thehatfox

Successfully monetising a platform means doing it in harmony with the the user base though, at least to some degree. A platform can't make money from users if it scares them all away. Social media platforms are especially vulnerable too because they rely on users to create their content. Nobody comes to Twitter to marvel at the system infrastructure, they come to read tweets.

The way certain tech companies are behaving currently is too knee-jerk and heavy handed. They are panicking and damaging their platforms in the process.

The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It's only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.

Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it's almost a new "wild west" as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it's going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.

I’ve noticed a lot of German language fediverse content too. Does anyone know why German speakers are so keen on the fediverse?

My Steam Deck experience has been very positive, it’s a great way to play games away from the desk. For me the controls are great, and game compatibility continues to surprise me.

I would say the only problem with the Deck is the size - it’s big. When I got mine it seemed a lot bigger than I realised, and that was after watching/reading a lot of reviews. Depending on your hands the size might be an issue. If you know anyone else with a Steam Deck I would recommend trying it out for size before buying.

Never mind zero stars, the Reddit app (and new Reddit in general) deserves negative stars.

Thankfully there is plenty of innovation in the market for fediverse apps.

The Amazon checkout has become a real maze for non Prime subscribers, about time something was done.

I cancelled Prime a while ago, and the few times I’ve used Amazon since I got multiple checkout stages with pre-selected Prime signups and trials.

Save them as PDFs and store them in your cloud storage or choice or a syncing tool like Syncthing. A basic folder structure can help keep things organised.

No need for anything complicated, for essential documents best to keep its impel and limit the scope of failure.

Federation is arguably the whole point of the fediverse however. Decentralisation is the solution to the problems created by centralised, proprietary platforms like Reddit and Twitter, but it can only survive if users are invested in it. If everyone joined one main instance, its admins could easily remove federation, add proprietary extensions etc and become yet another walled garden.

Trying to build the fediverse without onboarding users about federation would be like trying to build a democracy without educating citizens on the function and value of voting.

We should not shy away from sharing the concepts of federation, we just need to be better at sharing them.

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that's worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

Wow, this is impressive. Already seems quite stable, I got it running straight away on a headless machine with an Intel i5-7400T running Ubuntu 22.04. I think I need to do some optimising, but I can already use it as a somewhat convoluted way to get proper adblocking on an iPad!

I noticed a small mistake in the docs - the docker run command in the quickstart is missing a backslash.

The PulseAudio container also doesn't stop when the main wolf container stops - not sure if that's expected behaviour or not.

I'm excited to see where this project goes, I can see a bunch of uses for this running graphical application remotely.

Yes, it’s a sad state of affairs that Apple’s restrictions on iOS and iPadOS browsers are the only thing stopping an effective Google monopoly over web browsers. Ideally Firefox would still keep things in balance, but Mozilla doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing these days in terms of building market share - and I say that as a long time Firefox user.

I still remember the IE 6 era, and I hope we never see a single browser dominate the web again. To those wishing Apple would be forced to open up, be careful what you wish for.

Blink has diverged enough from WebKit that they are separate engines now. KHTML has been sadly laid to rest.

It’s a miserable state of affairs that we are effectively down to just 3 browser engines now, Blink, WebKit and Gecko. But with the ever increasing scope and complexity of web standards I don’t see that changing, unless someone throws a lot of extra support at the Servo project.