I’m no fan of Starmer, even less of the OSA but Grok is literally producing deepfake CSAM and other non consensual images. The UK government, like I would hope the vast majority of people, think that’s appalling and don’t want it to happen. They asked X/Musk to stop Grok producing non consensual deepfakes and all they did was limit its availability to paying subscribers - essentially making the creation of deepfake CSAM a premium service. All Musk really demonstrated is that X can act swiftly, despite the numerous times it said it can’t, but doesn’t want to deprive its paying users of the ability to create CSAM.

It’s totally insane to me that this is being framed, by US Republicans as a free speech issue but I guess a country that can murder a woman driving a car is fucked up in plenty of other ways too.

Could you DM me a link too please? I’ve got no issues paying for something that makes my life easier!

Yeah, things going wrong is a concern. From the very brief look I’ve had at the repo, it looks like PHP and a standard MySQL/Maria DB runs Castopod so I’m hoping that side of things would be minimal and similar to self-hosting a WP instance.

The VPS side, I’m reasonably OK with. I’ve been running static sites for a few years with zero issues so far but I am less familiar with this side of things.

In terms of bandwidth, based on (basic) stats up until now I would guestimate we have about 100 downloads per month and each episode is approx 90-100mb in size so the package I have my eye on, which offers 24TB bandwidth per month should easily cope with that.

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

For the threadiverse in particular I’d add transferable user created Communities (between instances).

Lack of audit is not great I agree. I can see from a basic web search that security is an issue but I’m not sure ‘nightmare’ is warranted. The lack of audit seems to be main focus of concern and I’d say thats a judgement call for each person depending on threat model. I was hoping for something more conclusive than that. Its certainly adequate for a more privacy-centric way of communicating than an app that doesn’t cater for Apple users at all.

Could you link me some resources for that? I may need something to demonstrate that to others.

Seems pretty similar to Jami except that it lacks the iOS and desktop clients that Jami already has.

Iconography clearly ‘designed’ by coders.

Lots of reasons.

1. They pay their artists an an absolute pittance with a model that vastly favours the big labels. New artists, those artists striving to establish themselves and/or independent artists are screwed over.

2. At the same time they pay hundreds of millions of dollars to pricks like Joe Rogan.

3. The ‘fake artists’ controversy where Spotify pay stock music production companies to produce pretty bland ‘playlist’ mood music, then created an internal team to seed these tracks on their uberhyped suggested playlists.

4. Getting caught heavily promoting AI Bands who have been trained on actual musicians work, without paying them for it, which in turn allows Spotify to pay out even less royalties to actual musicians.

5. Daniel Ek recently investing in 100m Euros into an AI weapons company, which has triggered an artist boycott.

6. You have zero ownership and zero access rights to the music you stream.

In short, if you care at all about music and the people who make it then streaming in general is not a good model for their future and Spotify is poison.

https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528b3318

Yep, it seems very well put together - I’ve chatted with the dev briefly and they seem very aware of the fedi side of things and how different services can interoperate.

Give Fedica a try - they have a very generous free tier which includes both Mastodon and Bluesky.

The OSA is nothing to do with kids or parenting and everything to do with further developing surveillance of the UK and controlling what we can access.

I guarantee you, at some point after this will come prohibiting content deemed terrorism such as mentions of the word ‘palestine’ and ‘action’ in the same paragraph for example.

Sooner or later we’ll have our own pseudo or real great firewall. I expect them to come after VPN use at some point too.

List of Send instances.

My own take on it is that growth is not very important in terms of how a network develops. The only truly successful growth is that which happens completely organically. Worrying about why one service has ‘stopped’ growing is pointless. Those who are unhappy jump ship - those who remain are likely people who are never going to and/or bots or influencers who aren’t interested in being part of a community just finding a way to exploit it.

I would propose so-called ‘smaller’ networks (such as the fediverse) concentrate on quality not quantity. That has the duel benefit of making the experience for current users even better and makes the network attractive to those who are outside looking in.