Anubis does its thing, shows me cute art, then leaves without elaborating. It's a mostly non-intrusive, individual/community effort to protect people against big tech and abusive scrapers. I usually see it in open source community websites that were getting hammered by LLM scrapers.

Cloudflare's is a corporate solution from the company that man-in-the-middles half the internet and makes me click shit every fucking time. I see it whenever I make the mistake of following a stackoverflow link.

You're goddamn right my reaction is accordingly different.

Most people know this in some capacity, but it's not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you'll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn't scale. By the time you realize there's a shift, it's too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we've copied too many of its faults. We've already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They're now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that's compromise.

I'd like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that's a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.

Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it... There's this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.

Nowadays I'm so, so glad when someone I'm talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don't need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don't suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).

(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob (skip to the bottom). I've seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let's not speak of online mentions. This is a relatively well-known, respected name in the industry. If you get to know people, you will meet many, many uncle bobs out there.)

Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.

I'll give my take on it. Something many fail to grasp is that it's not about a singular thing, you need to look at the context. Let's go through some of it:

• Andreas Kling, lead developer of (now-)Ladybird, rejects PR that changes "he" to "they" in documentation.
  • This is the most frequently mentioned example of Andreas' issues.
  • The "he" in question referred to any user, where "they" is already commonly used instead by everything from companies, to news, to the Linux Kernel docs (an arguably much more important software project).
  • Andreas' exact words: "This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics."
  • This code was eventually merged 3 years laters in a different PR, this time described as "Grammar fixes" (it changes even more pronouns to gender neutral than the original did).
    • This PR was merged two hours after its creation and coincidentally around a month after Andreas announced his stepping down from the project.
    • An unrelated post by the contributor, same day.
  • Someone got his attention and tried to explain to him why that's not cool; he doubled down, assuming the worst from the original contributor.
• Andreas Kling likes interacting with far-right, queerphobic, or otherwise controversial persons.
  • Here's him calling Brendan Eich, known homophobe, kicked out of Mozilla for... being a homophobe, now CEO of the foremost crypto browser, infamous for its bravery and attracting like-minded fans, "Senpai."
    • A far more impressive man than Andreas will ever be.
    • Brendan's great ...Also shouldn't have decried him in the past for being a homophobe (he did to fit in).
    • Memeing about Brendan Eich's secret to success.
  • Here's him welcoming Vaxry, infamous for the toxic community of his hyprland project to the point of being kicked out of the freedesktop.org project. He's also on record saying "I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide". There is a print of this, somewhere. I will find it and put it here.
  • Here's him doing a talk with Bryan Lunduke, tech's premier transphobe anti-DEI, anti-Woke conspiracy theorist with a classic far-right victim-complex.
    • Trudging through Bryan's slop wears on the mind, but here's another example of him being ridiculous. Highlight of the article: "There are multiple Software and Computer organizations which have declared their support for the Trans fetish over the last few years..."
      • Read anything by Bryan, then look into what he's talking about. There are at least as many examples, as there are times Bryan has touched upon LGBT topics or linux in recent years.
    • Here's relatively prominent KDE developer Niccolò's hour long video detailing how Bryan is a horrible, lying "journalist," and how people need to stop giving him a stage.
  • He also often interacts with other various degrees of right-leaning users on twitter, a platform he describes as full of positive energy, unlike Mastodon, which he's not a fan of.
    • Worth noting: Firefox, Vivaldi, Zen and even Brave (to their credit) are all active on Bluesky, the most popular twitter alternative that isn't Threads. Vivaldi hosts their own mastodon instance. Mozilla used to as well, but it didn't take off. Nonetheless, their twitter activity dropped heavily on their 2.4M followers account. Zen (a young firefox fork driven mostly by a student's free time and donations) is also active on mastodon.
    • Even Servo, the browser engine, is active on Bluesky and Mastodon.
    • Ladybird, predictably, has an X account and a discord server.
    • For fun, I would like to share with you, dear reader, my favorite comic about the state of twitter (all within 10 min of scrolling—Elon's pushing it hard).
• Other quirky things about Andreas that could be irrelevant in isolation but... please, put the pieces together. I'm begging you, look at the full picture. Is there truly nothing off about all of this?
  • Thinks the left doesn't contribute to Open Source, and the right does all the work.
    • Hey, remember that time Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, called himself a "woke communist" on a public rant on the fediverse? He must be having an identity crisis now, huh.
  • Self-described centrist and apolitical.
    • I can elaborate on why this isn't good, but I think most people get it.
  • Wary of people publicizing likes.
    • Someone once implied that if people didn't like Andreas' views now, they would've abhorred his Liked list before Elon made those private. It's a random person's word, so don't take it as fact, but I need to share this because I've seen similar situations before, and it fits the pattern.

Would I look at that PR and say I'm not touching Andreas with a ten-foot pole? Maybe that's excessive. Would I ignore all the rest and say he's just misunderstood? Hell no. For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. But I cannot support it until Andreas gets his shit sorted.

P.P.S. I'm tired, of all this.

This isn't America.

But it is. And it's just getting started!

This stupid bitch has since deleted the tweet and gotten back to it like it's another Tuesday. OSFM had to put out a statement correcting it. I hate people.

Sorry, I can't tell if you're serious or not.

It's extremely unlikely that facebook has in place a system that allows any lowly engineer to cause such damage alone. No hard drive hosting unique files no one else has, without backups, without security, and so on.

If you're a billion dollar corp that depends on an important recipe to make your product, you're not leaving the only copy of it on front desk with no oversight.

I don't see how deleting files would work as a form of protest. Would probably get you in trouble, though.

You feel the curling of the monkey's paw; the entire app is now in ~/.local/AppName

I feel like most people are wildly inconsistent on this. Fat shaming? Small dick energy? How about mental illness? Baldness for some reason? Disabilities? Oh, we could probably go on about those. Some people seemingly decide a line is too simple and draw a complex sine function instead.

My rule is to try to be decent. Sometimes, I even succeed. But I don't think I'm very good at it, and neither are most of you. Bunch of hypocrites, we are.

You could say Bluesky is... picking up Steam, eh?

Sorry, I have no new or interesting insights to offer, I'd hope most already get what's happening, anyway.

I doubt this sort of attitude helps, too. Mastodon developers know at least some of its failings. Migrating to Bluesky is not effortless.

I didn't want to rain on your parade, but:

• Firefox has hundreds of millions of users.
• Lemmy has less than half a million total users, and YTD MAU peaked at 52k.

Even putting aside technical details, I fail to see how "Lemmy integration in the browser" could be a good product strategy. A plugin/extension can also be developed by independent developers, which seems much more fitting for the size of the target demographic. Maybe I'm missing something.