Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.

But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.

Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

Maybe you don’t care, but the OSI definition does.

In fairness, they didn’t release anything open at all.

Posting your band’s tour dates on Facebook doesn’t really even change your privacy status that much.

Whether you have a Facebook account or not, Facebook tracks you around the web. Data brokers sell your data. Your cell phone company sells your location and browsing history, etc.

People over-estimate how much not using any given social media app really matters.

Now granted, installing it on your phone gives them a level of data they wouldn’t have from a web browser. That’s probably why Threads is phone-only.

They will do it to us, not just Threads users.

Do, what, specifically? How will they affect that your instance shows you?

Its more like email lists blocking people from other email lists. If there is a massive email list that has continually and specifically coordinated to destroy or consume other email lists and spent massive resources learning specifically how to do this via social manipulation, yes, I would think blocking people from that email list is a very good idea ^.

Should a listserv block people who are subscribed to another listserv then?

Perhaps if it wasn’t already corporate agglomerated, this wouldn’t be so true. But fediverse isn’t email, we have easier indicators for abuse because most content is public and we can guesstimate how much of an instance is “real” users ^.

An email is a message from a user at a domain. A fediverse post is a message from a user at a domain.

Content is public, but to a big email provider, it’s not much more data. Gmail filters based on identical-looking messages from an “unestablished” domain. If you came up with a way to filter spam on the fediverse, it would likely look very similar.

If Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever picks up critical mass, I can guarantee you there will be a shit ton of spam, misinformation, disinformation, and scammy nonesense coming from a long tail of instances. Much of the garbage will, thanks to large language models, look pretty human, too. The only real roadblock to it will be defederation from “unestablished” instances and even that will be unreliable at best.

There really isn’t a good solution to it, at least one that isn’t invasive in ways we won’t like.

They’re defederating smaller entities because the network got consumed by corpos. And abuse, but lots of that comes from big services and they don’t defed those.

It’s tempting to believe the email issue really is some conspiracy to keep the little guy down, but it really is just that a new domain, with low volume, is a strong signal for abuse. That is true with or without trouble from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. If you wrote a machine learning algorithm to find spam, your ML would come to the same conclusion. There’s no obvious solution to that.

Fediverse instances aren’t just providers, they’re communities.

Just like email list serves. Should a listserv block gmail subscriptions? I would again argue not.

This is in essence what FB/Meta is doing, all the time, except it’s not individual spam it’s an algorithmically backed manipulation mechanism using it’s users as tools ^.

Presumably people using Threads want that. Or they’ll tolerate it.

ISPs are at a different level of the stack and already have an oligopoly.

ISPs and Instances both offer you access to a wider network. That one exists on a network level is another matter. If there were a multitude of ISPs, like there was in the dialup era, would you have wanted them to decide what domains resolve?

its very difficult to selfhost without permission from them lest you get marked as spam

That’s because they’re essentially defederating entities they don’t trust; exactly what’s being proposed here. The solution to defederation is not pre-emptive defederation.

What email is really suffering from is a failure of the network to combat abuse. That’s a real problem for the Fediverse too, because there’s almost nothing that stops someone from spinning up infinite numbers of instances and spamming other instances.

I disagree.

Let me give you a thought experiment. Suppose you have an ISP. HTTP is a federated protocol. Should your ISP “take a stand” against Facebook by blocking the domain? I think very few people would think that wise. Should your email provider take the same stand by disallowing you from exchanging emails with fb.com or meta.com? Obviously not.

I’m tempted to say it’s better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it’s not.

What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that’s anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.

And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There’s no shift+select, ban.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be here, and Lemmy’s great, and there’s far less toxicity (so far). All I’m saying is, (1) there’s work to do, (2) don’t gloat.

You can certainly make the argument that phones (and computers) are slowing down. It used to be a revolution every year or two, now it’s very incremental.

I would not say though that you can effectively use a 10 year old phone. There are some old networks out there, but major networks shut down 3g.

You might have seen Joanna Stern’s attempt to use an iPhone 4 on YouTube last year (if not watch it for some amusement). Even if the battery on that device were fine, the device was really pretty unusable.

Also: even if the battery were easily replaceable, replacements will only be easy to find for the most popular older phones.

And has a shit ton of casing.

Oddly enough for me, my laptop battery has aged much faster than my phone one. And they’re almost exactly the same age.

I remember the sealed battery covers. They sucked. They maybe worked for light splashes but modern phones are fully submergable. And I remember the wireless charging things behind the battery cover. Those sucked too. Plus you have all the plastic bulk to encase the batteries.

That’s fine and all. And you should be able to replace the battery.

I just don’t want the compromises that I suspect are required to get to one that’s easily swapped out like in the 2010s. I don’t want to lose MagSafe, water resistance, or capacity. For me, those are more important than easily replacing the battery.

I suspect this plays into why small flagships are mostly a thing of the past.

The maximum a phone will ever last is probably ~10 years, because that’s about how often 2g, 3g, lasted. By then it certainly isn’t getting any software updates and on the Android side, security updates won’t even last 5.

So the maximum lifespan of a phone is, reasonably, 5 years. That’s taking into account software updates, and other wear and tear.

During that time, if you use and abuse the battery, you might go through 2 batteries, which you can have serviced.

So I’d say it’s more akin to a timing chain that’s a pain in the ass to replace. Most car owners would not try to replace a timing belt, much less a timing chain.

As long as they’re reasonably replaceable, I don’t see it as a big issue for longevity. I’d rather have a bigger battery (less plastic casing), wireless charging w/ magsafe, better water resistance, etc.

If the battery is toast 3 years in, I can just replace it, which I’ve done on other devices (including my last Pixel). It’s not much more inconvenient than taking a car in for an oil change. Besides, on my 18 month old phone, capacity is at 95%. These days batteries often last as long as you’ll need them.

I see the much bigger longevity issue on the software side. Many phones (especially budget ones) only get 1 major OS upgrade and very infrequent security upgrades.

I don’t really see the benefit anymore. My current device lasts ~40 hours on a charge, so I seldom find the need to swap anything out. Even if I did, those little USB battery packs that charge multiple devices are more practical. On a long flight, my wife and I just share one and it works on the Switch and tablet too.

Sealed devices have way better water resistance, less plastic makes the batteries themselves bigger, and wireless charging (especially with magnets) will be challenging to add to a battery that’s also the back cover.

I’m sure I’ll be in the minority on this, but, I don’t really have any interest in a removable battery, especially if it involves other compromises on size, capacity, and features.

That hasn’t worked in a while, has it?

Presumably they’d enforce it by requiring social media companies do age verification.

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