vaguerant

BlueSky is open source. The web site, the mobile apps, it's all on GitHub.

The one part of their infrastructure that's not open is the discover feed. BlueSky claims they have to keep that secret in order to prevent it being manipulated if it was known what it promotes. Kinda sketchy, but the feed is optional and can be replaced with fully open alternatives.

The more important factor holding it back from being as open as, say, Mastodon, is that it is prohibitously expensive to host due to its content indexing system. If you had the financial backing to support setting up another instance, you could.

Ultimately though, that's what causes the same Caesar issue for BlueSky, at least right now. You can't take your business elsewhere within the "BlueSky fediverse" because nobody else is offering to host. Getting on board with their federated system requires that you optimistically hope that somebody else will step up if this Caesar goes bad, which is a huge gamble.

Just for reference, while it has been edited, the comic is by Stan Kelly, The Onion's resident cartoonist. Kelly is fictional, a satirical stereotype of a right-wing newspaper cartoonist. His signatures are over-labelling everything, gratuitous self-inserts, and framing the wealthy/other advantaged groups as morally upstanding patriots unfairly victimized by their inferiors. The latter is usually accompanied by them crying a single tear.

All that to say, in the context of a Kelly comic, "Honest Tesla Salesman" is definitely meant ironically.

If you're accustomed to using Reddit via Android, you might like the app Stealth (download from F-Droid, source code at GitLab). It's a privacy-focussed Reddit scraper/client with no account support. I don't interact with Reddit any more, but on the rare occasion that I want to check on a community there, it does the job. You can bookmark communities you want to follow and get a feed, all the standard stuff you'd expect to do, besides logging in.

Reddit heard we have a fediverse chick.

Reddit before Reddit. Another community link aggregation site where users would "digg" (upvote) the most interesting stories across a variety of categories. After an unpopular site redesign and a poor algorithm that favored a handful of power users, the userbase left en masse to join the competing platform, Reddit.

In the wake of the entire userbase leaving, Digg turned into some kind of generic curated news site or something, nobody is really sure because nobody went there for like a solid 15 years. Just this month, original Digg co-founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian purchased Digg back from whoever the hell owned Digg lately intending to once again compete as a Reddit alternative.

Would it be possible to reset the purge timer for individual users based on activity? e.g. A user who comments or up/downvotes something gets their purge timer reset, so that active users never get purged unless they change their password or similar. Not sure how easy it is to tie activity data to a login token, I have no idea how Lemmy or anything else works.

In positive news, the title database has expanded their Unicode coverage.

Neat. Checking out fediverse.observer, the general Lemmy graph doesn't have the same shape, so it's doesn't look like feddit.org is "just" benefiting from Lemmy growth more broadly. Rather, feddit.org seems to be growing faster than average. The commenters from the original (German) feddit.org post attribute the growth to interest in the !buyfromeu@feddit.org community.

This old Toothpaste for Dinner comic is all I can think about when someone says they're a libertarian. It's got me this far.

It's true this is a thing that you can do, but the experience seems pretty degraded vs. just registering an account with a Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks (did I miss any?) instance which is natively configured for the kind of threaded conversations that exist on this segment of the fediverse. The instructions basically amount to "Go to a Lemmy instance and use its interface to find a community you're interested in, then copy the link to the discussion you want to interact with and paste that into your Mastodon instance's search bar, then reply to the post that appears. It's that simple!"

If you only interact with threads occasionally or you just want to try it out from Mastodon, this is workable, but you need a lot of patience for the busywork that's involved.

I use Matrix daily but I would hesitate to recommend giving it to children unless you're able to set it up in such a way that they only have access to the rooms you configure--I don't think any Matrix apps have parental control settings but I've never checked.

Matrix has kind of miserable moderation options. Mods can't do basic things like disabling attachments, which makes it prone to NSFL/NSFW image spam. The official automod bot, Mjolnir, can mitigate this somewhat, but can be pretty easily gamed. e.g. It tries to prevent image spam by deleting messages that have an image if they're the first message a user sends in the channel--so spammers just send a message to highlight everybody first, then the images.

When there's nothing that needs moderating, Matrix is great. However, it is severely lacking in ways to handle abuse. If you're in a community that's being targeted by bad actors (like Jared Leto), you basically just have to deal with it; there's very little you can do proactively.

You'll still end up yelling at them, now over the correct pronunciation of sudo.