Pretty common in tech layoffs altogether. Been through several waves over the years and typically the CEO goes “we don’t need this team, what do they do anyways?” before firing them and finding out exactly what that team did. I’ve always told coworkers to tell them hell no.

I think more than anything, this has shown the insecurity of ActivityPub for me. The whole point of federation is to get everyone on a decentralized platform that is aimed at ‘copying’ data. But there’s no reason that data needs to be unencrypted in plaintext. We should theoretically be very open to wanting to federate with a large new community, but the issue lies with ActivityPub. Because we can’t trust ActivityPub, we can’t trust Meta. So are we implying that we imperially trust the services we currently use? I think this should be opening a conversation about ActivityPub security, not ‘how quickly can we defederate from Meta to avoid the security issues’, we should be looking at options for resolving those security issues. End to end encryption is in absolute must. We should want to add and federate more users into the ecosystem without fear of where they’re data is coming from and where our is going to. So I’m not ‘for’ federation of Threads, I’m against defederation for ‘security purposes’ when everything is already so insecure. Fix the root problem, not these work around solutions.

What worries me most is how this has shown me how how wildly insecurely ActivityPub seems to be storing and sharing user data.

No, I just pay for Deezer Flac. xManager lets you use Spotify ad-free so the listening experience there is still 320 Kbps but I like the recommendation system better. it’s basically free Spotify premium. If I like any song a Spotify, spotify_sync will automatically grab it and download the flac file to my server. If I want to listen to lossless music, I just listen to my stored music using my Jellyfin server as a front-end. I never actually touch Deezer’s front-end at all.

I personally like being able to use Spotify as my front-end, but it doesn’t support flac. So I personally pay for Deezer’s Flac option, I use xManager for listening to music on Spotify, and I have a script setup to automatically download all my liked Spotify songs from Deezer in lossless flac. It’s not free by any means, but is the best/easiest way to download music I’ve found.

https://github.com/jbh-cloud/spotify_sync

At least in the US, the police found that the chances that a drug dog actually finds drugs is about 50/50. Which are not odds they like when it means they have to get a warrant, do the minimum amount of explaining to a judge, and do their job for once. So they found it was easier to train drug dogs to respond to signals and jump at a car on small signals or command. That way they jump on the cops suspicion and their 50% turns to 100%. If they find drugs then great, the dog let them bypass the warrantt and true due process. If not, then you have no recourse for action. Drug sniffing dogs for your local middle of nowhere PD are a joke.