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431
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • If you are talking about something like openauth (where you sign into some random website using your Google account) yes, but your base identity is still tied to Google. So if Google goes down, you lose your google account, and you also lose your account at every other website you logged in to using your google account.

    Yeah, essentially that. The back-up plan in case your instance goes down is a separate issue, my main plan is just that users shouldn't need a new account for each fediverse application they want to try, considering one account is already able to make any kind of post.

  • couldn't your instance just serve your identity to other instances?

  • I don't think the fediverse needs more platform alternatives.

    What I really think we need is a way for people to use one fediverse account to log into different interfaces, so people can try out a new app / interface without starting a new account. Many apps can do this, but web apps generally cannot, they're generally tied to an instance.

  • well, yeah, because it's private messaging, it requires encryption and things like that. Really, fediverse instances should ideally incorporate matrix chat in some way or another, but that's not exactly trivial.

  • oh man, that's not pretty enough to start using as an alternative to, like, partiful (oh, yeah, I totally want to give my phone number to some random fucking website to go to a party) or wedding registry sites... but those don't really need to be federated, huh?

  • I don't believe that's what OP intended.

  • I am assuming OP once heard the name "Sisyphus" and made a strange assumption about what he thought it meant and how he thought it was spelled.

    edit: oh, I'm replying to OP... that explains why it doesn't make any sense...

  • Smart TVs are the stupidest fucking things.

    No TV manufacturer is actually willing to put processing power or networking features in a TV, and they're never willing to spend money developing the software, so even new, they're slow as shit, and you can no longer realistically use them for 10 years, they'll go obsolete. A $35 external computer is more powerful and I've been using mine for a decade now without a problem. The interface is more straightforward. I don't need to log into anything. I don't need a special remote, I can just use my phone. The TV manufacturer can't spy on me. There's no microphone.

    Dumb TV + Chromecast is just a thousand times better than a smart TV.

  • what would that have to do with irritation from aluminum-based deodorant? Is he saying that "sissies" - "fus" (???) are complainers? That's a new one, to me, I thought the term was mostly just used to describe men who were perceived as feminine in some stupid way... unless OP is trying to suggest that complaining is femme...

  • what exactly does OP think he meant by "sissyfus"

  • It's weird how much better Chromecast was when it came out than it is now. Stronger hardware, sure, but no real antifeatures, you could set it up without installing the app, you could use the app without giving it location data, casting was way more straightforward...

  • how does qwant compare to Google and DDG in terms of the quality of search results?

  • ddg censors results?

  • Big companies have enough money to develop and maintain dedicated applications for multiple platforms. Small and medium-sized services might be able to get one platform going, but they'd be lucky if they had any money left for marketing, or for developing new features, and would eventually either need to grow or accept obsolescence.

    And again, I'm not going to develop a web application for my personal blog, and nobody's going to download it; I would need to use a centralized service.

  • Usenet was for geeks who didn't want a user interface getting between them and the raw text. It was never going to go mainstream, it was never going to be the internet.

    I did not know that a terminal-BBS existed, but it sounds even worse than usenet. When I was a kid, people used the letters "bbs" to talk about web forums, generally. Those were websites. They were fine, but even they died out for a reason. The development and marketing of a web forum is not something that scales as well as the multi-forum technologies we have now β€” reddit and reddit-style fediverse systems.

    People didn't want to, and should not have wanted to, install a new app every time they wanted to try talking to new people, but they always did want a good user interface for the conversations they have.

  • I think you’ve got that backwards. The early days of the web were the wild west; blogs, personal sites and forums were multitudinous. Weird, niche content was everywhere. Nobody knew what the web was supposed to be yet, so it could be anything. Nobody really knew how to make money from it, so passion rather than dollars was the motivation to create content.

    This relied on web browsers. Without web browsers, it would be worse than it is now.

  • It would only be mediated through more complex applications. We'd have open source apps like thunderbird for email, still, but most applications would be written by large companies who can afford that kind of ground-up software development.

    All walled gardens, none of the democratization we've come to know. None of those tiny websites. No independent blogs except on closed services like substack and medium. No independent forums, just one central service that houses all of them... IE reddit. Maybe social media is even more centralized than it is now; maybe nobody manages to get a network monopoly in this world, and some communication standard pops up, a less good version of the fediverse, so I don't need five fucking apps, but the corporations still find a way to dominate that world.

    Most importantly... The hyperlink is kind of dead. I can no longer click on an Associated Press article without an Associated Press app, or an app that knows how to read associated press apps. Maybe my RSS app has a feature like that built in, but if it does, it's bordering on browser territory. The same holds true for buying; I can't share a link to a niche brand's website because it doesn't have one, and you definitely don't have their app installed, so clothes need to be on amazon or nordstrom or not exist.

    The fact that most people can't just click on a link to see what it is means that there are fewer references between some things and other things, the web is less connected.

    This also ruins search. We can search Wikipedia, but we can't search the whole internet, because the internet doesn't have a unified format of references by which pagerank can operate, there are no websites to crawl, and the results you find each require you to download an app to interact with.

    What does all of this mean? ... well, it really means that somebody would have eventually seen the need for a browser and invented it.

  • Reposting content from other sources using bots generating content via bots.

  • Buying an electric vehicle does not make the world a better place, but buying and using a gas vehicle makes the world worse by a bigger margin, so if you're buying a vehicle, an electric vehicle is probably better.