When Reddit was down, most (all?) Lemmy and Piefed instances were still up. Aside from the number of users currently on the platform, I don’t see any significant ways that Lemmy is worse for the average user than Reddit.

Not even auto-update. Just auto detect updates. Then you go and download it yourself manually.

Auto-update-detection meant that the software was calling out to a remote server, so they updated the TOS to reflect that, and people got upset.

From what I could tell when I looked into it after a comment someone left on !nebula@lemmy.world, some people were very upset at the privacy implications of Audacity adding an update detection mechanism (which can be turned off, and which is not included at all in the default build if you build it yourself).

Watched last weekend.

On Nebula? !nebula@lemmy.world if you’re interested.

Automattic’s CEO seems to be saying that this is a bug. Apparently people who previously paid for the app should not be getting ads. I’m extremely sceptical about this, given that customer service on both email and their forums are pretty adamantly saying the opposite, but this is a space worth keeping an eye on.

The fact that they haven’t gone for this approach that delivers age verification without disclosing ID, when it’s a common and well known pattern in IT services, very strongly suggests that age verification was never the goal.

I don’t agree. It certainly makes it possible that it isn’t the goal. But I genuinely believe that, at least here in Australia (where our recent age-gating law is not about porn, but about social media platforms, with an age limit of 16), the reason behind the laws being designed as they are is (1) optics: despite what those of us here say, keeping young children off of harmful social media algorithms is very politically popular and they wanted to pass a bill that banned it as quickly as they could. No time for serious discussion about methods. And (2) a complete lack of knowledge. Because they wanted the optics, they passed the bill extremely quickly and without a serious amount of consultation. And I don’t trust that even if they had done consultation, they would have known who is more reliable to listen to, the actual experts and privacy advocates, or the big AI companies with big money promising facial recognition will somehow solve this. Because politicians are, by and large, really fucking stupid at technology.

What is it they say? Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity?

There is no expectation of privacy in public.

By which I mean that things like blurring a house from Street View are unreasonable.