“Many small instances that can survive with a couple of donations” seems much more sustainable than a handful of large ad-selling business powered by Mastodon.

Well said! My instance doesn’t need ads because the servers don’t care about profits.

I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and the network does just fine 🤷‍♂️

Without executives leeching money from going to the actual cost of servers things seem to work better! Go figure!

I opened this thread to type out this exact comment but somehow you typed up the exact same thing before me?

Actual Budget is software. It can be run on a home server if desired.

I have had similar thoughts, I think the answer ultimately lies in active mods that can really get to know a community and it’s users and identify when users are pushing a narrative even if they can’t confirm if they are a bot or not.

Also as @dessalines@lemmy.ml pointed out, user registrations. On startrek.website we have a question that is easy for a star trek fan to answer but not easy for a bot (although getting back to your concern, chatGPT probably would have no problem)

lol I was going to suggest “it just works”

I would not have suggested that before this year but it’s definitely true now, or at least truer than for Windows/Apple.

I’m with you. Tiktok is about as “healthy” as vaping. There are other just as bad (if not worse) apps out there, and the reasoning is stupid and has some first amendment concerns. But I won’t die on the protecting Tiktok hill.

I loved the constant pop-ups with offers for things I could purchase. If I don’t purchase something frequently enough I get sad so it’s nice to have an OS that cares about my well being.

Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

This is what I don’t understand, why would anyone choose to host when there is zero advantage? I sort of feel is by design so they can claim “decentralized” while still having full control over the data.

is decentralized

It’s not.

I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky?

They can’t.

in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

…yep.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse.

ActivityPub existed before BlueSky did and they chose to make their own, incompatible thing. So I don’t have high hopes for this.

That doesn’t mean much unfortunately.

Bitwarden

I like that snap support is included. You can’t easily add it to immutable distros and there is still some software out there only easily available via snaps.

I am not an expert but I don’t think Snap support can be added to an immutable distro after installation, meaning there is going to be some software that simply cannot be easily installed. Snap support is basically a legacy support feature at this point but I think it’s nice to cover their bases if they are trying to make something for widespread adoption.

I wonder what the differences will be!

I think you’re exactly right, honestly I think this has potential to be huge. Whether we like it or not, in order for a lot of mid-level savvy users to feel comfortable switching over they need a “default” option (like joining mastodon.social) to get their feet wet. A distro specifically built for KDE I think could appeal to a lot of people.

EDIT: Also for the people buying laptops in businesses and schools obv

How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?

This could easily be done with AI. For a week or so, that is.

Not at all, Pixelfed is very polished and gets regular updates.