I legitimately believe that if ActivityPub services had gained traction before the dotcom bubble, they would be the default today, and twitter/bsky/reddit etc would have to go above and beyond to convince people to used their siloed platforms.

Strong agree. Email is prolific because it is the proto social network infrastructure, and it has interoperability at its core. You have someones email, you can write them. Theoretically it doesn’t matter what email you send it from, you can send an email to any address in the world. There are limits to this these days, because of things like DMARC, DKIM, and SPF, which have been introduced because of shortcomings in the open protocols, but in its purest form, there are no barriers.

If ActivityPub had been around at the same time as email, it would be considered infrastructure the same way email is today. The online world would look different, but don’t neglect that industries are still finding ways to make money from email. There might not have been platforms like the social media silos we have today, but there might be an industry trying to milk ActivityPub for money.

I’m hoping this is the phenomenon that is the best chance for the fediverse’s future, because every time one of the platforms dies off some small percentage of the userbase switches to a fediverse alternative. And a protocol won’t fail like a private service will. So over time, the more often private services fail, the more users find the fediverse, the larger it gets, and the more people notice that it’s the most dependable way to go. It might take 100 years for a critical mass of people to figure it out, but I think in the long term, the fediverse will eventually be seen as “old reliable”.

I too subscribe to this hope. I always end up writing emails to people I haven’t been in touch with for a long time, and aren’t sure about which phone number, social network, or physial address they are currently reachable on. Which reminded me of this post:

https://my-notes.dragas.net/2023/09/25/25-years-later/

Email just (still) works. Can’t ask for more than that.

Ah yes, to prove they drive traffic to places, they funnel all outgoing links through themselves for tracking.

It’s great that Bluesky is gaining traction, but how sure are we that it won’t turn to shit before other relays come online and make it actually decentralised?

This is what I’ve been looking for for a very long time. It’s amazing, thank you for sharing 😍

This seems to have magically fixed itself. This morning the static hissing was still there. Without having done anything to any settings, or changed anything on the phone that to my knowledge could impact this, haptics no longer gives off a static sounding hiss when triggered.

Thanks for checking.

Yeh, that’s a good point, about the loaner and privacy. Will see if I can borrow a phone from a friend while I send it off.

I use this font for any document I type up, if it’s to be consumed by anyone else but myself.

Feddit.dk in the house 👋

@[email protected].

"Access Denied

Our apologies, the content you requested cannot be accessed."

On desktop, either the vanilla PWA for Lemmy, or alexandrite.app. I Really like alexandrite.

On the phone, I flip between Thunder, Summit, Sync, and Connect. Gotta keep a tab on how they develop, and I like them all, for different reasons.

Edit: my current preferred client on mobile is Thunder. Like you say, it feels like a modern way of browsing Lemmy, it’s really good.

Unlike twitter, if there are UI issues, people have a lot of options to try different clients, both mobile and web. I don’t use one only, I flip between a bunch of them, both on web and mobile. Sometimes the vanilla Lemmy experience is what you want, other times someone might have made a great ui for browsing one specific community that you subscribe to.

I’m also somewhere against the argument of it being difficult to pick a server, too difficult to know if it’s the right one for me, etc etc. In other parts of life, people make decisions on this all the time, day in day out, without batting an eyelid, and even on issues with a bigger impact on them, than which federated instans they sign up to a service on. Mobile phone subscriptions, which email provider you should use, what internet provider you should sign up with.

For some reason, social media seems to be one of these areas where we think it’s totally fine that monopolies exist, and options are not… an option. We need to resocialise the idea that it doesn’t hurt to make a conscious choice about where you lay your identity online, and what you sink your time and attention into.

Yes, thank you for adding that aspect. In general it behaves fantastically, but if a site misbehaves, you can disable it for specific sites by clicking the extension when on the page, and unticking the only box there.

I use Consent-O-Matic to automatically select “Reject all”. It’s an extension for both Firefox and Chrome, and I highly recommend it.

https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic