It would make a lot more sense to replace a formely-FLOSS component with a still-FLOSS fork of it than to replace it with a different component that is still not FLOSS.
A made-by-Pixelfed fediverse Tumblr replacement would definitely be interesting, but the concept of a fediverse Tumblr replacement has been done before, and I'm not really sure how this would be much different.
@dansup@virtuous_sloth Not necessarily. I think that they just tried something without realizing the massively chaotic impact it would have.
...I say this as someone who has done something here without realizing the massively chaotic impact it had, although this probably isn't even *that* bad.
@dansup I don't think joking about this is a good idea. This should not be a matter of discourse, but rather trying to find a solution that at least most people are happy with instead of fighting with each other.
It's not even enabled by default, and looks to me like an experimental feature that is just starting to be tested and isn't quite ready for a stable release yet.
The privacy concern is real, and valid, but I would focus on the approach taken. That's where the discussion should be.
I get why something like that would be implemented from a privacy perspective, but randomizing it is by far the worst approach as (like you have just shown) it manipulates legitimate fediverse statistics tools.
In my opinion, it would make far more sense to either report all of the counts as 0 or simply return a 403 Forbidden response.
1. It's not actually the unique platform it tries to make itself look like. It's a Mastodon fork. 2. *In violation of Mastodon's AGPLv3 license*, Frequency is proprietary, or at the very least does not provide any link to the source code. 3. They paywall signups.
This isn't anything particularly new and interesting. It's just yet another corporate leech on the fediverse...
Saw this in mov.im and the first thing I thought of is... WHY DOESN'T THE FEDIVERSE HAVE THIS?!
I obviously don't know much about the XMPP microblogging implementation, but I saw that they did this and I think that this is how it *should* be done.
Making a simple opt-in mechanism is the ideal scenario.