Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other things they value. Ask any Windows user. Also, video game modding.

My general experience is that clunky software is what made people tech literate, and now that everything has safety barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy has fallen.

There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being cultural.

I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.

All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.

At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more people every day.

> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them

Nobody really wants to use instagram either—there's basically nothing positive to say about the app or service itself—it just has critical mass.

To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it’s a hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.

It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?

Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.

Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.

>bypassing the permission system

On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.

I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.

Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to follow or get people to follow you.

By definition someone’s actions, if repeated sufficiently often, define their real character.

You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.

It's depressing to me at least. I guess with things like this it works well if you fully buy in and don't understand or care about the privacy violations and psychological tricks they use. But even if I tried to ignore it, I just end up annoyed by the interfaces or workflows or stuff like that. I guess it's just the curse of having really non-standard preferences

As a workaround, next time someone forces you to use Instagram go to https://flufi.me/ to see public content without logging in.

It’s not the solution but I cannot get other people to stop posting on proprietary platforms

I'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.

Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public

Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers

I can see that's probably the logic behind it, but when your biggest USP is federation it still seems like a bad idea to deliberately hobble it.

Since you seem like you have practical knowledge here, I hope you don't mind me asking:

Would it change the equation, meaningfully, if you didn't offer any transcoding on the server and required users to run any transcoding they needed on their own hardware? I'm thinking of a wasm implementation of ffmpeg on the instance website, rather than requiring users to use a separate application, for instance.

Would you think a general user couldn't handle the workload (mobile processing, battery, etc), or would that be fairly reasonable for a modern device and only onerous in the high traffic server environment?

I shove 1080p mp4s onto a very cheap server and I get 2 seconds of load time there versus somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds on youtube. And looking at network requests, the first chunk of the file loads in well under a second so I'd expect something with the metadata preloaded could start playing at that point. So if peertube takes 5 seconds, I really wonder why.

Is it inconvenient to transcode before/during upload?

The funny thing is that YouTube has now enshittified to the point where people routinely DO wait well over 5 seconds to watch the video they actually wanted to watch while interstitials and other commercials are jammed in. Even with adblock enabled, the latest YouTube code won't unlock the first frame of the actual video till some period of ad time has passed so you just sit there looking at a black screen. This on its own definitely isn't enough to get people to leave the platform, but it's still notable how much worse the experience has gotten compared to a few years ago.

What value do you get in transcoding your own stuff? I have plex transcoding disabled on all local network devices that stream it and run into minimal issues (codecs on TV devices, mostly).

I think that's more a measurement of demand volume than anything. It's a VERY tight squeeze between "I'll just send this file directly to the few people I want to show it" and "I want to show this to anyone" to the point no matter what is done by those people it'll seem like nobody does that unless it's also done in the other categories.

GNU Taler [0] perhaps. They are funded by EU grants, and have a funding program [1] going to stimulate the ecosystem.

> We are building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography. Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants. Merchants can redeem the digital cash for traditional money at the digital Exchange. As Merchants are not anonymous, they can be taxed, enabling income or sales taxes to be withheld by the state while providing anonymity for Customers.

[0] https://docs.taler.net/

[1] https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html

Here are some attempts:

LBRY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY

BTT: https://www.kraken.com/learn/what-is-bittorrent-btt

LBRY did that, the US government killed it.

What value would this virtual currency have? Okay, someone seeded some videos and got a token - why should I go and pay them for that token?

I seed videos to my other computer all day and I'm a trillionaire.

Thank you for your response!

So I thought that having an open source project in DPGA would be really great but it seems that everything that glitters isn't gold like how you mention support requests etc.

I have a question tho, What are the best foundations or labels (like DGPA) that an open source software can qualify for which might give it more exposure and funding

Personally I am starting to believe it might be NLNET (https://nlnet.nl/) but what are your thoughts on it?

I was watching the rsync video and she mentions the scenario where you run rsync with the remote as source, and the remote drive isn't mounted correctly and you end up deleting local. LOL

I'm happy that it did. It was a trick to get people to spend more time online so that facebook can make even more money off people's time and attention.

Are these many users actually uploading their stuff there, or is this downloading from youtube and re-uploading?

Definitely, hard to compete with YouTube as a revenue source. That being said, my instance is mainly for digitizing and hosting old VHS tapes from my family so they don't get lost over the years. No need for advertising there :)

Youtube used to have quality content (dare i say, content of much higher originality and quality) in times when there was no monetization yet