Hm, hopefully Discord takes awhile to enshittify. Sounds like the current solutions need time to polish up.

I did find out recently that the team behind the Element Matrix client made Element Call and integrated it into their apps recently, but I’ve never used it personally. Have you used it? How was it?

They definitely got the Discord aesthetic down. Unfortunately, it seems to be both self-hostable and unfederated, which means that the userbase is going to be split up between a bunch of small and quiet instances with no convenient way to interact with the larger ecosystem. Their FAQ suggests that while it’s not in the roadmap currently, they’re still open to the idea, so maybe we should let them know that this would be a desirable thing.

Oh? When did they change that?

And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.

It’s also ok to wish that they run at a consistently smooth framerate. It’s one thing to look like crap and it’s another to both look like crap and run like it too. I’ve been playing Palworld on medium for the past couple of weeks and it was pretty jarring going from that to seeing the Legends Z-A footage.

The questions should be fine for most people so long as they don’t go overboard with it. 2-3 should work. Select interests from a list (and have an option to fill some in), select moderation preferences from a list, and select a language/region from a list. There could even be a button that just selects an instance randomly for people who can’t be bothered (this can use the browser language to avoid sending people to instances in languages that they don’t speak).

I’ve had a similar idea before for the join sites where they asks users a few questions about their interests/preferences and then redirect them to an instance based on that information. And when they sign up, it could also automatically subscribe them to the relevant hashtags/communities. Instance admins could be prompted when setting up the software if they want the site to send users to their instance (and how many they’re willing to take); this could work like a firehose distribution system to help avoid overwhelming infrastructure during exodus waves.

I wonder if it’ll be the porn.

I’m going to be so pissed if this AI bullshit ends up drawing too much attention to the best shadow libraries and they get bopped because of it.

I’ve been using Virt-Manager with KVM/Qemu and don’t have any complaints.

Can’t come soon enough. I’m stuck in connector hell over here with USB-A, USB-C, and Micro-USB.

BTW, the Fediverse equivalent is called Friendica and it also supports more platform protocols than just ActivityPub.

If you post in public, it can be scraped; that’s true on Bluesky as well as the Fediverse and also on the centralized corporate platforms. It’s something you have to be mindful of when posting. Using privacy-conscious walled chat apps is the better option for people who want to avoid that, but even those can have leakers in the group chat.

Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.

The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.

Occasionally when I’m searching for something, I’ll check out some Reddit links and honestly it’s a crapshoot as to whether half of the comments have been deleted or not. Useful search results are getting to be a pain to come by.

Infrastructure for a 300 MAU Mastodon instance isn’t very much, but if they’re paying employees to run it then that will drive expenses up quite a bit compared to how it is with volunteer-run instances.

That’s a shame to see. Fediverse denizens are like the primary demographic that would consider using Firefox in the first place, so them hosting an instance was pretty cool.

Hopefully Pocketpair wins, because they made the better monster catching game. I’m still reeling from how bad the performance is in Scarlet/Violet.