cabbage

Never gave this much thought. I've been considering subscribing for Kagi again, but basically they are paying for a Google API subscription, meaning that Google directly monetizes my Kagi searches?

To be completely honest, I'm less worried about privacy and more worried about what kind of world I'm contributing to with my internet usage. I Mullvad sends money to Google for every search, it's probably not for me.

Switched to Qwant now - rather Microsoft than Google, and at least they are working on their own engine.

That's @Daojoan@mastodon.social, for those who can follow Mastodon handles. Worth following!

There are several mammoths (instances) peacefully grazing on the same pastures (the social web), but the pastures are also shared with completely different species of animal. Perhaps they are single-user instances as no birds are landing on them; perhaps they are completely different pieces of the social web, such as Peertube or Lemmy.

Or maybe I'm over-thinking it.

ActivityPub is absolutely not suited for private communication. I guess you could in theory transfer encrypted content over AP as well, but it's not what it is designed for and it generally makes little sense for content in a public forum like this. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise.

This is not what is proposed though. For E2EE, Rimu suggests the following:

Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

So to keep user data encrypted on the server, as well as looking into finding a way to encrypt private messages. I think it's hard to argue this wouldn't be at least a minor change for the better, giving instance administrators less insight into the private data of the users (and thereby also making them less vulnerable to law enforcement).

Of course this wouldn't make PieFed or Lemmy or whatever a good replacement for Signal. It is not supposed to be. It's a public forum. But it can still do its best to protect the identity of the users in this public forum, even with the inherent limitations of the format.

Just to clarify, you are aware that OP is the main developer of PieFed?

Chances are that PieFed more or less fits his idea of what he wants, considering that's what he designed it to do.

Ah, yikes - that's what I thought. Never imagined a French software company could lower themselves to M/D/Y haha.

Misskey is an unprecedented forking party. Sharkey is one of the many forks. Maintained by the Blåhaj folks, if I'm not mistaken.

Iceshrimp is another one to watch. Specifically Iceshrimp-NET, a full rewrite to fix the performance issues that probably play some role in why these forks often meet such sad ends.

I thought it was released more recently, but you're right, the first version was published in September. Still, it seems like a huge bump in users for the release of an app that currently has just north of 1k downloads on Android - and it's strange that the growth is so contained within one month. I think there's probably something going one here related to how users are counted.

The Fedidb graph of active Peertube users shows a huge bump from September to October - an increase of more than 10 000, coming from just over 20 000 in September.

Does anyone have any idea what happened there? Did Peertube change how active users were counted?

Sadly, the nature of some of the biggest Peertube instances makes the whole thing a bit less joyful. The fourth largest instance is obviously dedicated to gore, based on its name. I'm care about my eyes too much to check out the others on the list, beyond libre.video which is fine.

According to ths post it will be opt-in, on the instance side.

So smaller instances where there-might be risks associated will be opted out by default, while large instances that might want the attention and where individual users stand out less can opt in.

People have their preferences, and that's fine. I certainly think we would benefit from different instances making use of different user interfaces by default, appealing in return to different kinds of people.

I've heard some people are not into Piefed because it's too bare bones or something. For me, that's exactly why I love it. Besides, they have even added (optional) support for decorative drop shadows - it's futuristic as fuck, as far as I'm concerned.

Not well - at least in Lynx, content doesn't load at all. You basically get the sidebar.

Piefed looks great though. Obviously not the feel of a native terminal app, but seemingly fully functional and everything makes sense.