Matt

The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.

Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.

As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it's very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.

1. Isn't pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
2. Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn't matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it's more than just click the icon, it's too much.
3. If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

Threads never released in the EU in the first place, so this absolutely is not the reason for lowered engagement.

In an indirect way it could be though - not having the entirety of the EU on Threads is a huge non-starter for many people, as many of their favourite influencers, celebrities, companies, etc will be from the EU who were never able to get on it.

This is a strange take - Mastodon makes up ~80% of the Fediverse, whereas Lemmy makes up like 3% or something.

Mastodon is the entire reason the Fediverse as a whole ended up taking off - for most people, it is the only thing they are aware of.

That's because ublock.org is not related to uBO. uBlock is the original project that got compromised.

You're 100% wrong on the details.

A few things:

1. Lemmy runs on an open protocol which cannot be "bought", known as ActivityPub. All platforms that use ActivityPub can theoretically interact and federate with Lemmy. This means that if something like lemmy.world was bought, we don't have to "move away from it", we just spin up another instance and then federate with it while the other instance doesn't have to deal with corporate things like ads.
2. Lemmy is Free and Open Source Software licensed under a version of the GPL. This means that it can never be fully restricted, and if corporate interests were to theoretically "buy" the current maintainers, it can be forked to a version without corporate meddling, which can then federate and interact with all the current instances anyway, due to how ActivityPub works.
3. There's a lot of instances. You can't buy the entire fediverse as you will have people with principles.

Now don't get me wrong, they can absolutely meddle, but not purely through money or hostile takeovers, due to the decentralised nature of the Fediverse. No matter what, the Fediverse will always exist as it is, all the huge platforms can do is try to make it so people don't want to use the Fediverse and move to their platforms instead.

To try and give an analogy, it would be like a company trying to "buy the web" - they literally cannot. Of course, we do have some huge players who control a lot of the web and attempt to dictate standards for everyone else, but there is no one iron fist that rules over everything, and there's many small players and communities all over the place.

Literally any of them.

All you do is install your drivers if using Nvidia, then just install your games, whether native packages, flatpak, Steam, Lutris, or whatever.

I just run Debian 12 and everything through Lutris or native. Used to run Steam through Flatpak which also worked perfectly, but don't play any games on Steam anymore.

Ultimately, it's because the concerns of privacy are simply too far removed from people, or they trust certain entities more than others.

For example, if your next door neighbour knows all your browsing history, people would be bothered, but people are not bothered if Google knows as it feels they would have no direct effect on their life, whereas your next door neighbour might.

This can be easily seen in the whole discussion regarding privacy on Mastodon.

A lot of people refuse to use Mastodon over Twitter, because "Mastodon admins can see my DMs", even though Twitter absolutely could as well (Twitter apparently has encrypted DMs since May 2023 though). The reason for this is they see a Mastodon admin as someone who could potentially have an effect on their digital life, whereas they trust Twitter not to do anything with the data since they're a big corporation who has nothing to do with their personal life.

Unless it is an effect they can directly observe (or imagine to occur), people simply don't care. This applies to almost all discussions around the big picture, such as things like climate change or unions, or whatever.

Whether we like it or not, people absolutely trust corporations.

Hard to say exactly what Mastodon does, but mastodon.social's privacy policy should give you some direction in how they handle data: https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy

As mastodon.social is based in Germany, they will know about GDPR and have to follow it to the letter.

Here's my personal list of recommended apps for a few things:

• Aegis (Play Store / F-Droid / GitHub) - 2FA FOSS app that's minimal and simple
• Auxio (F-Droid / GitHub) - No-nonsense music player for local files
• ConnectBot (Play Store / F-Droid / GitHub) - Simple SSH client
• K-9 Mail, soon to be Thunderbird (Play Store / F-Droid / GitHub) - No-nonsense e-mail client
• NewPipe (F-Droid / GitHub) - YouTube client for privacy, has no ads, supports background playing, local subscription lists, and ability to download videos
• Techmino (GitHub) - FOSS Tetris clone with no ads and multiple modes, definitely my favourite
• Waistline (F-Droid / GitHub) - Calorie counter app that stores all data locally. Need to add products yourself but have full control.

It's whatever you want it to be.

In general, people on the fediverse are pretty chill and not hateful, but there are instances full of genocide deniers or literal white supremacists.

Thing is though, each instance moderates differently and your experience varies depending on where you are.

For example, beehaw.org (not sure if it's back up) is a very heavily moderated and curated space, and most people there tend to be from marginalised groups. They will federate and defederate accordingly so that experience is preserved.

On the other hand, you have instances such as exploding heads which are "free speech" which attracts the kind of people you expect, and your interactions across the fediverse will follow suit.

Your instance and moderation defines your experience on the fediverse, not the platform.

There's been a few comments on here talking about Firefox on Android being laggy compared to Chrome on Android.

Nobody seems to have mentioned this, but the main reason this is and/or appears to be the case is because Firefox is capped at 60Hz, whereas Chrome will display at 90Hz, making it feel much smoother.

No, I have no idea why.

Edit: The above is misinformation after I did some research - it appears that resisting fingerprinting causes the browser to set itself to 60Hz, but this can be disabled to get your screen's refresh rate, but of course this means throwing away a privacy protection...

You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these "free" products that do everything you need them to, so they've built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.

Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn't see this as they don't follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that's all people care about.

The one thing Musk and Spez have successfully done is make themselves scapegoats that leave people believing that everything will be resolved once they leave, so people have hope since there's a "clear solution."

These issues run much deeper than the individual owners and CEOs though, it's the rot of the companies and platforms themselves, and getting rid of those people will solve absolutely nothing.

What needs to happen is for people to just switch off and help grow alternative platforms away from corporate meddling. Will it ever become mainstream? Maybe not, but it will never happen if people never try and just give up.

So I didn't read it either (sue me), however people are paid to work on Linux. The examples you give about RedHat and SUSE are completely incorrect - they're not there to tell people how to use Linux, they literally develop for it and are paid to make it a better product.

The "issue", of course, is that they focus their paid efforts on Enterprise and server usage, and not as a user-facing product for the most part, although it could be argued that widespread adoption by companies is how you get it into peoples' hands, since they get used to it at work or education.

Also, you're using Ubuntu LTS 20.04 which is technically out of date, as 22.04 LTS also exists, and LTS is primarily meant to be for server/company use, rather than trying to keep up with the latest software and features.

I took a look at your bullet point list too, and literally every single one of your bullet points (other than accessibility, unfortunately) is covered by my laptop running Debian 12 with KDE Plasma - seriously, try out a KDE Plasma distro, it most likely fixes all your problems.

As an aside, linking to comments appears to be bugged and only shows any replies to it and not the main comment, like so:

Might be worth copy/pasting the content for now, I assume it's a bug in Lemmy UI. Unfortunately hitting show context just refreshes the page.

I am suspecting this is related to issue 2030.

It's weird that you use Germany as an example when Germany has been on Mastodon since 2020 at https://social.bund.de!

This is absolutely not a concern for 99% of people. As much as we (rightfully) scream about it on Lemmy and Mastodon, most people don't care.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and others are already collecting this information already, it's so strange to see people acting like this is a new phenomenon.

Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.

It's the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don't have a presence there.

That figure includes all known users in the federation with Lemmy. The users on kbin instances is a lot less, I'm not sure how to check that though myself.

It's not that complicated.

Threads is another instance that brings people to the Fediverse, and people like the idea that they can stay on their instances while still interacting with the world at large. For many people, having everyone on the Fediverse is the goal, and in fact, is a long-term goal of most of the platforms - the "Fediverse" is not meant to be a sort of closed community only for marginalised people to get away from the corporate web, it's for everyone to use in whatever way they see fit.

There is literally nothing more to discuss if you're wondering why people "defend" Threads.

Because they use ActivityPub, both of them can potentially interact with each other (post, viewing, following, liking, boosting, etc). There's no way to stop Threads from being able to interact fully with Lemmy if it's something Meta wanted to implement. Mastodon can already interact with Lemmy directly by following communities, posting to communities, and interact with posts/comments. Lemmy doesn't go the other way though because it isn't implemented, but it could be.

Any ActivityPub software/platform/website can interact with any other ActivityPub software/platform/website if it so wants to, because the backend of things like posts/comments/communities/etc are the same across every single platform if they choose to implement them, the difference between the ActivityPub platforms is how they choose to show you information and how you interact with it.

Edit: Made a few edits for clarification.

Yeah there is, governments too. It's not super widespread but they do have a presence.

Due to how federation and anti-viral Mastodon is though, they can't hijack trends and stuff so a lot will most likely never come.

I have worked in service/retail, and this argument doesn't make a lot of sense. Most service/retail is actually 7-day weeks, but the workers average out to 5-day weeks with rotating shifts etc.

All that would have to happen is the workers now average out to 4-day weeks, with a similar level of pay (which is what the 4-day week advocates are asking for).

The 4-day week isn't about office workers, it's about everyone.

I would suspect at some point it will come into contact with other matter but yea... That could take a very, very long time.

Have people installed Debian since Debian 12? The installer is very straight forward, and Debian 12 also comes with all the firmware modules to make things "just work" for people.

I would like to know exactly what Debian does wrong other than a blanket statement of "it's hard".

That's my take on it as well - GDPR is for the individual instances to deal with, as they're the ones who hold the data on their users and anything coming to them.

The software, of course, can have some design which purges data automatically or whatever, but ultimately the control is whoever is hosting Lemmy so no matter what Lemmy does, people can override it (though some sane defaults are always good, of course).

For a non-tech answer, it's basically the "language" used between these websites to make them talk to each other.

If a website uses ActivityPub, it can fetch information (and send information) to other sites that are using ActivityPub in a specific way that's designed for social media.

Another example of this would be SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) which is what e-mail uses so that different e-mail servers (outlook, yahoo, gmail, etc) can all talk to each other seamlessly.

I suspect they mean blocking instances at the user level - Mastodon allows this.

Right, the point of the 4 day work week is that it will become the new standard for full time work, rather than the current 5 days.

So all your points are kind of moot, as they will ideally be addressed through cultural changes, employee expectations, or regulation.

Yeah it's weird, there's plenty of examples of what people would consider "profitable" non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.

Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.

Build value, and people will happily support you.

You don't - you just open your distros software manager (which is like an app store) and get all your apps that way.

Been like this for several years.

And that's fine, the Fediverse gives you tools to not have to deal with that through silencing or defederation.

But for many people on the Fediverse, they're here specifically for other things, and being able to interact with the corporate social web from outside of it is ideal for them.

Note that I'm not arguing for or against here, it's just very easy to see why many aren't interested in defederating.

https://floorp.app

Firefox fork with features like the sidebar, vertical tabs, and more. It's a vivaldi-like gecko browser, give it a shot.

To be fair it's not really "falling" - Lemmy instances are not in competition with one another due to federation.

Understandably people want to feel like they "won" somehow, but this isn't something you really need to worry about on the Fediverse, it's more like everyone working alongside each other.

Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.

I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.

Is there a reason people go through all these steps for patching YouTube when you could just use NewPipe or LibreTube to browse YouTube without any ads, with background play, and so on?

The reason this doesn't work so well is that Lemmy communities are ActivityPub groups, which is not a feature the Mastodon has really implemented - right now you just follow the group as a user and it boosts all the posts to you.

However, Mastodon plans to do groups in their next major update, and this will most likely make the integration much nicer.

This is my take too - Google Search and YouTube especially which are owned by Google.

Even if Chrome had like 5% market share, surely they could just push this anyway? While the Chromium monopoly is partially to blame for this, I'd argue the centralisation of the web is as well.

Sure, "Google Search is useless now, you can't find what you want!", but the vast, vast majority of people still and continue to use it, and nothing will change that most likely.

Isn't this literally what Waistline is for Android? You create your own local food database (which you can automatically fetch info from Open Food Facts or USDA if desired, but not required) which lets you put in as many nutriments to track as you wish, all with graphs and information with different timelines.

No clue if there's anything like this for desktop.