You’re right, it does not make sense.

If Toronto isn’t in Poland, you must acquit! The defence rests.

Exiting from consensus reality?

Someone needs to tell Carole Cadwallader to move her resistance headquarters out of the Nazi bar. There are a lot of people who’d subscribe to her journalism if it didn’t also involve funding the enemy.

Tired: Lenin’s on sale again

Wired: Hexbear is a shitcoin

lol.

If their support of cryptobro social network Nostr wasn’t a huge red flag, Mullenweg’s stamp of approval surely is

No ActivityPub-based services are really private. There is no mechanism for end-to-end encryption, access-listed posts, or even true DMs. ActivityPub is intended as a microblogging-style publishing service with interaction built in, with privacy not being in the spec’s scope.

Maybe some day they’ll retrofit privacy to the protocol, but that would involve reengineering it to handle key management and end-to-end encryption, which would be a hard problem.

Strong Matt Mullenweg energy

Nice try, officer…

I have historically gone with PostgreSQL and had no complaints. The licensing issues concerning MySQL also give one pause (Oracle are greedy bastards who will use any excuse to extract money from captive customers, so depending on their properties is to be avoided). Having said that, these days, SQLite is probably sufficient for many workloads and has the advantage of not requiring a database server.

Have they figured out how to make access-controlled posts (i.e. friends-only, or for specific subgroups) work with ActivityPub federation, or are all your posts public and visible to anyone, as on Mastodon? If people are going to start using this platform, there will need to be an option for making posts visible only to friends (and “followers only” is not a viable alternative).

So, a more righteous than average Mastodon instance?

The fediverse needs to outlast BlueSky, so that when its VC backers call time and demand a profitable exit (i.e. enshittification), there’ll still be a fediverse.

That looks like an Iain Banks non-sci-fi book jacket

Both of these services appear to be dependent on BlueSky. I.e., if BlueSky ceased existing, or cut them off from its API, they’d die. In that way, they’re not that different from “Log in with Facebook” or similar.

One could theoretically make one’s own independent AT Protocol network, but not in a way that interoperates with BlueSky as a peer. You’re either a subsidiary part of its network or you don’t exist as far as it’s concerned, which is a much poorer value proposition than ActivityPub and related protocols.

No, because the AT Protocol is not designed for interoperability, but rather for entrenching the silo owned by the main node (BlueSky) whilst giving the illusion of being decentralised. It’s to decentralised social media what Microsoft’s OOXML file format (tl;dr: a memory dump of Microsoft Word’s internal data structures encoded in XML, and useless to anything that’s not Microsoft Word or a very precise emulation thereof) is to open document formats.

The official app appears to be written in React Native and is as laggy and janky as you’d expect. Other than that, more people are using it (and/or interacting with it from elsewhere in the fediverse).

Do friends-only posts only work on the same server, or have they devised a protocol for federating access controls?

No thanks, you keep it.

Let me know when you can have posts visible only to friends (which is not the same thing as “visible only to people who follow you”) and permissions for specific friend lists.