Skull giver

The problems that plagues Mastodon at the time have all been fixed as far as I know, but it’s too late now. Other, more difficult problems remain, like the inconsistencies between server on how many likes/comments a post has and the inevitable perception that you need to create an account on every server to follow people because the follow button doesn’t work by itself even if you’re logged into your account in another tab.

People don’t join a social media platform to go on an adventure and see what every button does. They came looking for a new Twitter rather than a new experience and Mastodon, and kind of still is, a bad Twitter. It’s a great Mastodon, but that’s just not what most people were after.

I agree and I personally think the whole preemptive Threads ban is stupid in general, but at least one major bridge has had to be turned off because people on the Mastodon/ActivityPub side of things got angry. I don’t mean the people behind ActivityPub of course, I’m sure they were chuffed their protocol got buy-in from a major player.

If anything, large corporations using open standards is better, even in situations like Google Talk where Facebook and Google dominated the protocol for a while; at least the protocol is useful for regular people.

AKAIK, activitypub (on mastodon) only requests and receives content from individual users that have been followed by someone on the local instance, it wouldn’t load all of bluesky at once, it would just need to have an up to date database of bluesky’s users so they are easily searchable. With that model, even crappy PC’s can interact with the mega servers.

Yes, but that’s how you end up with the “I don’t have anyone to follow” situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse. Now Mastodon has a feed of sorts, but for small servers (I host my own) you have to know the accounts of the people you want to follow, nothing will show up organically.

With the OP’s point of ATProto being open-source, I assume the thrust of the argument is that at done point there would be a community hosted instance, which were it compatible, I think most activitypub se rvers would gladly federate with.

You can run your own ATProto servers but it the millions of accounts I think maybe 500 to a 1000 users aren’t on the Bluesky instance. You’ll have to ask the people who complained.

Ideally there doesn’t need to be any, as the conglomeration of all smaller instances should be able to act as a large server. Unfortunately as it currently stands, the UI of most fediverse software makes interacting with that wider pool more difficult than it needs to be, and thus punishes smaller Mastodon servers with more difficult discovery of interesting topics or people to follow. But I think that can be overcome simply with better UI design.

From my attempts of convincing people to give Mastodon a try, the federation aspect confuses and scares the normal user. It’s also what taught me that most people don’t seem to realise that you can read your Gmail email without downloading the Gmail app. And that most people don’t realise that mail servers can and will refuse email from other servers as they see fit. My expectations about how well-informed people who email every day are about the core concepts of email were way to high. It’s stupid but it explains a lot of stupid questions I’ve heard of the years.

A large part of the problem is UX, following someone on another server is a massive hurdle that could be overcome (just register a web protocol so we can make links targeting web-activitypub:follow:user@domain, that way websites and apps can follow people without having to enter your username when you click follow…) but change is slow and there are many different projects that all have their own challenges to overcome.

Again, I think that’s a UI problem. I don’t use mastodon myself because of it, as I find it difficult to find people that interest me. However, Lemmy’s use of Topics, and more critically, the existence of Lemmyverse.net which searches across all instances, make finding interesting things possible regardless of the size of your home instance. It’s criminal that that functionality is not a native feature in the standard lemmy Ui, and I’m not aware of anything similar for mastodon.

ActivityPub just brings a lot of overhead. Especially with the way Lemmy uses it, which ensures that you actually get a somewhat view or the current replies on a post. My Lemmy server is constantly spiking in CPU usage because I’ve joined a few larger Lemmy instances. There’s a constant steam of opening and closing HTTPS sockets, constant TLS key exchanges, and often minutes of latency submitting posts in burst. This is tough to optimise for without reaching out and coming to an agreement with every other server owner. ActivityPub is way more efficient for small communities than ATProto ever will be (because it doesn’t take long to cache all keys and only the involved servers gain the information they need), but for larger servers that provide a more “social media” feel, you need to employ active scrapers.

As for the lemmyverse.net thing: you can’t build that into Lemmy without sacrificing some level of independence. A fresh Lemmy server doesn’t know about any other Lemmy servers so it can’t suggest anything. You could add support for third party Lemmy directory services, but then the server owner of lemmyverse gets to decide what servers get to see what other servers out or the gate. Sounds like a good feature for the Lemmy devs to consider, but I’m not sure if they’d accept the pull request without discussing this beforehand. Plus, someone will have to update every Lemmy app as well (and apps can already integrate with lemmyverse of course).

ATProto exists because of ActivityPub’s shortcomings for building Twitter 2.0. The protocol is much better suited for massive websites, and the “run your own data store but let someone else do the content tagging and filtering” approach is actually not a bad idea. The Bluesky firehose throughput is massive and any home ActivityPub instance that tried to enter the network would easily be overwhelmed just loading the basic home page feed. The Bluesky servers probably wouldn’t enjoy the endless connections back home to verify the key material either.

Plus, many ActivityPub folks don’t want to federate with big companies anyway. Threads is blocked by most small servers. A bridging service intended for allowing ATProto/ActivityPub cross communication was the center point of drama as well and had to go opt-in (and instantly became useless as a way to connect the two networks because nobody knows about the service anyway).

I don’t think ActivityPub is made for large servers, and I don’t think the protocol can be patched to support them well without upsetting a lot of people. AP works well for following friends and family, it’s kind of terrible for the tailored topic based social media feed most people want out of social media apps these days.

UHF RFID and the passive RFID injected into people’s skin are quite different technology. The credit card sized antenna combined with a directed radio signal (and a license plate scanner for backup) can do several meters, but a tag in your body won’t be readable beyond a few centimeters. Unless you use an active radio, of course, but then you need to power that radio somehow.

4G can track you to a few meters accuracy easily. Probably even better if you’re in a city. If cell response timings don’t give away your location, there’s a mechanism in your phone intended for emergency services that will have your phone turn on GPS and send back your current position automatically, initiated from over the network. Best to assume your carrier knows exactly where your phone is (as well as your car, as modern cars come with cellular modems as well).

mmWave 5G will give away your exact location all of the time. Exact as in down to the centimeter or less. The intent for 5G is to put a small transmitter on every street light so everyone gets gigabit internet everywhere.

This all works because these are active protocols. Passive protocols like RFID won’t be very useful for tracking people. It’s why airtags use Bluetooth and UWB for detection rather than RFID.

Downloading apps off app stores is easy. These sketchy websites can actually be real useful when developers decide to geolock their apps (i.e. when a local ride sharing app won’t download because your Google account isn’t from the country you’re visiting). apkmirror has also helped me obtain various Google apps that didn’t come with my phone’s custom ROM, though that’s one of the good ones that doesn’t alter apps.

Many of the sketchier will take apps and alter it to inject malware, though. By removing in-app purchases/ads/DRM with tools like lucky patcher they can explain away why people’s phones are calling these apps malware (because the alterations are to be expected), but the goal was never to give people free stuff, there’s always money behind it.

The difference between movies then and now is that back then being gay, transgender, or wearing clothes not befitting your birth sex in general was always paid as a joke. Haha, everyone point at the man in the dress and laugh. These days media is starting to accept that sometimes someone born with a penis actually likes wearing a dress, and not just as a sex thing or a comedy bit.

Drag is kind of an outlier, but as far as I know that never had much of a mainstream appeal in most places. I think the exaggeration helps acceptance a bit, for close-minded people the excess can be interpreted as “someone putting on an act like in a play” rather than “someone wants to be something which my small world view cannot comprehend”.

On the other hand, feminist empowerment made it pretty normal for women to wear suits many decades ago, despite the weirdoes disgusted by the idea of women wearing suits. These days, only dresses and skirts are treated weirdly by western media (unless they’re Scottish skirts, of course, those are fine for Scottish men to wear because they get a special name).

I’ve written a small program to do that for me on a schedule. Deletes on Lemmy are pretty unreliable, though, so I’m not sure if I’ll ever clean up the code enough to release it into the wild.

Many Lemmy servers fail to process/blatantly ignore deletion requests, though. That’s why the program also sends an edit, though that also gets ignored occasionally. Deletes in a federated system are just a request, nothing more, and that request often gets silently ignored.

Your calendars are tied up with your email because Microsoft Exchange decided to bring that feature to business ages ago and everyone else just copied them. There’s nothing preventing you from using third party calendar apps if that’s what you want, and there are standard protocols to exchange calendars between services. Your email address probably comes with a calendar by default already so most people just use that, but that’s your choice.

As for IMAP, there are a few alternative protocols but desktop mail clients are old people tech anyway. Outlook is just storing your email on their servers for a reason, people don’t want an IMAP alternative, they want an app.

I don’t really know what inconsistencies email supposedly has compared to other protocols. I use a bridge to join my Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/etcetera all in one place, and getting a consistent experience is a layer of hell not even email prepared me for. Telegram doesn’t do some emoji reactions, WhatsApp doesn’t do edits, every messenger needs stickers to be in a specific weird format, and god forbid you try to send files because every service has their own stupid quirks on that. Then there’s formatting, every service supports a specific subset of markdown, all incompatible with each other. And NONE of them allow “line of text, image, line of text” as a single message that can be forwarded. Messenger tech is bound to the same restrictions the Linux kernel mailing lists are. Email is a technical miracle in how it works consistly across platforms.

The only comparable protocols I can think of that come close to email are SMS (awful and insecure), MMS (awful and insecure and unreliable), RCS (only usable if you use Android and insecure in all other contexts). Young people don’t use email because they’ve been tricked into other apps, but it it wasn’t for the “my parents use it so it sucks” attitude that every teenager develops, email would’ve replaced so many shitty messengers.

The entire world relies on email but you can blow people’s minds if you tell them you can read Outlook emails in Gmail or read Gmail mailboxes in Outlook. The days of everyone having a local email client are long behind us, people don’t know the difference between apps and servers anymore.

“It works like email” means “oh, so I need to create a new account, like when I installed the Outlook app” to most people. Shockingly few people know the bare basics of how email works. You’ll be surprised how many people I’ve spoken to don’t understand that someone@gmail.com isn’t the same person as someone@outlook.com. I have been called a liar and a hacker for demonstrating I could send an email from f.l.lastname@mydomain.tld. Whatever you think the base level of technological knowledge the average person has, it’s ten times higher than what people actually know, and that includes young people.

RCS is already enabled on iOS. It it doesn’t work, that means your carrier or the carrier on the other end lacks support.

RCS is already made by an international standards body (except for the encryption part, that was invented by Google, which is why iOS doesn’t do it). Your carrier is supposed to host RCS services on their network and your phone is supposed to register with that, whether it’s a dumb phone or an app you downloaded like Google Messages. The problem with RCS is that carriers rarely implemented it when it came out a decade and a half ago, phone makers didn’t bother to implement it, and the standard kind of bled dry.

The only reason it’s gaining traction now is because Google said “fuck it, we’re building an RCS server for Google Fi anyway, might as well let everyone connect” and so they set their RCS server up in a way the standard didn’t foresee. This meant that everyone could suddenly use RCS, but the vast majority could only use it with Google’s servers rather than their carriers’. They’ve even started renting out their RCS servers to other carriers because Google’s server is a stellar shining example of great programming in the wasteland of awful telecoms service providers.

Apple isn’t connecting to Google’s servers and it’s not running a telco network either, so their RCS works as long as your carrier bothered to set up RCS services, like they were supposed to do when they first rolled out 4G anyway.

Should be noted that standard RCS is unencrypted like SMS is, so don’t use it to talk about things you wouldn’t want the government to read back to you in ten or twenty years (crimes, future crimes like abortion, health information, maybe political opinions depending on how bad the government gets). Google added a layer of encryption on top, but Apple is refusing to implement it until it’s standardised. And encryption won’t be standardised, because the standards bodies work together with law enforcement. No point in adding encryption when carriers are legally banned from/directly liable for “damages” caused by rolling out encryption support. Hell, one of the major reasons Apple even supports RCS is because the Chinese government made them support it, and they sure won’t accept encryption, they’re having Apple run a special version of iMessage so the government can access everyone’s messages for Peter’s sake.

As for alternatives, there are a few ways for a phone to log into RCS, but rhe easiest way (a simple web request) works for any app on your phone. Others require SMS verification or access to the SIM card, which only system apps are allowed to do. None of this prevents phone manufacturers/custom ROM manufacturers from adding their own RCS API, or even other apps from registering themselves with an RCS server if your carrier doesn’t require SIM access to do so. You can read the spec online if you want to know more about how it works, though it’ll take you a couple thousand pages of reading if you want to know everything.

Maybe in time we’ll see an alternative RCS client pop up. So far, nobody seems to be willing to pay for development or invest time in making an open source version, though.

Samsung has access to Google’s RCS implementation I believe. All other apps need to implement RCS themselves, which no real messenger has bothered to do yet. Everyone is waiting for Google to open up their RCS API so they don’t need to go through the complicated RCS API and the real-world testing/verification process themselves.

Depends where you live. I have given money to homeless people three times in my life, all while I was a child. All three times, my generosity was met with “don’t you have any more”. I’ve learned my lesson, at least.

Here, the social safety net is giving these people more than enough to pay for the homeless shelter and groceries. My change isn’t going to buy them anything the government isn’t allowing them to buy anyway. Sure, there are lots of things that can be improved about the safety net (and the housing, and everything else), but you don’t need to go hungry here.

I’m no longer giving money to beggars. If you want to help, fund local charities. Donating stuff is often appreciated, but what charities really need to help is cold hard cash, so that’s the best way to help the most people.

Also be wary of beggar gangs if they’re active in your country. Some criminal organisations will send out children, women, and anyone looking sad and unfortunate enough in an attempt to get strangers to donate money to them. A well-placed beggar can earn way more than a day’s wage, and criminals are eager to abuse that.

If your country doesn’t have a good social safety net, I’d still donate to charities before I’d give any money to the homeless directly, but it does change the situation a lot. I guess it depends on how good the local charities are (i.e. are they money hogs, do they require people to join their religion for aid, are they corrupt).

On Windows 11 you can select+copy text after taking a screenshot with the snipping tool. I think the same goes on macOS if you have games that run on that. iOS does the same, Android does it either natively or from the Lens app depending on the manufacturer.

CAPTCHAs are made specifically so computers have trouble reading them, so you’ll need more advanced software for those. I also don’t know of any tools that do this for live video if you’re looking into automating this.

All new cars that I know of come with either online trackers or offline trackers. Some are part of a safety system (like the one automatically dialing the emergency number if you crash), others are part of the infotainment system (live traffic updates, map updates), and then there’s the app stuff. A new car carries with it one or more cell phones and anything cellular can easily be tracked (which is even worse if you live in a country where carriers sell live location data to bounty hunters, like the USA).

If you know what you’re doing, you can probably take out all the transmitters so you can’t be followed live. Data will be stored on computers inside the car, but as long as it doesn’t get stolen or sold that data is safe inside. Might void your warranty and pop up a check engine light, though. You should also be wary of disrupting any internal antennae, like the ones for reading pressure sensors and other digital communication inside the vehicle. You may disrupt something and crash your car, and if you survive your insurance will fight tooth and nail not to cover your medical expenses.

If you don’t know much about cars or don’t want to go hunting for the exact right transmitters, buy an older car.

However, with how many dashcams and traffic cams are installed alongside the road these days, I don’t think it even matters much what you do to the car anymore.

Most of them act(ed) like an access point.

However, the SDIO spec allows for cursed applications like WiFi adapters, Bluetooth dongles, and more to be fitted into an SD card. It was really just SPI, so in theory it also allowed things like GPS tranceivers and any other peripheral you can think of that’s low bandwidth enough to work over SPI. Need Bluetooth for your Palm PDA? Here you go! Just stick a massive slab of plastic into the SD card slot!

These days SDIO is only really used for alternative (faster) transfer modes and maybe some slow and insecure WiFi access points in cameras.

As a counter argument: some countries (like the USA) accept mass mail-in voting, which has the same downsides as online voting (plus the “ballot took five weeks to reach the next town so your vote didn’t count” problem with an underfunded mail service).

Which isn’t to say digital voting is good, but clearly many people value the easier participation over the verifiability/security of normal voting.

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Depending on the elasticity of the brain, brain damage can make other parts of the brain take over for damaged areas (after a terrible recovery process).

In fact, it’s possible for a brain to be almost entirely empty space and people learn about it decades into their normal lives.

There are regions inside the brain that usually take care of certain functions but it’s not like there’s a specific area that’s guaranteed to be designated to specific nerves. Every brain is different, the schematics are generalisations that’ll work well enough most of the time.