Good fuck

Just as an FYI, Steam has some granularity for privacy settings, your profile can be private while your friends list is not. Steam defaults profiles to private since 2018 and as I recall I had to go and open mine back up after they made that change in 2018 (I enjoy having SteamDB able to give me some analytics on my account, which it cannot do while things are private, so I took my stuff public.) I believe that they made that change retroactive to some degree else I could have continued using SteamDB without having had to change anything in my profile which worked before the change.

I just sicced SteamHistory on a Steam account that I use for managing some dedicated servers I host, I’ve never futzed with the privacy settings on that account, but it does have a single friend that I set up so one of the server admins could find the account, and SteamHistory is completely unaware of that fact. It shows that the account has 0 friends and I was able to confirm that this is not the case from the perspective of that account.

You (or your friends) can check your privacy settings for Steam at https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings

That said, and you did touch on this OP, nothing on the Internet should be considered private, even in the best cases it’s still data that you don’t have 100% control over and you should assume that it COULD be public at any time because that scenario is always only one data breach away. If you’re not comfortable with your data being known by others, you should not put it on the internet in any form under any circumstances; privacy settings will not save you.

TL;DR: It seems that whatever means SteamHistory is using, they are bound by the limitations of the Steam Privacy settings, so if your stalkers were able to figure out where your account moved via SteamHistory, it’s probably because your friends do not have 100% of their stuff set private or because someone inside your circle of trust is giving the stalkers an inside scoop.

In today’s earnings call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson says he has been playing the next Battlefield game with the development team and it will be a “tremendous live service.”

“a tremendous live service” said Wilson, “…but a fairly terrible gaming experience.” 😁

Honestly, I think he may be right with his statement in so much as he was using Webster’s second definition for tremendous.

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don’t exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That’s not how it works and frankly I wouldn’t want it to work that way because it’s just incredibly dangerous. They’re trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they’re doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn’t function at all because that’s the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It’s not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they’re generally not a fan of those either. It’s disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it’s because it’s the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it’s their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it’s disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

…and lest anyone think that this problem isn’t solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they’re willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It’s funny how they’re allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It’s just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

As I heard it, the fact that they were heavily implying (and often delivering) versions of the emulator that worked with as yet unreleased games for Patreon backers exclusively while the ‘open to everyone’ version was not as compatible, is what probably did them in.

It would have been pretty hard for them to argue that their emulator was for legal means when they were constantly telling people to pay up for the Patreon to get access to builds optimized for games that hadn’t yet gone on sale. If they had just kept the public in parity with the Patreon and just coincidentally had performance uplifts on upcoming games before they dropped, they’d probably have been fine. As it is, they painted a pretty compelling picture that they were “pay for piracy” and that’s where the lawyers probably told them to take a deal and get out.

I’ll be honest, I could sometimes find a helpful answer there, but for about the last 2 years it has taken 3 reloads of a page at least before it actually loads any content, otherwise it just sits there at a plain white page showing their logo and I usually give up rather than try to get lucky with a page actually loading.

My favorite Libertarian society experiment. I mean, it’s the only one that I’m aware of, but that it ended about as well as you’d expect is just fantastic.

Your Mastodon data is already an open book to Meta if they care to have it. The protocol is open, they could already be black-ops scooping up everything that’s fit to federate without turning on Threads federation, so them doing that really changes nothing. And what I mean by that is that they could already have set up unknown instances to leech whatever data they want out of the Fediverse, which instances masquerade as normal mom and pop installs just federating and sucking up everything without bringing anything back to the table. There’s literally nothing stopping them from leeching everything out of the Fediverse at any time other than people being better at detecting their activity (and actively thwarting that activity) than Meta is at keeping it off the radar.

In this case they’re making it so that I might have a chance to follow and interact with people already in the Meta/Instagram/Threads atmosphere without having to convince those people to leave the confines of what they’re comfortable with and find a Mastodon instance to sign up for. Maybe they’ll be more comfortable with leaving Meta after dipping their toes in the open spec?

How is that not a win? If Meta/Threads decide that they want to fracture the protocol and go do their own thing later, so what? We’ll go right back to where we were before they brought their users into the Fediverse. If people decide that they value the Threads extras/connections more than they value the purity of the ActivityPub protocol then maybe Meta is actually providing something that matters and we’ve lost by not supplying that need before the corporate interest figured out that it existed. In that case we’ll deserve the death that causes in use of the open spec, but the open spec will still be there and people who want to do their own thing with it can’t be stopped now. The code to run an open ActivityPub Mastodon instance is already out there and it’s impossible to take it back now.

Everyone is out here decrying this as a subtle takeover of the Fediverse by Meta, but did Facebook “takeover” the HTTP spec when they started operating facebook (dot) com on the world wide web over the HTTP protocol? It’s an insane assertion. I’ve been running my own opensource web servers since well before Facebook was a thing and I’ve continued to do so despite most people opting to depend on a mega-corp to be steward of their online presence. That Meta has a very successful and popular website that I’ve never been a fan of has never impacted my ability to use the open protocol they operate on to continue doing my own thing. The same thing will be true here.

It really seems like people are just upset that Threads might bring ActivityPub to the mainstream and force them to contend with the realization that a diaspora of open spec implementations already lost the war to Meta/Facebook. We had that once before. It was called the World Wide Web and you could go and find forums, fan pages, company websites, and everything else back then that has since moved to Facebook (or other content aggregator sites) because people value the network effects and homogenization more than they care about one big company being in charge of it all. (…and not to belabor the point, but most of that stuff is still out there, it’s just waned in popularity because the network effects are not there.) Here we are with a chance to try and break things out again and people are seemingly worried that we can’t if we let the Meta users in? Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s impossible to achieve victory here, but gatekeeping the standard and enacting some purity test for which providers are allowed on the protocol isn’t going to tip the scales in favor of the open standards implementation.

If the protocol is truly open, then how can a corporation embracing it be a danger? We’re all free to adopt any changes or not at any point in the journey so it’s impossible to lose, you’re free to keep doing your own thing any way you look at it. Tell me how any of this is untrue.

TL;DR: Threads coming to the Fediverse is a good thing. It’ll make it possible to expand the network effects of an open protocol far faster and more than any amount of Fedinerds proselyting the gospel of ActivityPub ever will. The only thing that is at risk of being lost is that we’ll refuse to adapt to what end users want fast enough to keep a large corporation from bending the spec to their ends. Which loss again only means that you’d be cutting yourself off from those who WANT to embrace the revised spec by not adopting those changes yourself. That option (to just not adopt changes to the spec) can’t be taken away from you in the future, so worrying is only warranted if you feel like your ideal ActivityPub implementation can’t win out in the marketplace of ideas and that you’re owed that victory even if others are able to expand it in ways that people actually want to use enough to dismiss whatever downsides it contains.