Can’t I just ask it for the seahorse emoji once in a while and achieve the same result or something…

I agree with much of that, but not the things after “bring down the [list of companies]”.

I agree we need to bring them down, but not through governmental regulations and fines, but by us (the general public) building replacements for them. Like the thing we’re using here.

All that state regulation will do is make that harder because that regulation will also apply to those replacements and make sure nobody can ever operate anything that replaces them unless they have enough revenue to comply with those regulations.

The EU is planning to do something along those lines, as I understand it.

But that’s completely beside the point because it’s not a good idea in the first place to prohibit young people from participating in online communities. Participating in online communities is a fun, fulfilling and mostly harmless activity that improves many young people’s mental health, creativity, communication skills, and probably has other benefits too. I wouldn’t be the person I am now if I hadn’t started doing that regularly at age 10.

We shouldn’t be talking about “actually it’s about surveillance” or thinking about less privacy-invasive ways to achieve the same goal. We should be saying “if your goal is to reduce the amount of young people on social media, or the time they spend there, then your goal is wrong”.

The entire history of KDE has clearly been carefully planned to lead to the point where the version number is the same as the latest entry on the funny numbers list.

There are certainly some governments around the world that have considered requiring age verification for chatbots. Not sure any such laws are already in effect.

I don’t even want to express an opinion whether I find that worse or less bad than doing so for social media.

If I delete this post, will it be completely removed across all instances that synchronized it?

It will send out a message to relevant servers that it should be deleted. There is no guarantee that they will comply with that message. If your post has been copied to hundreds or thousands of other servers, there is no guarantee that they will all receive or understand that message. Some may even be actively malicious, for example because they are controlled by exactly the people you want to hide from!

I remember once deleting a comment (on this account) a few seconds after posting it. After that, I kept getting upvotes for it! I found out that that was happening because one very popular instance had for some reason not deleted the comment, so its users had no idea that it was supposed to be gone.

Is a deleted post traceable in any way?

Everything on the public Internet is. Anyone can set up a bot that just scrapes and archives everything on the Internet that it can find; and governments certainly have the resources to do so!

Is it kept in a log or a database on ferdiverse instances?

Potentially.

With governments across the globe increasingly surveiling us online and scrutinizing everything we say, I’m starting to think I should plainly delete any account that has personally identifiable information like my real name and photo. I initially thought it would be easier to connect with family and friends, but now I’m growing increasingly worried about how this can be used against me.

Posting things on the public Internet, especially under one’s real name, inherently comes with that risk. Always has.

so we finally solved https://xkcd.com/949/ I guess?

Where I live, gift cards are still very widely available.

Sounds like getting rid of Steam gift cards won’t solve that problem, they can do the same with other gift cards or even entirely different methods. Is that worth it to exclude minors or other people with no other way to pay?

What scams were those?

The main people impacted by this will be minors with no other way to buy anything from Steam…

Did anyone ever ask for the existence of AI shopping assistants, I wonder? No?

Because there’s no good reason to do that that justifies the cost and effort.

Hard forks are generally fairly rare, e.g. you could ask the same about the Linux kernel…

which is however not a fork, either hard or soft, of anything

Pretty sure that compared to NetBSD, Linux still runs on relatively few architectures. 😝

News outlets, for example, could spin up a server on their own official domain, and provide accounts to employees. So someone posting from a @news.bbc.com instance could, at a glance, be understood to be a genuine BBC reporter.

Some already do that. The ones I am familiar with are in German though: social.heise.de and mastodon.derstandard.at.

Do you have an example of that?

OSM doesn’t do this, but there are freely licensed satellite images out there. Usually they are produced by or for national governments and often ended up freely licensed precisely because OSM people asked for that…

For my country this is basemap.at and it would actually be an interesting project to aggregate such things in one UI, but I am not aware anyone has done that yet.

was expecting https://files.ohai.social/media_attachments/files/110/572/540/754/559/825/original/6ef5db5a6eab7c39.png

Jes, kaj mi supozas, ke tiu chi parto de la fadeno estas nun proprajho de la Universala Esperanto-Asocio.

I am certainly convinced that TV, being purely passive, is more likely to have negative effects on cognition than online communities, which are something you can actively engage in and be creative.