For this post let’s assume the people involved are or were in the past friends, and ghosting is leaving someone on “read” for more than 2 days.

This doesn’t match how I’m used to seeing ghosting defined.

That behavior might be unfriendly, but there are a ton of innocuous reasons people do it. People are busy and not every message merits a prompt reply. If someone sends me something that requires more time or attention than I have at that moment like a video or news article, I’m likely to make a mental note to look at it later. I might actually remember, and then remember to send a reply about it. I might not.

It’s maybe a little rude not to respond to something more important or time-sensitive, but I can always ask again or use something more synchronous like a voice call. People are busy, life happens, tech can be unreliable. It’s best not to assume intentional disrespect.

My understanding of the term “ghosting” is permanent or long-term cessation of communication over all channels without explanation. That should be reserved for situations where someone is a physical danger or behaved in a manner so egregious they almost certainly know what they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of a post that isn’t attached to a community. It’s probably possible to post to Lemmy from Wafrn by tagging a community as it is with Mastodon.

You can follow Wafrn users from Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, etc…

She’s 52; he’s 61.

I can think of a few things I do not like about the world today that I imagine I could improve in a scenario like that. They include:

• Much of the world’s communication is mediated through centralized social media platforms that use opaque algorithms to determine what content people see. (Yes, this is a very Lemming concern)
• There is a significant rise in (mostly) right-wing populism worldwide, driven, I think in part by the above.
• Corporations and governments are increasingly able (and motivated) to block access to their digital systems from general-purpose computers that their owners fully control. Even the mainstream press saw Microsoft Palladium as a nightmarish power grab in 2002, but did not react the same way to Google SafetyNet in 2014.
• I do not own a Gordan Murray Automotive T.50.

Social media

2002 is before anybody had a convincing lead in this field, but blogs were already popular, and on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog kid. I could start planting the seeds of more advanced federation capabilities through open source development right away. I’m assuming I have a computer of course, but I think even if I didn’t I could probably get my hands on something older just by expressing interest and aptitude.

After laying the technical foundations and establishing some credibility as a developer and technologist, my goal would be to build something with significant mainstream appeal by the time Facebook opens to the public in late 2006. I’d need access to money at that point, whether my own or through investors, though as a federated system, I wouldn’t have to bear all of the costs (nor would I have the ability to extract all the profits, but even a hundredth of Zuck’s net worth is obscenely wealthy).

Populism

I honestly do not know how much of this is due to the present day social media environment, but I’m sure it’s a significant factor. I like to think that by tuning the design of social communication tools for more thoughtful discussion, more thoughtful leaders would thrive. Barring that, if I was obscenely wealthy, I could put my thumb on the scale by less honorable means, and I like to think I wouldn’t be so terribly corrupted by the money and power as to use it for evil.

One idea that comes to mind for political discussion is used in Pol.is and (perhaps ineffectively) Twitter community notes: surface points where people who usually disagree are in agreement.

Protecting general purpose computing

This one is hard to the point I’m not sure it’s achievable, but It’s so important. The obvious approach is to launch a mobile operating system, which would have to at least stay even with Android. Microsoft tried this in 2012, and that was too late despite their entry attracting some diehard fans. If I have the superior OS and majority market share, I’m in a good position to resist attempts to mandate locked bootloaders and remote attestation.

The good news is it’s not hard to do a better job with some fundamental design decisions given perfect hindsight, and with Android being open source, it wouldn’t be hard to support Android apps. There weren’t a lot of dependencies on Google’s services in the early days.

This one would be reliant on the social media play for capital and credibility. It would need to be well underway by 2010, which is a tight timeline, but not impossible.

An absurdly expensive sports car

If either of the above plays works even moderately well, I can have my 11,500 RPM redline V12 three-seater. If not, I’d still be in a position to make a bunch of money, and I’d be trying some of them in parallel.

Nobody’s going to give a ten year old control of an investment account just because they say they have some good ideas about the stock market, but if my hypothetical parents are anything like my real ones, after a couple months of demonstrating nearly-unbelievable skill at investing fake money, I’d be able to talk them into letting me invest a couple hundred dollars of real money and snowball things from there. I’d also know which startup ideas worked, what decisions were important in their success, and which founders I wouldn’t feel bad about ripping off.

Even as reality diverges, I think certain trends were inevitable. Social media will happen. Smartphones will happen. Streaming will happen. EVs will happen. Generative AI will probably happen, but I think I might try to push that one back a few years if I was in a position to do so. Flying cars, fusion power, and space colonies probably aren’t happening by 2025 regardless of how many butterflies flap their wings.

Early Reddit didn’t have those either, so I suppose it’s a proto-Reddit-like. Nookie does look better.

How? Is the mouse reliant on their servers to operate?

It’s not the first.

That’s true but not useful.

It’s probably better to describe both ideologies as extreme-authoritarian or totalitarian. They’re about equally undesirable; when someone has a boot on your throat, it doesn’t matter much whether it’s the right boot or the left boot.

AI is untrustworthy and shouldn’t be used

I have a more nuanced take. AI is simultaneously untrustworthy and useful. For many queries, DuckDuckGo and Google are performing considerably worse than they used to, while Perplexity usually yields good results. Perplexity also handles complex queries traditional search engines just can’t.

About a third of the time, Perplexity’s text summary of what it found is inaccurate; it may even say the opposite of what a source does. Reading the sources and evaluating their reliability is no less important than with traditional search, but much of the time I think I wouldn’t have found the same sources that way.

Of course there are other issues with AI, such as power usage and Perplexity in particular being known for aggressive web scraping.

Nuance and depth isn’t as popular as I’d like on or off Lemmy.

Most social media that got popular took something that people were already doing and brought it to a wider audience. Here are some examples:

Myspace

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was common for people, especially teenagers to make personal sites introducing themselves and linking to a few of their friends. Sometimes they would add life updates to the sites, but often linked to a blog hosted elsewhere (e.g. Livejournal). Myspace just institutionalized that.

Facebook

At first, it was pretty much Myspace for adults, then it integrated something a lot like an internal RSS reader.

Flickr

As digital cameras became popular, people started putting photo albums on their personal sites. Flickr made it easy.

Twitter

A blog and feed reader combination you could post to by SMS at a time when most phones didn’t have internet.

Instagram

Image-focused Twitter designed to be used from a smartphone.

Reddit

A then-popular social bookmarking site called Delicious had a “popular” section for links many people bookmarked. Instead of people having to find the links independently, Reddit added vote arrows. Eventually they added comments and it became a forum, which is also a thing people were doing already.

Youtube

This is the exception. Hosting videos was ridiculously expensive in 2005 so people weren’t doing it much. Youtube set VC money on fire until Google bought it and set Google money on fire for a decade or so until it finally started to be profitable.

Aside from emphasizing the hat, that also seems like an opportunity to emphasize the importance of positively identifying one’s target and backstop. It’s reckless to shoot at something that might be a valid target.

This is absolutely not fine, but it’s probably not illegal under the EU DMA.

The EU requires Apple to allow direct installation of apps, but tolerates Apple requiring the apps to be signed with an Apple-approved key, which makes it possible for Apple to ban developers.

Google’s plan seems to be similar.

A while ago, I came across a curated list of no-BS games for Android and iOS.

BS consists of ads or barriers to progress that can’t be removed with a one-time payment. It has user ratings, and the highly-rated games are nearly certain to be good examples of their category.

It works when you’re not at home, so probably better for a mobile device.

All of those things should be illegal, and many of them are. Ideally, someone would go to jail, but until that happens, might I suggest a solution to block most mobile ads?

Should it fall upon me?

Maybe.

One option is a proactively regulated market where only companies pre-approved by the government can sell anything, and every product must be checked and approved before it’s offered for sale. Such a market won’t have many fake products, but it also won’t have much competition or innovation. It’s also very likely to attract corruption, where the government conditions approvals on unrelated behavior that the current leadership prefers or requires bribes to do business. We’re seeing the former in the USA with the Trump administration for certain types of businesses, and it isn’t pretty.

The current situation for most product categories is a reactively regulated market. Deceptive practices are illegal, but enforcement depends on someone noticing and reporting them. More deceptive products make it to consumers, but more groundbreaking products do as well. It’s hard for government officials to blackmail most businesses.

I’ve been using a similar solution with my static site at https://zakreviews.com/ for years.

Everyone sucks here.

she took off my condom without permission

Removing a condom without consent during sex is sexual assault. You’re absolutely right to break off a relationship or go no-contact for this. In many jurisdictions, you could press criminal charges.

I even called an old coworker to ask if she had her citizenship because I was trying to avoid child support.

That’s not OK even if you’re very scared.