toastal

Pretty sure that Jasmine scene was the first time I realized I like girls

Sad thing is cheap domains like xyz get flagged a lot for “security”. 😥

You can probably host a feed reader & a few other things at home on old hardware & a budget. Paying $5 USD a month on hosting is too much for many people.

Since Git can already be federated (no MS GitHub required), take a look at Darcs & Pijul for a better version control model based on Patch Theory. Tooling needs help, but fundamentals are sound.

Everything in the XMPP world is worth checking out. Movim is one of the more interesting projects bring a social media option to the platform & pushing boundaries for clients that is cool to see—as well as Libervia for setting up communities.

Nail on the head… it isn’t about one particular service or protocol but the philosophy of federation

No.

It costs literally hundreds of thousands of USD per month to run your own node. If it isn’t accessible to the masses, it isn’t revolutionary. De facto centralization due to prohibitively expensive costs is effectively centralization—same reason we should not trust a platform like Matrix.

Bluesky is just another startup grifting with open washing. It has all the same VC-funded trappings where the history of Twitter will literally just repeat itself—like we didn’t see what happened with it the first time around.

Mastodon can improve its UX but some of these platforms are rotten to the core. Or also use something on ActivityPub that does have a UX you like since they can all intercommunicate—or XMPP PubSub Social Feed since it has stricter governance to prevent it from getting too messy.

Microsoft bought these social media platforms like LinkedIn & GitHub for this very reason. They want you stuck in their ecosystems …then train their proprietary AIs on your communications, then sell it back to you when you were the one that made it.

& all the US-based corporate social media… Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, & GitHub.

The VC-funded ones too like BlueSky

Matrix is centralized around Matrix.org or servers they run tho. Since the protocol is a big data/metadata sync by design & medium–large-sized servers are expensive to run, almost all of metadata is with Matrix.org—of which was originally funded my Israeli intelligence & I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting data out of it to this day.

If they haven’t already, SimpleX registers a URI handler, you could put an ID in a vCard just like your contacts on XMPP show up in a messaging client.

They reason this happens more often with Signal is a) Signal requires a phone number (which is not good for your privacy) b) your contact is more likely to put in their phone number but many forget to add other IM protocols to their vCard & the default contact managers do not make this very discoverable.

So they have Carbons? Took them long enough.

XMPP for reliable, lightweight, & stable. SimpleX is a project worth keeping tabs on as well.