The idea of evolution is that the parts kept are the ones that are helpful or relevant, or proliferate the abilities of the subject over generations and weed out the bits that don’t. Since Generative AI can’t weed out anything (it has no ability to logic or reason, and it does not think, and only “grows” when humans feed it data), it can’t be evolving as you describe it. Evolution assumes that the thing that is evolving will be a better version than what it evolved from.

Less stress. Less worry. More time free to recuperate and enjoy things.

The problem I see with this mostly has to do with the fact that they do not have a good apparatus in place for detecting and blocking bots. There’s nothing stopping not farms from hyping channels that fit the criteria. We already see this with comments on videos.

That doesn’t sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can’t generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn’t get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?

Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren’t coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1’s and 0’s.

Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You’ve given me an outline of an idea you have but it’s all broad strokes and no details.

I’m not sure what you’re expecting me to do with this. I wasn’t using sync as an example of a foss Lemmy app exactly. I was pointing out that sync doesn’t have that many users and its developer offers a free tier but to give the service that people want it has to be developed and maintained which costs time and time is money.

I wasn’t claiming it as a foss app. I was pointing out that lists of Lemmy users use apps like it (if not that particular one).

No, I’m not wrong. I’m telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we’ve gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we’re to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.

The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn’t have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.

Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don’t run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn’t cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.

The ones like bittorent and such offload the bandwidth cost to the users but that’s only one facet of what we’re talking about here.

Lemmy only survives today because people donate, which I did talk about in my subsequent comments which is exactly my point. It’s not ad supported now (most instances aren’t at any rate) but there are absolutely ad supported fediverse services, and if it gets bigger, it likely will run ads because more users means more content, more bandwidth, more electricity etc. The alternative is possible small scale, when you don’t have billions of users per day. There’s a threshold where the number of users far exceed a what even a group of people can put into a project like Lemmy without needing additional funding.

So either the majority of Lemmy users pays to use the service through subs or donations, or this won’t last either.

Yeah but the web has been this way since the mid 90’s. It’s been funded by ads the way that things that came before it were. Broadcast television is a good example. People switched to cable because of less ads and more channels with the expectation that there would be better content. That didn’t last. Then we had tivo and DVRs and so many other products to get around ads. But the root of the problem is that people won’t buy things they don’t know about, won’t use services they don’t know about, will have a hard time looking for goods and services that they do want without some form of advertisement. Word of mouth is advertisment too when you get right down to it. The ads were often less intrusive but became more so over time because it’s such a hotly contested area that pretty much every company small and large is throwing money at.

What’s worthless garbage to some may be useful in a pinch to others. The point is that combating ads means taking away a source of revenue not just for ad aggregators and ad companies but for business full stop. I hate billboards. I’d be perfectly happy to never see a billboard again in my life. That being said, they have been effective ads for a long time, and have been used for good purposes occasionally (missing persons, unsolved crimes etc come to mind).

I’m not saying ads aren’t more often than not intrusive, annoying, or lost on me. I actually do find them intrusive, run a pihole and a private DNS etc. But I also recognize that really laws to curtain what ads can do is a major problem, and that services have bills to pay.

And all that is to also say that worth is subjective.

That sounds wonderful. But I’ve been using the web a long time. I remember the time you’re talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people’s eyes.

We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.

Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.

Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you’re looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it’s gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn’t seem to even know they’re not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.

I don’t honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.

I’m not talking about “someone must make profits” that’s disingenuous. What I’m saying is that services that you consume for free cost money to run. Someone somewhere has to provide if nothing else the computer/server, and electricity to run it the fediverse runs on donations and ads literally the sync app I’m using runs on ads, paid tier, etc. because it costs time and money to upkeep.

Your personal problems with tech in general and your disability don’t have anything to do with that. People are talking on the tech community about how Google is taking out competing front ends for YouTube and what this means for an ad free experience, and while I agree that Google is obviously the bad guy for being the mutli-trillion dollar company it is, I also recognize that they have always been an ad company and the thing about Google is that before it existed as a free to use service we relied really heavily on an open web that was pretty empty by comparison and very disjoined. Finding things was a problem. Web rings may give people nostalgia for a “better time”, but they weren’t efficient ways to find information.

I can understand being angry but paying for the things you use is the one way to create alternatives to these services that are literally taking advantage of their users for profit as you put it. Lots of web services that are big “gotta make money” companies started out offering us free or inexpensive alternatives to the companies that were overcharging us and gouging us.

The fact that they’ve got too big is an issue with capitalism not the concept that people shouldn’t have to pay for the things they use.

The Internet is full of ads because ads pay bills and keep the lights on.

Ads = revenue that keep sites and services running. What can you do about it? Pay.

I don’t know that you can. The way a Chromecast configures is it broadcasts its own network that you connect a device with an account to. Once connected it does the configuration on Google’s end, and allows you to connect that device to your home network for the purposes of streaming or casting. The thing is though, it doesn’t have ports that would allow you to run custom firmware so you’re stuck with a puck that you can’t configure without a Google account as far as I’m aware. It relies entirely on you connecting to it as a host device to share data, updates,firmware etc.

Edit from Reddit: "You don’t need a Google account but it’s relatively complicated if you’re not familiar with quite a few things. First you’ll need to sideload another launcher like ATV. Then you need to disable the setup wizard and Google TV. All of this can be done with a simple app called App Manager which is an open source app you can get from GitHub. You’ll need to go into settings then go to about phone and click build number seven times to enable developer options and then turn on USB debugging. The Chromecast is already set up to connect on Port 5555 depending on your IP address so after installing app manager it will detect that debugging is enabled and will connect to that port. You can disable any app very easily with it as well as many many other features that are very useful. As far as the Play store, you can also sideload the Aurora store which is the same as the Play store but you can login anonymously. Since the package installer doesn’t work you’ll need to install apps downloaded from Aurora with it. You can choose to do so in Aurora store settings. Also with app manager you can go into its settings and set the installer app as the Google Play store because some apps won’t function unless they’re installed or at least marked as installed from the Play store. "

I joined reddit maybe a couple of years before violentacrez was outed by gawker media. I fully remember what it was like back then, and I wouldn’t say it got worse over time. I’d say that as time went on some things got better and others got worse so that on balance not much changed. I don’t really understand the people who have the rose tinted goggles about reddit. I didn’t leave because reddit users got actively worse so much as I left because the policies that the company were making and the things they were changing made the platform untenable.

I agree with what you’re saying. This is the curse of the anonymity of the internet at large and it happens everywhere. People just like to pretend that it doesn’t.

I doubt it specifically because when joining a new instance you’re making a new account.

This. There are just certain ideologies that are so anti-human that the only way to deal with them is violence because they can’t be tolerated or reasoned with. Nazis know exactly what history says about them and they actively choose these hateful ideologies to believe in and follow. I wouldn’t punch a random person on the street unless they were a threat. Nazis by their very existence are a threat. That threat is not existential.

Nah, as someone who came from reddit, we were generally a pretty terrible bunch even before bots basically took over. I don’t feel that Lemmy is much better but the platform’s overall practices seem to be better. My mileage with the community varies greatly from day to day.

Twitter is still influencing the rest of the web (look at its influence on reddit since Musk bought Twitter, and Spez started wanting to live in his skin). I don’t think we can just take the good without the bad and assume a net positive.

There’s lots of technology channels on YouTube and it’s competition that do tech news that I feel are pretty relevant (gamerz nexus for sure). I wouldn’t want people to lose that just because some of us (myself included) prefer written formats to videos.

Nobody wants to believe me (a random person on the internet who has provided no proof whatsoever of their own that can be replicated in any way by a credible source, over actual investigative journalists and security experts who have been actively looking for such a thing to validate it and have found nothing after years of these allegations). Hmm. I wonder why that is.

Because the amount of data use alone would be so astronomical as to be very obvious. Unless it’s specifically recording you locally and then uploading that information when you’re on wifi (which would be obvious too because of the slow down it would cause, the amount of bandwidth it would take up (making you hit data caps with your provider and throttling your service), and the fact that most phones just do not have that much storage and don’t have a slot for added sd cards anymore. Feasibly it doesn’t make sense for a handheld device to be recording everything you say passively. Your battery alone would have to last several weeks of normal use.