Epicyon has a maximum number of remote/federated posts, and above some configurable number will delete or archive the oldest ones (unless they are DMs). This helps to keep the storage space within a finite upper bound and prevent running out of disk space.

This also is not entirely accurate. I checked the options, and only two exist: sms or authenticator app. Both phone based.

Mobile phones are the least secure device that you are likely to own, so using them as authenticators is unwise.

This is all about getting your phone number, since you can’t enable a hardware token without giving them your phone number first.

Phone number then links to “real” identity, bank, home location and so on.

It’s not the first time that I’ve seen a criticism like this article, so this might be a talking point amongst a certain crowd. The slight of hand is that they never mention the shared inbox, or the additional processing which the centralized systems do to serve ads and categorize users.

This is a rather disingenuous article trying to make the implication that the fediverse is comparable (or worse) in electricity use to cryptocurrency mining or to the centralized BigTech systems. That’s far from being the case.

The centralized systems do more than just display a timeline chronologically. They also do data mining in the background to put users into advertising categories. On Facebook I think literally every keystroke is data mined. Plus of course there is the serving of ads which takes large amounts of bandwidth - something which doesn’t happen in the fediverse to any significant extent.

I maintain an ActivityPub server called Epicyon, and being low on electricity use is one of its goals. You can run it on a Rpi and not have it make much of a ding in electricity bills. This type of system can scale horizontally rather than vertically like the BigTech systems do.

I always liked the laptops with the little slider over the camera, but you can improvise with suitably positioned piece of cardboard. The microphone is harder to block, but if you can locate it then something sound absorbent taped over it will render it not very useful to Mr Z.

afaik ipfs is “permanent” immutable storage. If you want your chat to be permanently on the record then this is ok, but not everyone may want that. Having the ability to permanently delete can be useful.

Sorry to hear about Elementary OS. Failing small Linux distro companies is not uncommon though. Also I’m not a fan of Lunduke, so there may be other sites where you can read about what’s going on with Elementary without adding clicks to his content.

Epicyon already does have hashtag topics, except that they’re called “categories”. They’re also published as an RSS feed by the instance, so other instances can bootstrap off of the categories assigned by others.

As long as they’re transparent and under user control then timeline algorithms might be ok. However, it would start to become problematic if instance admins could control the timelines of users, and it might become tempting for them to do so for monetization reasons.

Even under user control there would be a temptation for some people to try to SEO against the known algorithms, so that their posts appear preferentially in some people’s timelines, leading to the same set of problems that BigTech has.

Virtual Reality

They don’t really have a choice about whether to cooperate. Or rather the choice is one of cooperate or be shut down.

Have been using Emacs for over a decade, and I’m fairly happy with it.

This is true, but it’s not the quantity of engagement that matters, it’s the quality. Also the fediverse isn’t necessarily intrinsically better than a hellish corporate site, but it’s operated more democratically which tends (not always) to lead to better quality overall.

Also possible on a RPi is https://libreserver.org/epicyon

Instead of conventional push, what about sending messages via multicast? Scalable to arbitrary numbers of peers.

Also, consider offline message sync.

If you’re making a new XMPP client for android, please build in Tor support, so that the user doesn’t need to mess around with Orbot.

Matrix is quite good. Other alternatives are Briar and Anonymous Messenger. https://briarproject.org https://anonymousmessenger.ly

I would suggest not having the same design but having some sort of “this site is ActivityPub enabled” logo somewhere on the first screen.

It might be a possibility in future.