We’re nearing the end of the season, so as usual, there won’t be much new this and the coming weeks.

A quick disclaimer regarding Backerkit: They have redesigned their website again, which of course broke the crawler. I will try to get it working again as soon as possible, but until then, there won’t be any Backerkit projects included in the lists.

It still looks a bit quirky in Kbin sadly (especially on mobile where it gets very squished), but at least it should work in Lemmy now.

So it seems like the table formatting bug as finally been fixed in Kbin. In other words, the inline lists are back!

This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the “free” web that we are used to.

No, I’m not saying that selling out one’s personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn’t sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.

They are probably reusing a component that happens to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it’s happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It’s also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn’t have test coverage or wasn’t actually part of the specification.

Repeat after me: ChatGPT is a language model not a digital librarian.

Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.

So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

It’s funny, I’m not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.

I guess it depends on how this “Data Protection Review Court” actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn’t seem to really matter much to US agencies so we’ll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We’ve had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.

I know that is a popular narrative in the Fediverse community right now, but I honestly find it unreasonable. Google and Meta didn’t kill XMPP, they abandoned it and without them it went right back to where it was originally: barely used whatsoever. The Fediverse already has a small, but relatively healthy user base. Meta can abandon ActivityPub or twist it into something unacceptable, but all that will do is bring us back to where we are right now.

All that is irrelevant, though, because the difference is that Meta is legally required to incorporate interoperability with other services and that’s why they are going with ActivityPub. Not from the good of their hearts, but because they need to and is in their own self interest to keep alive.

Right now, they are early adopters of ActivityPub and have a very early strong position there. When they federate they will be by several magnitudes the largest instance on the network. Whether we like it or not, they will inevitably be a major player in dictating the future of ActivityPub. Thus, they want to keep ActivityPub alive because they want to make sure that becomes the future EU mandated industry standard for SoMe. Otherwise, some other technology will be chosen, one that might not be lead by Meta, but by Google, Apple or ByteDance.

Note, that I’m not arguing whether this is good or bad, but only what I predict is happening.

Interestingly it seems like the main reason is not the enormous data gathering list that has been posted a few times, but rather the connection to Instagram and whether the two services are allowed to share user data.

Meta is also using Threads as a test bench for the Digital Markets Act, so they are probably holding off the launch until they can get federation going.

We migrated to Matomo, which has very similar functionality as GA, but can be self hosted and is GDPR compatible. It can even be configured to run without consent since it doesn’t build a third party ad profile, which should actually improve the data coverage a bit.

The tracking API is a little different than GA so we had to redo some things to get all the events to trigger properly (especially for e-commerce), but for basic usage statistics it’s relatively plug and play in the tag manager.

https://matomo.org/

I don’t want a Meta account, but I want to communicate with the billions of people who do, including all of my family and friends.

But that is the power of the Fediverse. There is room for both small isolated instances as well as those that are part the larger “main” network, and everything in-between.

There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.

I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.

Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.

If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.

I don’t think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.

Not necessarily destabilised, but Sweden has deliberately opted not to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism which purpose is to stabilise currency exchange rates.

Sweden is by law bound to adopt the Euro, but by choosing not to join the ERM II, Sweden by extension can’t join the Euro because they technically don’t fulfil the requirements.

This is of course a simple loophole that could be closed by the EU, but there hasn’t really been much political will to do anything about it.

Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.

Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.

JetBrains have some quite extensive VC tooling built into their IDEs which I use almost exclusively. I used to do everything in the terminal, but I find it so much quicker and simpler to do it directly in the IDE.