Wow this is bad. Some Italian researchers decided there wasn't enough anti-right-to-repair hardware #DRM in the world already, and developed a way to physically profile and recognize individual battery cells that can be combined with classic DRM technologies to prevent non-OEM battery cells from working inside a device, even if the classic DRM portion is circumvented. Whyyyyyy?!
Over the past year these are the top arguments against the Fediverse:
Too left wing
Too difficult
Not enough people
Not enough mutuals
Too nerdy / too niche
Too confusing
Too ugly
Too many different options and apps
Too many servers
Not owned by a corporation (yes, really, one person told me he prefers an oligarch)
There is no algorithm
Hard to discover people
Many of these are based on the attitude and feeling, but there is some truth to it, for example discoverability is still a bit of an issue. I personally find most of the Fediverse web UIs clunky considering the big world standards, but I’m sure they will get better over time.
@rolle i think this crusade that so many on here have joined is a fruitless one. i think if we all just chilled out on here, ppl would start showing up. like, part of the issue of the fediverse is that half of the convos on here are about the fediverse or how we get more people to join.
if 30 ppl were all standing outside of a bar shouting about how great it is in there, would any of us believe them?
We tried to simulate 1000 viewers on a #PeerTube video, and then on a livestream. (Note that 99% of twitch livestreams are under 1000 simultaneous views.)
We optimized accordingly... And here are the results: it works!
With a ~20$ server, PeerTube can now support such usecases.
I don’t believe the EEE narrative about Threads federation. The number of #fediverse citizens isn’t large enough to justify the (substantial) investment in Fedi/Masto/ActivityPub interop if the goal is just to bring them to Meta. @mosseri explicitly said that the goal was to enable people to move off Threads and I believe him, because…
…All the Big Techs are under considerable political pressure to be less lockin-y and more interoperable. Especially in the EU. If any Threads user is free to step over to some Masto/Akkoma/whatever instance, it’s hard for any regulatory agency or politician to make a case that Meta is locking people in.
A project has started to build a #Fediverse#testsuite, so it becomes possible to systematically test interoperability between applications in the fediverse.
It is going to need some virtualization, to run "substantial" server-side applications for testing. So we'd like to know what development and virtualization platforms #ActivityPub developers develop and test on.
If you are a Fediverse developer, could you spend 5min and answer our survey?
In the light of renewed conversations about Meta and Threads, I would like to remind everyone that it is now easier than ever to run your own fediverse community, without having to worry about setting up and maintaining your own server.
One of the world’s longest-running experiments has been going for 144 years!
In 1879, botanist William Beal wanted to study how long buried seeds would remain viable. He buried bottles w different seeds in a secret spot on Michigan State's campus.
Every 20 yrs, a small group scientists dig up the bottles & seeds continue to germinate 🌱 (My husband @DavidLowry is the one on the right).
Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation
Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.
For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.
Content isn't cached unless someone follows it anyways.
And I'm not sure what you mean with that latter part; what difference would this make in what content admins can see before they cast their judgement on a server?
What op said still stands: if only one of your users follow a high-traffic, heavy-content /c/, then the server is caching all of that content for one person.
E.g., there’s this great bot on Mastodon that posts random fractals, and the highest-voted ones “breed” to create a new generation of child fractals. The bot posts a static image and an animated movie of each new child every 4 hours. The images are ca 5mb each; the movies are between 20 & 40mb ea. That is, on average, 210mb/d, or 1.4gb per week. That’s a lot of data. You might, as an admin offering a free service, not want to have to pay for that much storage just because one or two users are suscribed to /c/flamereactor (“FlameReactor” is the name, so you can find this mind-blowingly awesome bot). There’s also bandwidth considerations, both on the pull and when users request the content.
I like the idea, though, and will suggest a tweak, tried and true from Usenet days: provide the ability to unblock to only paying users. It’d give admins control, plus money to offset storage costs. Maybe provide three options to admins: full defederation; auto-block with any user able to unblock, for odeous but low impact sices; and auto-block with unblock for only users in some group - close friends, paying users, whatever.
Lemmy could also transcribe content into links back to the source, but that’s just punting the bandwidth costs onto someone else, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is frowned upon within The Federation (although it’s common practice with Reddit and X(twitter) content).
