🦊 OneRedFox 🦊

I use what’s packaged in my distro’s repositories, unless I need a specific version, or the software isn’t packaged at all.

What’s your social network look like, OP? For people in your situation, your friends and family will have to be your safety net. Shared resources can also bring expenses down.

I see some things never change. Been having that same experience since at least 10 years ago.

The loss of money matters more, to the point where it’s better for them to just put up with the annoying rules that pop up. They’d have to make this switch out of pure ideology, which considering that this is their job, that’s not going to win out in most cases.

I talked about this with someone else a few days ago. Professional content creators aren’t going to like the Fediverse very much, as the decentralization fundamentally means that there’s going to be a smaller audience for them to reach due to users being more spread out between instances in addition to the lack of ads and recommendation algorithms to spoonfeed their content to new viewers. There’s really no reason for them to prefer the Fediverse over the centralized corporate platforms that basically cater to their use-case. I don’t think it works as a profession here, at least in its current form. The Fediverse is good for hobbyists and everyone else though, whom I happen to prefer for the most part.

Oh wow, I didn’t realize that even the VCS systems were getting in on the action. Guess all the Fediverse platforms picking Codeberg to host their projects has been rubbing off on the Forgejo devs. Maybe I should make a Forgejo account somewhere.

The platforms copied the design of centralized services without making enough adjustments to accommodate the different UX that a decentralized federated system brings. Some things that I think should be standard that currently aren’t:

1. I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
2. I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
3. PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
4. Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.
5. Links to known Fediverse instances should open on your instance where you can interact with it rather than taking you to their instance where you can’t.

Implement these and the experience would be much better.

Firefox has always had the better extension game, even after the switch to WebExtensions.

Most people view computers as an appliance to get what they want, like a toaster. They never think to install a different OS, if they even know how to do so or that Linux exists in the first place. Windows comes installed out of the box for every computer not made by Apple for the most part. My boomers aren’t dependent on any Windows-specific software as their use-case is just a Facebook machine, so I put them on Fedora with GNOME and there hasn’t been a single problem in years. They can even handle installing and updating software with the software center that GNOME provides. They were actually interested in trying something else because even the tech illiterate can see that Windows sucks now. All I had to do was pick the distro and DE and then install it for them. The distro could just as easily be Debian, or Ubuntu, or possibly even Arch. The DE just needs to be absolutely braindead so they can’t hurt themselves by accident. Yeah, some use-cases require that people use Windows-specific software, but there’s also a lot of Facebook machines that could just as easily be running Linux if the computers at the store shipped with it; Chromebooks are an example of this. And honestly, even the OS-specific software thing is becoming less of a problem as more stuff moves to the browser.

I wonder if we’ll ever see people who know what they’re doing legislate this stuff. This is just pathetic. They couldn’t even hit the right target.

The way that the ActivityPub protocol (this is the protocol that makes the Fediverse function) works is that it only pushes out content to instances that explicitly request it (a user follows another user/channel/community/etc, or the instance uses a relay), so the spread does matter and the ecosystem is kinda stuck with that until the underlying protocol is changed. I’d agree that a different protocol could remedy this, but realistically speaking I don’t see AP getting swapped out for something else anytime soon.

Well, it’s moreso that decentralization fundamentally means that there’s going to be a smaller audience for them to reach due to users being more spread out between instances in addition to the lack of ads and recommendation algorithms to spoonfeed their content to new viewers. Even if the UI/UX were more polished, IDK why they would prefer to use the Fediverse over significantly larger centralized services that basically cater to their use-case. The Fediverse is good for hobbyists and everyone else though, whom I happen to prefer for the most part.

Professional content creators probably aren’t going to like the Fediverse in general since the design inherently limits their reach and there’s just fundamentally less money in it for them. I don’t think it works as a profession in its current form here.

It’s when you connect two unrelated platforms. If PeerTube had a YouTube bridge it would be able to play YouTube content directly on all of its instances without people having to re-upload anything.

The only real hardware problems I come across these days with Linux is WiFi cards being shit. As far as I’m concerned, carefully selecting hardware is a problem for the *BSDs at this point. Am I missing something?

Sounds interesting. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on how it plays out.

It’s an open standard for granting clients access to APIs without needing to hand over things like your password each time.

True, it is like a breath of fresh air. I’ve thought that the internet has felt cancerous for at least a decade at this point, but with the Fediverse everything has felt so nice again for the first time in ages.