I like Kbin, but if it’s just the Lemmy interface bothering you try accessing your lemmy instance from Voyager (formerly wefwef - https://vger.app) or one of the many lemmy clients.

I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!

And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don’t want you to leave, they don’t want you to “be done”, they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that’s part of what they sell to advertisers.

If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).

If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.

If you don’t like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.

I absolutely agree.

Reaching the masses and keeping all of the mass content requires money, since investors are starting to realize that gazillions of views do not necesarilly equals profit, they are asking about ROI, which in turn makes the masses-reaching platforms look for ways to monetize those views, and that does not sit well with privacy caring people, but the masses don’t care about that.

I really hope the masses never fill the fediverse with their nonsensical content.

Brave does support opening tabs from other devices, sync works good so long as it always has at least 1 device in the sync chain, so if you only have 1 device and have to reinstall it the settings might be lost, but if you have 2 devices and reinstall one the settings are still saved whenever you rejoin the chain. The reason is there are no accounts saved in brave, so the only way to ID your browser is by the sync chain. If the sync chain has no devices it may be removed from the sync servers.

All of the crypto rewards stuff can be disabled with 1 switch, and a second switch if you also want to turn off wallet, but it’s not really active unless you configure it. Rewards is there as a way for them to make money without having to make Google or Bing the default search engine as other browsers do.

Brave is a great browser, but Firefox is also great and very configurable. And thanks to this thread I learned that FF’s interface can be customized, which was one of my main reasons not to use it anymore. I’ll play with it again, it’s important to have a non-chromium based browser as an alternative.

Awesome! Dang, Second Life… we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣

Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!

C - It’d be cool to have C with the background of B.

For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).

I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I’m back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.

Dell had a Linux line some years ago where everything worked out of the box, never got the popularity needed to keep it alive.

System76 has Pop!_OS so that they can provide great out of the box experience with their computers, but they are not as big as other vendors.

A good way to really get a product like that to mass market is to make it available in general stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Etc.), the problem is that most of those customers will not understand why their system is so different and they cannot install that MS Office 2003 they have always used, or that Norton Antivirus that their cousin’s son recommended to them 10 years ago that was working fine on their old computer.

And then you have the younger generations that use every other device but a computer. They’d rather do all their school and college work on their phones and tablets rather than open a laptop, if they even know how to use a computer (you’d be surprised how many don’t even know how to use a computer).

Really makes you think about its “Security through obscurity” approach! 😆😆

At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.

Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.

They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).

My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:

If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.

Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.

I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.

If I’m not mistaken, it’s only on the GUI app store, you will still be able to launch a terminal and install deb from the CLI using apt. I could be wrong as I’ve read different things from different sources.

I understand, and I do remember the XMPP debacle, but I also remember that back then people trusted Google and their do-no-harm motto, and they really wanted them to lead in the real-time voice/video chat arena, and in order to make it Google made some protocol desitions that broke away from XMPP.

This time around we don’t trust Big Tech and will not try to adjust to their ways, if they want to they can embrace ActivityPub or not. The rest of the Fediverse will not try to apply their tactics or monetization to the protocol. Either they adhere to the stardard, or their users will have no compatibilty with the rest of the Fediverse.

I am not suggesting we all embrace them and try to make them feel welcome, but let’s not close our instances alltogether to them, let each person decide for themself if they want to follow people from their instance or not.

A lot of the FUD regarding #Threads joining the #Fediverse has been put to sleep by #Mastodon on this blog post:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers.”

Also @daringfireball made this blog post that I agree with:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open

“the idea that administrators of Mastodon/Fediverse instances should pledge to preemptively block Facebook’s imminent Twitter-like ActivityPub service (purportedly named Threads) strikes me as petty and deliberately insular. I don’t like Facebook, the company, and I’ve never seen the appeal of Facebook, the product (a.k.a. “the blue app”). But there are literally billions of good people who use their services. Why cut them off from the open ActivityPub social world?”

Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap and many other registrars offer dynamic DNS via API or a ddns client very easy to setup.

The average user would have the same issues with Windows if they had to install it themselves.
The only way to get average users to start using Linux is to sell them the devices pre-installed with it.
Case in point: Android.

I mean, you don’t have to use Edge, any modern browser should work. I use Brave mainly, and have not had any issues with O365. You can use OneDrive on the browser, but even if you want it synchronized to your desktop there’s a few ways to sync it to Linux:

https://github.com/jstaf/onedriver#readme - FOSS with GUI

https://github.com/abraunegg/onedrive#readme - FOSS CLI (but there is a GUI for it, and a System Tray icon if desired)

https://www.insynchq.com/linux - Proprietary commercial product

I am not having issues, they just made it complicated for the average user in Win11.

And no, installing offline does not force a local account anymore, it just keeps asking you to go online unless you do another workaround usually too complicated for the average user.