Andreas
Given the number of bots on the internet trying to crack captchas, this is already happening. I don't think captchas are being used for AI training that much, since hCaptcha uses AI-generated images with prompts like "Select the images with a hamster eating a watermelon" for its tests. All of the reCaptcha road captchas I receive also have answer validation and won't let me pass if I answer incorrectly because of a misclick.
I remember seeing somebody mention a Reddit-like wrapper for the Lemmy API so that existing Reddit clients can be interoperable with Lemmy without changing any code. Does anyone have more information about this project? It would be great if we could use open-source clients like Infinity (what I use for Reddit on Android) with Lemmy without rewriting them.
Yeah no, this "America Bad and backwards 3rd world country while us Europeans are so enlightened" circlejerk isn't constructive either. The American political system is terrible but a lot of European countries, mine included, are copying their "celebrity drama show" attitude towards politics because of extreme American cultural influence. We shouldn't deny our own problems.
He has American citizenship and lives in America, he's talking about America here. And I promise you that other countries, yes even those in the magical fantasy land of Europe, also have lots of political drama despite having more than two parties in the government (They tend to form alliances based on left/right and split into two blocks anyway).
I try to remain optimistic about this but companies like Facebook and Microsoft actually being too big to fail is depressing. Feels like we're all being held hostage and we'll only be free if something causes these technologies to become obsolete.
I don't think Mullvad's port forwarding decision can be compared to Reddit's greed. They were getting in trouble with law enforcement for providing tunnels to illegal websites, so they had to either identify those customers or stop port forwarding if they didn't want to get the entire company shut down.
It's a fundamental problem with moderation that focuses on "being nice and always wholesome" because you wouldn't believe the things some people get upset by and they will try to argue that anything edgier than a padded cell is rule-breaking. I don't think your conversation was uncivil either. Besides, "Do not debate strangers" is an absolutely bizarre rule on a platform focused on anonymous debate and discussion.
On the topic of the discussion, I have the same problem as you where all of my friends use Facebook Messenger for chatting. Sure, you could go cold turkey and tell people to contact you through other platforms, but you'll probably lose a huge chunk of your friend circle that way. Things like group chats also make it worse because you will need the entire group to migrate, and even if they do, people don't want to juggle two groups with the same purpose. They'll abandon the one which is less convenient, which unfortunately is the one without Facebook Messenger.
The only way Youtube could do that is by making a Google account required to watch videos. Logged out users on Youtube's official services like its website and mobile app use the same API these frontends use, so breaking that API would disable its actual services for users without an account as well. You'll notice that you cannot perform any logged in actions with a Google account on these frontends, and that's because the frontends only use endpoints that don't require authentication like watching videos and reading comments. This is the same reason why Twitter hasn't shut down Nitter (the privacy frontend for Twitter) yet, even though they would really want to.