FaceDeer

If they're being used to "chase people down" I don't think acceptance by the general public is all that relevant.

Never. There's absolutely no need to use humanoid robots for that, other form factors would be much more efficient.

Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can't come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.

Would be nice if the Fediverse had more of that.

There are three or four different "Technology" communities. But there might as well just be one, it's the same bubble in each of them.

Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other "normal" people. By our definition of "normal."

And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, "normal." Often when an election happens.

So, a ton more developers for the GrapheneOS ecosystem.

DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.

Here's an unboxing video, this timestamp skips straight to Moxie coming online. Moxie is a real product. And the video is from three years ago, before convincing video generation AI was a thing, in case that was a concern.

Moxie does pose as well, its various joints are motorized. The arms exist entirely to point and gesticulate, they don't have grippers.

We don't have people walking around trying to put human faces on cats and dogs, but we can understand them well enough all the same.

They do have faces, though. Dogs literally developed additional facial muscles compared to wolves apparently as a means of improving their communication with human companions. Moxie's face isn't a human face, it's highly stylized.

Yup. IIRC they paid the movie's producers for the product placement, and then the company went under before the movie's release date. So it ended up advertising a defunct product. But at least it fit perfectly into the movie's plot.

Right before the AI boom really started to take off there was a robot "companion" named Moxie that I thought struck exactly the right balance - it was nowhere near the uncanny valley, staying firmly on the cute robot side, and it used a projected cartoon face that was simple but expressive. Unfortunately the company's timing was rather poor, they went out of business right before the AI back end would have been able to make full use of an avatar like this. I'd love to see another version of this approach.

Sure, if they subscribed to literally everything and had started doing so right from the beginning.

Not holistically, as an archive. When new content is posted on an instance it gets pushed out to any other instances that are subscribed to it. That's the only time the content is sent out. So if you start up a new instance but don't subscribe to anything nothing will be sent to you, and you won't get any historical content sent to you from beforehand. The Fediverse isn't a "flood fill" mesh.