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.

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.

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.

Zero.

I mainly look at my subscribed feed, which contains mostly topics I want to see in communities moderated well enough I rarely see anybody being horrible.

Even if you did (don’t eat batteries), the voltage range is much lower and you probably wouldn’t feel anything.

Now if it was added to rechargeable batteries, it would be pretty useful

I think the reason we haven’t seen that is that NiMH rechargeables have fairly stable voltage during discharge while alkalines don’t.

I use Firefox almost all the time, but I’ve run into a few sites that act up, and the rate seems to be increasing. Sometimes I complain.

When Firefox had a tiny set of permitted extensions, I used Kiwi most of the time.

There are better ways to assess the legitimacy of a media outlet than critiquing its web design. The Wikipedia page might be a good start.

I don’t like the loginwall, but it doesn’t require payment.

The biggest reason is most likely that the cases had different judges.

My initial reading of the reporting on this ruling suggests it won’t do that. App developers can opt out of most of the provisions, but Google may not pressure them to do so.

Extension developer information from Firefox explains why it was necessary to make some technical changes. What they’ve never explained to my satisfaction is why they took a cautious, curated approach to it reminiscent of Apple.

The typical approach of a large open source project is to put a “here there be dragons” sign on unstable features and let anyone who wishes to use them anyway do so at their own risk, and that’s the approach I prefer.

Kiwi Browser has offered an Android build of Chromium that will install and attempt to run any extension available for desktop Chrome. Most of them work.

Firefox also recently regained reasonable extension support on Android, which was a slow and frustrating process for those of us who had used it before.