The Social Internet and its dramatic stories

Not Games
41

The Lemmy user statistics graph is hilarious.

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I wonder if (corporate) reddit is laughing this off as “they weren’t paying, so we don’t need that small percentage anyway and it’ll plateau”

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42

OK, so some more noodling about and Mastodon/Fediverse comes across more like twitter to me.

I don’t get on with Twitter so I nuked my Mastodon account.

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43

If you were trying to migrate away from reddit not twitter I recommend checking out any lemmy instance (I’d recommend mine but the local stuff is mostly German language) or kbin.social (I hear the latter is really good). …

I also just checked out calckey/misskey as alternatives… but I actually liked twitter somewhat for a while and find the smaller-scale thing that the fediverse presents me with more palatable.

I admit I just read a scathing article on the whole of the fediverse on ars technica. felt a little frustrating not so much because I need mastodon to be bigger to enjoy it but because I keep hoping more people will come around to avoiding twitbook & co and the bigtech data tentacles. the more people care about privacy the better protected my own is.

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44

I have observed that non-technical people only actually care about data privacy in short bursts.

My partner’s friend was telling my partner about an app you can get for your phone where you take pictures of receipts.

And then… who know what all else happens, but one thing that happens is that people nearby can see your receipts?

Listen, only 3 people in this world need to know that I buy 1kg of breakfast cereal every week: me, my partner, and the person at the store responsible for ordering more.

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45

But it is so very comfortable and also you can get coupons!

PS: I agree data privacy is a complex, often technical topic and I rarely agree with non-techies on this even here where people are far more privacy aware than in the US

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46

Hahaha, my wife does that. It’s for the ONS here in the UK, basically how they track shopping habits and track inflation etc.

Anyway, Lemmy looks good. Unfortunately I’m probably being dumb, is there a board game specific one?

EDIT: found out how to search

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47

at least one is here: https://feddit.de/c/boardgames

weirdly on the German instance but an English community. So… there are probably others. I‘ve posted comments on this one a few times.

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48

This morning I imported my goodreads data to bookwyrm.social (the bookish end of the fediverse) after someone on mastodon mentioned it might be adaptable to boardgames. yes that is my logic.

in any case after importing I noticed a distinct lack of certain features that I had expected. upon checking github I discovered that bookwyrm is written in python/django (which explains the incredible speed of the app oO)… I am currently writing a webapp in python/flask. Overall everything looked pretty familiar (unlike lemmy which is written in rust of which I know nothing) Maybe I have finally found an open source project I feel competent enough to contribute to :slight_smile:

PS do not make a lemmy account tomorrow of all days. they are already posting memes about the expected influx of frustrated reddit users.

PPS: Lemmy Apps. Here are some links to new apps to try. The iOS ones need „Testflight“ (apple beta program, I have never used this before but it was really easy, just install Testflight from appstore and click on the invites on the github pages of the apps)

PPPS: In other social internet news:

  • apparently twitter has now made it so you can no longer view content without being logged in
  • youtube considers not showing videos to people with adblockers.
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49

And Boost is closing down tomorrow as well. What a shame.

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50

maybe someone might like this :crazy_face:

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51

Yeah, I hit that today. Really wish people would stop embedding tweets in forums.

(Although in BGGs case, that is partly the fault of the forum, because it is so annoying to post images.)

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52

Just hastening its demise, IMO.

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53

FWIW nitter.net was still working, as well as some of its mirrors, and was already a much better way to view twitter posts.

54

Elona is apparently saying (on Twitter, which I don’t use) that it is a temporary anti scraping measure. I suspect that was a reaction to the reaction, after she got caught without thinking about the consequences.

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55

“People are leaving the platform, so we’re going to make it harder to take their data* with them”.

In this case, the data may be the context of their posts in the form of other peoples’ posts.

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56

Reminds me, I’m sure there must be something illegal about the way I can’t delete my Facebook account because Facebook insists I go through a process where I give them my phone number and who knows what else to get back on the platform in order to do anything.

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57

The legality of it would be subject to where you live.

I’d say you have roughly two avenues to pursue:

  1. If you do not recall agreeing to phone/SMS-based account recovery, you could make the argument that they are trying to collect personal data on you beyond the user agreement. This argument would likely need to be made in court1
  2. Send a generic personal data removal request. Unfortunately, it appears that Japan’s data protection (APPI) doesn’t have quite the same teeth as GDPR.2

[1]: good luck with that
[2]: see [1]

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58

The concern is verifying you are the owner of the account. (Account hijacking is a real problem, not just for Facebook, but for everyone). If you’ve never provided a mobile number, I don’t know how it helps and it’s probably possible to get around it.

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59

I think this is the crux of the matter. They want a phone number (because they can then correlate your data in cleanrooms better); and when they get it, they can check to make sure that nobody else’s account is associated with that phone number (legit security analytics methodology; I suspect that the vast majority of “Facebook account hackers” have their own account and are probably 17 years old and may not have the resources to buy a burner phone).

But it’s silly to demand if there’s no phone number already associated with the account to begin with.

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60

To clarify: about 3 months ago, I got the following notice:

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No further details, no clue what the issue was, as I hadn’t posted anything in a while and there hadn’t been any suspicious activity on my behalf. If I wanted to contest the suspension, I had to start by providing personal info I had never given them before. No way around it. I opted not to bother, but then found I kept getting emails about messages sent to me and FB activity that I’d missed, etc., so I blocked it all. I then realized I wanted my account to be properly deleted, but again, no way to do that without providing them with more personal info.

So I’m just washing my hands of the whole thing, but it seems iffy to me.

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