I would compare Mastodon with Threads to Linux with the Wine compatibility layer.

People used to hold off on using Linux, because they did not want to lose their Windows software. Now with Wine, people are a lot less reliant on Windows and many Linux users and Microsoft competitors profit from this.

The Steam Machine was reliant on native Linux games, but almost nobody wanted to develop for a niche desktop OS, which led to less games on the platform, which made Linux even more niche for gamers …

That’s a big reason the Steam Machine failed.

The Steam Deck side-steps all of this with Wine. Now Linux can grow freely, even when developers ignore Linux completely. Wine gives Linux a fighting chance against Windows.

The same way I believe, that Mastodon will only get a fighting chance, if they can side-step the “nobody I know uses Mastodon” problem. Federation with Threads could be one solution to this.

What do you think could dethrone it?

Same thing happened with Mastodon to an extent. Twitter migrants want a platform that is at least as “good” as Twitter.

Mastodon has at least as many features as Twitter, but almost no important users to follow.

Threads has a lot more important users, but far less features than Twitter.

Though Mastodon’s key advantage over Threads, is the fact that people are more willing to “believe” in the Mastodon project. Mastodon had no high-profile controversy yet. It is FOSS, the people are friendly and it is slowly growing organically with a few growth spurts here and there.

Meta Threads has the same image problems as Twitter. Zucc and Musk are probably equally controversial figures. I imagine people mostly joined Threads because of FOMO and group-think. There is no reason for most of them to use it over Twitter.

In the end tho, I don’t see Twitter being de-throned by either of these platforms.

Connect is great, because you can use it to block posts with certain keywords automatically.

Besides that, wefwef.app is my favorite. You can really tell, that the devs there put a lot of passion into this.

Hyperloop is such a hot mess. Everyone talks about something different, when they mention Hyperloop. There is no consensus among pro-Hyperloop and anti-Hyperloop people, what this project even would look like from a barebones conceptual perspective.

In my eyes governments see Hyperloop as some kind of prestige project. All big governments invest in it, otherwise you are not modern. America, EU, China, Arab oil states and India.

Somehow “Hyperloop” has become a political buzzword, just like “Smart City” or “Green City”. Everyone claims to build those, everyone invests in those, but they all seem to be fantasy products, that go nowhere.

Fools, we at Meta always know were you are. Our trackers are more powerful than your VPNs.

Nah dude Big Tech will replace every institution in America and start to divide the states among each other and colonize them with their employees.

Citizenship is outdated and barbarism, employment to an allied company is the civilized way.

You could make Iulius Caesar sing Gangnam Style, if DNA Analysis AI and deepfake voice AI work both towards this common noble goal.

I am not talking about America vs Russia. I am talking about the fact, that Internet censorship doesn’t really work.

Chinese citizens can easily bypass Internet restrictions, implemented by the second richest economy in the world, just through a simple VPN.

The only way for a country to implement an effective deepfake ban, would be disconnecting from the global Internet entirely and let computers only connect to a government controlled intranet, like in North Korea.

And even then, with a USB stick with a copy of the illegal deepfake software, a criminal can still easily do, what this article is talking about.

You can’t download a tank.

One leak would make this deepfake software publicly available to all bad actors anyways regardless of any ban.

Also a global ban seems unlikely. You can protect Americans from bullets coming from enemy territory. You can’t protect them from viral deepfaked posts.

Would it even be possible to ban? Every military in the world wants this technology.

That’s why I never take narcotics and just watch my surgeon, while they cut me open

Don’t platforms do this already?

Why would the admin close the donation platform accounts immediately after this supposed attack?

Why did they not create a second account to clarify right here, what happened?

I personally could (after many tries) load the site with my account logged in and saved my list of subscriptions.

Can you replicate the PrinceHabib screenshot in incognito mode?

Maybe this is some Lemmy glitch that randomly gives you access to other users’ accounts under very specific circumstances?

I personally think that the admin got busted by the IRS or got involved with law enforcement for a reason unrelated to Lemmy, which is why their payment accounts got flatlined.

Vlemmy maybe is just running on their homeserver, but the server has some issues, that the admin can not fix right because they are in prison/in a hospital/dead or something similar.

iMessage also runs on data/wifi. So I don’t think, this is really about affordable data and more just stubborness from the Android side.

The biggest feature that WhatsApp and Signal provide over RCS, is the fact that you can use them on iOS.

Right now RCS in practise is just another walled garden, that not every phone with every carrier can join.

Apple will likely never implement RCS, especially not right now where the best RCS experience is reliant on Google servers and propietary Google extensions.

Only government intervention could force Apple’s hand. But I don’t believe the EU will implement such a law in the next 10 years. America, where this issue actually matters, probably not even in 20 years.

I doubt that even Google will stick to RCS to the bitter end. They had significantly more power over XMPP, but they abandoned it anyway for some in-house propietary protocol. Who says history will not repeat itself?

No need to apologize, I understand your viewpoint. I don’t understand your “Lol, nice hyperbole” comment tho.

"We should let actual terrorists communicate and radicalize others, because there’s a block button already. PS: I’m very smart.” <— Isn’t that exactly what you believe in then?

Google dropping XMPP leading to the death of the protocol is a distortion of truth. Sure it hurted the XMPP federation back then, but this is just one aspect.

For one, XMPP had many competitors since the beginning including other open federated ones like IRC. XMPP was just a new standard with new interesting features. Most people used propietary messenger like AIM back then.

Imo the most critical reason why XMPP did not become mainstream, was because they slept through the early smartphone phase. iOS for a long time had no client compatible with XMPP servers. Smartphones nowadays dominate the global messenger market tho, which made federated XMPP helpless against the rise of WhatsApp, iMessage and so on.

In the desktop space XMPP never really overshadowed IRC significantly. IRC kept all the old tech nerds, while Discord now swallows all the younger nerds. Skype, Microsoft Teams and Zoom took the rest.

XMPP again slept through all of this. Jitsi and Matrix/Element rose up as new open standards because of that as well.

Google Talk was never that big in comparison. Even if Google had kept their XMPP implementation on life support to this day, I would doubt, that federated XMPP would be a big player even then.

Also towards the end, Google Talk had less XMPP extensions then the rest of the XMPP federation. That’s the opposite of “Extend”.

would be great if Fdroid could support payments as well

Have mercy with yourself.