“We understand migrations of this magnitude can be challenging“
No, this specific migration should have never happened in the first place.
Manifest V3 is an absolute disaster that makes developers’ lives hard for no reason other than Google being desperate to crackdown on adblockers.
No additional security. No additional features. Nothing to make the pill sweeter. Just Google abusing its dominant position in the browser market to relentlessly push for years for a new standard that makes HTTP requests and intercepting requests at runtime ridiculously hard, so it can tame uBlock and friends. The whole declarativeNetRequest API that replaces the dear ol’ webRequest API is the equivalent of tying developers’ hands behind their back with the only purpose of increasing friction.
Manifest V3 is a technological abomination that greatly limits what extensions can do, and it should have never seen the light of the day.
My browser extensions will stubbornly remain Manifest V2 only. Even if that means being compatible only with Firefox. I wish that more developers did the same, so the Chromium-based extensions ecosystem may become as barren as it deserves to be, and more people would switch to alternative browsers, but of course nobody likes to say no to the browser that serves ~90% of the market. I just hope that the folks at Mozilla won’t get strange ideas and will keep supporting Manifest V2 forever.
“Firefox, however, has no plans to deprecate MV2 and will continue to support MV2 extensions for the foreseeable future. And even if we re-evaluate this decision at some point down the road, we anticipate providing a notice of at least 12 months for developers to adjust accordingly and not feel rushed.”
I really don’t like that “…even if we re-evaluate … 12 months notice…“ part. I know that the folks at Mozilla may have the best intentions, but with all Chromium-based browsers leaving V2 behind Mozilla will basically become the sole maintainer of the old Manifest API. Brave at some point announced that they’ll keep supporting it as well, but 1. I don’t trust anything that comes out of Brendan Eich’s mouth, and 2. if they decide to keep supporting V2 then they’ll basically have to maintain, forever, their own fork of Chromium that keeps the old API.
I feel like Google used its weight and played the long game quite well here. Of course we all know why V3 came out. Of course nobody likes it. But hey, what are you going to do? Maintain your own fork of V2 without having even a fraction of Google’s resources, and to serve probably <5% of the market with a tiny subset of extensions that didn’t migrate? Hmm…
I’ve just had to debunk some more pseudoscience garbage shared by my mother on Facebook. The only reason why I still use that platform every now and then is just to make sure that my family doesn’t go completely off the basket case tangent with conspiracy bullshit.
This time, after chemtrails, vaccines that cause autism, Covid intentionally spread by the government, climate change that doesn’t exist, new world order secretely decided in Davos, freemasons and Jews ruling the world, gender theory pushed by a cult of paedophiles, and Putin and Trump as the only saviours, it was the time for the landing on the moon that didn’t happen.
The arguments used by the guy (“there are no signs of the source code that was used by the Apollo missions and the lunar module didn’t have enough thrust to take off”) could be dismantled with a simple Github link and a quick round of the Tsiokovsky rocket equation.
But the original post had hundreds of reshares, while my response didn’t get a single reaction. And my mother, who quit school at the age of 12 and has no clue of what either specific impulse nor escape velocity are, didn’t understand anything of my explanation anyway, and tomorrow she’ll probably just reshare some more bullshit that she wants to believe in.
Does anyone have family members or close friends who are also stuck in this vicious conspiracy cycle that apparently can’t be broken with any efforts of reasoning? How do you cope with that? It is becoming utterly depressing from my side. The conspiracy-inclined side of social media has features that resemble too much those of a cult. I’ve fought to take my family out of a cult years ago, just to see them plunge into another one. The time required to debunk bullshit is high, while the time to reshare it basically zero, and I feel like it’s a war I can’t win. Wondering if there’s a way out that doesn’t end up affecting our own mental health even more.
@informapirata a proposito, ma va bene se redirigo un paio di boomer intortati da anni di complottismi su Facebook su mastodon.uno come forma di detox temporaneo? 😆
@cory the idea sounds similar to what I’ve done a while ago with #Platypush + #mopidy (and optionally Tidal). My implementation also uses the scrobbled tracks over a certain period and Last.fm’s API to automatically generate a “discover weekly” playlist.
I haven’t toyed with Plex in a while, but why did you have to run everything on Firebase/Supabase? If you have your Plex server running locally isn’t it more convenient to go for a fully local solution?
@paul yeah it seems to work for me too now. I eventually went for the nuclear option - reset the db, encryption key, workdir and create everything anew.
Not sure if the problem was with some cached configuration parameter that wasn’t refreshed even after the container was destroyed, but at least things seem to work now…
@adiz lol my bad - my tut client mixed up the threads.
The only alternative I see to Matrix right now is XMPP. I still run my own server. But it doesn’t come even close to compete with the number of available bridges (that’s actually the main thing I use Matrix for).
The only thing that can still compete with Matrix when it comes to bridges/integrations is still IRC+bitlbee. But that ecosystem is literally falling apart, it’s largely based on libpurple extensions that often haven’t been touched in years, and of course you can forget decent mobile-native clients.
Or maybe just run alternative servers to Synapse, but so far I’ve had a mixed experience with them - Conduit is definitely snappier, but I’ve had trouble to set up many of my bridges, which seem to be primarily designed for Synapse.
@Goffi integrations like Instagram, Telegram and WhatsApp mostly rely on libpurple plugins (like purple-gowhatsapp or purple-instagram) that are either poorly documented, more unstable or lack many features that are available on Matrix bridges.
By own admission of some of these developers, they usually don’t test their plugins against Spectrum2, and mileage may vary a lot. And usually when one of these plugins dies it takes the whole service down with it.
I’m in general a bit unimpressed with the state of libpurple - I feel like it’s becoming a very aged ecosystem maintained by a very limited number of developers that have to make those plugins work for a very wide range of clients. That’s also the reason why I left bitlbee.
Slidge seems to be promising, but I feel like it’s still at an immature stage.
Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:
"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”
And creators like @thelinuxEXP have mentioned multiple times that the lack of financial incentives to post their content on e.g. PeerTube vs. YouTube acts as a deterrent for many.
And the Fediverse community in general has already a strong sense of “reward-based” ethics - many already make LibrePay/Patreon donations to their instance admins and favourite content creators, so why not embed such ability in the protocol itself and bypass the middlemen?
Allowing micropayments in ActivityPub (per-post, one-off, recurrent etc.) would actually attract many creators who are currently stuck against their will on proprietary platforms, are at the mercy of YouTube’s mercurial monetization algorithms, don’t have much freedom in deciding how they want to get paid, and have to give back a non-negligible share of their revenue to the platform itself.
Imagine instead a world where micropayments are handled at protocol level itself, a piece of content or a profile that requires the user to make a payment would transparently respond with an HTTP 402, the money would move from the donor’s account to the contributor’s without any middlemen to shave off profits, no external algorithms are in charge of what can be monetized and how, and creators don’t even have to worry about posting the same content across multiple different platforms because ActivityPub would take care of the whole distribution problem. I can’t think of a better silver bullet to get content creators to do the jump.
The thing is that if we don’t implement this right on the protocol level because we oppose commercialization on ideological grounds, then Threads may implement it anyway on their version of ActivityPub (and then yes, it’d really be E-E-E), and content creators who do content creation as a job have one more reason to avoid the Fediverse.
I’ve got a bit more of a mixed feeling about ads instead. There’s sensitivity on the Fediverse about donations and micropayments, but almost everyone here hates the ad-based business model to the core. If the payments idea and implementation works right, then I don’t think we need to pollute our walls with such low-quality littering. I’m happy to leave that to Threads if they want to implement it, because I really don’t see much of added value in it and I don’t see why anybody out there would like that idea.
@Chocobozzz@thelinuxEXP@Techaltar@dansup@jwildeboer I would add that any implementation of a payment subsystem should probably be done at protocol level, so individual implementations of #ActivityPub don’t have to reinvent the wheel - doing #payments right is a hard problem, and it doesn’t make sense to fragment the efforts by solving the same problem multiple times on Mastodon/WriteFreely/PeerTube/Pixelfed etc.
The payments subsystem should be better integrated in the ActivityPub ecosystem compared to a “Donate here” link that redirects to a 3rd-party provider. This is probably the right chance of giving the HTTP 402 code the implementation it deserves.
I left the payments industry a few years ago so I’m not sure of what open solutions and protocols are in the market that could be already leveraged, but maybe something like OpenPayments could be a good starting point - there are many efforts on the open banking standards lately, with different degree of maturity, and IMHO a good implementation of payments over ActivityPub could be a great driver for adoption.
I’ve got the feeling that if we don’t do this right then Threads could scoop up this chance for an “embrace” to “extend” pivot.
Featured speaker this time was Euro Member of Parliament @kimvsparrentak who passionately spoke on the need for a more free Internet detached from #bigTech and more focussed on #Democracy and real #Social interaction.
When confronted with her presence on X and Insta, and the lack of active presence here on the #Fediverse we promised to help her.
Please help us get a decent follower-base here and follow her account right now, before she even gets a chance to get more active. A follower base of more than a 1000 people will surely help her convince her party members to spend time and money on a real presence here.
Many politicians agree with us that #BigTech centralization is bad. Yet their primary presence is on Meta/X in most of the cases. When asked “then why are you not on the Fedi?”, many respond with “because there aren’t enough people for me to justify the jump/investment”.
And that in turn feeds the other feedback loop - “why do you still have an account on X?” - “because most of the politicians/public figures are there”.
Building presence in the social infrastructure one actually believes in, even if that requires extra effort, shouldn’t be something contingent to the probabilities of getting thousands or followers on that platform.
@amerika@kimvsparrentak@koen@gemeenteamsterdam@DeGroene@sicco@waag to be fair, recent European laws are as anti-monopolistic as they can get. The DMA is a good piece of legislation that, if implemented right, can really lower many of those barriers erected by those monopolies - from hostile approach towards 3rd-party integrations to the tyranny of the app stores.
IMHO you don’t have to explicitly encode incentive structures when you are dismantling existing barriers. The goal of dismantling barriers arbitrarily created by someone else (e.g. by E-E-E of open protocols like RSS/XMPP, by takeover of potential competitors, by hindering inter-operability, by opposing alternative clients/stores etc.) is to re-establish the level-playing field.
Once the level-playing field is restored, competitors have a fair access to the market again, and have market incentives to create e.g. alternative clients for Facebook, alternative app stores, social platforms that support cross-posting across walled gardens, experiment with alternative business models without having to compete with the established stalk-and-throw-ads monster, etc.
There’s demand for these things (the number of screenshots posted on walled gardens about stuff that happens on other walled gardens are a sad manifestation of such demand), there’s potentially supply to fullfil those demands too, the only thing that stands in between is a handful of monopolies who have no incentives in opening up.
You don’t need to give those monopolies incentives to stop monopolizing and implementing rent-seeking behaviour. You just need to hit them hard where it hurts them the most, because they will perceive any change from the status quo as a net loss and will oppose it with all the means they have.
The retreat of a monopoly is already a great incentive structure for competitors to fill in the gaps. The only additional incentives should probably be directed towards businesses and entities that instead embrace openness (sticking to the “pick the willing, not the winners” principle). And this is probably an area where the EU could do more (e.g. through direct investing into companies like Nextcloud or Fairphone, or funding to medium-sized Fediverse server admins), so they have a better chance of standing against multibillion companies and build credible alternatives.
Same API, same features, same UI, and support for other DBs than MSSQL.
One single stand-alone application vs. Bitwarden’s 10 Docker containers. 70MB of RAM vs. 2GB. 3MB of db storage vs. 300MB.
Why was a password manager supposed to take so many resources in the first place? Just because it runs on a Microsoft-only stack and on .NET’s inefficient VM? Just because somebody thought that it was a good idea to separate everything into different containers (even icons and 2fa are modeled as separate services in Bitwarden)?
It reminds me of my recent migration from Mastodon to Akkoma. I got more features, 5GB of RAM freed up and 300GB of storage freed up almost overnight.
Writing and running inefficient software that pointlessly consumes all the resources available on a machine should be a crime in a world with limited resources.
It makes me think of how much shitty bloated software like @bitwarden, probably based on awfully inefficient languages and frameworks like Java, Ruby on Rails and .NET, is running out there, pointlessly sucking up resources for doing simple jobs that could easily be done with 99% less resources.
Today’s developers, spoiled by IDEs, powerful machines, docker-compose and shortsighted “just throw more RAM at the problem” approaches, have forgotten how to write efficient software. Time for them to learn how to write good efficient software again. Software doesn’t eat the world. Only shitty software built on shitty framework does.
@davidculley my experience with Ruby on Rails application mostly involves running both Mastodon and Gitlab on my servers.
In both the cases, what I’ve noticed is that it’s not the language itself that is slow and heavy (Ruby’s weight is comparable to that of e.g. Python), but Sidekiq.
Sidekiq is the standard framework used by Ruby on Rails application to schedule and run asynchronous jobs (processes, threads…), kind of akin to what php-fpm does for PHP.
In my experience, it’s hard to configure properly, and when not configured properly it ends up with endless pools of active jobs doing all kind of things and sucking up all resources you give to them.
How can you call yourself a civilized country when you can’t even keep guns outside of schools, and your solution to gun violence in schools is either to have armed guards at the entrance or give teachers guns as well?
Is it a civilized Western country or is it the fucking far west?
How come most of the other countries around the world have figured out long ago how to send kids to school without fears of them being shot, and the richest country in the world can’t figure out how to solve such a simple problem yet?
@chillanarchist01 the insularism of Americans with no exposure to the outside world never ceases to amuse me.
You guys are the ones who are likely to elect again a malignant narcissist who buddies up with people who wave Confederate flags and Swastikas, and you think that it’s others who are slipping into totalitarianism.
You guys are the ones who have by far the highest number of shootings in the Western world, and yet you still fail to acknowledge that guns are the problem rather than the solution.
A parent who would send their kid to learn about society and civilization to a place with armed guards, armed teachers and armed pupils rather than give up their distorted idea of “self-defense” (as if it’s your supermarket guns who would defend you from modern warfare) is the best definition of evolutionary failure.
@chillanarchist01@Bernard or maybe just make sure that deranged people can’t easily get hold of a gun at the nearest mall?
How come such talks only exist in the US? How come nobody in the civilized world would think of arming the teachers? How come a shooting in Europe is such a serious event that people talk about it for months and years, and in the US shootings have become a weekly routine? Is it so hard to understand that the ease of getting your hands of a gun is the only problem?
@chillanarchist01@Bernard well there are people with degrees in psychology whose job is exactly to assess whether someone is mentally fit to hold a tool for murder. I’d trust their experience. Most if not all the other Western countries have tight background checks when it comes to gun licenses, and nobody seems to complain.
Is the right for a nutcase to buy a gun worth more than the right of a kid to grow up in a safe school environment without exposure to violence or tools of violence?
@chillanarchist01@Bernard you see, there’s no right of self-defense in Europe that needs to be enforced by individuals owning their own guns because institutions here actually work.
Because I can call the police if something goes wrong and they would usually do a good job protecting people.
Are institutions so rotten in the US that you can’t trust the police nor the government and you have to resort to people owning their own tools of murder? Then the problem is probably with your country and the mindset of its citizens.
Defense from crime and abuse is a task undertaken by governments in basically all civilized countries.
You have laws that set clear boundaries on what’s allowed, courts whose job is to enforce those laws, and a police force that is trained to use weapons if needed in order to protect other citizens from law abusers.
Civilized societies are shaped around such separations of concerns and accountability - something that you don’t have if every citizen feels that they have the right to pull the trigger whenever they like.
This is how things have been working at least since the times of the Greek polis and the Roman empire.
If you mistrust institutions, elected governments and police forces to the point that you feel that you have the right to take care of yourself however you please, then either you have a problem with rotten institutions, or a mindset problem. Either way, your idea of advanced civilization was already outdated 2500 years ago.
And you can’t see that if you’re the only country following these principles, and you’re the only country with a major gun violence problem, then probably the problem is with your country, not with everyone else.