Considering the fediverse microblogging scene includes Threads, which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users, I’d say its death is greatly exaggerated.
Yes, I know a lot of Mastodon servers refuse to federate with Threads, and yes I know their active user figures are likely very different from what they claim. But at the end of the day, it’s an ActivityPub microblogging platform with a considerable userbase and a very rich corporate backer.
If something has hundreds of “centralised” platforms owned and run by a diversity of different people and spread all over the world geographically, then that’s “decentralised”.
I can’t really think of another way in which something could be decentralised.
With ActivityPub, there’s nothing stopping you hosting a server literally just for yourself. It wouldn’t get much more decentralised than that.
“Never” is a strong word. API translation is a technical hurdle, but rarely an insurmountable one. If Blue Sky wanted to add an ActivityPub interface to their platform, they probably could.
This issue isn’t technical per se; it’s a matter of priorities. Blue Sky doesn’t want to federate with Mastodon/Threads, because they want users to switch to their platform.
Threads (for better or worse) demonstrates that that’s not a fundamental obstacle for fediverse microblogging.
If someone wanted to launch a Mastodon fork with algorithm-driven content discovery, they could do. Just as with Lemmy/kbin/mbin, the beauty of the fediverse is that different servers can take quite different approaches to use experience design whilst still maintaining compatibility with the rest of the community.
It’s not a bad shout for beginners by any stretch, but it has a massively overdone reputation for beginner-friendliness that is not really deserved
Cinnamon, for one. Yes, it looks kind of like Windows. But the similarity is surface deep, and it’s also pretty janky- by far the biggest resource hog of all the main DEs, lots of weird snagging bugs and stability issues. I’ve always found it very unsatisfying.
I personally use MATE quite a lot and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t really be recommending that to Windows users either; it’s pretty old school at this point.
Keep recommending Mint to people by all means, though. If you like it and it’s what you use, that’s still a great recommendation. There is fundamentally no reason why beginners shouldn’t use it as their first distro.
Heck: phones. Phones are federated. I pay for my phone service through one company, and you pay for your phone service through another, but I can still call you as long as I dial the right number.
The issue isn’t really that federation makes things hard. The issue is that it’s not how people are used to social media, and very specifically social media, working. And people are strange creatures of habit who hate change.
Intel as a company isn’t going anywhere any time soon; they’re just too big, with too many resources, not to do at least OK.
They have serious challenges in their approach and performance to engineering, but short of merging with someone else they’ll find their niche. For as long as x86-derived architectures remain current (i.e. if AMD is still chugging along with them) they’ll continue to put out their own chips, and occasionally they’ll manage to get an edge.
The real question would be what happens if x86 finally ceases to be viable. In theory there’s nothing stopping Intel (or AMD) pivoting to ARM or RISC-V (or fucking POWER for that matter) if that’s where the market goes. Losing the patent/licensing edge would sting, though.
Ha, my thoughts exactly. I’ve dipped out of Lemmy for a few weeks, just dipped back in today. “I wonder if it’s still wall to wall Musk?” I thought, logging in; and this was the first post I see.
There’s nothing truly like a Framework, because they’re a whole unique category of one. But if you just want something that is user serviceable there are other options.
I’m a big fan of my Star Labs laptop. It came with complete disassembly and reassembly instructions, and pretty much every part is available to buy individually as a replacement. It’s not magically “plug and go” like a Framework, but if you’re comfortable with a screwdriver you should have no trouble.
They’re a Linux specialist small independent producer, too. And being based in the UK, imports to Switzerland should be more straightforward than imports from the States.
The corollary of that line of thought though is that by preventing tech companies from dabbling in microprocessors you reduce competition in the microprocessor space- a sector which has proven very prone to the formation of monopolies/duopolies. If anything, we want to encourage more new competitors in that space, not fewer.
Also, it’d be essentially arbitrary. Is it OK for Apple to design its own microprocessors, but not Amazon- and if so, why? Is Google allowed if it uses them in phones like Apple, but not if it uses them in data centres like Amazon?
What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google Are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.
See, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.
That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.
This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They’re the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.
Realistically, they could just move their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it’d only be a VPN away.
The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it’s also not the likely outcome.
Oh yeah, I’ll just tell my wife that we’re never having sex again because we’ve now got enough kids. I’m sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.
I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?
Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.
GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).
Yes, it’s always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.
But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren’t trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.
That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they’re relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a “they’re all the same!” when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.
Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don’t provide anything unique that isn’t provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).
YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we’re a long long way from that right now.
Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn’t to my interest. Other than my local football club’s channel, I can’t think of anything on there that I actually seek out.
In this day and age, if it’s actually important they’ll probably immediately send you a text message/WhatsApp/etc. anyway.