Wasn’t it hosted in Finland? Or have things changed?

I enjoyed helping this place grow and doing my part to discuss here but I disagree with this decision and I’m going to evaluate looking for a different home instance.

Not being bri’ish

Just kidding, I’m neither lol

Enshittification is fueled by normies NEVER LEARNING.

There was a project called Yacy but it clearly never took off.

just like RSS feeds did not become mainstream while Reddit did, the current state of the fediverse will not gain mainstream popularity; however, it’ll serve as a stepping stone towards a new federated internet that’ll be seamless and intuitive for non-technically-inclined individuals and those who are indifferent to the implications for privacy and digital freedom.

97% of people will only jump from walled garden 1 to walled garden 2

97% chance of being EEE. Suddenly everyone will be coming to the Fediverse but not because they’re interested but to talk to people on Threads. Then they’re going to deviate from the AP spec slowly and become the de facto standard and so on. Or they’re going to pull a Google Chat.

Back when I was a teenager I had the blind optimism the future would be bright and we would keep all the positive trends we had in the early 2010s.

But is hosting your own mail server and using it for work/finances/everyday life still an option? I don’t think so, at least not without workarounds because sooner or later you will have to send/receive to/from big email.

No server is required to use them, and the amount of spam and fraud they filter out is enormous.

Okay you do have a point. The thing is they get abused for email where it’s pretty much a racket. I just really hope Lemmy doesn’t end up the same way, since if some bad faith powerful actor starts having control over a list then they get to dictate which servers can federate and which ones not, which is pretty much a walled garden.

I do get the need to identify malicious instances preemptively though, spambots are a threat wherever we go and some instances are just insufferable like exploding heads.

I think the small instance can temporarily defederate to reduce the load. kbin.social had to do this during the first reddit exodus because they grew too much too fast and couldn’t handle the load.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t go the way of email, it started the same way: federated service controlled by no one. Nowadays big corporations influence banlists to enforce a protection racket and non-compliant instances are both banned and filled with spambots.

buen nombre

Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.

These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.

Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.

By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it’s already harming society as a whole because it’s causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.

This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it’s only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it’s extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.

Seems to work good enough!

Thanks c:

it is more sustainable to pay for your small chunk of a network than to pay for a monolith that encompasses everything

Imagine you have a bunch of island countries. Each country needs to communicate with other countries for several affairs and to trade. A network connection is a route where boats transit back and forth between two said countries with people and things. The location of each island is encoded with a unique address, called an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The thing is, each country also has a huge, massive amount of different sea ports. A big amount of them. To be precise, 65536 different ones.

Each port number is associated with a service or a city that benefits from said sea traffic and expects boats. So to send a boat from one country to another, you need to send that boat from a specific port to a specific port in country (IP address). For example, port 80 is Website City in Google Land. You need to google something / send and receive boats with cargo (your search query). You have to send a boat from your own port 80 (Firefox Town) to Google Land (IP address of a Google server)'s own port 80 which is located in Website City.

Each network connection is a series of sea trips between cities.

True black background, AOSP Mods suite for 3 columns on quick settings, better scaling options for launchers, Lineage trebuchet launcher and derivatives, isolate apps like Google Calculator and Gboard off networking, theme engine tweaks for better generated colors and more.

I think it’s nice as long as you have a custom ROM with root to tweak it. It’s UNUSABLE on its default state.

But I still miss Holo and its mystique so much, it was perfect on small screens and needed some tweaking to be a mature, elegant, unique and expressive UI design language.