Yeah my car is about 13 years old. Still has CD player. Will drive it until I die.

Damn. This needs to be a blog article and saved somewhere! No need to apologize. You’ve done a great job explaining a very technical topic in a simple and relatable way.

Good god! That was a good laugh 😂. Desperate to advertise to people who don’t want to be advertised to. Exploiting activity history of anonymous users? Uh… that’s the whole reason people post anonymously. Because they don’t want to be associated with their activity. How exactly is this a good strategy, again?

Hehe

I dont want any parts of Threads. But if they’re gonna federate, at least do it 100%. This half-ass, piecemeal approach where they release an itty bitty teeny weeny change every month is weird.

Was about to ask if there was a way to do this automatically. Does anyone know why this isn’t baked into the Lemmy codebase? I’m thinking this would be pretty easy with browser cookies. 🤔

If you use RSS feeds, there is. There are services that provide RSS feeds for Lemmy posts. You can subscribe to those and get an update whenever any comment is made on the post.

As an engineer who’s worked on very large codebases over two decades, I’ve realized that this is so much easier said then done.

If people want to fork Mastodon, great. But they’ll quickly realize that what they may think are straight-forward “improvements” will lead to them having to address bigger architectural issues.

Many design decisions that were made when building Mastodon may not be perfect, but they address a lot of very complex decentralization and federation issues.

There’s no such thing as perfect software. What some may think is an improvement, others will think is a terrible choice. Each decision is a trade-off and will have downsides. We just have to decide which of them we’re comfortable with living with.

Just depends on what works best for each of us. But personally, I agree with you. It’s not that I think one company owning a ton of the services is a bad thing in itself. But history has shown us that, when a company starts to dominate a certain market, they tend to start becoming tone-deaf to our interests, because they know we can’t (easily) switch and go somewhere else.

Yeah, depending on the branch I’ve found that method not to be too reliable. openrss offers branches for RSS feeds for commits on every branch though: e.g. https://openrss.org/github.com/octokit/octokit.rb/commits/main

I hope you’re right!

Maybe Vimeo?

sigh So Threads can throw their posts out into the fediverse, but no one from fediverse is allowed to post comments back? Why am I not surprised? 🙄

Signal app is great. Would that be a better alternative? Or is that too niche for Discord users?

Have you tried the Signal app? Has all that and works pretty well!

Exactly what I was wondering the entire time I was listening. None of these questions were asked during the episode. A lot of handwaving and buzzword double-speak. She didn’t go into any real technical detail.

Sorry, that’s not what I meant. The AT protocol has been available since they began. So anyone could have built apps on it all this time. Federation isnt required for their protocol to be used.

I just haven’t seen any entirely working apps (made by non-Bluesky devs) using their protocol yet. And they totally ignored using or improving ActivityPub. So it comes off as their just kind of building their own thing, which is a centralized way of thinking.

They would’ve been better off building Blusesky on ActivityPub, an open protocol that’s already battle-tested and in use by a number of different apps and made my different developers. But building a whole new protocol that no apps are using has the same net effect as if a centralized company like Instagram Threads were to do it.

If you’re saying there are non-Bluesky apps using their protocol, can you link to these apps here in a reply? Totally open to being corrected.

Not the person you replied to. But I think they meant that Bluesky is using a protocol that only the company uses.

Sure its a federated and decentralized protocol, I guess. But if they’re the only platform using it, it’s still rather centralized in that regard.

You can get an RSS feed for a Lemmy search term e.g.

https://openrss.org/programming.dev/search?q=cats

There is if you want RSS feeds for things like Lemmy search. And if you want the links in feed items to be associated with a single instance. AFAIK, regular Lemmy feeds dont provide that. But ofc people can use Lemmy feeds if they want.