The annoying thing to me is that it's taken a further 13 years to reach a point where another social network is feasible.
I'm not saying there haven't been attempts like diaspora and the early mastadon etc, but now we're actually reaching a critical mass of participants where a move is worth it.
The same is true of Signal. I've been using it for nearly a decade, but it's only in the last 2 years that people haven't rolled their eyes when I mention it's my preferred comms app.
I'd sign up to Titter.
I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷♂️
I don't want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it's beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.
Threads will mainstream threads.
Any good content here will be available to the Threads users, who will be oblivious to where it is coming from.
Eventually, Meta will take steps to break compatability, and lots of the most prolific contributors from here will move to Threads exclusively (for a host of valid reasons).
When it is no longer in Meta interest to federate, they will stop.
The fediverse will continue, but it will be weakened by it's temporary reliance on Threads (who could afford to host large images/videos/etc, have lower latency, etc etc).
That single point of failure is to facilitate ease of use, with minimal reduction in security.
The messages are e2e encrypted and the server is designed in such a way that attempting to listen in would bring it down.
The signal org doesn't even have your address book.
If your concern is "I don't like signal", you're not going to make much traction.
The stated reason is that there's too many bad actors coming from here, so it's too hard to moderate:
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.
Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.
I want to be clear, that I disagree with his "federation is stupid" point, but email has problems right now.
Theoretically it's federated, theoretically you can spin up your own mail server and self host.
But even if you do that absolutely perfectly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), you can falsely end up on spam list, that effectively block delivery of your email to large segments of the network for days if not weeks.
Whilst theoretically federated, email falls under the broad dominion of google, microsoft and a couple of other large players.
The condescension in that makes it clear that the smug social network is whichever one the author happens to use.
The US (which is where I assume you are), has the second largest one in the world in current operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station
Short answer, it scales fine.
Now you need to find someone to pay for it.
I love the top gear reference, but surely May would have been the obvious choice, Hammond is just asking for a crash!
The Back to the Future trilogy is good for a re-view.
JavaScript (TypeScript) has access to cookies (and thus JWT). This should be handled by web browser, not JS. In case of log-in, in HTTPS POST request and in case of response of successful log-in, in HTTPS POST response. Then, in case of requesting web page, again, it should be handled in HTTPS GET request. This is lack of using least permissions as possible, JS should not have access to cookies.
JavaScript needs access to the cookies, they are the data storage for a given site.
To protect them, the browser silos them to the individual site that created them, that's why developers haven't been able to easily load cross domain content for years, to mitigate XSS attacks.
The security relies on the premise that the only valid source of script is the originating domain.
The flaw here was allowing clients to add arbitrary script that was displayed to others.
You're dead right that only the way to fix this is to do away with JavaScript access to certain things, but it will require a complete refactor of how cookies work.
I haven't done any web dev in a few years, this might even be a solved problem by now and we are just seeing an old school implementation. 🤷
I never owned a console, but I distinctly remember playing this, so there must have been a PC port some time in the early 90s.
Classic game.
I mean yes, but that's not a federation problem.
To completely strawman AND slippery slope what you're saying:
As a car safety pro, who primarily deals with car crashes:
STOP
TOWING
TRAILERS
Agreed, dangerous, I don't want numpties doing it.
But it's a large part of why I have a car.
The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.
By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to !australia@aussie.zone AND upvote boobs.
Individual instance owners can do literally whatever they like.
Put up ads.
Charge a subscription.
Anything.
Let's say instance A is hosting a community that everyone on instances B and C love to participate in.
But A want's to earn some money so they start charging access to their local users.
This doesn't effect users of B and C at all, because the data is federated.
The owner of A get's grumpy and defederates B and C.
The users on B and C find somewhere else, either on one of their instances, or on D.
Everybody wins.
I'm not goin to shit on Briar, I hope they build out their dream.
It's fundamentally not as easy to use.
My Grandma already has a phone with a full addressbook.
If she's told to install Signal, it'll just work as a drop in replacement for iMessage.
Briar meanwhile suggests sharing your contact info using another such as signal: https://briarproject.org/quick-start/#:~:text=When%20you%20choose%20%E2%80%9CAdd%20contact%20at%20a%20distance%E2%80%9D%2C%20Briar,choose%20a%20nickname%20for%20them.
Briar is chasing different goals.
Main stream reporting.
Get John's attention, hope he does a segment on it.
I hope he not only does, but that he drives attention here, it will bring new users.
Maybe the client is faster/prettier/can show videos/uses less data/integrates with their phone better.
Maybe it's got features that clients here lack such as the ability to host larger images or video.
Maybe the user is sick of responding to conversations over there and it not being federated, so they are ignored.
Maybe using the Threads app is just faster (because it's local instead of batch federating).
If I was in charge of product design for Threads, I would be literally crawling the issue listings for Lemmy/Kbin and the associated clients looking for complaints and implementing solutions for those problems.
Then I would make a list of every limitation within the system and make sure Threads exceeds that baseline.
And then when I had made the software better in every measurable way (because I am paying a large team of developers to target those pain points), I'd start adding features that ActivityPub doesn't, especially if ActivityPub instances would find those features hard to implement.
I'd make damn sure that every time ActivityPub changes from a source outside Meta, I'd drag my heels on implementing that feature, so that instance hosts are forced to choose between implementing the new version, or maintaining compatability with Threads.
Why would a user here move there?
Because their spouse/coworker/friend tried to send something for the 50th time and the message just never came through.
I also use this.
Have had to update it in tiny ways in the last ~ 7 years?
Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you'll need to update it dynamically.
It's becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.
One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.
I personally use a bash script triggered by cron on my server to first determine my external IP address: curl http://v4.ident.me/ then if it differed from the last check, would update one of my dns entries via the godaddy API.
This can be a simple or as complicated as you like.
Impressive.
And dissapointing that you can't simply grab the chromecast client from a google github instance somewhere and integrate it.
Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.
I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.
These are cool ideas.
I'm only one voice screaming in the darkness, but I want to be clear.
These are not risks. These are certainties.
And the only thing we can do about it is refuse to participate in their bad faith actions, for whatever good that will do.
20 years of professional developer experience and some outsider knowledge of what Facebook has done in the past.
I'm not a cheap whore Meta, I expect to get PAID.
The first 90% of the task takes 90% of the time.
The last 10% of the task takes the other 90% of the time.