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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 25th, 2024

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  • Also interesting is the language they used in the email they sent me after I requested account/data deletion:

    We received your request to permanently delete your 23andMe account and Personal Information. The following apply when you submit your deletion request:

    • If you chose to consent to 23andMe Research by agreeing to an applicable 23andMe Research consent document, any Research involving your Genetic Information or Self-Reported Information that has already been performed or published prior to our receipt of your request will not be reversed, undone, or withdrawn.
    • Any samples for which you gave consent to be stored (biobanked) will be discarded.
    • 23andMe and the contracted genotyping laboratory will retain your Genetic Information, date of birth, and sex as required for compliance with legal obligations, pursuant to the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988 and California laboratory regulations.
    • 23andMe will retain limited information related to your deletion request, such as your email address and Account Deletion Request Identifier, as necessary to fulfill your request, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims, and as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law.

    The first bullet point makes sense - you agreed and they already published something, so too bad. The second bullet is doing the right thing. But those third and fourth bullets sound like they don’t really have to delete anything, and they’ll keep a bunch of data even if you ask them to trash it. I asked them to trash it anyway.





  • I started out with local forums on 2400–9600 baud dial up BBSes with banks of only maybe half a dozen modems for simultaneous use, run by self-funded hobbyists (who has the time and knowledge for that?). Pre-internet, if you will, although really internet did exist then, just primarily with academic and DARPA users and not public ISPs. The pinnacle of software evolution there was MajorMUD (on MajorBBS), with great adventures and full ANSI-colored text and ASCII art, but the local forms were fun too. We even had an occasional IRL picnic since everyone was within a reasonable area (not to have long-distance phone charges). But it meant the niche topics were few and far between, lacking a sufficiently broad user base (hello Lemmy!).

    Boy I really hated the mess of forums you described as one of the golden eras. It wasn’t just the fractured identity management. BBcode was functional, but damned ugly, and difficult to navigate.

    I hope you’re right about the future. Reddit was far and away the best forum discussion ground I had ever used, until it wasn’t anymore. I particularly like the idea mentioned in another comment of a future where (journalism, academic, professional, etc.) organizations might provide identity services in the fediverse and we could interact with either known or anonymous users. Bots and AI training are ugly issues you don’t address at all though.

    I’m curious to hear your thoughts about publishing a post like that on your blog and then publishing a link to it here in the fediverse. Obviously you expect the discussion to occur here rather than in the curiously-still-enabled Wordpress comments. Would it be better to post the original content on Lemmy, but you still feel tied to Wordpress and having an RSS feed? Does Lemmy still feel like an experiment that might end whereas the blog is more still your own content repository?





  • The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.

    That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?

    You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.