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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Why was there even pressure to deliver if the official API wasn’t even out yet? I thought they were just working on UI and basic functionality until they can plug in the API, so if anything they had more time and leisure than if everyone were screaming “i need it now”. It seems more likely they just bit more than they could chew and decided to give up the app development since it ended up being harder than they thought (and that’s completely fine to do). You don’t really make an app like this overnight, especially if you have no prior experience doing it.






  • I’m not really going to get into the technical aspect since I feel neither of us know enough to tell how feasible it is (although I think you’re wrong since you do need trackers in order to find at least one other member of the swarm), but this part

    If they both aren’t online at once, messages won’t get delivered. Which is not a big deal for a modern smartphone given that most of them are online close to all of the time.

    I just a horrible take. You can’t base your business model on “modern phones being online close to all of the time”. You can’t have random data loss whenever someone goes out of service area, has to turn on airplane mode, runs out of battery, has a software error or just an update or some other kind of temporary downtime? That’s not how you design any software, less alone a dependable messaging service. You can’t just “stipulate that”.


  • You can also just hook up any old phone or computer, install the app, and let it run as the server.

    If you have a static IP address, if you want to bother with securing and maintaining it, if you’re willing to deal with downtime when something inevitably breaks, if you’re willing to deal with lost data or also maintaining a backup solution, if… a dozen other things that most people don’t want to deal with.




  • I hope these kinks get ironed out as the software matures. I see no reason why people wouldn’t be able to just rent a cloud server, run a few docker commands and have their own instance running one day. Maybe not for kbin or lemmy, but at least mastodon.

    As long as we all continue to federate with each other instead of relying on some corporation to say whose messages go through and whose don’t, there’s a chance.


  • Not necessarily, email had to work well because businesses depended on it and (lots of) money was involved. Fediverse is a much more hobbyist endeavor and attracts groups of people who are not profit driven.

    That could change of course but that’s why it’s important to stick to these (FOSS) principles from the start. It’s why it was important to reject threads in the fediverse and not let it overtake everything, which it luckily doesn’t seem like it’s gonna any time soon.