Bluesky made more money selling T-shirts mocking Mark Zuckerberg in one day than it has in two years of selling custom domains
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I'm going to state an unpopular opinion. Bluesky should have ads, not a personalized ads that track users, but just simple ones at the very top of the feed. Consumers today are too addicted to free services, and companies need to be financially independent so that they can support a quality product.
Ads incentivize them to make the platform addicting and to prioritize ragebait because it will cause people to stay engaged in the app longer.
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Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
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If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
I didn't realize Ed Zitron had another podcast
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Ads are attractive to many users because they have a simple option for universal opt out (adblocking) at the cost of everyone who isn't a Freerider.
Another reason why they just externalize the cost of the website onto anyone who can't use an ad blocker or doesn't know how.
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Zuckerberg wears t-shirts comparing himself to Julius Caesar? Why is that every time I think I’m up-to-date on the latest weirdness there’s more of it?
At Meta’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg wore a custom T-shirt with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing,” as he revealed the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses.
The phrase was a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “either a Caesar or nothing,” or more simply “all or nothing.”
Zuckerberg has long been interested in the Roman Empire. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and two of his children, August and Aurelia, are named after emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
Incidentally, fascists tend to have a hard-on for ancient Rome, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
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I obviously support ActivityPub or I wouldn’t be posting this here but one of the AtProtocol developers bought a Raspberry Pi with 8GB ram and added an NVME drive. He’s trying to prove (or possibly make) this point wrong.
https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.teamSo far, it seems like it’s “working” but he’s found some things that are way too slow and needs to be fixed for it to run on a Raspberry Pi. But that gives me some confidence that the developers, at least, aren’t trying to make it so only people with deep pockets can run an instance. (I don’t know what the investors want but the developers aren’t scheming assholes.)
It’s probably going to ultimately be a situation where anyone with a high end PC (by today’s standards) can run their own instance. It’s definitely not an A.I. situation where you have to reopen Three Mile Island and piss away more water than Nestle to self-host.
Because of how Bluesky is designed, to meaningfully federate, your server needs to ingest all data from everywhere, and every new message needs to be sent to every single other federated server.
This means that Bluesky just isn't set up for federation currently: it scales quadratically.
Self-hosting a PDS is not the same.
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Also most people won't care anyway. Even big businesses are unlikely to really be that bothered.
For years everyone's been fine with Twitter and that never had custom domains.
But up until recently, Twitter used the blue checks to verify identity. Bluesky (as far as I know) doesn't verify anyone's identity. Instead, your domain name is your verification.
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I actually view it the opposite. Lemmy isn't necessarily doomed from the start but we will not reach mass adoption because we are too clunky to use for most users because of its distributed nature.
Bluesky has enabled tons of non tech users to immediately reap the rewards without having to worry about instances or who can see their posts, while maintaining decentralization (albeit with a high cost).
The true path forward will probably be a world like Bluesky but instead of running your own relay, your contributing compute power to a Kubernetes cluster. Instances and having to worry about federation is far too clunky for most users, it's the reason mastodon never saw mass adoption while Bluesky almost immediately did.
I think the difficulty to use ActivityPub as a user is a side effect of what makes it resilient. It does not grow quickly amongst the masses, but it also can't be taken out with one company changing. I think in the long run, more and more people will see it as a legitimate social network and it will grow over time.
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Free services? Where?
Free services don't really exist.
If you mean somebody, somewhere is footing the bill, then sure, if you torture the definition of "free" enough, then nothing on Earth is free. It is worth pointing out that if you enjoy (for example) Wikipedia, then you should donate if you can, because Wikipedia runs on donations. If you're just trying to be a pedantic jackass, though, that's another thing.
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If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
Thanks for the correction, it’s Augustus Cesar. Still, what an odd connection. Good article btw.
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At Meta’s annual Connect event in Menlo Park, Calif., Zuckerberg wore a custom T-shirt with the Latin phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” or “all Zuck or all nothing,” as he revealed the first working prototype of Meta’s augmented-reality glasses.
The phrase was a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “either a Caesar or nothing,” or more simply “all or nothing.”
Zuckerberg has long been interested in the Roman Empire. He spent his honeymoon in Rome and two of his children, August and Aurelia, are named after emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.
Incidentally, fascists tend to have a hard-on for ancient Rome, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Zuck puts out this weird “pick me” or “me too” energy lately, trying to fashion himself as one compatible with Trump’s world. His interest in Rome may precede Trump’s ascension to power, but his coming out is not a coincidence in my view. And yes, a fascination with Rome started as so many other things as an “innocent” meme and became a fascist dog-whistle.
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
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No one's taken my lunch money in awhile wearing Linux t-shirts. I need to up my game - I'd buy a Lemmy shirt.
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cease your attempts at causing "retrieve" to transpire.
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If you think thats weird you haven't even scratched the surface on Zuck. He actually idolizes Emperor Augustus Caesar so much that he copied the guys haircut for most of his career. Behind the Bastards does a good job of highlighting it. If you want a quick readable version, here's the first non paywalled article I could find. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-fascinated-by-augustus-future-of-facebook-2018-9
So... Zuck stans the guy who ended the Republic and turned it into a monarchy that pretended to still be a republic?
Well, that's not concerning at all.
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I thought this was slightly funny.
Mark Zuckerberg is known these days for wearing t-shirts with Latin phrases on them, especially ones where he compares himself to Julius Caesar.
Bluesky made a shirt in the same style, but theirs says "a world without Caesars" in Latin.
I mean why is this surprising? Custom domains are a very niche thing; the majority of people don't know or don't care.
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That's cool but I'll check back in to see which fascist technocrat is running bluesky in 8 years
Yeah, it's kinda sad but that will probably happen.
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That's cool but I'll check back in to see which fascist technocrat is running bluesky in 8 years
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One good thing about BlueSky’s moderation over Mastodon’s is that it’s (partially) chosen by users. Mastodon/Lemmy instance hosts almost all do an admirable and often thankless job by defederating and booting people but in the end, you’re relying on your instance host and your own one-off blocks.
BlueSky currently does have centralized moderators who kick people off all the time. But if the law changes in any country, BlueSky has the fallback of relying on user-created blocklists and user-created algorithmic feeds. In the U.S., Section 230 is apparently hated by Congress and, while I agree it could be updated and reformed, I’m not confident our corrupt gerontocracy will strike the right balance.
I’d love it if the future of ActivityPub-based platforms uses that approach. Even Instance moderators would probably be thrilled.
That was something I liked about ZeroNet; in addition to it being incredibly easy to universally block a specific user, there were also block lists anyone could create or subscribe to.
(Although IIRC ZeroNet blocks would only mean you didn't see blocked users; others could still see that person's comments etc on your content.)
