadily dropping market share ever since. This is not a new problem by any stretch.

which goes a long way to scaling back on the reliance of google donations.

$3 million is about 0.67% of the money they get from Google and that money isn’t even going into Firefox development.

The day Firefox shutters its doors is the day the internet truly dies.

Firefox is little more than just a Chrome clone itself, financed by Google no less. It doesn’t do anything to set itself apport. If they cared about an open Internet they should have put some effort into building it (support RSS, Torrent, IPFS, etc.). If Firefox dies tomorrow, nothing much would change as the rest of the Internet already didn’t care. It might however make room for a browser that actually cares about privacy and an open Internet, instead of just using those words for marketing purpose while still having telemetry by default.

Not really. Recommendation algorithms are great for discovering related information and new stuff. They even beat search at its own game, as search is often limited to plain text, while the algorithms take the broader context into account. The problem is that you have no control over the recommendations, no transparency how they work, no way to switch or disable them and no way to explore the deeper knowledge hidden in them. It’s all just a magical black box for more engagement and more ads.

A recommendation algorithms that somehow manages to be open and transparent would be a very big step towards fixing the Web. Lemmy and Co. are too busy replicating failed technology from 30 years ago instead of actually fixing the underlying problems.

The ai is trained on recordings of his voice which they have not secured the rights to though.

Not really the case with the latest models, a couple of seconds of audio are enough to clone a voice, as you can essentially remix it from the all the other training data, you don’t need that persons specific voice for training anymore. This is more a personal rights and trademark issue than a copyright one.

In fact, machine translation started much earlier than this AI craze…

…and has since than switched over to deep learning based stuff like everything else. This “current” AI craze is not new, it has been going on for over a decade if you paid attention.

The thing is no one is outraged about machine translation because it is not a primary creative process.

But reading text from a script is? Seriously? It takes substantial creative effort to translate jokes into something that works in other cultures as well as have the dialog in another language fit into existing lip motions. All of which is now getting replaced by AI. And of course all the voice actors that did the dubs are out of a job as well.

Have fun boycotting anything that uses spell checker or offers translations and subtitles. There won’t be much left in a while.

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Lame attempt to distract what caused it all.

It completely puts the whole system in question. If federation is optional and defederation happens for ideological reasons, what’s even the point of it? It just means that communication can get disrupted at any point at the whim of any random server admin.

I just leave this link here as counter point (somewhat NSFW):

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11un888/flamboyant_origami_fgures/

A whole lot of weird stuff can be created by bashing things together with AI. The beauty of AI is after all that you can “edit” with high level concepts, not just raw pixels.

And as for humans and dogs: https://imgur.com/a/TdXO7tz

How does a completely decentralized platform handle data that should be removed?

You make a blacklists of forbidden content and relays can use or ignore it. It’s up to the relay, there is no central authority that can make content go away globally. Nostr is build to be censorship-resistent.

In the long run I think a platform like that

It’s not a platform, it’s just a protocol and apps using that protocol.

I can move to another Mastodon instance, and keep following the same accounts.

You can’t. What you can and can’t follow is determined by whatever the server federates with, which is not under your control. Also you lose all your followers and in case of server shutdown all the accounts on that server stop existing, so you can’t follow them either.

Federation is a brittle framework that starts collapsing the moment anybody tries to use it seriously.

You can always move to another server. That’s just the Web. As said, don’t like Twitter? Move to Facebook. You don’t need federation for that. Having to leave everything behind is the fundamental problem that federation fails to address.

Let’s not forget threads planned to monetize every interaction it was aware of,

So does GMail. Making money running a bit of the network should not be a problem, quite the opposite, that just means the network won’t run out of money. This kind of arbitrary enforcing of political ideology should have no place this low in the network structure.

Let’s not forget we’re really breaking new ground here

We really aren’t. It’s just repeating what EMail and Usenet have done for 40 years.

There is no central authority in mastodon.

There is no centralized authority on Twitter either, because you can always go and use Facebook. The Web is a federated system where everybody just decided they don’t want to talk to anybody else.

If you make a Mastodon account your digital identity is bound to that one server. You can’t move to another server. You can’t communicate with other servers that got defederated. Exactly the same as Facebook and Twitter. It’s only decentralized up until server admins decide that it isn’t, which already has happened numerous times in the past. The whole thing is basically just based around wishful thinking. If everybody would be niche to each other and servers would run forever, it would be totally fine, but that’s not how the world works.

There are many entities that are part of a federated system, just like email

Email is a terrible protocol by modern standards and the problems of federation show in email pretty clearly, as the majority of people will stick to Gmail and a handful of other major providers. There is no reason to repeat past mistakes. The saving grace with email is that you don’t have the moral police looking through your emails and kicking you from their server when they find something they don’t like (outside of sending spam), with Mastodon on the other side they do exactly that.

It’s federated, not decentralized. Which even Mastodon itself doesn’t seem to realize or care, since they falsely advertise themselves as decentralized.

Decentralized means there is no central authority.

Federation just means there are many centralized authorities, that might or might not communicate with each other.

I really don’t see what Mastodon is supposed to solve in the long run. The server has full control and can do whatever it wants. Just look at what happened Threads.net. Big company joins the Fediverse and instead of celebrating, everybody starts thinking about defederating them. This approach is doomed to fail if it ever gets popular.

Nostr looks like a much more promising approach, with proper cryptographic identities and signatures. Nobody owns you there. Servers are just dumb relays. If one steps out of line, you can just use another one.

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