7 hours ago
The consolidation of the internet is something a lot of people are becoming aware of. I'd recommend Bluesky, but they keep delaying their promise to release the SDK already so people can actually make federated instances of it. Until that happens, Bluesky is just another Twitter. X... Twix!
So, there's Mastadon. Completely decentralized, though the onboarding is a bit obtuse. That's what's prevented adoption, ease of use and fully explaining just what "federation" means to a lay userbase.
Forums are great as they are, but I do worry what all these new privacy laws are going to do to that. Speaking of, Discord is seeing a slow decline. Nothing that threatens them as a platform, but their compliance with these laws has meant a lot of people have left for self hosted options. I'm even seeing people spinning up self hosted AIM servers. Remember AIM? We all used to chat on that quite a bit! IRC would be nice for chat, but ICQ got bought by the Chinese and is highly suspected of basically being malware at this point.
But, so far at least, we're too small to notice, yet.
So, there's Mastadon. Completely decentralized, though the onboarding is a bit obtuse. That's what's prevented adoption, ease of use and fully explaining just what "federation" means to a lay userbase.
Forums are great as they are, but I do worry what all these new privacy laws are going to do to that. Speaking of, Discord is seeing a slow decline. Nothing that threatens them as a platform, but their compliance with these laws has meant a lot of people have left for self hosted options. I'm even seeing people spinning up self hosted AIM servers. Remember AIM? We all used to chat on that quite a bit! IRC would be nice for chat, but ICQ got bought by the Chinese and is highly suspected of basically being malware at this point.
But, so far at least, we're too small to notice, yet.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)