While I think that the article is correct in stating that mastodon isn't currently a serious competitor to facebook, it's possible that it (or something else based of activitypub) might become that one day. I think that there's a decent chance that facebook might want to prevent fediverse spaces from potentially becoming serious competitors, and even if that's not the main reason why their implementing activitypub, if e.g. mastodon ever does get to a point where it can challange meta (which I think most of us are hoping!) then facebook will use the position of power they will have over activitypub to try to prevent that. I think it's a misstake to give facebook any power of our spaces because that means essentially giving up on the idea of an internet not controlled by large corporations like facebook.
hetscop
I don't think there's any risk of someone stealing your kbin account with this, however I do think that admins can access more data than normal users, including from federated instances. They where only logged in on the web, and I think you can only access that kind of data by accessing the database more directly, which the exploit wouldn't have allowed the hackers to do.
It's honestly amazing that perhaps the aspect of technology that has most profoundly shaped peoples lives during the 2010s has turned out to be almost completely financially unsustainable
Having a single player control most of the market - like meta - means that they will have a lot of sway over how the protocol is developed. This is propably a bad thing since meta har different goals than people currently using the fediverse and also have financial incentives to get people to move over to their platforms instead.
Hey, glad to hear that we're mostly on the same page!
I should clarify that I'm just grouping fun friends and racist uncles together in the sense that they're both groups of people who might only join the fediverse through threads in the forseable future. This is obviously a very hetrogenous groups so it's not surprising that it contains very different kinds of people.
I just read a comment about someone grouping a racist uncle and funny friend into the same category of normie because they aren’t up to date on the fediverse or super tech savvy or whatever.
Hey, I think that was my comment!
What I was trying to say is that the barrier of entry for joining the fediverse is too high for some people, and one appeal of threads is that people who wouldn't otherwise join might, so in my mind I was doing the opposite of gatekeeping! It was a normie-positive comment, if you will (although not without caveats).
I was also using the term somewhat ironically although maybe this didn't come through well. People have different connotations with words and I can't expect everyone to share my connotations.
What I think is important isn't the exact wording (if I hadn't written "normie" I would have used a different word to refer to people who wouldn't otherwise join the fediverse) but to not use your fediverse instance as a way to build some sort of upside down social pyramid where you use your outsidernes as a status symbol against people who are well-adjusted irl. This happening or not happening isn't contingent on a certain word being used or not, although arguably normie is a word that has strong enough negative associations to push people away. I don't have those associations with that word so that doesn't ring true for me, but as I said, not everyone has the same connocations.
I feel like instagram is one one of those apps - at least the way I use it - that relies on a lot of your irl friends having it as well. I would love for them to be open to signing up to some fediverse platform but we're not there right now sadly.
Right now fediverse is mostly made up of techy people - which is fine! But there are many other kinds of people you might potentially want to interact with online. Threads could bring in normies and celebs to the metaverse. Normies are a mixed bag - this includes your racist uncle but also your really cool and funny friend who can't be bothered to set up a mastodon account. Celebs are a source of real world influence (I'm including politicians and journalists for example in this category) which is obviously attractive. I'm gonna miss cyberbullying local politicians on twitter, and it would be nice to be able to continue doing so through the comfort of e.g. kbin.
I get your point and I largely agree but it isn't that hard to see the appeal of threads for me. I don't think it's gonna work out in the end though so I really hope they mostly stay of the broader fediverse.
The way I see it, you can still talk to your friends by making a threads account (or an account on an instance that federates with meta). If meta EEE's the whole fediverse, you won't have the ability to talk to unshowered strangers free of big corporations anymore.
If we buy that the reason for meta joining ActivityPub is to EEE it, that means that meta sees the fediverse as a potential future competitor that they want to nip in the bud. I would rather leave that bud un-nipped and give it a chance to one day become an actual thorn in metas side, die out on its own terms or remain a niche community for freedom oriented tech-savvy nerds.
People want to be "where it's happening" and mastodon isn't that. Which might be fine for the people that do use it, but mastodon isn't going to be a platform where you can potentially interact with celebrities, politicians and journalists the way that twitter was for example any time soon.
(typed this out yesterday before @ZickZack s excellent answer, but couldn't post it at the time due to maintenance...)
No, you've got it wrong. This is a fairly common missunderstanding which is perpetuated by a lot of coverage about the topic being sloppy.
You could argue that there is a grain of truth to the idea of processing multiple possibilities at once, but it's a bit more complicated than that and the way it's usually presented leads to people building a bad intuition of how it works. If you do get in to the nitty-gritty of Shors algorithm it feels to me at least a bit like a weird hack that shouldn't work at all or at least not be faster than the normal way to compute prime factors. It isn't a general speedup, just in certain cases where you can exploit quantum mechanics in clever ways.
Of the top of my head the SMBC comic about it is actually pretty good. This article makes basically the same points, but a bit more elaborated (note that it was written a while ago so the part about the current state of quantum computing is outdated). I noticed that Veritasum put out a YouTube video which I haven't watched, but he is in my experience good at explaining physics and math so I think that there's a good chance that it'll hold up. I remember liking this Minute Physics video about Shor's algorithm too, if you wanna get a better understanding of it.
I should clarify that I'm not a quantum phycisist, I've just done a couple of internet deep dives on the topic but I can't say that I fully understand quantum computing at all. I do think my understanding of it is better than the one in this article and others like it.
I wonder what it's like to sudendly be able to see a new color, that must be an interesting experience