Check out the app permissions for the Mastodon app vs its competitors, and you’ll get an idea.

Of course, it’s not the Fediverse as such - Threads is still surveillance capitalism, even if it gains full AP support. And 3rd party Mastodon apps can track as much as they want. But the Fediverse makes it possible, by not depending on returns on investments.

Twitter was never the town square of the Internet. The Miiverse was.

It would be way too cool if the Wii homebrew scene implemented ActivityPub in the original miiverse. I might just dust of my Wii for that.

Is it particularly common for judges to have this kind of age difference? Do you think his profession is part of the attraction?

I’ve seen it before with a legal scholar and an international judge. I only met them together when he was maybe late 70s and having suffered a stroke, so the age difference was maybe more glaring than when they first met.

Might have been a user error then! Admittedly I did not try very hard.

There’s also a low bandwidth mode available. It’s an impressive platform in general.

In my experience it’s very snappy, and with minimal JavaScript (if at all). Hell, it’s even somewhat usable in Lynx, though I couldn’t sign in.

I wouldn’t be quite so pessimistic. There’s a commit for #FetchAllReplies (by @[email protected], I believe) that seems to be shaping up well, with a seemingly healthy debate going on. Just yesterday @[email protected] posted in agreement that it is a must-fix issue.

They’re moving slow, but their reasons for doing so doesn’t seem to boil down to an unwillingness to fix it.

Mastodon is non-proprietary software. So one person or company cannot own it in a meaningful sense.

His foundation might own the copyright on the name and logo, so that bad actors can’t pretend to be them. That’s pretty much it.

I was surprised to learn how little the domain as user name feature actually means, after setting it up with my bridged account.

The real user names on Bluesky are called DIDs. Different URLs can point to a DID, making your profile discoverable through this URL. By default it’ll be username.bsky.app (or username.instance.bsky.brid.gy), but as long as the URL redirects to the DID it could really be anything.

Several such redirects could be active, but you choose one to be the “official” one that shows up on your profile. People don’t follow your domain though - when they interact with you, they interact with the account associated with the underlying DID.

It’s basically just smoke and mirrors for what is still a very centralized service.

It is still, of course, more decentralized than Twitter, as one can post there through the bridge without having an account. So that’s neat. But the whole domain thing is deceiving as hell.

As a general rule, try to also include a description of who you are on your profile. If you’re active people will check in, if you give some sort of description there they are more likely to actually follow you.

Usually when someone follows me I’ll check out their profile, if they look interesting I’ll follow them back. If their profile is empty I usually won’t.

I post on mastodon and bridge to bluesky. That way I can reach anyone there interested in following me, but I personally don’t have to bother with the site at all.

As someone trying to reach an audience, it’s pretty much perfect. Each to their own obviously.

Thanks, very insightful!

Maybe elaborate?

Vitamin D supplements. You’re not gonna get much sunlight, and you need vitamin D not to get depressed.

The locals are used to seasonal depression. Foreigners tend to have a hard time with it.

Layers are key. Noting beats real wool.

Use mittens, not gloves. Gloves suck.

You cannot interact with microblog folks on Lemmy, unless they actively post something in a Lemmy community by tagging it. So if you want to combine microblogging with threaded discussions Mbin is the only platform that does both. Mbin lists followers publicly.

I think there are Mastodon forks (or configurations) that hide followers from the public though. But it will only ever be half hidden.

It’s useful.

Let’s say you see someone who posts stuff you’re interested in. In a brief moment of absolute brilliance, you think to yourself “aha! Maybe this person follows other people whose content I would be interested in!”

So you check, and sure enough, there’s a bunch of interesting people listed. So you follow them as well. Your social graph grows, you have a better time there, the people you follow get better reach and gets to enjoy pleasant interactions with you. Everybody’s happy.

These social media platforms are designed to be public. If you want to do stuff in secret, do it somewhere else.

I guess I at least agree that we were naïve with regards to Dorsey and way too slow to realize Twitter was a threat. Looking back now it seems like it was bound to go to hell eventually, and if we look beyond the west it already went to hell a long time ago. And even in the west the tipping point was arguably years before Musk bought Twitter, it was just that people were too addicted to accept how dangerous it was.

So I guess you could criticize people for only realizing now how fucked up Twitter is. Then again, better late than never.

That’s fantastic.

It seems clear the English speaking web has a preference for Bluesky. It would be interesting to know how much variation there is between users of other European languages. It seems to me the Germans are pretty active in the Fediverse, which makes sense considering a significant portion of them have been huge privacy nerds since the fall of the GDR.

Oh no, it’s fine, we’re just being softly threatened with the enabling of a Russian invasion of our eastern borders should we force Twitter to comply with our laws. No real problem here, keep posting.

I just saw this post over at Mastodon, and it seems to be a solid reminder why Victorinox deserves to be represented in this community:

A few weeks ago, I sent my 1985 Swiss Army Knife back to Victorinox for a broken blade replacement.

It came back today, fully repaired, cleaned, polished, lubricated and in a new box.

Total cost: £10 + return postage.

They sent the knife back with an invoice. I didn’t have to pay a penny before the job was done.

A product that’s been out of production for almost 40 years, repaired at very little cost by the original manufacturer.

I’m stunned. Happy, impressed, grateful and stunned.

— @[email protected]

I’ve only had my Swiss army knife for around half a decade, but I can confirm that they are still amazing.