Matt

Isn’t this literally what Waistline is for Android? You create your own local food database (which you can automatically fetch info from Open Food Facts or USDA if desired, but not required) which lets you put in as many nutriments to track as you wish, all with graphs and information with different timelines.

No clue if there’s anything like this for desktop.

Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can’t really “compromise” in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.

While “nobody cares about privacy” and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.

Furthermore, the Matrix team aren’t the ones “complaining” about adoption, they’re actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn’t insignificant as there’s over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can’t track.

I only self-host a MediaWiki website at the moment, along with a PPSSPP adhoc server for said game that the wiki is related to. I want to self-host a lot more stuff, but storage space is expensive, and I don’t really want to leave things running at home all the time either as it will eat into my electricity bill.

Nextcloud and OnlyOffice are what I’m interested in next, and perhaps a Fediverse platform.

That’s because ublock.org is not related to uBO. uBlock is the original project that got compromised.

Note that setting up a Revolt instance means it will literally only be you that you can talk to, and others that sign up on your instance.

Revolt is not federated (and most likely never will be). You might be aware of this though, but it isn’t like Lemmy or Mastodon at all.

Unique usernames cause issues with having to come up with wildly “creative” names to be able to be called the same thing everywhere if the platforms get big enough, or start adding loads of numbers to everything. Unique usernames also create prestigious names, which people most certainly care about, especially for branding or clout.

The discriminator system was clever, as it let people just pick names that they felt resonated with them better, while also keeping everyone equal - you didn’t have a prestigious name like “adam”, and everyone else who just wanted to go by adam on the internet had to add extras to it. Instead, everyone was given the extra numbers so nobody was special.

Now obviously, the username in itself is not that special, and nobody really goes by their username, but a lot of people do assign some value to their online identities and handles, and Discord just sidestepped that by putting everyone on the same level.

There were issues with the username system, but I don’t think the 4 numbers were it. You absolutely do memorise your 4 numbers if you’re adding people constantly for some reason, and if you’re not, it’s not exactly a major inconvenience.

From my experience, people who are happy with the new system already go by somewhat unique names, so this makes it easier for them.

There’s no way I’ll actually use the platform, but I personally have no qualms with federating with it on my instances so I can communicate with friends who may be using it that haven’t made the jump to the current fediverse.

Whether we like it or not, this is most likely the best chance for regular people to be introduced to the Fediverse and hopefully gain a good understanding of it, providing that Meta doesn’t hide it from people too much or make it complicated enough that people are “encouraged” to use their platform instead.

I’m using Startpage and it’s been mostly fine. The biggest issue is that the “nested” results that come from Google (e.g. a forum and related posts) don’t show in Startpage, it will only show the main result.

I really wanted to use something like SearXNG, but I get basically zero results whenever I use an instance, no idea if I’m missing something in how they work.

They’re just different softwares that communicate over ActivityPub. They’re both link aggregators, so they’ll be similar in functionality.

For an easy comparison using established names: One is Reddit, one is Digg, but they can communicate with each other and show each other the same content, and you can just pick which one you want to use.

The Fediverse allows people to just choose the platforms they prefer, and then talk to everyone else on the Fediverse regardless, instead of having to create multiple accounts all over the place to talk to specific people.

It’s hard to predict - because despite the bad decisions from platforms like Facebook, Twitch, and Reddit, they are still always going to be immensely more popular than Fediverse / FOSS equivalents due to the network effect.

Despite all the bad moves from YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in another platform, they just want the current platform to not be rubbish, so they don’t lose their current communities and contacts.

While I’d like for all the Fediverse platforms to become relatively “mainstream” that people will sign up for them, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any time soon, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

I suspect support will be axed eventually - chances are many people will flock to these exempt apps to still get their 3rd party client fix, and that will put them on the radar for Reddit to find a way to justify pulling the rug out under them too (e.g. “Our app is now accessible!”).

It’s a shame that Reddit went like this.