How dare you. As a former redditor now lemming I would wilt into a shriveled, frail, incontinent, barely conscious entity without the ego-fueling fire of my all-powerful downvote.

/s

I’d rather be tracked by apple than google.

The first link requires a paid subscription to see historic data and the second link only has visitor data up to May.

I’ve been playing around with kagi and am actually super impressed with the search results for finding info about a product to purchase. Google results were full of your-search-term-best-reviews.com SEO crap but kagi found info that didn’t pop up even several pages into google search. So it might be how popular/commercial the search term is and google is still better at finding obscure niche things.

Lol. Ty now I understand. 😆

All that’s missing is the “You are here” pointer at the second to last step.

There’s no summarizer bots here and this article is fascinating but long. Here’s a slightly shorter version:

##Network by Ploum on 2023-06-23

With debates around Twitter and Reddit, the Fediverse started to gain fame and attention.

Capitalists Against Competition

Instagram, WhatsApp to name a few, were bought only because their product attracted users and could cast a shadow on Facebook. But the Fediverse cannot be bought. The Fediverse is an informal group of servers discussing through a protocol . Those servers may even run different software . 

You cannot buy a decentralised network!

That’s exactly what Google did with XMPP.

As MSN was part of Microsoft, Google wanted to compete and offered

Google Talk in 2005, including it in the Gmail interface. Applications had to be installed on the computer and Gmail web interface was groundbreaking. MSN was even at some point bundled with Microsoft Windows and it was really hard to remove it. Google chat with the Gmail web interface was a way to be even closer to the customers than a built-in software in the operating system. 

While Google and Microsoft were fighting for hegemony, free software geeks were trying to build decentralised instant messaging. Which is still how ActivityPub and thus the Fediverse work. In 2006, Google talk became XMPP compatible. Google was seriously considering XMPP. 

So Google was really embracing the federation. It meant that, suddenly, every single Gmail user became an XMPP user. 

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between

Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. As expected, no Google user bated an eye. While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. 

Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. That it would be the default decentralised communication platform. What Google did to XMPP was not new. 

It was not the first: the Microsoft Playbook

« By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market». Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book «Rebel Code» and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. 

Microsoft used a similar tactic to ensure dominance in the office market with Microsoft Office using proprietary formats . When alternatives became good enough at opening doc/xls/ppt formats, Microsoft released a new format that they called «open and standardised». The format was, on purpose, very complicated and, most importantly, wrong. Microsoft Office. 

Meta and the Fediverse

Which is exactly what is happening with Meta and the Fediverse. There are rumours that Meta would become «Fediverse compatible». I don’t know if those rumours have a grain of truth, if it is even possible for Meta to consider it. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers. 

I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. Fediverse are those looking for freedom. 

We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it. By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values.

Based on how well the post was written contrasted with their claimed lack of thought processes I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was half tongue in cheek. But also I agree with not answering just yes or no.

As the official Fediverse Overlord I say yes whatever that’s fine do what you want.

And not just a regular amicable breakup but one where you left after finding out the other person was actually a cold-hearted narcissist who only pretended to care about you and now they’re lying to everyone about how you were the horrible one. So it’s understandable to feel some schadenfreude for awhile.

I’m starting to feel we should delete this whole thread and replace it with how much FMHY sucks and is the worst instance ever the admins are literal trash pandas please don’t come here. I like it small.

Why are all the answers here from FMHY? It was like 20th on the list in terms of popularity when I joined. I chose it because it had fewer restrictions - users can create their own communities and, most importantly, downvote (the chart I looked at said some didn’t have downvotes??). Also I assume pirates know how to run a server.

There’s also the possibility of just paying off owners of popular instances in exchange for allowing advertising to its members and installing trackers.

I dont’t know what’s so confusing about this. Just sign up for an instance who’s accepting new users after researching about what an instance is and finding one that’s not overbooked and is accepting new users and then once you’re on, just find new communities but also change the settings to “all” and then start a new community when what you wanted wasn’t there except there’s some sort of format error when you do that but it’s ok because the community you wanted was there all along it just wasn’t searchable because no one from your instance had searched for it/joined it yet. It seems pretty self-explanatory to me. Just don’t talk about the linking.

I am so pleased with ourselves.

Hopefully mlem gets new features added. I don’t know how to subscribe to new communities on it or see replies to my comments so I use the browser as well.

Yes. I thought this was already the default “home page” to send people to. It might also be nice or have a quick sign up option where a new user is randomly assigned to an available instance instead of them having to go through and research which one they should join. This would keep things distributed (which is the whole point of using not-super-user-friendly lemmy) instead of everyone just signing up on the same instance.

3060 now. It’s happening

On most instances, yes! The instance owner provides server space for the community. When I was comparing instances, there were some that did not allow users to create their own communities so it looks that’s something the owner can choose to enable/disable. But no need to ask for permission if it’s enabled. I can’t find it now but one of the instances just posted a no porn rule on theirs. So you can always check your local feed to look for any relevant rules.

It’s just cool to see the variety of refugees here sharing memories of their previous communities in the once glorious homeland made uninhabitable by the authoritarian regime.