For those who don’t know, Bluesky isn’t really federated. The only way to host a non-Bluesky instance required 1TB of storage in July 2024, and 5 TB of storage in Nov 2024. Could be way more than that now.

You basically have to be a company to federate into the ATProto (Bluesky) ecosystem. You can’t just “stand up an instance”.

Lots of detail: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

(I know you’ve already realized that you were conflating Mastodon with Bluesky, I’m putting this here for others who come along so they can get the facts).

There was a good discussion online between Christine Lemmer-Webber, one of the editors of the ActivityPub W3C Standard, and Bryan Newbold, protocol engineer at BlueSky.

• CLW - How Decentralized is BlueSky Really?
• BN - Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization
• CLW - Re: Re: BlueSky and Decentralization

These are long reads. But they are worth reading. Christine and Bryan agree that ATProto and ActivityPub have different design goals and so what you get from “federation” with each is different. ATProto makes a centralized index of the entire system possible, at the cost of relying on very few (practically likely one) centralized providers.

As a result, the Lemmy ecosystem, as it exists today, wouldn’t be possible with ATProto. It would probably look more like Reddit, but with a “credible exit” possible as a defense against enshittification.

The fight for justice, democracy, and civility knows no borders. You (singular), and those who fight against oppression will always be our brothers/sisters IMO.

We know you’re there, and we know who we are and aren’t booing when we boo the Star-Spangled Banner.

I think I can speak for most Canadians if I say we’re sorry that standing up for ourselves means hurting you, but we’re not sorry for standing up for ourselves.

I’ve been saying “Canadians are nice by choice, not because of something in the water.”

I like this one, too. I intend on stealing it and spreading it. #ElbowsUp

I think Trudeau is best when he gets to lead a country, and not have to deal with politics. I mean, he’s not the best policy maker, IMO, but we’ve had worse PMs. Whenever he has to do “politics” stuff though he’s… well, bad.

Didn’t have to be real, just scary to the powerful.

(Not commenting on truth of whether it happened or not, just a generalization of my observations of the behaviours of the powerful)

I don’t frequent that world much these days, but I personally preferred the agent/pull model when I did. I can’t really articulate why, I think I feel comfortable knowing that the agent will run with the last known config on the machine, potentially correcting any misconfiguration even if the central host is down.

The big debate back in the day was Puppet vs. Chef (before Ansible/SaltStack). Puppet was more declarative, Chef more imperative.

I also admit, I don’t like YAML, other than for simple, mostly flat config and serializing.

I further admit that Ansible just has a bigger community these days, and that’s worth something. When I need to do a bit of CM these days, I use Ansible.

So wait… Did Puppet have a license change as well recently? Is this just preemptive because it looks like Perforce is starting to change things?

Not really. It sounds like they haven’t gone after them for emulation, but instead for emulation-adjacent things: copying ROMs, circumventing digital locks, etc.

They explicitly mention (one of?) the developers of Yuzu sharing ROMs in the article.

In other words, the emulator itself isn’t illegal, but in order to use the emulator the way most people want, you have to do illegal things, and that’s what they go after you for.

N.B. I originally went looking for a reason that maybe it was okay that Andy Yen was giving the thumbs up to Gail Slater. I thought this was an unfair internet pile-on. I think now it’s a fair internet pile-on.

The official @protonprivacy@mastodon.social account replied and doubled down

protonprivacy@mastodon.social - @jonah

Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation.

Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidently has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote.

At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance.

1/2

protonprivacy@mastodon.social - @jonah By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand.

Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost.

Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.

2/2

(Less importantly, my response)

Which documents, you say?

What happened?

Shredded, you say?

How badly?

To bits, you say? Oh my my…

I tried to switch to Tidal, but I found their app not as good, their integration with Sonos lacking, and no parental controls, which is important to me. Music selection was pretty good. A lot of niche stuff isn’t there, sadly. For example I sometimes listen to college acapella groups, and there just isn’t as much there. All the popular music is there though.

IMO since the app is Louis’ project that is primarily being financed by donating his personal money to FUTO (AFAICT)

For clarity, FUTO is privately funded by an independently wealthy person, not Louis. Louis is an employee who believes in the mission.

I mean, you got my upvote already, but one big reason is that Robertson wanted to control all the manufacturing of the screws and the bits. Phillips licensed his patent out and let anyone make them just taking a tiny licensing fee. Made a fortune on volume. Robertson: good engineer, bad businessman.

I don’t fully agree with these, but these are the cases I’ve heard of:

• Deeper integration with webcams
• USB authentication devices like Yubikeys

I think these are better served with extensions or specific browser protocols that communicate with native apps in order to keep the crazy web world more isolated from the high-value computer world, but what do I know? My guess is that someone at Google went “You know, we’re creating a lot of these specific protocols to communicate with webcams, printers, and now we want to do authentication dongles. You know what? They all use USB? Why don’t we just create a general way to access USB?”

In the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm:

There’s the topic of this conversation, WebUSB. I happen to believe that a missing feature here for Firefox is a good thing, mind you…