They’d get busy: The creator of Phanphy also maintains a list of github repos named after Pokemon.

That’s great!

It’s a nice user interface, made by @cheeaun@mastodon.social, and loved by a lot of people.

If you don’t want to trust people with your account details that’s fine - then using a third party app is probably not for you, unless you’re willing to either trust people or dig into the source code.

If you have Mastodon you can just try it?

It’s a Mastodon client. It has many neat features. I like it on desktop because it’s easy to navigate with my keyboard. It’s also great on phone. Overall pleasant, Mastodon users should try it out. But I feel like describing it at length is not really productive - it’s a user interface.

I’d say pretty much all of those are worth a look!

Personally I’m curious how Bonfire and the Open Science Network will develop. Bandwagon also seems to have a lot of potential.

Would be curious to hear if anyone have tried using Quiblr! It’s not really for me I think, but it does look like an interesting service.

The EU at least is still sticking around, which is cool.

I have to say I’m a believer in slow growth here. It wouldn’t be good if one Mastodon server completely dominated; neither would it be good if Mastodon as a software was the only viable alternative. Right now we’re in a great spot where a bunch of different solutions are being developed.

I think this development is healthy, and it be depends on slower more organic growth. And it might not be a linear process, but eventually I believe activitypub integration will be as obvious as having an RSS feed. Doesn’t matter much if it takes a while to get there.

On that note it would be good if governments didn’t just sometimes use Mastodon, but rather integrate activitypub into their actual web sites.

I just mentioned them because they’re microblog sites, so in theory they do the exact same thing as Mastodon. The number of Mastodon users doesn’t matter; the number of people on Fediverse platforms compatible with Mastodon matters.

So Lemmy users are not very helpful, but Mbin users maybe more so. Or Friendica.

The point is just that the number of Mastodon users is, in theory, irrelevant, as you don’t just communicate with Mastodon users. Maybe misskey was a bad example, I don’t know anything about it.

FediDB reports that the Mastodon active user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.

Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It’s natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it’s an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It’s not here for explosive growth.

Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it was matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial or misskey, it wouldn’t really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.

Anyway, they’re not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they’re not entirely right either.

Then again, the only person in these comments actually using lemmy.world seemed pretty happy with his experience.

It would be nice if people had an easier way of knowing the level of moderation before joining a server. One idea could be for services like Fediverser could include an indicator of moderation level - for example “relaxed” if few instances are defederated, “moderate” if moderation is more active, and “strict” for more restrictive communities. Data from Fediseer might be useful in this regard.

That way the people fleeing Reddit because of censorship would know where to go, and the rest of us wouldn’t have to be bothered by them unless we really wanted to.

The biggest problem, I guess, is that it’s a lot of work, and I certainly don’t have the time nor skill-set required. So people will just have to read their instance rules. :)

Simple! According to this thread, it is:

• an arbitrary standard of censorship
• nonexistent
• constant abuse of power
• the Chinese Communist Party

It doesn’t even need to make sense on a conceptual level!

It’s accessibility, and it’s also sovereignty.

Another way of rephrasing this decision is “we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X”. Which is pretty questionable.

The Fediverse is not one thing. It’s a bunch of different sites that are interconnected. You can join a site that has strict moderation, or you can join one that has no moderation at all.

Personally, I’m not here because I think moderation on Instagram and X is too active. Rather to the contrary.

In my case, somewhat chronological order:

1. First Mastodon account, on server that is unmaintained but still running.
2. Funkwhale
3. Mastodon with full name for academic use, on relevant server
4. BookWyrm
5. Kbin (dead now)
6. New Mastodon for hobby interests, as the server of my first account is worthless at this point
7. Piefed
8. Mbin
9. My professional website is in the early stages of federating as well. Still work in progress, but I follow myself and it somewhat works

If a nodebb forum I have an account on decides to federate I might reach double digits.

I recently moved to Denmark. A lot of my stuff is from the trash, including a huge old school full wood dinner table, TV, and my stereo system (works as a charm, sounds amazing). I also picked up an amazing old cast iron frying pan.

I make sure to check the big thrash (storeskrald) regularly. Things pop up there that I would never have afforded myself if I had to pay for it.

I think Denmark/Copenhagen is a bit crazy in this regard though.

Here’s a GNOME blog post from a couple of years ago. But really it’s about GTK4 - apps designed for GNOME are made to be adaptive. So if you’re using a GNOME desktop you can experience it yourself by simply making windows of the core apps smaller, be it GNOME Web, Maps, Weather, Calendar, or a huge range of other apps. Apps like Spot (Spotify client), Tuba (Mastodon), Shortwave (radio), and Podcasts are also perfectly adaptable for mobile devices. Basically apps in the GNOME Circle should work well on mobile, and many of them have screenshots that illustrate how they look in different form factors.

Also, this.

More than anything, the problem is apps. I installed Ubuntu Touch on an old device I had lying around (after replacing the battery to bring it back to life), and I ended up liking it more than my daily driver. It worked, the interface was snappy (no pun intended), and there’s a lot of solid design choices. I found myself trying to navigate with gestures on my android phone after.

However, I could not talk to my friends, who unfortunately use WhatsApp. I could not install my banking app. There’s a bunch of small thorns in the side that makes changing difficult for most users - kind of like in the early days of desktop Linux.

As in the early days of desktop Linux, the solution might lie in a compatibility layer (like WINE). Android emulation within at least Ubuntu Touch has gotten quite good, I believe. Unfortunately my device is too old to support it.

Those interested should also check out Postmarket OS.

GNOME, a major desktop environment, is also moving towards all apps being designed for all types of devices. But as long as people can’t use their banks, switching is hard.

If you want something that could actually be useful in real-life situations, pick up running.

I can’t say I ever really understood what Newsmast is up to, but Channel.org looks pretty nifty. It seems like a good way for organisations consisting of several independent people to get together and present all their federated content in one public channel.

The hatred is partly fuelled by people in the open source community getting really riled up when they find out some open source projects are developed by organizations that need to earn money and pay their employees, be it Red Hat, Canonical, GNOME, Mozilla, or anything else. Female leadership will tend to push people over the edge.

In addition to the usual rage-fuelled misogyny of open source forums, there is however also valid concern out there. It can be difficult to hear through the noise.

Mozilla’s job listings provide some insight to what many consider to be a red flag for the way forward. To work on FireFox, they are looking for:

• Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Director of Product, Firefox Growth
• Principal Product Manager, Generative AI
• Senior Software Engineer - Layout (CSS and ICU4X Support)
• Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI
• Staff Full-stack Engineer - Generative AI
• Senior Front End Engineer, Gen AI
• Senior Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Front-End Engineer, Firefox
• Staff Software Engineer - Credential Management
• Staff Software Engineer - Release Engineering
• Senior Front-End Software Engineer, New Tab

For fairness I include every position, highlighting in bold the ones I think are likely to do more harm than good. This is not the direction I want FireFox to take, and I believe Mozilla are misguided to try to place themselves as the ethical AI actor. That said I’m not 100% against it all of the time - I do think the local in-browser machine translation feature of newer releases is great. But I don’t think I want much more than that, and even this feature should probably have been an optional plug-in.

There’s also some former empolyees voicing valid concerns.

In short, I think the legitimate criticism boils down to:

1. Buying into the AI hype
2. Flirting with “more ethical” ads and tracking, rather than being unquestionably on the user’s side of just blocking it all
3. Doing too many things nobody asked for, arguably while not paying enough attention to FireFox
4. Appearing distant from the community and unresponsive to its preferences
5. Paying company leadership too much

I don’t really buy into point 3 personally. I use FireFox every day and it’s by far the best browser I have ever had. It never gives me any problems at all, and password sync with Android is really useful. I wish it would support JPG XL, but that’s pretty much it in terms of complaints on my end.

New in this release:

• Separate audio and video streams, so that only one audio track is stored on the server even if there are multiple resolutions for a video, and viewers can choose only to stream audio. You can also do audio-only live streams. Cool.
• Browse subtitles, search them, click on them, read them to a friend
• Better video fetching from Youtube channels, in case you post there first
• Smaller tweaks to improve user experience

Cool stuff.

PS: My favourite way to keep up to date on PeerTube content is to go to Piefed, press the search button, choose “PeerTube” under Instance Software and sort by “Recent first”. It shows content from all PieFed channels subscribed to by PieFed users, so it’s a limited scope, but I still think it’s a nice little feed.