The fediverse offers a noncommercial alternative and that can be a draw. A “normal” Reddit user might not want to join us, but there will be users fed up with all the ads on Reddit, some of Reddits policies, tolerance of nazis and abuse and so on. Mastodon always was in the shadow of Twitter, a nice, but blew up when Musk started to destroy it. It offered a way out and that is worthwhile. And if Zuckerberg is starting to transform Instagram into a rightwing horror show, Pixelfed is there as an alternative. And if you want out of YouTube, PeerTube is working and ready for you.

It’s not only about the pollution: Cruise ships are also bad for cities as cities. A cruise ship will vomit 5000 people into your city center. Most european city centers are quite small, so 2-3 cruise ships will totally overcrowd the city. People might buy some tourist shit, but they will get their breakfast & dinner on the cruise ship. That’s bad for local restaurants. They will not stay overnight, which is bad for local businesses, hotels etc. And they will push out other tourist, because who wants to stay in Dubrovnik when the experience is like this?

It really does make sense for cities to ban cruise ships and advocate other types of tourism, where the tourists are “doing” more for the local economy.

This can start a death spiral - the more cities & ports are banning cruise ships in the Mediterranean, the more traffic the other cities will get. That will increase the problems there, leading to demands to also ban cruise ships there and so on.

Those fake download buttons go way back - they were around in the late 90s. In a quarter century the ad industry hasn’t managed to block this easy to detect scam. I mean - how hard can it be to not allow ads that are just a big button with “download” on them? Therefore I never will deactivate my adblocker. Fuck them.

This shows how unfair the tech landscape is. The Kickstarter is currently at 45000$. Meta & Co generate that in seconds through their advertising or some billionaire gains that through investments in under a second.

Never use a “for-profit adblocker”. Ublock Origin is free, open source and therefore won’t fuck you over. You can guess where this “profit” is coming from when you’re not paying for your “for-profit” adblocker

Don’t worry about YouTube - according to alphabets filings they account for ~10% of Googles ad revenue. Google is posting record profits every quarter, so they should manage.

The biggest problem with such a clause is that it is hard to define “evil”, even if it seems clear to you. Some people think that abortion is evil, so are abortion clinics banned from Json? What about the military and weapon manufacturers? Killing is evil, but you all know how the discourse about the military as national heroes that can’t be evil in the US goes. What about a service like X - is it evil? Can you define “evil” for a surveillance tool that brands itself as ad tech?

That also does mean that photobucket is training their fucking AI on my old account, which is full of Memes and Gifs I totally don’t have the copyright to. Some of them might even be from Disney movies.

Yeah, I really don’t understand why people are so confused. From a practical perspective your username is username@instance.tld and that’s it. You’re on some server and can simply follow that guy@mastodon.social and you will see the posts.

Here is the data they are forced to report to the EU:

Logged In X Users 61.8M Logged Out Guests 49.6M Total 111.4M

https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/amars-in-the-eu/amars-in-the-eu-aug-24

“Logged out Guests” is everyone who gets linked to a thread, who was send an video on Twitter and so on. And also take a look at the definition of the logged in users:

EU Active Recipients of the Service - Average between August 1st 2023 - January 31 2024

So you do count as active EU user if you have logged in between August and January with an IP address from the EU. That should even include some tourists.

Still better than Chrome. Mozilla is not perfect, but in comparison to Google and its behavior they are saints.

Kind of not what you’re looking for, but use rss2email to send everything as a mail to a mail address.

I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.

So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.

If it is counting website visits, I’m wondering how they are filtering out bots using selenium on a linux system to crawl their sites. That should be a huge amount of traffic