Boz (he/him)

U.S., and I don’t know how many businesses here use it, but I think it’s quite possible to avoid using it socially here. I’m not sure if I even know anyone who does use it, and certainly no one has asked me to get one.

Aren’t pictures the point of Instagram, though? I don’t use Instagram, but I would not expect people to like something that is basically a picture sharing service without the pictures.

And in my opinion, the ChatGPT summary is a pretty good condensation of those 500 words. There are some things that are said more than once, and some details that are interesting, but not crucial for having a discussion about the topic, particularly with a focus on privacy.

Sure, 500 words isn’t a big ask, but I think when 500 words really conveys 300 words worth of content, and easily boils down to more like 100, it is reasonable to choose to read 100. I enjoyed reading 500, but that doesn’t mean everyone should.

[/I took a lot more words than necessary, lol, it’s because I am a degenerate]

I don’t know, I think Musk might actually have an inferiority complex. He’s obsessed with himself, but he puts an awful lot of effort into trying to prove that he’s cool. But yeah, they’re both terrible, it doesn’t really matter who’s worse.

Probably the shirtless pic was a carefully calculated move to short-circuit theories about his lack of humanity, by showing that he has a navel. [/s]

…for real, though, at least the man utilizes his paid PR staff.

You’ve lost me on the precise breakdown of growth types, but I don’t think there’s any kind of growth that can be sustained indefinitely without fundamental changes to a business. If you sell widgets, you are eventually going to hit the limit to how many widgets are going to be purchased anywhere, by anyone, and then you’re going to have change something in order to grow.

And sure, I’ll accept that it could be all right to grow past the point where your business model has to change. Some businesses do spread into multiple fields and do reasonably well in all of them, although at a certain point it might start violating anti-trust laws. My point is just that “infinite growth” as a long-term strategy can go down some bad roads, regardless of how innocent the starting point is. Even a benign tumor can be life-threatening if it grows in the wrong place, and I think that can apply to growing businesses as well.

The posted content is almost all backed up elsewhere, iirc. My understanding is that the risk is less having a huge amount of content being generated on specific servers than it is having a lot of users concentrated on those servers. Restoring data from backup or migrating communities (from a content perspective, as in, rehosting) is a lot easier than having people locked out, or, worse, losing accounts altogether.

Depends on whether you are trying to reduce the likelihood of people tracking you across instances (for example, if one account is for porn). If you just want duplicate accounts on which you’ll do the same things, I don’t see why it would be a problem to use the same name.

I think part of the solution is to normalize the idea that you subscribe to all the communities on a topic you’re interested in, even if they’re small, so wherever something gets posted, you see it. Eventually some of those communities may be closed in favor of the more active ones, but as a subscriber, there’s no opportunity cost.

I’d say it’s mostly formatting, and what brands have to do to get them. Sponsored posts are the ones disguised as regular posts, which is easier on some platforms than others.

You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that’s just a way of restating the problem.

I think another part of the problem is that business don’t want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.

A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they “run.” I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.

She’s not just chilling, she made a press release saying Twitter just had its most successful day (I think by user engagement, I don’t remember the metric she mentioned) right when Threads was blowing up. If she wasn’t straight up lying, she was looking at some reeeeallly well-massaged data.

…of course, there’s a market for CEOs who do that, too, but I admit, I was a little shocked. I thought she was supposed to be the Responsible Adult ™ here.

No, they’re going to start with some kind of sponsored post arrangement similar to Instagram’s, iirc, and put in ads when they get a bit bigger.

I personally wouldn’t trust the website, either. It might be possible to block all the direct trackers, but they can learn a lot about you by what you do on the service, from who you follow to how long you spend on the site. If you have an account, you’re paying for it in data.

…if you’re okay with paying in data, that’s your business, not mine, but don’t assume blocking trackers is full protection.

No, they’ll start raising rates for people with weight loss apps on their phone, or refusing coverage for people who made too many phone calls to an oncologist, or got a lot of texts from their pharmacy saying “X prescription is ready.” Companies collecting medical data is very, very scary for a lot of people.

If you have a smart light bulb or thermostat you control through your phone, they probably know when you went to bed last night, and approximately what your electric bill was last month–unless you get electric bills by email, in which case they might know exactly what your electric bill was last month.

Confirmed, unless they have done it in the past few days, not yet. TechCrunch quoted the head of Instagram as saying that they haven’t implemented ActivityPub yet. There was no specific reason why not, and no timeline for adding that functionality. I think we have at least a few months, since there are a lot of other missing features that should be higher on the to-do list.

Wait, are there people who aren’t advertisers who do prefer Threads over Mastodon or Lemmy? Most of the reviews I have seen are bad, and the good ones seem to be from people who haven’t tried the fediverse, though I couldn’t swear to that.

Possibly. Apparently there are some possible issues with interconnection between instance admins that would give Threads information your local instance has about you. I understand that there are ways to change the code so that doesn’t happen, but as of right now, there’s more risk of data transfer than just posts/comments.

…Wayyyyy less than if you actually install their app, of course. But there’s room for improvement.