100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.
And VPS providers are mostly interchangeable. If one of them goes crazy and starts using AI to randomly ban customers, just take all your toys over to the next one. At the end of the day it's just a commodity root shell.
As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?
It used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.
I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.
If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.
Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.
This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.
No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.
If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.
I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.
Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
> Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010
By 1999, Internet Explorer on Windows had over 95% of the web browser market. Modems were 56K. This is not comparable to the web in 2010, much less the web today.
You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.
> Private websites are nearly extinct
I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?
> Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.
> You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.
Is this a universal argument against "something was better"? Yes, many things were better in the past, internet included. Now we do things faster, cheaper and worse.
> I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?
Have you ever seen a private website requiring you to register? I haven't. If it does, then it's another sign of how we break simple stuff.
> How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.
Idk, maybe take a look how Facebook and Instagram work? Posting is super simple, just a few clicks and it's done. So effortless that any brainless individual can do that. People forgot how to do that without those platforms. Even MySpace required some basic knowledge of site building.
Apple still issues software updates for many years beyond the competition. I have a 9.7" iPad Pro from 2016 (mostly a youtube and music device now) and I received a security update today. That is dedication to long time customers.
The products have matured. Comparing to last year's product makes no sense because most people don't buy new products every year
A lot of people buying the 17 are coming from the 12 or earlier, and it is a significant upgrade.
The article is referring to EV market share, which is a useless metric. The whole point of Tesla opening their patents and their chargers was to encourage more companies to make EV's, which would necessarily imply a drop in Tesla's EV market share.
The metric that I would like to see is Tesla's market share of the auto market in general (regardless of fuel type).
I like the new Model 3 and Model Y. It is unfortunate that they didn't do a facelift for the Model S and X. I know they've updated the motors and batteries and interior, but unless you look closely the Model X looks pretty much the same as it did in 2016.
I mean, they sold 3,500 more cars out of the market's 27,400 bump. GM sold 2,000 more; Ford sold 2,400 more. Even in absolute terms, they're not exactly dominant. They're not dying currently, but they're never going to be more than just another car maker.
The difference is liability. If you're riding a Waymo, you are not at all liable for what the vehicle does. If there is a collision, you don't need to exchange your insurance info or name or anything else (regardless of who is at fault). You are not allowed to be in the drivers seat.
Tesla has chosen to not (yet) assume that liability, and leave that liability to the driver and requires a driver in the drivers seat. But someone in the drivers seat can override the steering wheel accidentally and cause a collision, so they likely will require the drivers seat to be empty to assume liability (or disable all controls, which is only possible on a steer by wire vehicle, and the only such vehicle in the world is Cybertruck).
Tesla has not asked for regulatory approval for level 4 or 5. When they do, it'll be interesting to see how governments react.
It makes sense why they wouldn't from a game theory standpoint. Why not shift liability? Waymo would too if they could set up such a structure in a way that makes sense. It is a little different for a cab where a 13 year old could call one on moms cellphone vs a car you buy outright and is registered to a licensed driver who pays for the insurance on it.
Still, my point is all this has nothing to do with the tech. It is all regulatory/legal checkers.
Because being a passenger in a driverless vehicle is a much better user experience than being a driver. You can be on a zoom call, sleep, watch a movie or TV show or scroll TikTok, get some work done on your computer, wear a VR headset and be in a different world, etc etc. Tesla would make a lot more money, and could charge a lot more for FSD.
They aren't doing that yet because they aren't ready yet. It's why they still have humans in the robotaxi service.
There are no doubts in my mind that they will do it probably next year. The latest version of FSD on the new cars is very, very impressive.
