Probably. In all honestly, if you are a hexbear user, I’d be keeping a careful eye on who owns the domain when it magically pops back up.

Centralization is a weakness

While I agree with the basic premise of this, I think this is all-the-more a good reason for design solutions around this problem to be discussed so that more competitors can exist. If the fediverse is to expand, there needs to be easy non-technical ways for users to start up a multitude of instances. More of these types of services actually reduces centralization, in that sense.

Corporate internet doesn’t even filter out “uncomfortable” shit for people. They have a vested interest in keeping people engaged whether it’s through love or hate.

This is a misconception I see all the time. Reddit et al try their hardest to make browsing feel like a roller coaster to keep up engagement.

Whatever reason they don’t isn’t a very good one when there’s already excuses being made around AT proto not being scalable beyond a single app.

ActivityPub works today and we are using it right now. There’s basically no incentive to make a new protocol if you aren’t willing to support more than 1 platform that uses it.

I’m not even a bluesky hater, but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel other than disliking the lack of agency that comes with making a (essentially) proprietary protocol. You have to wonder if they ever truly plan to federated at all or if it’s all just lip-service.

That’s what I’m here for lol. I mean this is how reddit was when I first started there. Same with digg

This is what people always miss. Generally, sites become popular because niche subcultures form outside of the “big” websites as they no longer really serve their purpose of connecting to like minded individuals. They never “start big”, they generally snowball from small hardcore users to larger more generalized userbases over time.

When I mentioned I was going to be old at 30, they practically started a riot

I mean, to be fair, there’s been riots for stupider reasons. But probably not many. 🤣

Young people don’t even understand that the internet isn’t only the 5 websites that have existed since before they were born lol

That’s probably a big part of it. We kind of designed the internet to become an information super oligarchy, even if it wasn’t intentional.

I’m 33 for the record so I guess I’m an older tech nerd. Nice. 😎

Regarding VPNs, I wish this was an easier way of doing it. Unfortunately it requires all friends to be tech savvy enough to understand why a vpn is necessary.

I do agree that developers should use their own software, but doing so on a smaller instance with strict active user limits is probably the right call – at least until you are certain the software has a “stable” version, but even then you probably will want to run a master branch instance that is much less stable and prone to errors. Until you can afford it, it’s probably not a good idea for developers to be spending a huge amount of time debugging in-progress features (which IIRC, firefish had a lot of those.)

I was on firefish’s previous instance, known as calckey, before I migrated back to Mastodon.

There were definitely warning signs that the project was facing maintenance issues in those days as well, and it felt that the Firefish rebrand was an attempt to “start a new”.

But just like my post on KBin’s demise, it should be a warning to those who want to make the software and host a “big” instance: Don’t do it. I think it’s smart to host your own mini instance for testing, but you should probably solely focus on the code development side of things to make sure that you aren’t over burdening yourself with managerial tasks. If your software is good, people will make spins inevitably. If people use it, then you will probably have enough people contributing that you can scale up your mini-instance if needed. But don’t jump in without the finances in place, because you’re essentially taking on two jobs.

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