Hm, hopefully Discord takes awhile to enshittify. Sounds like the current solutions need time to polish up.

I did find out recently that the team behind the Element Matrix client made Element Call and integrated it into their apps recently, but I’ve never used it personally. Have you used it? How was it?

They definitely got the Discord aesthetic down. Unfortunately, it seems to be both self-hostable and unfederated, which means that the userbase is going to be split up between a bunch of small and quiet instances with no convenient way to interact with the larger ecosystem. Their FAQ suggests that while it’s not in the roadmap currently, they’re still open to the idea, so maybe we should let them know that this would be a desirable thing.

Ah yeah, I remember reading that post awhile ago. I was quite surprised to find out how old Friendica is (first release in 2010); if that doesn’t demonstrate longevity, then I dunno what does.

Federated social media has been around for a long time; the oldest one that I know of was identi.ca from the late 2000s. ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon have since breathed a lot of life into the federated ecosystem and I’m excited to see what the future holds for it.

Hot damn! Never thought that I’d see the day.

I wonder if it’ll be the porn.

I’m going to be so pissed if this AI bullshit ends up drawing too much attention to the best shadow libraries and they get bopped because of it.

Can’t come soon enough. I’m stuck in connector hell over here with USB-A, USB-C, and Micro-USB.

BTW, the Fediverse equivalent is called Friendica and it also supports more platform protocols than just ActivityPub.

If you post in public, it can be scraped; that’s true on Bluesky as well as the Fediverse and also on the centralized corporate platforms. It’s something you have to be mindful of when posting. Using privacy-conscious walled chat apps is the better option for people who want to avoid that, but even those can have leakers in the group chat.

Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.

The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.

Occasionally when I’m searching for something, I’ll check out some Reddit links and honestly it’s a crapshoot as to whether half of the comments have been deleted or not. Useful search results are getting to be a pain to come by.

Yeah, it’s really weird that people keep acting like Reddit hasn’t been astroturfed to shit for years at this point. I wouldn’t trust the product reviews I see there.

Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn’t very much, but if they’re paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.

That’s a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.

GTK 2 has been EoL since 2020 (GTK 3 released in 2011). GIMP 3 marks the completion of the GTK 3 port, which by itself offers:

• Moving to an actively supported version of GTK (and future migrations will be easier because the difference between 3 and 4 is a lot less than the difference between 2 and 3)
• Better graphics tablet support
• Better handling of HiPPI displays
• Better Wayland support
• Should also mean that they finished refactoring the code, thus making it easier to implement new features.

And on that last point, I would say that the biggest benefit overall with the release of GIMP 3 is that we’ll finally, finally start seeing serious work on implementing non-destructive editing; I’ve read that some of the preliminary work is going to be shipping with the 3.0 release.

Then that’s very concerning, because IIRC that is actually Mozilla’s largest funding source and losing that could easily threaten Firefox.

Government prosecutors had argued during the trial that Google illegally monopolized control over the internet search market, spending tens of billions of dollars each year on contracts to providers such as Apple and Samsung in order to become the default search engine on their devices. Justice department lawyers accused Google of using its dominant market position – they alleged the company controls about 90% of the US search market – to crowd out rivals and boost its own advertising revenues.

Does this mean that their deal with Mozilla was ruled to be an antitrust violation?