This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…

But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.

There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday

But then profits would hinge upon such concepts. It might actually be brilliant long term.

The risk is that Mozilla is in a position to add features and stability at a rate that smaller developers cannot possibly replicate. By doing so they risk becoming the defacto standard (embrace/extend). Then they get to dictate what the entire platform should or should not do. And you’re either on board or left in the dust. And if Mozilla decides that moderating a social network is too much of a liability, then we’re at extinguish.

To be frank, I’m so jaded by big players in this late stage capitalist world that I don’t trust anyone I might otherwise be fine with, like Mozilla.

I mean, we all probably said similar things about Google 20 years ago. It was a liked company that brought a lot of cool innovations to the web. Or even relatively more recently with Chrome. At launch it was liked, but now it’s weaponized.

To be fair, there are far, FAR worse players than Mozilla. I might even be so far as to be convinced they have benign interests at heart at the moment. But corruption always follows domination.

I just read the entire article and I don’t see why Mozilla really wants in on the Fediverse. It covers a lot of how it wants in, but not the driving motivation.

My best guess is they want to be the next Facebook/Twitter. They see a window and think it’s not something to miss.

Never forget: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”, even if it’s from a relatively liked company like Mozilla.

Okay, if that’s the case then that is a perfectly reasonable implementation.

I could be convinced that the search engine itself isn’t profiling me.

But if by virtue of loading the ad, the advertiser gains my IP address, MAC address, and a fingerprint based on things like my installed fonts, then that’s not really privacy in any meaningful sense.

Wait… how does that work?

If our searches fund trees, then our searches have to be making them money… and I’m not aware of many advertisers that respect privacy.

Okay, but realistically, how can we prevent this from happening in the future?

We’ve already, according to the article, dodged one bullet; but there’s no reason to expect that it’ll be the only one.

Also, due to the nature of the Fediverse being open source, there’s no way to prevent Facebook or other corporate monstrosities from building their own hooks.

I think we need to be prepared to preemptively defederate from the likes of Google, Reddit, Facebook or whatever. Not just this instance, but the greater Fediverse should have a United policy to reject association with those who would consume us and spit us out.