Local AI Tagging (Optional)

Finally a good use of AI that doesn’t overpromise functionality it can’t actually provide. Just a system for rewriting page text as tags. This is a feature I’ll legitimately use.

It’s what drives most billionaire mentalities: elite projection.

They think that what they want must be what everyone wants. They believe that what’s best for them is best for everyone as long as they believe it to be morally okay for their own interests.

For a billionaire that regularly isolates himself from not just society, but also his own company’s employees, having fake profiles where computers do the communication instead of a human, go along and agree with whatever you say, remain eternally unoffensive, and exist solely to increase engagement doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since it seems almost like what he’d want for himself.

All requests are proxied through DuckDuckGo, and all personalized user metadata is removed. (e.g. IPs, any sort of user/session ID, etc)

They have direct agreements to not train on or store user data, (the training part is specifically relevant to OpenAI & Anthropic) with a requirement they delete all information once no longer necessary (specifically for providing responses) within 30 days.

For the Llama & Mixtral models, they host them on together.ai (an LLM-focused cloud platform) but that has the same data privacy requirements as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Recent chats that are saved for later are stored locally (instead of on their servers) and after 30 conversations, the last chat before that is automatically purged from your device.

Obviously there’s less technical privacy guarantees than a local model, but for when it’s not practical or possible, I’ve found it’s a good option.

And there are also free, online hosted instances of those same LLMs in a (relatively speaking) privacy-protecting format from DuckDuckGo, for anyone who doesn’t have a powerful GPU :)

It’s possible, but funding changes at scale.

For example, more people using federated protocols like Mastodon or Lemmy are going to be early adopters that care more about underlying technology and have stronger ideological views about online platforms, compared to, say, your average Facebook mom.

So of course, they’re going to be more likely to donate. Once you scale outside of those groups into groups of people who don’t care as much, and are less invested in the technology, you get less donations.

Sites can work on donation models (again, see Wikipedia) but it’s much more difficult to have such a system stay afloat than one where monetization is much more heavily required, and thus generates more revenue.

It’s not ideal, but it’s also difficult to have such a system work otherwise in many cases.

and do not have to deal with the added tasks of ads and trackers commercial sites use.

They use these things because it makes them more money than it costs. If ads and trackers costed more to implement than not having them, then they wouldn’t use them in the first place.

You could pretty easily build a youtube like site around it.

PeerTube exists if you’re interested, by the way.

Sites can be distributed, the technology to do that has existed since the mid 90’s.

Certain aspects of sites can be distributed, but others can’t as easily be. For instance, you could have a P2P federated network where every user of, say, Mastodon, helps host and redistribute content from posts, but that’s not how these systems are built right now, and they’d have difficulties with things like maintaining accurate like counts.

It would be ideal if they could be built in a way that removes the need for a central platform in the first place, and can run on general-purpose devices, and thus doesn’t carry costs that require monetization, but because they aren’t built like that, they will eventually need to monetize as they scale up. Unless they change the entire underlying technological model of these federated platforms, they will inevitably need to monetize if they gain enough users outside the (relatively speaking) small bubble of dedicated users that can easily fund a platform through hobby money and donations.

There is no larger site the internet wouldn’t be better without.

You’re targeting the larger sites as they exist, not the concepts and underlying functionality.

If you want social media, no matter if it’s Lemmy or Reddit, it costs a hell of a lot of money to host that. If you wanted social media, even a federated model like Lemmy or Mastodon to actually scale to all the people that are otherwise using other sites like Meta’s, you have to fund it somehow, and those funding models change at scale.

I’m not saying needing money like this is good, but it’s simply objectively difficult to fund any platform, for any purpose, when handling so many users. The only reason Lemmy and other federated platforms are funded so well right now is because they can be done at a hobbyist level, for a hobbyist cost, in most cases.

Once you scale up to the whole world, your funding model simply has to change. Donations can work, but they’re much more difficult to get working than either ads or subscriptions in terms of securing long-term funding at scale.

Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.

The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.

Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.

Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.

It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.

The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.

Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.

I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.

Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.

While a lot of us hate ads and subscriptions, I have the unpopular opinion that they are generally still viable considering the state of how we use the internet today.

The thing is, I think that if there are ads, there should be the ability to pay to remove them, and if there is a subscription, there should be an ad-based tier as an alternative.

Let your users choose, respect their preference for funding model, and allow them to choose if they want to support a given monetization policy.

Of course, seeing as how they raised $15m from VCs, I doubt this will be nothing but what will inevitably devolve into a pay-for-reach scheme similar to Twitter Blue (or, sorry “X Premium”) that just leads to those with wealth getting more engagement, and a louder voice.

Technically, drug dealers are using the tech (more specifically, other people are using it, then selling the product to the drug dealers, who then sell it to their customers as a ‘service’ included with the drugs)

The thing is, they’re not doing it to make stronger drugs, or for PR purposes. They’re actually adding pre-exposure prophylactics (PrEPs) into their heroin, which then creates the side effect of preventing the contraction of HIV from the needles. (referenced about 1/3rd of the way down this article)

If people are already going to be addicted to these drugs, them not getting HIV from it is just one harm reduction measure that can reduce their risk of serious, permanent illness.

For those who don’t care to read the full article:

This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.

So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.