vaguerant

In positive news, the title database has expanded their Unicode coverage.

Neat. Checking out fediverse.observer, the general Lemmy graph doesn’t have the same shape, so it’s doesn’t look like feddit.org is “just” benefiting from Lemmy growth more broadly. Rather, feddit.org seems to be growing faster than average. The commenters from the original (German) feddit.org post attribute the growth to interest in the !buyfromeu@feddit.org community.

This old Toothpaste for Dinner comic is all I can think about when someone says they’re a libertarian. It’s got me this far.

It’s true this is a thing that you can do, but the experience seems pretty degraded vs. just registering an account with a Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks (did I miss any?) instance which is natively configured for the kind of threaded conversations that exist on this segment of the fediverse. The instructions basically amount to “Go to a Lemmy instance and use its interface to find a community you’re interested in, then copy the link to the discussion you want to interact with and paste that into your Mastodon instance’s search bar, then reply to the post that appears. It’s that simple!”

If you only interact with threads occasionally or you just want to try it out from Mastodon, this is workable, but you need a lot of patience for the busywork that’s involved.

You’ll still end up yelling at them, now over the correct pronunciation of sudo.

Only if you do it anonymously at some kind of blood donor glory hole.

It goes beyond just cracking, with support for features like SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike, but essentially yes. It’s not a meaningful YouTube “alternative”, just a tweaked version of same.

I see your point but think it’s also valid to use Lemmy or other social media to engage only with memes or whatever else people enjoy. Absolutely, everybody should stay informed and passionate about the rapidly crumbling world, but there’s no rule that they specifically must do that via Lemmy. If someone chooses to use their social media as a haven from the real-world issues they encounter everywhere else, then unless Lemmy is their entire life, I don’t see that as a problem.

I think the part I’m unclear about is what definition of selling Mozilla was using before. Here’s the update they posted to clarify the changes: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/

Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data”), and we don’t buy data about you. We changed our language because some jurisdictions define “sell” more broadly than most people would usually understand that word. […]

The reason we’ve stepped away from making blanket claims that “We never sell your data” is because, in some places, the LEGAL definition of “sale of data” is broad and evolving. As an example, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) defines “sale” as the “selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by [a] business to another business or a third party” in exchange for “monetary” or “other valuable consideration.”

I’m not trying to be a dick or anything–that comes naturally–but yeah, Mozilla. Exchanging a good or service for money is called selling it. Since this has already been Mozilla’s practice for a while and they’re only now removing the promise because the definition of “sell” has apparently become so muddied, I don’t follow how Mozilla was describing it before now.

In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice. Whenever we share data with our partners, we put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share is stripped of potentially identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

I think this is really the important part and Mozilla is burying the lede by focussing on the word “sell”. I think there’s an argument to be made that “your data” is no longer “your data” once it has been de-identified. I don’t agree with that argument, but I find it more convincing than this Clinton-esque “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘sell’ is” stuff. Mozilla isn’t selling “your data” in the sense of your name and phone number, but they are selling “all data types”, de-identified, anonymized, pseudonymized and/or in aggregate, about you.

I would still argue that that is your data and that by selling it, Mozilla is and has been selling your data. It’s nice that Mozilla isn’t blasting anybody’s actual personal biographical details to all their advertising partners, but it’s misleading to say that’s the only way “selling data” is understood.

Source for the cavepalm: Newly Discovered Cave Paintings Suggest Early Man Was Battling A Lot Of Inner Demons - The Onion.