A domain takedown was never able to shut a server down, not even with centralized servers. Most big services are accessible via multiple domains of different countries, and this would just disable one of them. But for the Fediverse that means that they also "disabled" an entire instance with all its users.

This actually shows us that relying on domains can be a problem for the Fediverse! Imo we need to upgrade the federation protocol to be able to handle these things, like propagating a domain change or migrating accounts to other instances.

The Opera of today is not the same as the one from back in the days! The original company sold all their code and rights to a chinese consortium in 2016. Since then it's basically a variant of chromium, with some propriatary features and tracking added. I don't know the new owners, so I don't trust them with my browsing data!

Just leaving this here: Aurora Store

Afaik this is not an error from Lemmy but from nginx, which is not able to relay the request to Lemmy and therefore returns a 502 bad gateway response. Imo this just means the servers are over capacity, so most likely a scaling/infrastructure issue.

I had a quick read of the code and it looks pretty solid to me. Not the most "enterprise" code imaginable, but definitely no code smell or quick hacking job.

In theory they could. Every city or state that migrates increases the market for open source solutions, and many also invest in the creation of custom software that others can later use when they migrate. The problem imo is hitting a critical mass, and also overcoming lobbyism at the highest levels.

Not really. Most centralized services are accessible via multiple domains, e.g. for different countries. This would just disable one of them, but users could still use another to log into their accounts. For the Fediverse it "disables" an entire instance, cuts it off from federation and locks out users.

Lets not put a positive spin on a situation that exposes a weakness of the current system. The federation protocol needs to be able to handle these things gracefully, like propagating domain changes and migrating accounts between instances!

This is suspicion on the level of "you can't be sure reality didn't just pop into existence 10 seconds ago". You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!

What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn't comply because they didn't have the requested data. That's about as good as you can get.

The author of this blog post just realized that things posted publicly on the internet are indeed public, and that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V exist.

This is not some special property of the Fediverse, it's how the internet has always worked. If you post something publicly (say on your personal blog) then others can see it, make copies and redistribute them, even if you later decide to delete the original content. Companies like Google build massive indexes of everything posted by anyone ever, and there is nothing you can do about it if you want your content to be publicly accessible. If you share something with just a group of people, and someone decides to make it public, then it's public. Nothing new about that.

The GDPR works in exactly the same way in the Fediverse as with the existing services right now. If you want something deleted you have to send a notice to every service that has your content. In reality you'll just send it to the X biggest services, because they represent 99% of the users that could potentially see that content, and that's usually enough. You can do the same with the X most popular Fediverse instances. Even better, we might be able to create a standardized and automated process for it, because they all run the same set of Fediverse apps using ActivityPub after all.

Afaik DMs work just like unencrypted (so regular!) emails. If you send your company secrets to [email protected] then you're probably screwed, same thing with @[email protected].

The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.

That's one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you're not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!

Your right to choose is the same as everybody else's right to choose. You can decide to post something, and others can decide they don't want to see it. Decentralized just means there is no one entity to make those decisions for you.

This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.

What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.

Fedora! To me it sits right at the sweet spot of stability and bleeding edge (they call it "leading edge"), and I'm very happy with how they run things (including the most recent controversy!).

An app to manage important config and unit files (fstab, hosts, sysctl, systemd units, ...), and present them as settings menu or editor with auto completion and tooltips. Kinda like how VSCode handles settings, where you can use the GUI or a context-aware text editor.

I think federating with an instance that actually wants federation to die (have a monopoly) is a very bad idea. Meta would use its leverage to actively undermine and harm the Fediverse, because it's not in their interest to split the userbase between multiple servers they don't own. Imo they only want to use it to bootstrap their own service, after that they'll do anything to control as much of the users and content as possible. That's the complete opposite of what the Fediverse is supposed to be!

Ever heard of the phrase "democracy without democrats"? That would be Meta in the Fediverse.

I won't buy Apple hardware as long as they keep being absolute dicks in the tech and app world. It's a shame really, because they build awesome devices, but I would feel bad everytime I use them.

Also they are much more restricted in many aspects (e.g. sideloading!), so it would be a downgrade for me.

Also depends how the other clock is broken, if we're this picky about it.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago, because it's just better for personal privacy and the freedom of the web as a whole. Brave would be my second choice, but FF lets you easily self-host a sync server for all your browsing data.

People in FOSS are still regular people with opinions and biases. The difference is that you can fork the code and remove the restriction yourself, or ask someone else to do it for you.

While this is probably still true, I doubt it's a big factor when talking about mass adoption.

I doubt it. While the server to server communication is standardized with ActivityPub, the server to client (app) communication isn't. This means different Fediverse apps have different APIs to login, fetch and create posts and so on. It's unlikely that we'll ever have a standard API here, because the apps work diffently and have different needs for their APIs. Maybe some kind of common denominator, but that probably wouldn't be feature complete on most apps.

So the one app to rule them all would have to created custom API Implementations and UIs for every Fediverse app, which would be a loooot of work and probably a worse experience than specialized apps.