We’re nearing the end of the season, so as usual, there won’t be much new this and the coming weeks.

A quick disclaimer regarding Backerkit: They have redesigned their website again, which of course broke the crawler. I will try to get it working again as soon as possible, but until then, there won’t be any Backerkit projects included in the lists.

It still looks a bit quirky in Kbin sadly (especially on mobile where it gets very squished), but at least it should work in Lemmy now.

So it seems like the table formatting bug as finally been fixed in Kbin. In other words, the inline lists are back!

This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the “free” web that we are used to.

No, I’m not saying that selling out one’s personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn’t sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.

They are probably reusing a component that happens to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it’s happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It’s also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn’t have test coverage or wasn’t actually part of the specification.

Repeat after me: ChatGPT is a language model not a digital librarian.

Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.

So first they alienate the people who are working for them for free and then they go ahead and alienate the people who are giving them money for free.

So they have a bunch of users that have been freely paying them money for virtual coins that you can literally only use to display a few pixels of a gif next to a comment.

Their absolute genius move towards profitability is then to forcibly stop making these people give them free money and also erase those virtual coins that they spent money on with absolutely no compensation whatsoever. Not even a shitty award or literally anything at all.

It’s funny, I’m not sure if I should actually be impressed that they are not engaging in any marketing dark pattern whatsoever; they are just straight up alienating the people who were until now been practically giving them money for doing nothing.

I guess it depends on how this “Data Protection Review Court” actually functions in practice. What is written on paper doesn’t seem to really matter much to US agencies so we’ll see how strong these safeguards actually are.

Nevertheless, it’s good to see that the new agreement is finally in place at least. We’ve had this legal vacuum for years now and it was completely unsustainable in the long run. Sans a complete legal overhaul of the nonexistent privacy laws in the US (hah good luck with that), this is probably the best we could hope for now.

So for some reason the inlined tables didn’t format at all in this post. I’m generating them automatically, so I have no idea why they didn’t work this time. Probably some project that contained some invalid character in the name or description.

The Google Docs still works however. Meanwhile, I’m gonna see if I can find what the issue could be.

Edit: It seems like there’s a bug in Kbin that somehow breaks the tables (even when posting to a Lemmy instance). Until that is fixed, I guess the Google Docs will have to do, sadly.

We migrated to Matomo, which has very similar functionality as GA, but can be self hosted and is GDPR compatible. It can even be configured to run without consent since it doesn’t build a third party ad profile, which should actually improve the data coverage a bit.

The tracking API is a little different than GA so we had to redo some things to get all the events to trigger properly (especially for e-commerce), but for basic usage statistics it’s relatively plug and play in the tag manager.

https://matomo.org/

Meta federating would be the best thing to ever happen to the Fediverse. Face it, Fediverse is not by its own in a billion years going to somehow kill off Meta. The vast, vast majority of users are going to stay with traditional social media, there’s nothing we can do about that.

However, Meta et al actually joining the Fediverse means we won. The vast majority will still stay with Meta’s services, but no one here has to. This is the closest we will ever get to a truly open standard for social media.

I don’t want to have an account with Meta or Twitter or whatever, but I, like most people, want to be able to communicate with the people who do.

As I see it, there are only two ways forward for the Fediverse:

1. Traditional SoMe stays closed and inaccessible for anyone who doesn’t want to sell their soul to Meta. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe and the Fediverse stays a minuscule hobby project at best. Even here, most people will probably also have accounts on the traditional platforms in order to not cut oneself off from the world.

2. Traditional SoMe embraces open standards and anyone who cares can choose to use whatever service they want. The vast majority of people still use traditional SoMe, but the Fediverse now has access to billions of people (or not, you can choose yourself) without having to become a commodity that Meta can sell to advertisers.

Ideally, instead of having to register a Meta account, I can just stay with Kbin.social without losing access to the content.

I really wanted something similar so I threw a quick and dirty tampermonkey script together to fetch the subscriptions from the settings page. I think it worked out pretty alright.

Edit: Someone else can probably do something a lot better, but here is the code: https://pastebin.com/P0mR9QL6

Paste it into a new script and call the addSubscriptionsSidePanel() function to run it.

Edit2: I’ve uploaded it to Greasy Fork so that you can install it directly: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469139-kbin-subscriptions-panel