Well, here you have a company that fires their CEO for going too much in the direction of earning money.

Yeah, honestly, that's music to my ears. Imagine a world where organizations weren't in the business of pursuing capital at any cost.

Google right there alongside, going from useful results to sponsored ads and replacing the useful basic sections in their nav bar (i.e. "News") to whatever random categories their algorithm thinks fit your query.

Honestly, I'm worried that people will be put off by extra level of complexity but I really hope the fediverse takes off, this feels like the only part of the internet moving the right direction at the moment.

I didn't want to make the post body so long that people missed the link entirely, but for those that scroll straight to the comments and just want a summary, some of my thoughts and some excerpts:

It sounds great in terms of facilitating interactions with people that don't want to move off their usual apps, but the encryption concerns are pretty valid, though niche, as well. The other thing that I thought was interesting was the big companies (as well as European government agencies) that have already migrated over. One of my biggest concerns with fediverse services is always the difficulty of convincing people to adopt it, so hearing about cases like that is very encouraging.

It makes sense too - if I were an organization representing a sovereign government, I'd hardly want to be beholden to the whims of private corporate ownership. Governments starting to make official statements via social media has always seemed a bit odd to me, and the recent issues with Twitter shuttering public post visibility do a great job in demonstrating the danger of that dependence. If this article were a bit more recent, I imagine they'd go into that a bit more too.

Some excerpts for people that don't want to read the whole thing (though I'd recommend just doing that!)

The Matrix protocol also supports non-native interoperability through a technique called “bridging,” which ushers in support for non-Matrix apps, including WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. Element itself offers bridging as part of a consumer-focused subscription product called Element One, where users pay $5 per month to bring all their friends together into a single interface — irrespective of what app they use.

This is enabled through publicly available APIs created by the tech companies themselves. However, terms of use are typically restrictive with regard to how they can be used by competing apps, while they may also enforce rate limits or usage costs.

_________________

A growing array of regulations, particularly in Europe, are forcing Big Tech to pay attention to data sovereignty, with the likes of Google partnering with Deutsche Telekom’s IT services and consulting subsidiary T-Systems last year to offer German companies a “sovereign cloud” for their sensitive data.

This regulatory push, alongside growing expectations around data sovereignty, has been a boon for the Matrix protocol. Last year, the agency responsible for digitalizing Germany’s health care system revealed that it was transitioning to Matrix, ensuring that the 150,000 individual entities that constitute the health care industry such as hospitals, clinics and insurance companies, could communicate with each other regardless of what Matrix-based app they used.

This builds on existing Matrix implementations elsewhere, including inside the French government via the Tchap team collaboration platform, as well as the German armed forces Bundeswehr.

“The pendulum has been clearly swinging toward decentralization for quite a while,” Hodgson explained to TechCrunch. “We’re now seeing serious use of Matrix-based decentralized communications across or within the French, German, U.K, Swedish, Finnish and U.S governments, as well as the likes of NATO and adjacent organizations.”

Back in May, open source enterprise messaging platform Rocket.Chat revealed that it would be transitioning to the Matrix protocol. While this process is still ongoing, this represented a major coup for the Matrix movement, given that Rocket.Chat claims some 12 million users across major organizations such as Audi, Continental and Germany’s national railway company, The Deutsche Bahn.

_________________

End-to-end encryption is a huge selling point for the big technology companies of today, one that WhatsApp hollers from the rooftops. But making this work between different platforms built by different companies is not exactly easy, and many — if not most — experts on the subject say that it’s not possible to enforce a truly secure, interoperable messaging infrastructure that doesn’t compromise encryption in some way.

WhatsApp can control — and therefore promise — end-to-end encryption on its own platform. But if billions of messages are flying between WhatsApp and countless other applications run by other companies, WhatsApp can’t really know what’s happening to these messages once they leave WhatsApp.

[...]

There’s no escaping the fact that breaking encryption is far from ideal, irrespective of how a solution proposes to reconcile this. But perhaps more importantly, a robust solution for addressing the real encryption issues introduced by enforced interoperability doesn’t truly exist yet.

Despite that, Hodgson has said in the past that the upsides of the new EU regulations are greater than the downsides.

“On balance, we think that the benefits of mandating open APIs outweigh the risks that someone is going to run a vulnerable large-scale bridge and undermine everyone’s E2EE,” he wrote in May. “It’s better to have the option to be able to get at your data in the first place than be held hostage in a walled garden.”

[...]

In many ways, the ground has never been so fertile for Matrix to flourish: it’s in the right place at the right time, as the world seeks an exit route from Big Tech’s clutches backed by at least a little regulation.

nitter.net is a good mirror, I have an extension called LibRedirect that sends me there automatically instead of twitter. no need to login just to read a single tweet or something that way 🙂

edit: sorry for the misinformation, I'd just woken up at the time and definitely misread - I didn't realize twitter had made the change today from needing an account to click around to needing one to view anything at all. Nitter doesn't seem to work anymore 🙁

because we're taking the internet back to 2003 and that includes omg teh random posts being funny again *holds up spork*

Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, warned more records could be broken this year, due to an increase in emissions and El Nino.

Okay, I know this isn't the point of the article, but this guy's name is cool as hell and would fit perfectly as the leader of a band of survivors once the climate change apocalypse actually hits.

Now, that said, I would prefer that it didn't. Every other form of existential dread I can rationalize away, but this feels inexorable.

well, they hired thousands of devs in the last few years, only to direct their efforts to self-hosting videos, chat features, customizable snoo avatars you can sell NFTs for, etc. (you know, things people wanted)

so I can understand the loss potentially growing in recent years, given what they've been spending on

I voted for no memes, and I'm really glad we got that, but one thing I want to mention is that it'd be good to have a /c/gamingmemes or something to redirect people to, rather than just a closed "no memes here". There's definitely an appetite for that content, and it seems gentler if there's another community they can be directed to.

(I thought about creating it myself but I've never really liked gaming meme pages, so I don't think I'd be good at hosting one 😅)

Yeah, it's the only issue I have with it. good thing federation means I don't have to actually go there to see the content haha

honestly, I want to share this because it's a super relatable sentiment... but tide pods and coffee creamer aren't exactly the most relatable groceries to use for it lol

someone pls photoshop this tweet with bread or chicken or something so I can send it to my friends 😅

I didn't realize Sam Reich's dad was so cool

It’s definitely a valid question, because Lemmy is going to be just as vulnerable as reddit to the problem of how much quicker low-effort memes accrue upvotes, which naturally results in them drowning out articles and discussion posts. The latter, despite being more interesting and generally “higher-quality”, will always take more time per-user to engage with - so, in systems like this, they naturally fall behind in both pace and volume of upvote.

So, as long as we’re using an upvote system, those need to be split so the articles and discussion posts don’t get drowned out in a sea of easily-consumed and quickly-upvoted low-content posts. I know I would personally really prefer having a proper feedly-style community with a bunch of articles and discussions than another gaming meme one that could basically be a bot linked to an instagram feed.

I actually voted for one day but now that I've thought about it a bit more, I think I'd prefer a /c/games and /c/gamemes or something, just so the people that want the latter have their space all the time. It seems preferable to the friction of trying to share space for both styles of community when we don't actually have to. I think, if we do vote to keep them, we're going to need a /c/gamingdiscussion or something for the actual wordy content.

3 is the biggest thing about pivoting more towards Lemmy / traditional forums for me. It's been really nice feeling like I'm not drowning in a sea of trite idiocy and unempathetic rage every time I open a comment section. It's genuinely refreshing to feel like I'm actually engaging with normal people again.

I voted for that, but almost immediately regretted not going for the "none at all" option.

The people that want a gaming meme community want that. They don't want a 2000 word eurogamer deep dive or the Verge breaking down some publisher deal, they just want a meme page. The people that want a nice hub for gaming headlines of the day aren't generally looking for that to be replaced 15% of the time with image macros of Geralt making a funny face in a cutscene.

Splitting that into two communities (like /c/Games and c/gamingmemes or something) seems like the best way to allow for both spaces to exist for people who want that environment, when they want it, without the additional friction of them trying to coexist and appeal to different groups of people. I can understand why that compromise feels like a good way to make everyone happy (and it's why I voted for it initially!) but I'm just not convinced that it's a better solution than two distinct spaces with their own distinct approaches.

How many of us are ten year plus users who have just had enough?

I just use both now, honestly. I don't really use the big subreddits because the users and quality of conversation feel like they're actively making me dumber... but there are smaller niche communities that don't really have a viable non-reddit alternative yet, and I'm not willing to let one greedy man force me to give up on a part of my life that I really enjoy.

Don't worry. When it's time, it'll find you.

This is nice! my only suggestion would be the ability to minimize cards for a text feed, if that's something that's eventually possible.

I like how smooth wefwef is, but if I could keep everything from auto-expanding (i.e. just scrolling through titles instead) it'd be closer to the old.reddit / RiF experience 🙂

the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It's a link aggregate.

I'm only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it's a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.

I just discovered you can just refresh on those and it'll sort out the thread. Up until now, I'd thought I was just misclicking every time haha

largest tech community in the fediverse

TIL. I assumed between lemmy.world, programming.dev, infosec.pub I'd had my tech feed basically covered