Only out of convenience. There are many alternatives, and search engines will find them. And (although it won't happen) if Facebook were ordered to shut down, hundreds of entrepreneurs would offer alternatives for "small business web presence"
Small businesses have complained about being buried in search results for long years. In some industries like restaurants, scammers create a higher-ranking website that looks like the real thing, in order to skim revenue.
Not everyone has SEO-fu, and hiring a contractor is an additional cost for small businesses. At least on Facebook one normally finds what one is looking for.
There is nothing technical that says this is how it has to be. A "business directory" that is vetted and paid for (like the old "Yellow Pages" used to be) could be trustworthy.
Angie's List started out this way but I think it has been corrupted since the merger with HomeAdvisor. I could be wrong about that.
Establishing trust would be the tricky part. People are so used to 80% of the internet being scams and clickbait. But that certainly goes for Facebook pages as well.
And just like they found Facebook they can, and will, find something else. And maybe they learn something about trust in that type of service the next time around.
Maybe they have no interest in finding something else. Maybe they aren't interested in your opinion and don't see you as someone they are want to learn lessons from.
And? This is the same argument the south made while supporting slavery. I’m not saying the two are equally bad, but this is just simply not a valid argument if you ignore the surrounding context.
I find that truly mystifying. I won’t go through the hassle of opening an account on any platform just to see some dumbed down website. I can’t be the only one, can I?
As with seemingly all AI these days - it seems to fail with prosody and simply speaks the very next word with zero regard to the nuance or cadence that author intended, or an understanding of any the words being spoken.
When AI achieves the ability to deliver some of Shakespeare’s greatest soliloquies or monologues, then I’ll pay attention.
Prosody is hard. No AI voice I've heard really nails voice generation with fully smooth and human-like cadence and quality, but they're gradually getting better. Airy voices sound a bit tinny and childish, but even so, they're better than many I've heard, including for the elusive "humanness" quality.
>I t's a bit like using c# or powershell on Linux… but I wouldn't consider it a first class citizen.
C# is very very much a first class citizen on Linux. It may not be native, but you can run binaries on Linux without needing the runtime when you compile it to target the platform.
I wrote a couple of monoservices on my Mac using c# which ran perfectly on my Microk8s cluster on Linux.
I have nearly a decade of experience building .NET C# solutions on Linux and lately also on Mac, with almost everything hosted on Linux via Docker. I’m not sure what’s still missing for it to be accepted into the "first class citizen" club by the Linux elite.
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That's tomorrow's problem, not today's? In the face of tyranny we stay on our toes and try to keep one step ahead of the dictators so we don't end up underneath their boots.
As the UK, USA, and 1/2 of Europe start modeling themselves after erdogan and putina, just know we are all facing the same enemies now.
Was thinking about a bring-your-own-machine setup but the complexity isn't worth the cost savings imo. That dang 30% Apple fee for payments inflates VM cost.
Is it just me, or is Sandstorm just not maintained any more?
The most recent closed issues were self closed rather than as the result of development, while meanwhile the open issues continue to pile up with virtually no code changes made to the tree…
It’s a shame because it seems like it could have been a thing. Sadly though it’s hard to justify time investment into a platform like this if you know there’s little to no chance of getting any issues fixed.
There is a small community working on it (hi!) but there is several hard problems in the way of moving forward, all of which can be solved with time and money, neither of which we have a lot of. :/
I think ten years on there remains nothing even remotely comparable to Sandstorm for a dozen reasons, but I also can't assure you an issue you find would get fixed expediently, for sure.
There is a small community maintaining it - there should be a link to the Zulip on the website - but it is a small group and a complex beast. Some effort is going into a rewrite that keeps the same app/security model, but moves from C++ to Go and simplifies the database layer. I believe that's taking up a fair bit of contributor energy.
I don't know about that, I happily use it to host a couple of Wekan and Dokuwiki instances, and some random Etherpad docs. It's certainly MVP-complete.
And even in its current state, it has some fantastic affordances that I don't feel I could get anywhere else.
For example, I had an instance running on my laptop to fiddle around with developing apps. I wanted to take a Dokuwiki on my laptop and move it to my cloud-hosted instance. I clicked "download backup" of the grain, which gave me a zip file which was whatever, 40MB or something, and then I went into my cloud setup, clicked "import from backup", and voila - my entire Dokuwiki grain was now in the cloud.
