From what I can tell, Bluesky is both decentralized and federated in terms of the protocol and software, but in a practical sense, trying to run the whole thing independently doesn’t seem quite there yet.

The things that are easy to do are use a domain name as an identifier and host your own personal data server. Owning your own data is nice in theory, but being able to take it with you isn’t that valuable when there’s nowhere to go.

Choosing an instance has gotta be culled.

The trouble with that is having many instances is the core trait that makes it a federated system.

There are certainly ways to de-emphasize that step during onboarding; an onboarding site that picks an instance from a curated set of general-purpose instances would be a good way. Bad ways include joinmastodon.org making mastodon.social the default, and join-lemmy.org asking a couple questions and presenting a list.

instances have no native ability to crawl other instances for communities or content

That’s not quite true. They don’t do it automatically or routinely, but a user can cause a server to read a post from another server by putting its URL into the search box. This can be useful for an end user to manually address a federation glitch.

Here’s a concrete example. I was trying to post a comment via lemmy.world, but lemmy.world sits behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare flagged its content as potentially malicious. I then posted that comment via my own Mastodon server, but push federation to lemmy.world also failed, for the same reason. I could, however cause lemmy.world to pull the comment using the search.

Correct. Each server that shows the post to its users stores a copy of the post. It does not necessarily store attached media (IIRC Mastodon usually does and Lemmy usually hotlinks media).

They don’t duplicate the database in a technical sense, but when things go right, they each have a copy of the same post and comment text, and the same votes.

Any attempt to regulate big tech needs to be gated on big tech sized user counts.

Violent racist rhetoric posted to a forum with 20 monthly active users might lead to one lunatic ranting on a street corner to be ignored or mocked. The same thing posted to Xitter sparks riots.

It’s open source. The alternative, if project governance actually starts making problems for end users is that someone will fork it. Cloning the plugin/theme repository makes that a bit more hassle, but it’s entirely doable.

That’s not to say there’s no room for more CMS projects. Wordpress is a little clunky, and variety is good.

If only there was some way to find out. I guess we’ll never know.

Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

I see no reason to believe that it is.

I find it useful when outside the USA to be able to communicate with American luddites who refuse to install messaging apps.

Messages between two Apple devices are safe, and messages between two Android devices are safe, but messages between an Apple device and and Android device are vulnerable.

This is not very accurate. Some Android devices come with Google Messages, which will use Google’s encrypted version of RCS if the carrier supports it. People who don’t know what all of that means should not assume their messages are encrypted.

What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there’s a chance they don’t own all of it.

Linux is a kernel which is often bundled with proprietary components. Android, for example uses the Linux kernel. The whole desktop operating system you seem to be thinking of is a Linux distribution.

There have been many Linux distributions with proprietary components over the years. SUSE’s YaST configuration tool used to be proprietary, for example. There’s probably something current along the same lines, but there’s not much demand for semi-proprietary desktop Linux.

Robespierre thought killing tens of thousands of people was defense. History has not been kind to that position.

I couldn’t help but notice Blue Cross rescinded its very dangerous policy placing a time limit on anesthesia the day after the murder.

I don’t want a reign of terror, but perhaps just a little bit of terror will have CEOs thinking they could be next when considering especially harmful policies.

I run Linux on a Thinkpad P14S III with a Ryzen 6850u. It has been a trouble-free experience, and if there’s any way in which it is not optimized, it masks that by being very fast.

Instagram has long maintained a login wall, so I’m not surprised to see one on Threads. That means they hate the open web, not necessarily federation.

I do assume bad faith when it comes to Meta, and I suspect their middling, slow implementation of ActivityPub here is mostly intended to discourage antitrust actions against them.

I hadn’t heard of the WAN show before this comment. I learned about puffery as a kid when my parents were shopping for a car and I was very excited to inform them I had just heard on the radio that a specific dealership was the best.

This is marketing puffery. It’s an imprecise claim about the product’s goodness that cannot be objectively tested.

It’s not unique to Xitter. Facebook has been deprioritizing posts with links in them for a while.