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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • acosmichippo@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldWhy is Mastodon struggling to survive?
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    24 days ago

    i have a mastodon account but it’s completely useless for me.

    the only thing i use twitter for is to follow updates and news from professional journalists and artists who are not on mastodon and likely will never be. if your job depends on twitter, switching to mastodon is not going to happen.

    if i want to engage with random average people, i come here to lemmy.







  • this is straight up nonsense. we get into orbit just fine, ISS has been operating for decades. Going beyond that is only a matter of political will, not a limit of tech or engineering. In fact they are working on Artemis to go back to the moon right now, and Mars after that.

    and i actually disagree with the person above that we can go to mars right now. there are issues they need to figure out, but they are solvable problems. This isn’t like cold fusion that is 30 years away from being 30 years away.

    also boeing isn’t representative of the aerospace industry or even just NASA. They are mismanaged and negligent. they can’t even build airplanes, never mind spacecraft.





  • This would be a major issue, because DDG specifically claims it does not store any identifying information about you.

    https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

    I had a search saved from some months ago, went to check it for some references and got new hits involving local organizations that had nothing to do with the search. Opening up a private browser I see that the searches aren’t 100% matching up either.

    my guess is this is just variation in the search algorithms over time. excerpt from their privacy policy above which I think can explain most of the variability you mentioned:

    “For example, we may know that we got a lot of searches for “cute cat pictures” today, but we don’t know who actually performed those searches. That is, viewing search results on DuckDuckGo is anonymous. And we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you. For local search results in particular, we’ve further engineered a solution to shield your precise location from us and our content providers that sends us a random location nearish to you, which we also never log to disk.”

    So they do use your geo IP and popular searches to weigh results which can change over time.


  • However, after seeing TV ads for DDG not that long ago I kind of lost what faith I had left in them. As a rule of thumb, I’ve never trusted products and services advertised on TV - TV advertising is expensive, and the business expects to make that expense back and then some from their customers.

    DDG doesn’t claim to be non-profit or anything. Their business model is based on revenue from advertising targeted solely from the search queries themselves, not from stored personal data.