It’s absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.

It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.

That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.

Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.

ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I’m not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don’t think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.

Apple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.

This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.

Yes. I think it’s good not to form opinions about subjects you don’t know much about.

When it comes to voting in an election, it’s possible to make good decisions about candidates without forming opinions about every policy issue. That’s kind of the point of representative democracy.

That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.

It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.

I don’t think many people have read RFC 5322 (I haven’t), but most non-technical people I know understand these things about email:

• There are different service providers, and people can email each other no matter which provider they use
• There are different email apps
• Some apps are tied to specific service providers and others are not

I do lament the overall level of tech literacy.

The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn’t require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.

That’s a bit of a circular reference: “it got popular because it got popular”. The question remains: why did BlueSky reach that threshold and Mastodon did not?

I’m inclined to agree that’s a problem. Everyone’s first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.

You can’t middle-click them because they aren’t links. That is to say, they are not a elements but div elements with an added click event handler that navigates to another page. There’s a case to be made for doing things like that on a website that’s trying to behave like a native application, but Ebay fundamentally behaves like a website and building its navigation this way is bad design.

I’d still echo the (current) top comment’s advice to use something open source, local, and encrypted.

They’ve already taken the hard stance. If they roll it back, they will lose the trust of their users.

Biowink GmbH is probably not a corporation registered under US law. If I had to guess, the government of Germany will not be particularly eager to force them to turn over data to the USA. The Germans take their Datenschutz very seriously.

Having moderated a number of online spaces over the years, sort of. It’s usually the harshest thing a moderator can do, but it does not have very much real world impact on most people. In many parts of the internet, it isn’t even very effective at keeping the same person from coming back with another account, which isn’t a big deal if they don’t come back with the same behavior.

I’m not particularly shy about reaching for the permanent ban if it seems like someone is being an asshole on purpose. I’m not getting paid for it, and I do not have much patience for dealing with people who don’t want to be respectful toward their fellow humans. There’s usually a way to appeal if it’s a misunderstanding. That’s especially true in systems like Lemmy and unlike traditional web forums where one account and UI provides access to many communities, leading to drive-by comments.

I’m also fond of somewhat ambiguous rules like “be excellent to each other” or “don’t be an asshole”. Without that, if a community gets active enough, someone will show up, act like an asshole, and argue about the rules when they get banned.

It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.

It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.

Persuadable voters seemed really focused on prices. It’s hard not to be condescending here. Eggs are expensive because of bird flu. Rent is high because not enough housing is being built, mostly limited by local issues. Gas is high because of Putin’s war. Anyone who thinks electing Trump will bring those prices down because they were lower last time he was president is fucking clueless.

I’m interested to see how much of a factor unenthusiastic Democrats were. Trump got about the same number of votes he did in 2020, but Harris got far fewer than Biden. It looks like a bunch of people who voted last time didn’t vote this time. For them, the concerns the author dismisses might have been more important.