And Jellyfin has third party music player apps for android and IOS.

Jellyfin’s the way to go IMO, screw Plex and their constant BS.

You give that up that strategy and lean into fixing shit when you put the time in to customize the OS and desktop/window manager experience… at that point you should understand your system well enough to make fixing it easier, and you are also afraid of having to redo some of your customization. That being said, you still should make regular system backups, especially if you are tinkering with the OS experience a lot.

MIT≠FOS

GNU is Free and forever free software… MIT not so much.

https://fossbytes.com/open-sources-license-type/

Point being, any forks of GNU will have a free version available, MIT carries no such limitation… making it a corpo favorite.

You can call it open source, but Free and Open source is questionable.

Any “Decentralized” Solution that is not F.O.S. free and opensource was never “Decentralized” at all.

When your platform advertises itself as decentralized, and a simple “host bluesky instance” search results in articles telling you to join the main instance’s waiting list… that sounds too stupid for me to give them the time of day.

I am surprised anyone uses or takes them seriously.

Simple, [Content Warning Tag]-(User Description Of Content Warning)

This is very true, I have hosted my own email before and if you are doing it yourself and not going through a big player like google to host it then your stuff sometimes gets treated as suspect by filters. Used to beg people with Gmail accounts to flag my emails as “not spam” whenever it showed up in the spam folder.

True, if they integrate with federation in good faith it won’t matter that much for those not using them. But until we see what they do I won’t hold my breath on Facebook doing something in good faith.

This is true, and line is king in Japan and yet I believe the most common third party messenger app in the US is Facebook messenger despite its obvious flaws. Why, because it has more features than sms, and most people already have an account.

No matter which way you slice it, companies that can profit off communication will try to wall off their market share. Which is one of the things the fediverse aims to cure.

Alternatively, imagine a world where the US government passed a “privacy bill of rights” and also required online platforms to be freely interchangeable via open protocols like ActivityPub.

Won’t happen any time soon, and if you ask why, go read !news@beehaw.org for a little bit and come back.

Well think of the iMessage example for a second, other phone manufactures wanted to extend upon SMS with RCS to enable cross-platform read-receipts, better image quality on messages, and more… and you can use RCS between various android phones, but apple has not yet adopted RCS. Then because of the pre-existing market share of iPhones being so high, if you want read-receipts, high quality image messages, and more you with most of your contacts will either have to convince all of your friends and loved ones to use a third party app or cave and get an iPhone.

The features don’t have to be revolutionary, they just have to find ways to flex their market share with their features. And their market share is almost destine to be huge if they put any meaningful effort or money behind it.

I think among other issues would be the Gmail-ification and iMessage-ification of the fediverse. What I mean by that is open standards like email are dominated today by many people using Gmail accounts as it is popular, “free”, and comes with a ton of features. Then google started “walling off their garden” by adding features that only work between gmail accounts. Similarly, apple also took the open standard SMS and started adding on features only available between other iPhones.

What we might see is some of the coolest features the fediverse has ever seen, but it will come at the cost of most users ignoring or dealing less with “irrelevant” things not on meta ran instances.

Hope we can resist such a change, but that is what I am concerned about.

In related news, Elon Musk has been adamant about ending remote work, but that’s likely to be difficult without, you know, office space.