Well, you guys got me good on that one. I was thinking that this word would have adopted a new cool Sillicon-Valley-jargon second meaning, but perhaps even brogrammers aren’t so bold to think they can coopt such a loaded term without consequence.
Their users’ data and their (potentially) taxable profits on the other hand…
But all joking a salad (Comedy Bang Bang Fans?) It does annoy me when anything written in HTML is just categorized and called a “website” and then compared against others regardless of purpose, intended audience or format. Is there any value in comparing Google.com to boingboing.net, for example? It’s like saying horses run faster than washing machines. also what is even the boundary of a website like google? anything on the same domain? Simple web traffic stats are just such a weird lens to look at organizations through.
I think part of the pitch can also essentially be that a decentralized platform like Mastodon makes it possible for those organizations to control their own social media presence and act as their own authentication systems for users posting on behalf of that group. News media is a prominent example, but even politicians could conceivably get in on the benefits of having an instance that certifies their users’ authenticity. Candidates could get accounts on their party’s instance, and public officials could have accounts that are hosted on some subdomain of senate.gov, house.gov, etc.
While we’re throwing around alternatives to Facebook properties, Pixelfed is an Instagram-alike that is being built on the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon. It’s still a pretty nascent project, but worth keeping an eye on. The flagship instance is pixelfed.social (AP federation with other servers is rolling out this weekend, apparently).
Is there any way to set up a trial leaf read-only node of one of these programs that doesn’t involve port 80 and LetsEncrypt? (I already have a server on port 80/443 that I don’t want to mess with.)
Wall Street rolls on BS mostly. If then want to raise a price by buying a lot of a stock, it goes up. Ex. TSLA keeps getting pumped up when literally the bear case gets stronger every day as competition from companies capable of operating profitably becomes more and more competitive while Musk engages in what, in the old days, would be held as illegal stock manipulation; only competition he has for false statements is POTUS.
But I digress.
The bull case for FB is that while numbers are softening in the US and Canada, the numbers are great in the rest of the world. The problem with that optimism is that that part of the North American market finances the company and is the source of its profits. Without North America, the company’s nothing. And North America’s numbers are awful: Shrinking use and membership, rejection by kids. Not going to happen soon, but the writing’s on the wall.
