Well the fact is yes, Mastodon is still relatively small compared to Facebook, X or Bluesky. Mastodon has actually 7,616,908 users total: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon. Which is a huge number, but most likely a lot of bot accounts and non-active account to be honest.
Now the reason why is Mastodon is not as large as Bluesky is debatable. I actually blame ActivityPub protocol and the complex nature of trying to become a federated platform.
Let's be honest now, most people do not care (or don't have the technical knowledge) to understand federation or decentralization. Hence people will just jump to the easiest solution: A big centralized server, aka X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky. Same for search engines like Google.
Meh.. I get itchy when I hear private. We could also improve the experience for seeding publicly and for longer. Not only by education but maybe even using some kind of intensive to keep seeding.
Blockchain is a nice technology, but not all the solutions need blockchain technology. Just like BitTorrent doesn't require blockchain, a decentralized internet alternative also doesn't need blockchain.
With LibreWeb I tried to go this route, using IPFS protocol. But like I mention above, IPFS is not as decentralized by design as people might think. People still need to download the content first and hosting a node.. And then ALSO pin the content.. It's not great. And look-up takes way too long as well with their DHT look-up.
Problem with IPFS, is that it's not really that decentralized as I wish it was. Since by default the data is not shared across the network, meaning if nobody is downloading and hosting that node, you are still the only one having a copy of the data. Meaning if your connection is gone or if you get censored, there is no other node where the IPFS data is living. It only works if somebody else is activily downloading the data.
Ow, and then you also need to Pin the content, or the data will be removed again -,-
Furthermore, the look-up via DHT is very slow and resolving the data is way too slow in order to make sense. People expect today max 1 or 2 seconds look-up time + page load would result in 4 or 5 seconds.. Max... However with IPFS this could be 20, 30 seconds or even minutes...
Yes it's very much alive and very important. A lot of industries (like their products: books, movies but also games) are getting restricted, taken away, taking down and removed from other platforms. Old ROM sites are taken down. And platforms like archive.org need to remove all their books.
The problem is, that there is nobody archiving anymore.. because it's not allowed due to "copyright infringement". In the end, all these products like books, movies and (old) games might be gone forever. Next generations will not be able to have access to it. This is what worries me the most. And Torrent might be the only way to fix/solve it. By distributing these kind of material. Especially older books, older movies and older games.
Let's don't.. The internet is important to keep open for everybody, or we become just like China with their "Great Firewall"... Yea.. No thanks. When you go this route (pun intended), there is no going back, every industry would like to enforce bans on everything.
Look I understand it's a small team, but they also not onboard more people. I like the AUR in that regard much more, since that scales at least. No single point.
If Void Linux has some kind of AUR instead of this long list of open PRs, I would go directly for Void instead of Arch.
WineGUI is officially removed now by Wikipedians. I'm not proud on you. #wikipedia #winegui #opensource