stinerman [Ohio]

WLW is a TV station in Cleveland so I was really confused.

PBS here has ads. They are short, but there are ads nonetheless. This is over and above the ads for their own shows that will be on the channel at a later date.

I heard tell from a Gen Xer who said cable TV used to not have ads.

I will take your word for it. I am not involved in any online dating, but am also not gay.

online dating is toxic

I’ve read some good evidence is that this is because women, especially zoomer and millennial women, are considerably more liberal than the men in their peer group. Historically, women have always been more liberal than men, but the difference between them has gotten extreme in the last 10 years. Being a Trump supporter is a deal-breaker for many single women.

Yes and it’s likely that they will not be allowed to any longer after Google lost their anti-trust case.

Someone who repackages/patches free software has different incentives than upstream. So generally speaking, derivative browsers are more privacy friendly, have better features, etc.

That’s not to say that upstream isn’t important. It absolutely is! It’s just that derivatives are generally better.

I have just recently heard of both after not knowing who either was like 2 months ago so this was just another instance of a long line of “man those people are constantly in the news.”

My recollection is that they advertised and got Important People™ to post there as part of their invite-only beta. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe they paid some of these people to create accounts and post there. Not sure if that was a rumor or not.

I agree, but there was also the problem of Mastodon has no marketing budget. Before Musk closed the sale on Twitter, they had 2 full time employees, IIRC.

FOMO. More celebrities are on Bluesky than Mastodon and people don’t care enough about open protocols and so forth to forego that. If Taylor Swift was only on some Fediverse-enabled platform and nothing else, people would come here in droves. Taylor Swift does not post on Mastodon so people don’t want an account here. Replace Taylor Swift for anyone of any sort of popularity and ask the same questions.

I do wonder who the most famous person in the world is that exclusively posts on a Fediverse-platform. It could very well be Eugen Rochko, who probably has about a 0.05% name recognition throughout the world.

The budget for Mastodon gGmbH is measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and Bluesky’s is much more than that.

I’m not trying to disparage anyone who likes Linkin Park, but my opinion is that, in general, alt rock from the late 90s through the early 00s has aged really poorly. I used to listen to that music a ton when I was in high school and college, but I don’t anymore.

There’s a guy who works as a product owner at my employer. He has a PharmD. He got fed up with the metrics for how many prescriptions he had to fill. Now he does software.

It’s crazy to think that someone has a terminal degree in a really technical field and he nope’d out because of how bad it got.

I think it’s fair to think that they could refocus their efforts on the browser if they didn’t have that large slush fund from Google. I don’t think “hey we don’t take Google money anymore” is going to lead to a lot of new donations, however.

it sounds like no one else does either

Maintaining a browser that doesn’t rely on someone else’s upstream code is quite an ordeal. Of the four main browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox), 3 are built by large for-profit enterprises and the other relies on money from a large for-profit enterprise. Browsers are very complex pieces of technology and can’t be maintained by 3 guys on GitHub in their spare time.

Close. Chromium uses Blink which was originally a fork of WebKit. I have no idea how much they’ve diverged since then.

They could probably raise more if Google went away

I’m interested in how you think Mozilla would raise more than half a billion dollars if they didn’t take any money from Alphabet/Google. Genuinely. In what ways could Mozilla raise money that they’re not doing right now?

Microsoft’s most important customers are businesses, who generally don’t deal with this (they have corporate images). Home users also generally don’t deal with this given they buy a computer that has already been configured.

Linux-based systems have always needed to be better because almost no one buys a computer with $DISTRO already installed and configured.