Microsoft accidentally leaks internal tool that can enable hidden Windows 11 features
For what it's worth, !community@instance has been a standard of sorts for Fediverse groups since 2018, when Friendica implemented them. Lemmy communities are simply Fediverse groups which is why they use this syntax, and I suspect it will probably be the one adopted by Mastodon as well when they do groups (although who knows? Whatever Mastodon decides is what will be standard across the entire Fediverse).
These sorts of instances are private - you can't sign up to them, only the new organizations post on them.
In your example, people who have the "bad instances" blocked won't see the replies under the posts in question, as the instance will not fetch replies from said source.
With how Mastodon works as well, it won't fetch replies from instances until they're known either, so brand new instances aren't going to flood popular comment sections - this is a bit of a con though in a way, as it degrades the user experience when trying to read threads and causes people to constantly post the same stuff as they can't see all the replies.
I think this disconnect here on Lemmy comes from why people use the platforms they did before (Reddit vs Twitter).
Reddit was always purely content focused, and I feel people trying out Mastodon from Lemmy are expecting the same thing - where Mastodon is about content, and not people you want to follow.
I also love Mastodon as well and I don't think the issues people are posting about in here are issues at all either, as Mastodon being about directly connecting with people and a purely chronological feed is why I like it - if I want to search content relating to a topic, I browse Lemmy instances instead.
No, because what is the chance people will give up YouTube?
Not very high, I'd say!
For what it's worth I'm not saying that - it's just a common argument I've seen online lately in these spaces. I don't actually know if it's true because I don't use Google Search.
This is my take too - Google Search and YouTube especially which are owned by Google.
Even if Chrome had like 5% market share, surely they could just push this anyway? While the Chromium monopoly is partially to blame for this, I'd argue the centralisation of the web is as well.
Sure, "Google Search is useless now, you can't find what you want!", but the vast, vast majority of people still and continue to use it, and nothing will change that most likely.
The examples you give are bad - in those spaces you are judged on how you look, not your legal gender. Many men and women have been questioned in changing rooms / bathrooms just because of how they look, even if they're cisgender.
So I can't really see how changing your legal gender freely is going to cause issues. There is nobody stopping a man going into a womens changing room or bathroom already.
Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can't really "compromise" in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.
While "nobody cares about privacy" and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.
Furthermore, the Matrix team aren't the ones "complaining" about adoption, they're actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn't insignificant as there's over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can't track.
Would you be able to give any examples? I can't really think of much that would crumble under a self-ID system, and I would suspect there's some restrictions on things like how often you can change, so you don't have people changing for things like government bonuses or whatever might exist.
A lot of other things like "women's shelters" or "men's clubs" tend to be based more on society's view on you as a man/woman rather than any sort of legal check.
Technically the idea is that if Chrome has barely any market share (will never happen, but let's pretend), they cannot implement this as it will anger and lock too many users out of day to day life.
However...
With Google Search and YouTube being by far the most 2 popular websites in the world, I think they still could. The vast majority of people would never give those up and if they're told to use another program to access them, they absolutely will, meaning in an ideal world with a browser competition, they can easily destroy it immediately.
Not really - Mastodon is specifically about socialising with people you know, not content groups.
Closest thing is probably https://getstarted.social/, although it looks like the person who runs this site hasn't posted to Mastodon since December so...
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these "free" products that do everything you need them to, so they've built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.
Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn't see this as they don't follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that's all people care about.
The one thing Musk and Spez have successfully done is make themselves scapegoats that leave people believing that everything will be resolved once they leave, so people have hope since there's a "clear solution."
These issues run much deeper than the individual owners and CEOs though, it's the rot of the companies and platforms themselves, and getting rid of those people will solve absolutely nothing.
What needs to happen is for people to just switch off and help grow alternative platforms away from corporate meddling. Will it ever become mainstream? Maybe not, but it will never happen if people never try and just give up.
Nomadic identity is a bit of a weird one, because there's no silver bullet. It's either:
- People store their credentials and data on their own systems in a peer-to-peer like system, but people are going to be constantly losing their access to their identity if they do this, so while this is technically ideal, it isn't going to work for those that aren't too familiar with technology. People have gotten very used to not having to look after their data in recent years.
- The identity is handled by some sort of identity server for authorisation, but what this will most likely do is give rise to some centralised identity services that you're going to have to trust, which arguably may be against decentralisation.
I do agree it would be way better for a single account/identity to just work everywhere on the Fediverse, but I'm not entirely sure how the details should be handled. Nostr is one implementation (it's the first one), whereas things like SSO with Google / Microsoft is the second (kbin, for example, has this).
I have noticed that Mastodon development has slowed down considerably though, but admittedly it must be hard having requests from literally every angle about every use case and concern. It's easy for us to say "just add quote posts", "just add search", but the people who have already been on Mastodon have used it knowing those don't exist, so the Mastodon developers have to implement these things while still thinking of every use case and also still sticking to their own beliefs as to what Mastodon should be.
Telling people to "just use Firefish" is a common thing that comes up when people talk about this, but it's not really a solution at all with where we're currently at. (this isn't aimed at you, by the way, just addressing this specific point)
Whether we like it or not, Mastodon is by far the biggest player in the microblogging space (8M accounts on Mastodon vs 499K on Misskey at #2. with Mastodon being 77.9% of the entire Fediverse!), and it is going to be what the vast majority of people are using, simply due to word of mouth or mindshare. On these sorts of platforms, many features depend on the people you're posting to also experiencing the same features you are. Quote posts are a very popular topic that's requested for various reasons on Mastodon, but while the 3rd party apps and other microblog platforms have these implemented, it doesn't matter if 80%+ of your followers are using Mastodon, because they won't see the post as you intend for them to see it.
Furthermore, as we know, the "culture" of Mastodon is of the Fediverse at large, using a different platform isn't going to fix this issue - your community is what you make of it depending on your instance really, but fact of the matter is, most people are going to be drawn to the simpler general instances "where everyone is at", which is going to be the big Mastodon instances. Trying to divert those people to other platforms isn't going to work, because they don't understand how all this works, so good first impressions need to be made on Mastodon, and unfortunately due to the culture of Mastodon attracting a certain type of crowd and no mass migrations to "Eternal September" the culture, especially since Threads now exists, this is going to be a very hard barrier to overcome.
Whenever I've talked to people about Mastodon outside of the tech-savvy spaces, most people just see Mastodon as an app and there are "people on Mastodon", attempting to try and introduce people to all these different platforms and how you can still talk to everyone in places unfortunately just makes their head explode, as they're not used to the open web due to how it evolved after the rise of Facebook.
Mastodon is stuck between a rock and a hard place, where it wants to make decentralisation the norm by attracting as many people as possible, while still keeping its general culture in place and not wanting to turn into "another Twitter" which usually ends up being filled with hot takes and people dunking on people for entertainment - but unfortunately, this is how people consume social media now, it's all about content.
For what it's worth if you want to stay inside the Ubuntu ecosystem (so to speak), I would personally recommend installing KDE Neon, which is based on Ubuntu and maintained by the KDE developers. Otherwise, Debian - most Ubuntu specific things work in Debian, although not everything (PPAs and stuff).
So I didn't read it either (sue me), however people are paid to work on Linux. The examples you give about RedHat and SUSE are completely incorrect - they're not there to tell people how to use Linux, they literally develop for it and are paid to make it a better product.
The "issue", of course, is that they focus their paid efforts on Enterprise and server usage, and not as a user-facing product for the most part, although it could be argued that widespread adoption by companies is how you get it into peoples' hands, since they get used to it at work or education.
Also, you're using Ubuntu LTS 20.04 which is technically out of date, as 22.04 LTS also exists, and LTS is primarily meant to be for server/company use, rather than trying to keep up with the latest software and features.
I took a look at your bullet point list too, and literally every single one of your bullet points (other than accessibility, unfortunately) is covered by my laptop running Debian 12 with KDE Plasma - seriously, try out a KDE Plasma distro, it most likely fixes all your problems.
Not officially - but they'll be adding groups in one of their future updates (not 4.2, unfortunately). That will work exactly as you'd expect.
However in the meantime, people use Guppe Groups (https://a.gup.pe/), which are a type of "user" which boosts all posts sent to it to other people following it. For example, I could follow @bikes@a.gup.pe and anytime anyone mentions @bikes@a.gup.pe, the post will be boosted to all other users following @bikes@a.gup.pe.
The above is how Lemmy communities work when followed from Mastodon, as well.
If you're wanting a Firefox-based browser with sidebar / vertical tabs, I'd take a look at Floorp.
It aims to be a Gecko equivalent to things like Vivaldi, you can get it at https://floorp.app. The recent version 11 release is fantastic.