This is pretty standard online though - even regular Google has settings like “Safe Search:On” that you can toggle to moderate your search results.
It really just depends on what the default settings are when you arrive at a service before you start using it, and how obvious and discoverable you make those settings controls.
Well, that’s the whole point of the whole thing. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, which will be federated early this year. https://bsky.social/about/blog/11-15-2023-toward-federation
I know everyone likes to shit on all Social Media that isn’t called Mastodon, but that doesn’t mean Mastodon is the only option. I am on both (and Twitter a bit still too) but Bluesky is where I spend most of my time.
I like it over there. Of all the Twitter alternatives I think it ticks the right boxes.
If they can bridge their AT Protocol with ActivityPub then I don’t see why it can’t take off.
It’s more that it pops up in Image Searches all the time and it’s almost always a useless example of what you’re searching for.
It’s like the text version of Pinterest.
Honestly, I’m so jaded with this government that I just assume anything they announce is either just a disraction away from whatever ghastly thing they’re really doing or it’s some culturewar bait to stir up trouble.
Mastodon is great if you want a social media site that’ll have people shout at you for not putting a Content Warning on a post about you eating a ham sandwich.
All the advances in toothcare seems to be around fancier electric brushes or other gadgets, but regardless we’ve never been able to move away from ‘brush for 2 minutes’. I want some fancy device I just bite down on and it zaps my whole mouth clean in 5 seconds.
I don’t really think there are ‘series’ in the Mario saga. There’s basically two streams of Mario game that have co-existed since Mario 64 - the 2D games and the 3D games.
Mario Wonder is the best 2D one I’ve played in years. Right back to SNES Mario World.
I’m more than happy to have more 2D ones like this.
I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it’s been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV… It’s only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it’s only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print…) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.
Which basically means advertising has been part of people’s lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.
It’s just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you’d be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.
Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.
Or alternatively not taking the mobile operators side - being able to charge £10000 data costs to stream a couple of football matches worth of data shouldn’t be allowed.
In what possible way does that price come anywhere close to the costs of the providers in servicing that data?
Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you’ve built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you’ve caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.
The last election was in 2006. 17 years ago. The median age of people there is only 20. Most of those people didn’t vote for anyone, let alone Hamas. And even those that did vote, Hamas got less than 50% of the vote.
Also, nice use of ableist slurs there. Is that really appropriate?
But that’s the wrong way around. They don’t want you to pay, they make their money through advertising. They make far more money from advertiser’s paying to put up ads than they ever make from people paying for premium.
Same as with Facebook now bringing in an ad-free version (in the EU anyway) - they charge higher than is reasonable so that people will opt for the ad-supported free version instead.
It’s not that you are blackmailed into paying premium, it’s that you’re encouraged not to as a way of explicitly consenting to ads.
Basically, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
But people advertise with Google precisely because they know the ads will be targeted at relevent people. If Google just sell loads of ad slots that just show to random users then that’s just a waste of money. If I’m selling motorbike helmets I don’t want to waste my money having Google show those ads to 60 year old men who only travel by bus or golfers or people who use wheelchairs.
Google won’t just sell loads of ads here, they’ll totally change their business model to something closer to the targetting approach.
Lens has been one of the most impressive bits of Google tech for years, but it still flies under the radar. I guess they’re just going to label it ‘AI’ now to get people to pay attention to it.
Thanks, but I can’t install into a Roku, which is the main TV I’d be using.
Weirdly, and annoyingly, I get this same thing when watching YouTube on my TV (the quantity thing, not the war propaganda stuff. Just regular ads). Whether via Roku stick, Chromecast or anything. It’s sometimes an ad every 2 minutes. However watching the same thing on a laptop or my phone even without any adblock and the video will play far better. Maybe 1 ad at the halfway point and nothing else.
I don’t know why the TV version of YouTube is such an arse for ads. They’re not even in clean places - I get an ad mid-sentence.
Honestly, for a 20 minute video I’d be perfectly ok with a 30 second ad or so. It helps the creators and isn’t that much of a pain for me. But getting adverts every 2 minutes, even if they’re skippable is just a horrific experience.
Your default timeline view on Bluesky is just ‘posts from the people you’ve chosen to follow, in date/time order’. That’s the algorithm.
Everything else is optional and you can choose whatever other timelines or views you also want to see. If you only want to see the posts from people you follow then you don’t need to subscribe to any other feeds / algorithms.