ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I’m not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don’t think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.

Apple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.

This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.

That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.

It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.

I don’t think many people have read RFC 5322 (I haven’t), but most non-technical people I know understand these things about email:

• There are different service providers, and people can email each other no matter which provider they use
• There are different email apps
• Some apps are tied to specific service providers and others are not

I do lament the overall level of tech literacy.

The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn’t require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.

That’s a bit of a circular reference: “it got popular because it got popular”. The question remains: why did BlueSky reach that threshold and Mastodon did not?

I’m inclined to agree that’s a problem. Everyone’s first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.

I’d still echo the (current) top comment’s advice to use something open source, local, and encrypted.

They’ve already taken the hard stance. If they roll it back, they will lose the trust of their users.

Biowink GmbH is probably not a corporation registered under US law. If I had to guess, the government of Germany will not be particularly eager to force them to turn over data to the USA. The Germans take their Datenschutz very seriously.

It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.

It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.

The higher-score comments there don’t seem to be particularly hostile to Lemmy. They talk about legitimate concerns like whether Lemmy as it exists now could deal with a Reddit-size volume of data, The top comment at this time speaks favorably of [email protected].

Of course people who are still using Reddit are more likely to view Reddit as favorable or acceptable and alternatives as problematic, or not quite there yet. I’m actively Fediverse-first in my use of social media, but I still end up on Reddit quite a bit for niche interests because that’s where the most people are.

It’s probably more fair to call its claim of being decentralized fake or disingenuous. There doesn’t seem to be any way to participate in the ecosystem without going through the Bluesky relay, a central point of failure with strong incentives to eventually do something shitty.

Zero.

I mainly look at my subscribed feed, which contains mostly topics I want to see in communities moderated well enough I rarely see anybody being horrible.

Even if you did (don’t eat batteries), the voltage range is much lower and you probably wouldn’t feel anything.

Now if it was added to rechargeable batteries, it would be pretty useful

I think the reason we haven’t seen that is that NiMH rechargeables have fairly stable voltage during discharge while alkalines don’t.

There are better ways to assess the legitimacy of a media outlet than critiquing its web design. The Wikipedia page might be a good start.

I don’t like the loginwall, but it doesn’t require payment.

The biggest reason is most likely that the cases had different judges.

My initial reading of the reporting on this ruling suggests it won’t do that. App developers can opt out of most of the provisions, but Google may not pressure them to do so.