Another traveler of the wireways.

  • 16 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This is buried toward the bottom of the release notes so I’m bringing it up here:

    Added instance-level default sort type

    Any admins out there considering changing their instance sort settings or asking people on their instance if they’d like this changed, given that we can individually set sorting anyway? Taking into account the inclination of people to never adjust default settings (I remain deeply curious about this tendency, as an aside), I think it might be worth at least bringing up to one’s instance community.

    If they decide they want it to remain the same, all good, and even better, it raises some people’s awareness that they can change it themselves.








  • Pulling the background link here to save people some clicks: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

    With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:

    That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.1 Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.2)

    Emphasis added.

    Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. […] The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong. […] Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

    […]

    And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.

    Emphasis added.