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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I think this is done to provide the illusion of choice. The rate limits are high enough to allow personal emails through, but for any mass emails or corporate emails this forces you to use Google. Unfortunately a standard corporate strategy, it’s why corporate office suites are so generic and tend to be from one of the big companies.






  • It’s not social stuff. A lot of Americans are socially conservative, but social progressives and social libertarians (live and let live types) together make a clear supermajority. The problem isn’t that Americans are socially conservative, it’s that a large number of people have the notion that Republicans are good for the economy and Democrats are bad for the economy, and that therefore when things are economically rough they should vote in the Republicans. This group of people play a large role in why Congress flips so often.


  • Partly because of discrimination, partly because she lacks charisma. There are a substantial number of people that dislike her because she’s a black woman and they have biases against both, sometimes without even knowing it. There are also some people on the left that dislike her because she’s a moderate liberal that used to be a prosecutor. Honestly she’s about standard as vice presidents come, so though I’m farther to the left than her I don’t have any strong feelings on her.



  • I figured I’ll write up a tldr on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in case you aren’t really feeling reading the articles.

    Embrace: Meta builds a federated Twitter/Reddit alternative, potentially called Threads but is right now P92, that follows the ActivityPub standard almost perfectly. Various Lemmy and KBin instances federate with them and share information. Users from Facebook and Instagram flood into P92, making it one of the largest instances.

    Extend: P92 starts adding nice, but proprietary features to their system. The allure of these features begins drawing users off of other instances to P92. Those instances are upset, but Meta insists it’s doing nothing wrong, continues to follow the ActivityPub standard in some form, and tells the other instances to just implement the features themselves.

    Extinguish: Meta announces that due to incompatibility, they are withdrawing from the standard and defederating from everyone. Most users of this software are now on P92, and thus don’t mind. Meta gets a fully populated Twitter/Reddit alternative, and the remaining ActivityPub instances wither. Without user support, the standard fails, and a new open source alternative is created to replace it.

    That strategy has been used to kill other open source protocols, and many people are worried it will happen again. My personal opinion is that servers should only federate with Meta if they follow the standard perfectly, and if they deviate even a little bit they should be universally defederated via software changes, but I’m sympathetic to the people that would rather be proactive than reactive.