And did in the UK and US.

Lol, somebody you don’t know knows where you’re at right now. Literally, your exact location right now. And where you’ve been today, and everywhere you’ve been for the last year. And where you’re most likely going in the next few hours. Everything you’ve bought, said, and texted. What vehicles you own, your entire family and relationship history. Your dna, fingerprint, retina pattern, and medical history. And on and on.

And we just keep giving it to them.

I mean, you are absolutely correct in your statement but people have no idea how much of the infrastructure is already in place and humming along. Our only monetary grace is that it still revolves around merchants and different data points are consolidated in various countries rather than accessible by any one group worldwide. Yet. But you can buy profiles of anyone. Well, we can’t but governments can.

International corporations are pushing this hard, and have been laying the ground work for the last 20 years, and their biggest clients, countries, are eating it up.

All this stuff coming up recently about mics in your electronics, flock cameras, AI in everything, is just a tiny icicle sticking up from the massive glacier that is the data collection that has been going full steam since the 2000s. We are surprised miners standing around a recently discovered dead canary trying to decide if we should exit the mine.

The trap has already been sprung.

Just posting stupid shit so-and-so says sounds like engagement bait. Waste of time.

You’re not wrong but you’re wasting your breath. Every generation has a small group that figures this out and no matter how much they change their own lives, no matter how they try to get the word out, or get involved in activism, or literally anything at all, the masses will not budge. The people are incapable of saving themselves or making substantial changes in their lives without external pressures on them. People you know and like and share your opinion will nod and agree and pontificate from the comfort of their armchairs, but as long as they have even a sliver of comfort and convenience and entertainment they will not change anything about their lives at all. But they sure will get online and bitch all day. The best you can do is either move out of the country or gather like minded friends and family and live on a commune.

Yeah, but states and feds have always been tracking left wing groups. The FBI has files on tens of thousands of people associated with leftist groups and have been surveiling them for decades. It’s only news because this one person is publicly doing it.

Wow, neat! Thanks for the explanation

How do you do that?

That was a wild ride.

Psh, somebody can’t do math, '96 wasn’t 30… years a-

…fuck.

No. But I wasn’t doing anything particularly complex, just a LAMP stack server for some game forums. Think I had a Dell desktop. Was a dishwasher at the time.

Took a few days fumbling through tutorials but I eventually got it up and running. Repeated that a few times over the years, once to host a blog, stuff like that.

Would like to get into it again but all I have now is a tablet.

Ah, a fellow controls guy out in the wild.

I tried Bluesky before I found Lemmy. I really wanted to like it but after a few months I decided it wasn’t for me. It’s got a chicken-or-egg problem and you need to bring your own fanbase if want to have any interaction.

I never liked Twitter and don’t feel it’s a particularly good model for actual socializing. I think it was created back when people were still hacking together ideas, it sort of worked, and it hasn’t changed much since.

It’s great for disseminating stuff, terrible at creating space for discussion.

The founders seem like a bunch of young ultra-capitalists who sensed an opening in the market and are just shooting their shot. The app reflects this in subtle ways.