atrielienz

I'm not. They don't want anyone scrubbing their data but them, but honestly I think it's more because it's a gateway to allow their people to get information from several sources that they don't want their people to have.

The idea of evolution is that the parts kept are the ones that are helpful or relevant, or proliferate the abilities of the subject over generations and weed out the bits that don't. Since Generative AI can't weed out anything (it has no ability to logic or reason, and it does not think, and only "grows" when humans feed it data), it can't be evolving as you describe it. Evolution assumes that the thing that is evolving will be a better version than what it evolved from.

Pretty much exactly what I thought of.

Less stress. Less worry. More time free to recuperate and enjoy things.

The problem I see with this mostly has to do with the fact that they do not have a good apparatus in place for detecting and blocking bots. There's nothing stopping bot farms from hyping channels that fit the criteria. We already see this with comments on videos.

I love this artist. His self portraits are wild and zainy.

That doesn't sound reasonable for a lot of reasons. The idea that each family can host their own instance (which still has costs, and as you reasonably pointed out can't generally be done with a server in the basement because of broadband laws preventing that kind of usage, is kind of ludicrous. That would lead to an internet where only people with money would be able to host a website of any kind. And even then, public services (video hosting, cloud storage, news, any kind of public service or so on) wouldn't get anything out of the deal so why would they let you connect to them and mirror their content?

Also, if we keep things small scale, social networks die because new people aren't coming in to replace dead accounts as people leave. So what happens then? Those social networks die. Social network sites like Lemmy and mastodon and so on need people. Without people to post content and people to consume it the site is basically just an empty husk of random 1's and 0's.

Keep things responsible? How do we do that? You've given me an outline of an idea you have but it's all broad strokes and no details.

I'm not sure what you're expecting me to do with this. I wasn't using sync as an example of a foss Lemmy app exactly. I was pointing out that sync doesn't have that many users and its developer offers a free tier but to give the service that people want it has to be developed and maintained which costs time and time is money.

I wasn't claiming it as a foss app. I was pointing out that lists of Lemmy users use apps like it (if not that particular one).

No, I'm not wrong. I'm telling you that there is a threshold beyond which a service cannot support the number of users it has without additional funding and that ads right now provide that additional funding, and always have. And now that we've gotten to this point with billions of online users using services daily, we're to the point where in order to provide a service to that many people bills must be paid and to do that one of two things needs to happen. Ad aggregation, or subscription.

The only reason most of the fediverse survives as it stands now is that it has a small userbase or daily users. When it grows too big to sustain in that regard (given that most of its users now do not actually donate to it), it will die or move to a model that pays the bills. That doesn't have to be ads. But it absolutely could be, in the same way that it could be subscription service.

Grayjay is an example of a competing service that is subscription based. So was floatplane. Both of these service compete with YouTube. Both of them cost money to run. Each of the examples I have been given that don't run on ads or subs can be supported currently by the user base because the user base is small and people are providing what it needs out of a labor of love because it doesn't cause them a hardship to do so. That will not remain the case as the user base grows.

The ones like bittorent and such offload the bandwidth cost to the users but that's only one facet of what we're talking about here.

Lemmy only survives today because people donate, which I did talk about in my subsequent comments which is exactly my point. It's not ad supported now (most instances aren't at any rate) but there are absolutely ad supported fediverse services, and if it gets bigger, it likely will run ads because more users means more content, more bandwidth, more electricity etc. The alternative is possible small scale, when you don't have billions of users per day. There's a threshold where the number of users far exceed a what even a group of people can put into a project like Lemmy without needing additional funding.

So either the majority of Lemmy users pays to use the service through subs or donations, or this won't last either.

Yeah but the web has been this way since the mid 90's. It's been funded by ads the way that things that came before it were. Broadcast television is a good example. People switched to cable because of less ads and more channels with the expectation that there would be better content. That didn't last. Then we had tivo and DVRs and so many other products to get around ads. But the root of the problem is that people won't buy things they don't know about, won't use services they don't know about, will have a hard time looking for goods and services that they do want without some form of advertisement. Word of mouth is advertisment too when you get right down to it. The ads were often less intrusive but became more so over time because it's such a hotly contested area that pretty much every company small and large is throwing money at.

What's worthless garbage to some may be useful in a pinch to others. The point is that combating ads means taking away a source of revenue not just for ad aggregators and ad companies but for business full stop. I hate billboards. I'd be perfectly happy to never see a billboard again in my life. That being said, they have been effective ads for a long time, and have been used for good purposes occasionally (missing persons, unsolved crimes etc come to mind).

I'm not saying ads aren't more often than not intrusive, annoying, or lost on me. I actually do find them intrusive, run a pihole and a private DNS etc. But I also recognize that really laws to curtain what ads can do is a major problem, and that services have bills to pay.

And all that is to also say that worth is subjective.

That sounds wonderful. But I've been using the web a long time. I remember the time you're talking about when we first got web browsers etc. And let me tell you, the windows 95/98 time frame before Google and ask Jeeves etc was not a golden age. Ads were still on web pages, and while people with the right technical knowledge and access to a computer could create a server and a website and so on, they still had to get that website in front of people's eyes.

We had visitor counters and web rings and a rush to buy up domain names before everyone else, and so on. That still costs money though. The electric to run a server. The time to upkeep a website (even in html), and make it look/function the same across different screens and different brands of computers.

Google and even Jeeves and Alta Vista came at a time when we badly needed to connect the internet together in a way that the average new user would be able to find usable and.intuitive enough to get away from books and papers.

Search engines that ran on ads became one of the few good ways to do this. And a lot of the way the business of ad aggregation and web search have developed to make it easier to find what you're looking for for on the web makes sense when you give it any thought. But people spent a good couple of decades completing ignoring that to the point that now it's gotten out of hand and Google basically has a monopoly on search, and half the internet doesn't seem to even know they're not a search company but an ad aggregation company doing what makes them money.

I don't honestly care if you agree with what Google is doing or not. But I do wonder if anyone is thinking about how foss replacements and competition will gain any ground because honestly they either pay the bills with donations and ads, or they charge a subscription fee because these things cost money to run.