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.

Starting your own instance doesn’t solve the problem of big communities being reliant on the one specific instance they are hosted on to not go down or rogue.

I imagine it like friend requests between communities: x@instance.a, all-about-x@instance.b and x-is-great@instance.c could send each other friend requests and merge into one federated meta-community about x. Then if one instance goes down the other two are still there to keep the meta-community alive, and if one goes rogue the others can just unfriend and keep going without it.

The nice thing about manual federation is that the communities don’t have to have exactly the same name, and the mods can keep malicious or troll communities out. And ofc you could still have client-side control if you want to, e.g. add or remove a community just for you locally, or create your own local meta-community.

The database, storage and network are usually the bottlenecks in these kinds of websites, not the programming language. It might add a few ms of latency, but the big lags come from congestion or bad db queries.

Oh, he is even “urging” them, so brave!

What comment?

I’ve literally never seen anyone say this except FediPacters as a strawman.

I’ve seen that quite a few times already, mostly in the form of “it’s stupid to preemptively defederate, we can always defederate later”.

Signal if possible, WhatsApp if not. I’m also trying out Session, but it’s still very much work-in-progress.

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.

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!

Wow that looks good, thank you very much!

Looks good so far, but two major features I want from a note taking app are still missing: Handwriting and table calculations. If they can add good support for those then I’ll definitely switch!

RHEL is not Fedora. It’s still lead by a community council, even if you don’t agree with some of their decisions.

In case of your first link it wasn’t even about making a decision. The project has always had the clear stance to not include patented works, so there were no two ways about it.

What’s wrong with Fedora?

Afaik it is all connected to the domain name, so they could definitely start to impersonate any .ml instance. Other instances could detect that the signing key for federation messages changed, but that’s about it. Their admins would probably have to block/defederate them manually.

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!

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.

Here is a good resource for these kinds of questions: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

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.

Using p2p for messaging is really nice for decentralization, but it has the major downside that both communication partners have to be online at the same time to find each other and transmit a message. So you might have to wait for it until both look at their phones at the exact same time. On top there are privacy issues, like being able to see the devices and public IP addresses of other users.

Imo its just not practical and robust enough to be used by millions of non-techy people.