Yeah the selective part I think is new. I believe Akkoma’s authorised fetch is similar to Mastodon, though I’ve also heard it came at the cost of breaking MRFs (essentially policies to handle incoming messages, that can be custom-written if needed)

Agreed. I think Lemmy is more public than Mastodon and co. which do have some privacy settings for posts and account follows, but ActivityPub is inherently a public protocol. Appreciate everything you’ve done for Poptalk btw!

I’m talking about the installation process for VMware itself.

I had to help someone non-techy install VMware on Pop!_OS (the OS preinstalled by System76 on their hardware), and it required messing with the kernel modules which fails on Pop!_OS. It seems like VMware builds for a very specific version of Ubuntu which of course, means the kernel module building process fails when you use a kernel version that’s different to what Ubuntu has (which Pop!_OS does and maybe some other Ubuntu-based distros). Thankfully someone on GitHub maintains up-to-date patches for the VMware modules so I was able to guide him through there but this isn’t something someone new to Linux would want to do.

It’s not like simply installing it from a package manager, well unless you use Arch but I’m not putting this person who’s new to Linux on Arch when he just started using CLI.

Authorised fetch has been a thing on Mastodon and I believe Akkoma too. I don’t know if Pleroma, Soapbox or Misskey have it though.

Essentially, Facebook’s Twitter competitor Threads is gearing up to join the fediverse by integrating ActivityPub into their platform. Don’t take my word too much on this but I believe this is due to the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act which requires interoperability (similar to how iOS now requires sideloading in the EU). This is essentially their cheap way of complying.

The fediverse has a strong hatred of Facebook, for various reasons (from petty things like “embrace, extend, extinguish” to much more serious things like Facebook’s compliance in the Myanmar genocide) and a “pact” was enacted of fediverse instances that are simply outright blocking Threads. Part of it is the fear that Facebook will federate its moderation problem and cause a headache (which, in my opinion, would be better dealt with by limiting Threads to followers only - Mastodon and Pleroma allow this).

Opponents of the Fedipact are optimistic this will help a more mainstream audience warm up to the fediverse. The fediverse has a reputation of being unwieldy and complicated to newcomers, and having a major platform like Threads integrating ActivityPub might help bring them in and see what it’s like. Toxicity is cited as a reason for defederating Threads, but IMO I see more toxicity towards newcomers and outsiders coming from the people already on the fediverse, so I’ve been quite apathetic to the Threads thing.

Hopefully some of this comes to Windows guests. One of the major issues right now is that Windows virtualisation isn’t great. VirtualBox has GPU problems, VMware requires a lot of messing about with kernel modules if you don’t use Ubuntu, if KVM/QEMU is able to make a smooth environment for Windows guests that’d help bring people in who still need Windows for the odd bit of software or two.

I remember there was a GPU driver for Windows but that seems to have stalled?

Edit: Cleared up why I think VMware is a bit of a mess.

On Lemmy, it’s shown. On Mastodon, instances are given the ability to hide their blocked instances which IMO hinders people’s ability to join. A lot of the drama on the fediverse with regards to blocking is from Mastodon and similar instances.

People claim the instance you join doesn’t matter because “everything is federated!” but it kind of does. It strongly affects the people who will see your posts and even who you can follow, and if you don’t know what an instance is blocking it creates an air of uncertainty. I’ve seen instances get blocked for stupid at best and downright malicious at worst reasons, so the 4chan post isn’t inherently wrong.

XMPP was never killed the way Netscape was by Microsoft lmao

Probably to experiment with it, or maybe it was a good idea back then. Definitely not to extinguish it lol

Means there’s no incentive for Google to support it.

Limited essentially means the instance is put in quarantine. AFAIK it won’t appear on the federated timelines but users can still follow and communicate to them if they desire.

How so? I don’t see the EEE in Google discontinuing XMPP support tbh.

Hate to burst your bubble, but no-one was actually using XMPP with Google Talk except for open-source tech nerds.

I remember people complaining about Bluesky’s lack of privacy, and tbf there’s a lot of privacy/security theatre they do that makes a lot of mixed messaging, but people presenting the fediverse as this privacy-friendly alternative is… laughable, for the reasons you stated.

Yeah the detailed explanation would be very helpful. It’s nice that Lemmy has the page at least (and I learned something new today), though that is just Lemmy and the fediverse is much bigger than that. I believe Misskey and Pleroma share it similarly to Lemmy, while Mastodon allows admins to hide it from the public (which, as I said, will act as a barrier to those wanting to sign up)

Yeah there’s a similar tool for the wider microblogging part of fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc.) but because it was made by an edgelord it gets dismissed. I get the vibe some instances just don’t want to share that information, which is important when you’re basically dealing with web infrastructure, and get mad when you seek that information out.

tbh this is a general issue with the fediverse. Some instances aren’t transparent about who is being blocked and why. It made it a whole lot more difficult for me to figure out what instance I should go for.

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I’ll have to give it a shot then, maybe on a VM or something. I thought it was mainly for specific configurations at first.