namingthingsiseasy

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

but I no longer believe that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.

The fact that we have a telephone system that works with separate providers contradicts this sentiment. If I want to pick up the phone and talk to my cousin's puppy in New Zealand, I can do that without creating an account on his provider's service.

I don't understand why we've forgotten this as a society. Yes, it was difficult to upgrade the phone systems over the past century, but it's worth it in my opinion. I really wish we'd start seeing government regulation that says "you should be able to talk to someone on a service without having to create an account on said service." I thought the DMA would do this, but sadly, Whatsapp still requires an account to talk to people using that service. Very disappointing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

The colors in the peertube logo are pretty hideous.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Are we claiming now that Activity Pub is the only protocol that we can use for the fediverse? I think XMPP is roughly 30 years old at this point, and I'm pretty sure Activity Pub is much younger than that. I could be wrong though.

But regardless, I don't see why Activity Pub has to be the only protocol we accept to be considered a part of the fediverse. It's not even like different AP implementations talk to each other all that well. My understanding is that Mastodon doesn't federate that well with Lemmy, and I haven't seen Loops or Pixelfed on Lemmy yet either.

I'd be happy to be corrected on any of this though, I haven't looked too closely into exactly how AP works or how it's supposed to interoperate with different applications.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their "standards" are blocked behind paywalls and can't be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here's a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

The best UIs are the ones that never change.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

No you don't! That's why we have key-signing parties!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Interesting! I was already vaguely aware some of these efforts, but that was still quite informative. Nonetheless, from what I've observed, it seems that these kinds of funding initiatives aren't very popular politically. Most people don't benefit from it enough, and then it's only natural to ask why we are spending, néé, wasting money on them. I think better messaging is needed on these types of issues.

And education would help a lot too - most people don't think about where the software that they are using is coming from and that is a big problem. When you present people with two pieces of software, they don't really give any thought to where those pieces of software came from or how it's made. So they won't be able to understand issues like the fact that vendors can just pull the rugs from under their feet whenever they feel like it. If people don't understand concepts like these, then obviously they won't understand how to avoid these things from happening!

I do think there's hope on the horizon though. If we can brand Microsoft et. al. as American companies and successfully convince people to be more and more skeptical of the USA as a whole, then maybe we have a chance in stimulating people to take more initiative in getting off these products and adopting other ones.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

We should be worried about Windows as well to be completely honest. But at the very least, it's still more replaceable.

Nextcloud is a great start point, but it's terribly underfunded... as are all of our "alternatives" to big tech companies.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

We've had FUCKING DECADES to do something about this. DECADES!!!

When will we ever learn....

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not money they want. It's power. They want global domination. And this is not an exaggeration by any means.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It is very sad indeed. I went through the same experience when I wanted a license plate to commemorate Albert Heijn.

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