These changes only affect the Fleet API. TeslaFi is fine for now.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but servers cost money. Developers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. If you want to run a reasonably successful social media company, you need money.

Bundling domain registration (already a thing) with custom usernames (already a thing) and taking a profit from that transaction is not enshittification. Enshittification would be if they took away the ability to link your own domain and required everyone to buy domains through Bluesky. This would just be giving less savvy users the ability to link a domain to their username without having to learn DNS.

From what I can gather, they aren’t selling the ability to link custom domains as your user handle. They are acting as a domain registrar to allow users to buy domains and link them to their handle in one step, then likely skimming some profits off the top. Imagine they sell a “custom username with domain” for $20 per year, they pay the wholesale fee (around $9 for a .com) and pocket the rest. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.

To be brutally honest, mastodon isn’t appealing to average people. Picking a server and client is too complicated, it’s mostly full of FOSS and Linux nerds, and the lack of a good discovery algorithm prevents them from finding content they are interested in.

Unfortunately, average people don’t care about federation. They get confused when they click a link from a different mastodon instance and it’s not the same website. Why aren’t they logged in anymore? They don’t know. Website must be broken. They don’t know or care about the differences between instances and clients and protocols. It’s just an app that they download and don’t see any of their friends or content they care about, so they stop using it.

Is Bluesky prone to enshittification? I don’t know much about the AT protocol, but it seems like it works relatively similar to ActivityPub. Is it open source?

I really hope he has a good plan to pass the reigns to someone with the same integrity and philosophy.

Planet of the rising temperatures more like

The Model 3 and Model Y have regular door handles.

I’m saying I’d just turn the PC into a headless server and get an Apple TV or something and plug it into the TV. The apps on a streaming box are going to be optimized for couch use, and then she can use the YouTube app with her algorithm if she wants.

That’s essentially what I have, a Plex server in my office and Apple TVs on each of the TVs around the house. Whether you like Apple or not, their 4K box is powerful enough to decode any media I’ve thrown at it and it supports pretty much all codecs without issue. The remote control is nice as well, but you need an Apple account to set it up.

How are you controlling Kodi from the couch? Do you have a remote control, or a mouse and keyboard or something? Having to use traditional PC controls in the living room is probably enough friction to turn most people away. You can have the best of both worlds if you get a “normie” streaming stick/box and connect it to your offline media server.

Oh, I thought you had the actual PC plugged into the TV and your wife was struggling with that.

Use the HTPC as a Plex or Jellyfin server and plug an Apple TV or something in over HDMI. Much more user friendly