Did I just voluntarily watch an ad? Worse, did I just kinda enjoy an ad??? You have me spiralling here lmao

pause???

I do think their point about not using E2EE enabling better moderation is worth considering, because it’s absolutely true that the server being unable to filter malicious content makes moderation harder. Still, imo any decent chat client should support it as an option, because if I’m talking to friends I don’t want any servers having access for any reason. Large guilds for public info, like the KDE matrix for example, shouldn’t be E2E encrypted for this exact reason (iirc it’s not, because matrix allows the choice and KDE has chosen correctly). Lack of encryption doesn’t mean all moderation issues are solved, though, cuz that same unencrypted KDE matrix had a pretty major problem with CSAM being spammed a while back.

So IMO the ability to disable E2EE is valuable for a discord replacement, but the author’s idea that E2EE shouldn’t be implemented… does not follow.

Super minor but there’s also a missing ‘A’ in the “add paper maps” line

This is the problem with the network effect, everybody using marketplace is saying the same thing. I’m not trying to shame you in particular for this or anything but I think it’s important to consider that at some point if we don’t just make the move off anyway, nobody ever will

Okay rip I think the post I was using as a status check for hexbear was just deleted lmao, cuz yea now that I check others it’s all there
Thanks lmao

Oh awesome, so hexbear’s back fr then? Does that mean old hexbear posts will federate back onto other instances, or are those still gone?

Either way, glad to see you dudes back and thanks for the update!

The author of that essay (@dessalines@lemmy.ml) is one of the main devs of lemmy, so you’re asking in the right place lmao

I’m glad hexbear’s back, but I’m way out of the loop on this one. Re-federation? Like they were defederated? The most recent thing I know was them losing the domain, and I’ve honestly just been waiting for them to come back with a new one.

Can someone please summarize whatever went down for those of us who missed it?

I get this perspective, but I don’t personally wanna use it cuz “costs advertisers” == “rewards ad companies” and it’s the ad companies I have a problem with more than whatever random company decides to pay for an ad. Punishing companies for intrusive advertising is great, but not if it’s making even more money for Facebook/google/whatever fucked up company is the actual driving cause of the ad industry’s state.

Fuck that platform, if it dies right now the world will be a better place overnight. That being said, I’m against it being banned - imo if we’re petitioning for anything, it should be to get governments off of it and onto better alternatives.

I love the concept, but the ugly reality is that anyone can spin up an instance and pour in an arbitrary number of votes to themselves or anyone else. I think the credibility score would give people a false confidence and honestly do more harm than good unfortunately

Minor correction: the website has my VPN’s IP 😂 I don’t trust random websites with shit, personally. The payments not being tied to your real identity would also not make the web any more or less private than it currently is - just the alternative would remove privacy. Again tho, I’m not tied to crypto specifically and would be perfectly happy with any payment system that maintained user privacy. I just don’t want to see a feature roll out that gets people jailed for visiting lgtbq+ sites or some shit when their payment providers are controlled by fascist governments

Your other points are absolutely valid, but privacy-wise I’d much rather have my data associated with an anonymous wallet ID than any payment linked to my real identity

Would you want your full identity being associated with every page you donate to, especially if the donations happen based on you just visiting? Idc if it’s crypto or another alternative personally, but it absolutely has to be properly anonymous or at least have the ability to be. Especially at the time BAT launched, crypto was the only way I personally knew to achieve that - if Mozilla wants to get on board and switch away from crypto to something equally anonymous, I’d be thrilled, but imo this is a good use case for crypto anyway so it doesn’t bother me.

Exactly how I feel, which is why I’d be psyched if Mozilla joined in so that system could be extended to the browser I use lol

I’d also love if they could do it this way, but I just don’t think it’s realistic tbh. In brave’s system it’s just up to the specific content creator to accept rewards - someone on YouTube could opt in without requiring google themselves to stop showing ads on the site in general (not gonna happen imo). Also, it’s not a reality I’m happy with, but Firefox and brave together are negligible for websites compared to chrome (65% of users use chrome 😭) so expecting websites to globally remove ads for non-chrome specific features is unlikely. Web devs could show ads based on user agent, sure, but that’s more work for the devs themselves compared to just blocking the ads and allowing them to say yes or no to be rewarded for their content.
BAT vs taler wise, I personally don’t care - I feel like the system works with either, so if they wanted to stick with BAT or switch it up I’d be happy either way. The part that’s important for me is the ability to reward creators independently from the websites that host them - like rewarding both is great, but in the case a website hasn’t/won’t done the work to disable ads (cough cough YouTube, Facebook/ig, etc)I still think creators should be able to benefit from the system. The last time I used BAT (which was very early after it launched tbh, things may have really changed) you could buy BAT (or watch ads for it, but the experience was truly shit and I immediately turned it off) and donate directly to websites (I gave some to Wikipedia iirc) or creators (I don’t watch YouTube but I heard some had signed up on there) or just let brave watch the time you spent on sites and divide your BAT between them proportionally monthly(?). Literally the only downside was like you said, adoption wasn’t incredible back then - but keep in mind that Firefox has 2.74% of users and brave is a rounding error. Firefox coming on board could dramatically increase engagement if all websites have to do is say “yea sure” to getting money from a small subset of their users, but I just really don’t see the majority of devs bothering to write new logic and fundamentally change their sites for the fraction of the Firefox+brave users who choose to donate (who are already a tiny fraction of their traffic).
Endgame ofc I agree should be to make tracking ads a thing of the past, but tbh I just don’t see the benefit of convincing websites to stop but only for a fraction of their users - like if you stumbled onto a random website and saw they said they’d opted into the program and wouldn’t track you / show ads… would you disable your adblocker? Imo until a system like this gets EXTREMELY wide adoption we have to be using adblocker anyway, so expecting devs to do a lot of work just so we can run the blockers on their page seems less than ideal to me.

Isn’t that exactly what brave did? I wasn’t a fan of their “watch ads to get BAT” system either, but the alternative was always to just buy BAT with actual money. I’d rather see Mozilla work with brave to collaborate and improve on the BAT strategy than to start another competing standard, personally.

…did we read two different articles? The only link I see is to Mozilla’s own blog, explaining their choices in a relatively positive way. I’ve seen the effect you pointed out a lot, I just don’t see it here.

Samsung in particular has “smart” monitors, so for some of them the answer is unironically yes