I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it's hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you're going to end up with a system where you're under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.
I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it'd still work. You wouldn't have to worry about links to the "wrong instance" and you wouldn't have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.
I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a "fediverse browser" is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.
However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it's own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we're originally trying to avoid.
I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr's approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the "content" tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else's server or your own.
Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. I think it's fine for servers to store the content and provide endpoints for specific queries/sorts, and expecting the clients to have all the posts is a tad extreme.
In this case, yes the data needs to live somewhere, but that's the nature of having data be retrievable.
Nostr does some interesting things! What I mentioned here is actually just the identity part of what I think could be a significantly improved version of the fediverse. I have ideas on how to support subreddit style communities and decentralized moderation and things like that that make the whole idea a bit different from nostr.
I suspect retrofitting a whole new identity system to Fediverse will never happen because server admins, or instance admins, will come up with all kinds of reasons why they don't like the idea of not knowing who their users are. Some of them would probably allow it, but I bet a whole bunch of them wouldn't, and we'd get into this fragmentation where some servers won't allow posts from those types of identity, etc. It seems to me much easier to take Nostr and just give it the functionality you get inside the Fediverse.
It can also be an awesome idea, depending on your perspective. Having an instance without all the cruft is a pristine peaceful thing at times. For a while I ran one of those subscriber bots on Lemmy and pretty quickly found it to be so full of shitposting spam as to be unusable. Just don't start an instance and expect it to be a raging party and you won't find it disappointing.
The first populates the replies of the home timeline posts you see (as well as profiles of people it finds in those replies) and the second pulls down all the content from instances you select for your followed hashtags (choose mastodon.social and you can guarantee you'll see most all posts with those tags)
The only complaint on this list that, I think, is a legitimate complaint is replies not loading. Imagine if Lemmy worked that way. The rest is just how it's intended to work.
Certainly a good warning before trying to self host but this isn't broken.
As someone who's had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It's definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.
I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends' posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It's worked well for me, but again, it's surely not for everyone!
I don't understand the point the posts are trying to make. If an attacker can get at the SQL database, they must have remote access, i.e. the system is compromised somehow. What's stopping them from getting at anything else? Why should we concerned about the database specifically?
I think the point might be that any other program on your pc can access that db. Which would obviously be very bad. If that is the case I would think it would be patched.
More and more games are shipping with mega sus kernel level anti cheat which can (and does according to their EULA) take screenshots and files from your PC to make sure you "aren't cheating".
Valorant, for example, is made by riot, owned by tencent, owned by the Chinese government, and has a nasty kernel anti cheat in it.
So this means that with essentially no effort or changes the Chinese gov can just take this file and related screenshots of everything you do wrapped in a bow
Well, this tells us that more privacy minded people with a background or interest in technology tend to be more present/engaging on Fediverse platforms. Not really surprising.
Same idea as new-reddit with its 'views'. It doesn't make sense how some post on a local subreddit gets a few hundred impressions immediately, even when posted at 4am. Meanwhile the actual organic comments on the same post follow the average human wake/sleep cycle
I wonder if advertisers are also fooled by those numbers, or if they use a different way of measuring
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