The smart ones all know how to use VPNs as well. They know what’s up.
Crazy thing is they only need to control the masses who are mostly uneducated or don’t care enough to figure out what’s going on. Turns out that even the USA has a massive group of the latter type.
Accelerate, brake, accelerate, brake, accelerate, brake on repeat when on a wide open road.
Some drivers do this seemingly without being aware and once you notice it’s impossible to ignore how irritating the feeling is.
I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.
The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.
I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.
Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.
Hah, I installed Postiz just yesterday, interesting to see this thread. It’s like buffer or one of the other paid tools to schedule your social media posts and track engagement. Of course, of particular interest to our community, Postiz is self hosted.
It doesn’t have as many features yet as the major SaaS businesses, but the software is looking good and quite usable right now. I’m sure the more people who use it and support the developer, the more this tool can grow.
For example you can plug in your OpenAI API key and get an LLM chat interface inside the software while writing social posts. But I don’t think it learns your style or creates posts using any kind of system prompt yet unless you type it in each time.
Another thing I couldn’t figure out so far is how to limit which social media channels individual users can see. For example my business has several different units and there’s a different marketing team on each unit, so they shouldn’t be able to post into other channels.
If you’re in the business of needing to post regularly on a lot of channels I think postiz is worth checking out.
Bluesky is being run by a funded professional startup team and is aimed at the masses. Mastodon is run by activists and software devs and brings in other like minded folks.