That’s a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.
That’s a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.
Hopefully Pocketpair wins, because they made the better monster catching game. I’m still reeling from how bad the performance is in Scarlet/Violet.
But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.
Privacy as a cause is something that helps support other forms of activism. We live in a world in which hostile state actors routinely surveil activists in order to more effectively divide, subvert, marginalize, and intimidate them; privacy is important counterplay against this. It’s like saying that you’re not going to eat healthy because exercising is more important; one facilitates the other.
Sounds like it’d improve interop. Make it so that there’s a curation system where communities can choose specific users/instances to watch for this content.
Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.
Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.
Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?
Video hosting/streaming is the hardest use-case to replace due to infrastructure costs. PeerTube exists, which works like torrents and is probably the best solution that we’re gonna get for this. I don’t see it replacing YouTube though, since decentralization fundamentally limits reach (and potential income as a result) and a lack of data collection makes it harder to accurately profile viewers (both of which professional content creators care about). It’s probably fine for hobbyists and FOSS projects that want to distribute videos though.
I’m currently rebuilding my math foundation and part of that process was tracking down high quality educational resources with passionate instructors, rigor, and entertainment factor (because I want stuff to recommend to parents). I did eventually find something that was better than what I got in grade school, but I have to say that the Pythagorean Theorem just isn’t going to be as interesting as social media feeds and entertainment products custom tailored to my preferences. No teacher is realistically going to be able to compete with the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry for attention and tech companies are abusing psychology research to make their shit as addictive as possible. It’s not the biggest problem with the US educational system, but it is one of many, so I’m down with restricting smartphone access at schools.
Based on my interactions with teachers, the administrative class that runs these schools are cowards who don’t want to deal with angry parents, nor the liability if the phones get confiscated and then stolen/damaged. There’s also a lot of parents who want to text their kids during the school day and get mad when they can’t. A lot of teachers have given up since the higher ups won’t back them up. This happened around 2015 or so, when smartphones became ubiquitous.
LibreELEC with a FLIRC dongle and a cheapo infrared remote. If you have any bluetooth console controllers laying around, you can use those too so long as they have good Linux support. There’s Kodi addons for popular streaming services and LibreELEC also offers an SFTP addon in case you want a local media server setup instead.
Firefox has been great since Quantum released. They finally fixed the performance issues and it’s still more flexible in what it can do than the Chromium browsers.
Lemmy’s interop with the microblogging portion of the Fediverse (which is by far the largest part) sucks. You can’t follow users, so there’s no way to pull in content from there and there’s no hashtag support built in for posts, so Lemmy posts don’t get to take advantage of the discoverability features on the microblogging side. Beehaw in particular is picky with whom they federate, but it shouldn’t matter since there’s plenty of microblogging instances that share their ethos. I was already a Mastodon user for a few years prior to any of the exoduses and it bummed me out that you guys didn’t get to experience Fedi in its full glory because of these limitations. Hopefully the next platform that Beehaw migrates to will be better about this.
I’d say that the Indie game experience can still match that. Doesn’t have to be old titles.
I would say that the decentralized nature of the platform means that the demographics that don’t get along don’t have to share the same space. Reddit is full of communities that fucking hate each other and the centralized nature of the site means that those userbases have to occupy a lot of the same subreddits; those users have a low barrier to entry to go troll each other and pick fights. In the Fediverse, these communities are separate instances and will just defederate from each other, putting an end to it. Instead, like-minded communities and instances can congregate together. The federation model also provides incentive for users to behave, since instances can be cut off from everyone else if they’re deemed too toxic/annoying.
Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.
Something that has become very apparent to me over the past year of migrating away from the big 6 sites into the dark forest is that, no honestly, the internet isn’t that; the big 6 sites are that. Places like Neocities still exist and have lots of traffic and you can go there and have an interesting time. I’ve encountered more cultural diversity on the Fediverse than I had in the past decade of using Reddit. There’s still cool stuff and interesting communities; it’s just hard to find because search engines are increasingly useless. We need better discoverability; if we fix that, then we’re golden.
Well if it’s any consolation, the Fediverse is basically the spiritual successor to that time period on the internet: now with interesting tech improvements.
OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.
The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.
Will this be impacted by browsers killing third-party cookies?
The MissKey forks like Sharkey/Iceshrimp/Catodon all have better featuresets and UI/UX than Mastodon IMO. If you don’t already have a Mastodon instance that you’re extremely pleased with, I would pick one of them instead. I can’t comment on the app situation though.
Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn’t very much, but if they’re paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.