YSK: this is clearly entirely jurisdiction-dependent and we don’t all live in the USA.

Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.

Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.

Because, as I said, the demands are not so much theirs as those of the people who vote for them.

That’s what I once thought but I’ve changed my mind. Concern about porous borders is not a right-wing media invention, it’s about values, it’s deeply held, and until governments get a hold of the problem they’re going to fall one by one to idiotic populists. And populist governments will be far worse for our privacy among much else.

More likely ID cards are (and have always been) the only surefire way to make his country less attractive to illegal immigrants, and rampant illegal immigration has become the defining issue in the country’s politics. Whether we like it or not, the Anglosphere’s generally lax controls on identity are a major pull factor in irregular migration.

Well yeah this is the obvious drive-by comment, but there are good technical reasons too, which you might understand better if you had actually clicked on the article, which of course you didn’t, as probably didn’t most of your drive-by upvoters.

Ah, social media. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

I’ll inconveniently only have it online when I’m at home

So this is like a dial-up website where you have to hope that the webmaster’s in?

IMO this episode was a decent litmus test of how much we value free speech, and indeed freedom of thought. Apparently we just don’t so much, these days.

Sure, but this was completely predictable. The bureaucrats were not going to win this battle in a world where laws are not enforceable across borders. They should have gone about this task in a different way which would not completely predictably result in this counter-productive outcome.

At last! The cookie law has been a spectacular own goal. If we truly care about privacy and free computing, we should have been promoting the Web with both hands, not making it unusable. As an open software platform, the Web is now the only game left in town.

Sure. But social media is becoming a nightmare. It’s literally destroying democracy. As things stand, I’m not even convinced the fediversal version is an improvement. And if it’s not, then personally I don’t care how many people are pushed away. In as far as technical fixes are possible to the myriad problems of social media, I believe these might be a couple of them. That’s all I’m saying.

Sure. But in theory, with (slightly) better resources, this would be my solution.

On posting, crawl the link and cache its content. Compare with quote on the basis of some generous threshold of similarity.

do I just want to shit on ai in the comments

Laudable honesty. The problem is that other people have to read the shit.

But to vote without engaging with the actual content is just to “sort” posts based on feelings. Who cares?

It’s pretty clear no one read the linked article

This is the root problem. Upvoting and downvoting headlines on the basis of vibes. It adds zero value. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, not least the upvoters and (especially) downvoters themselves, who get nothing out of it but the tiniest of vacuous dopamine hits. It’s the original sin of social media.

My preferred solutions:

• no voting at all without a registered click on the linked article
• no commenting at all without including a verifiable quote from the linked article

Deep-seated problems call for radical solutions. Both of these are technically feasible.

Some interesting thoughts - and questions - here. Seems you posted them in the wrong place, given the paltry response. Or possibly at the wrong time (i.e. 6 hours after the herd had moved on, a perennial problem with social media).

It isn’t based in XML, and modern devs don’t want to use XML. As I’m not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

XML is space-inefficient with lots of redundancy, and therefore considered to be ugly. Coders tend to have tidy minds so these things take on an importance that they don’t really merit. It’s also just fashion: markup, like XML and HTML, is a thing of the 90s, so using them is the coder equivalent of wearing MC Hammer pants.

Crucial detail:

The backup archives are “stored without a direct link to a specific backup payment or Signal user account,” O’Leary says. You’ll use a recovery key to unlock your backups, but if you lose that key, the company “cannot help you recover it.”

And this reader comment was clarifying IMO:

This solves a user issue of changing a phone and their Signal message history is just gone, which to normal users, is not acceptable.

Keeping them definitely seems to increase possible risks, but for most people this is a requirement, so good move on their part (guessing it’s optional) - when it’s rolled out.

This kind of purity policing is deeply offputting IMO. And certainly won’t help build federated social media.

But it’s neither good nor better, it’s worse.