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Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.

I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”

I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.

July 4, 2012. The day the Higgs Boson was discovered. Everything since has done nothing but get stranger and stranger. I won’t even say it’s all just gone to shit. It’s just to me, everything since has been… increasingly unreal.

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I have… lots of media available on a local Plex server, several thousand movies and tv shows, continuously growing, never getting smaller - more than you can say for streaming services. I have an OTA DVR for local stations so I can watch sports on the weekend and maybe some PBS content. I pay $0/mo for all of it.

Try sorting results by ‘price low to high’ and then watch as it completely ignores you - no - laughs in your fucking face - as it gives you results in whatever goddamn order it so desires.

It might make it easier to give it up if you can fully realize that Amazon is now 100% in the business of fucking you over.

Well, I mean… not much better.

Huh. Well, everybody I hung out with knew about it. IIRC moderation was tacked on after USENET had already taken off. If a newsgroup wasn’t proposed with moderation then it couldn’t be moderated, so most of them weren’t. It’s pretty wild that they didn’t understand how desperately necessary it would be. In order to get a group to be moderated you’d have to get a proposal for an entirely new group through the committee, which was nearly impossible. The process was so slow and bureaucratic that the web literally just showed up and stole it all in what seemed like overnight. I remember when I switched over… it was like 2002, 2003? I’ve never had as much fun on any web forum as I had on USENET though. Those were fun times. And don’t get me started on the web’s lack of threaded discussions. Drove me NUTS.

Yes pardon me I left off the word “largely” before “unmoderated.” We all knew it was possible, but it didn’t matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.

Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.

Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.

A concentrated effort by bad-faith actors who understand that the only thing Americans love more than being told they’re right is being able to feel smugly superior. Tap into that with the power of social media and voila.

“by now, we know that the vaccine was not safe or effective.”

Also yet another a dangerous moron who thinks they’re a fucking genius.

Now if only they could do the same with the stock market. But the conspiracy theorist in me believes that all this manipulation is being done hand in hand with certain arms of the government in order to maintain the government’s appearance of solvency and to control inflation in the face of what appears to be nearly unlimited spending. Just keep moving around fake money using a million different utterly opaque methods.

This was what I was thinking. If she put quotes around “thank” and used unceremoniously instead, the post would read closer to what it sounds like she intended.

Edit: I only just noticed a couple of things: first, this post is five years old. Second, she responded with full-throated support of Rick. So despite the fact that he is pretty well understood as a POS around most Trek communities these days, Denise doesn’t seem to want to be lumped in with that.

Nice straw man. Nobody said the community was going to “Linux-sized” nor that it was going to be built in a “few days,” nor that it was going to have paid devs. It’s like you’re being intentionally obtuse.

There are already multiple supported forks of Firefox and while it doesn’t take much to maintain such forks when they are being fed a large part of the codebase by Mozilla, if you think such a project would not pick right the fuck up where Mozilla left off if Mozilla tried to pull a Google and get behind Manifest V3, you are, I believe, mistaken.

Mozilla itself owes its existence to Netscape’s failure in the face of unfair competition by Microsoft’s Explorer. Netscape released its source code, Mozilla was founded and the power of open-source created Firefox. Chrome’s halfhearted support of Mozilla is itself owed to the fact that they don’t want to get spanked over Chrome like Microsoft was over IE.

As if installing and using something else means you can’t have Chrome lying around for that one stupid website.

Yes, and we will drop Mozilla when it drops uBlock as well. We will all get behind whatever open-source browser stops ads, and it will very quickly become the most widely used browser. Why? Because everybody despises fucking ads and you can’t curb-stomp them into liking ads, that’s why.

Google can spend all the money it likes trying to piss on users and tell them it’s raining but at the end of the day, a new king will be crowned and if it isn’t Chrome and it isn’t Firefox, then it will be something else.

And no, FOSS doesn’t need money behind it. FOSS needs a dedicated community behind it. Assertions to the contrary are FUD constantly being seeded by Google, Microsoft and their ilk to destroy competition. This is an existential necessity for Google, you can bet they are doing everything in their power to maintain the status quo.

No sense worrying about it then. I know I don’t.

I believe there is a way. Nanotechnology helped along by artificial intelligence could conceivably bring material abundance to everyone. This would be a world dramatically reshaped. Humanity might not even qualify as the same species anymore.

Some people actually think that such a future is an inevitability; that it can’t be stopped. Short of everybody dying in a fire of course.

I’ve literally never seen any of these except the top symbol.