Recovering skooma addict.
sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.
What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it’s also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that’s the intention.
Maybe I don’t want the “normies” around, whoever they are, but personally I would like to see a lot more people joining in such as Go players, Skyrim modders, situationists, auto mechanics, British panel show enthusiasts, death metal guitarists, discordians, card sharks, magicians, acid heads, skydivers, xylophonists, and amateur zookeepers. This part of fedi has more than enough politics and computers and too little everything else.
It’s not for the end user’s boss, it’s there to collect data for the future Microsoft user behaviour analysis tools that will be sold to the end user’s boss’s boss.
Actually, I guess they’re carefully probing to find out exactly what level of freedom they can give their users before they start losing people to the real fediverse. As soon as they find it they’ll make things just slightly worse than that.
According to another report:
Threads users can like the replies from other servers, but they can’t yet reply to them, as the feature is still in beta and under development.
It’s like they’re trying to find out how slowly they can go while still convincing enough people that they’re going to get there some day.
I wish Signal was developed more openly, more like the linux kernel for a “critical infrastructure” example. I wish it had more features, so it could take the place of something like Slack. I wish it supported interoperability like fedi.
But it’s good for what it is and I sure am glad it’s around. People who disrespect it don’t know what they’re talking about.
Oh right, I forgot there’s a setting you may need in order to show only ‘subscribed’ stuff by default.
It’s sort of confusing. I usually just navigate directly to fedia.io/sub/newest as my starting point and then the microblog link at the top goes to /sub/microblog/newest.
They appear in the “microblog” tab. To see them it’s necessary to get in the habit of clicking on that occasionally. Seems worth it. The rest of the fediverse is maybe two orders of magnitude larger than lemmy, there’s lots of stuff to be seen out there.
It’s much easier to follow people from e.g. mastodon from here than I remember it being on lemmy.
Okay, sorry! Still a long way to go before the idea becomes sufficiently well-specified to make much sense to me though. Perhaps an examination of yacy could provide you a concrete example of the ways in which such things are complicated. One would need to do much better to end up with a suitable replacement for the ways many of us use searx.
It was wanting to use ActivityPub and the “I fail to see any downside” which led me to read the rest of your post in a way that might’ve been overly pessimistic about its merits.
Ah, I wondered if something like that had been tried before. Looks like it is maybe still running: https://yacy.net/
The demo isn’t giving me useful search results.
I think you are not a computer programmer. Trying to build an index of the web by querying other search engines is not an efficient or sensible way to do things. Using ActivityPub for it is insane. Sharing query results in the obvious way might help a little during events where everyone searches for the same thing all at once, but in a relatively small pool of relatively sophisticated Internet users I don’t think that happens often enough to justify the enormous amount of work and complexity.
On the other hand a distributed web crawler that puts its results in a free and decentralized database (one appropriate to the task; not blockchain) might be interesting. If the load on each node could be made light enough and the software simple enough that millions of people could run it at home, maybe it could be one way to build a new search engine. If that needs doing and someone has several hundred hours of free time to get it started.
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging
It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”
But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.
If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.
The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.
Never mind the small fry. The word “put” has enough different meanings to fry your CPU.
Suddenly I’m worried about AI’s energy draw. “6 percent of global electricity” is not a small amount of electricity.
Further searching turns up the information that “federated” Bluesky PDS instances are limited to ten user accounts each, and API usage limits which may constrain things further. So that would explain why there aren’t any big ones.
So far as I can tell they do all still “federate” through the central server, not directly with each other. So there being not much point in it may also explain why it hasn’t caught on.
Almost as bad as Threads, really.
Well, what’s a popular server? Are there several big ones? Sorry, but I really don’t understand why the answer isn’t turning up in web search results.
PS: Are you sure it isn’t just people who’ve done the “set your domain as your handle” thing but even so are still on the central one? Because even if they have made some small progress towards decentralization they absolutely have not gone so far that there isn’t still a central one.
Is it really? Seems hard to find out. Anyone have a list of Bluesky servers other than the central one with open signups?
tl;dr: Here’s everything you need to know about the fediverse, assuming you’re never going to use it. Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Friendica. Now, back to our regular coverage of all the biggest social companies, including TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Reddit, as well as funding and acquisitions of new social startups.
37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That’s ~90% who didn’t bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.