The future is probably going to be:

• Whitelist federation models with invite-only instances.
• Anubis and similar software being a base requirement for operation.
• Getting creative with stuff like picture-based logic puzzles as a type of captcha.
• A retreat into less publicly visible spaces like chat apps that you can only get access to through networking.

Yeah, and with the corporate culture that MBAs bring with them, they also tend to make everything as boring and sterile as possible since any degree of fun and personality could be seen as off-putting to a hypothetical person.

Hm, hopefully Discord takes awhile to enshittify. Sounds like the current solutions need time to polish up.

I did find out recently that the team behind the Element Matrix client made Element Call and integrated it into their apps recently, but I’ve never used it personally. Have you used it? How was it?

They definitely got the Discord aesthetic down. Unfortunately, it seems to be both self-hostable and unfederated, which means that the userbase is going to be split up between a bunch of small and quiet instances with no convenient way to interact with the larger ecosystem. Their FAQ suggests that while it’s not in the roadmap currently, they’re still open to the idea, so maybe we should let them know that this would be a desirable thing.

Oh? When did they change that?

And so the hell-loop continues. Matrix seems like the closest successor, but having used it for awhile I would describe the experience as janky-but-workable. Signal’s good, but requires a phone number. I hear that Mumble’s good, but it’s overly focused on VoIP. Hopefully the alternatives polish themselves up before the enshittification gets too bad.

I use what’s packaged in my distro’s repositories, unless I need a specific version, or the software isn’t packaged at all.

Ah yeah, I remember reading that post awhile ago. I was quite surprised to find out how old Friendica is (first release in 2010); if that doesn’t demonstrate longevity, then I dunno what does.

Federated social media has been around for a long time; the oldest one that I know of was identi.ca from the late 2000s. ActivityPub platforms like Mastodon have since breathed a lot of life into the federated ecosystem and I’m excited to see what the future holds for it.

It’s also ok to wish that they run at a consistently smooth framerate. It’s one thing to look like crap and it’s another to both look like crap and run like it too. I’ve been playing Palworld on medium for the past couple of weeks and it was pretty jarring going from that to seeing the Legends Z-A footage.

I wonder if it’ll be the porn.

I’m going to be so pissed if this AI bullshit ends up drawing too much attention to the best shadow libraries and they get bopped because of it.

I’ve been using Virt-Manager with KVM/Qemu and don’t have any complaints.

Can’t come soon enough. I’m stuck in connector hell over here with USB-A, USB-C, and Micro-USB.

BTW, the Fediverse equivalent is called Friendica and it also supports more platform protocols than just ActivityPub.

If you post in public, it can be scraped; that’s true on Bluesky as well as the Fediverse and also on the centralized corporate platforms. It’s something you have to be mindful of when posting. Using privacy-conscious walled chat apps is the better option for people who want to avoid that, but even those can have leakers in the group chat.

Mozilla is looking pretty cooked, NGL.

The Pixelfed guy does good work, but video hosting/streaming is the most difficult use-case to compete in due to infrastructure costs; I’m interested to see how he’s planning to handle this and I wish him luck.

Occasionally when I’m searching for something, I’ll check out some Reddit links and honestly it’s a crapshoot as to whether half of the comments have been deleted or not. Useful search results are getting to be a pain to come by.