3 out of the 4 US ISPs I've subscribed to in the past 5 years have provided service with CGNAT, and one other location that I had homeservers on fiber just switched to CGNAT less than two months ago: - Boingo Internet (WISP, on most military bases) in different 3 states - MetroNet (fiber), switched to CGNAT ~2 months ago - and my current local ISP (that I'll not name, because it's a smaller ISP that would narrow down my location) Spectrum/TWC was the exception, but wasn't available in some locations.
Probably the most important keys on the keyboard, while I'd be fine if Caps Lock ever disappeared. Meanwhile I abhor the trend of things being dumbed down, like newer ChromeOS devices that I think omit either the Super key or Alt key, having narrowed arrow keys, and often omitting Home/End/PageUp/Down keys. It makes the hardware more useless for refurbing into a freer Linux netbook.
Except this is the exact scenario as marketing Linux: XMPP is a building block to federated messaging, just as Linux is a building block to an operating system. You don't very often see a heavyweight company advertising the concept of Linux-based operating systems to the public. There are marketing efforts such as one group doing the branding project of "Snikket", and there's also plenty of material being pushed out there, but nearly everyone instantly writes it off based upon their past experiences. Nearly everyone just chases after hype, new projects, new VC-funded platforms, and seldom bother with mature and non-controversial projects. Once hype faded, it's always attention diversion to "the next big thing" even though much of what's come about in recent years is just reinventing the same thing over and over again.
The impression that I've been getting is as if Matrix was started by someone naively jumping into protocol design without much background in it. It's as if you asked a younger 'full-stack developer' to make a chat application, and they were trying to check all the boxes for -isms of the time (just transport JSON over HTTP/HTTPS instead of a purpose-built protocol, Comet-style communication, RESTful APIs, etc), as well as ignoring the warning of creating an overly state-dependent protocol.
There's still the major infancy of server implementations with the Matrix world, meanwhile in the XMPP world there's a selection of very mature and performant codebases which are actually quietly running very large high-availability workloads, just like with ejabberd running the notifications system for the Nintendo Switch user network, chat in EVE Online and Fortnite (https://xmpp.org/uses/gaming/) as well as in WhatsApp and Zoom (https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/), just unfortunately that these platforms choose to not federate likely over control and moderation concerns.
I remember the shitshow of the earlier years of Google Talk and Facebook Chat trying to steer XMPP usage solely within their interests, as well as the different mindset of chat protocols back then that understandably soured people's outlook on the protocol. I've been following and using Matrix from back when the webclient used to be hosted under the domain vector.im (and had an account under that domain), as well as the later rebranding of the client to Riot, and then Element. Matrix was trying to pitch the idea of account portability, true decentralization (not just federation), and other lofty goals, and I was hopeful to see something come of it. Instead we just have another glorified webchat with a RESTful API that federates and implements Double Ratchet, and it doesn't have that big of a sell (in terms of protocol architecture) over XMPP.
Meanwhile there's a lot of modernization that's happened within XMPP in just the past 5 years, but because of people's soured experiences from Google Talk from long ago, or Cisco's abomination in the corporate world, everyone still writes it off based on decade old experiences, or keeps repeating several years old complaints about XMPP on mobile, when that's completely changed since. Either way, everyone keeps showering Matrix with attention, as if it invented the idea of federated messaging, just like how people do the same with Mastodon instead of acknowledging any other fediverse platforms.
That is not "required by US federal law". I assume you're confusing with COPPA, which requires verified parental consent for a user under the age of 13 to register, if the platform performs data collection on users for commercial use or advertising. The platform could very easily limit registration to a much higher age if they so desired, and that wouldn't be 'illegal'. It's the pairing of allowing young users to register on a platform that could feature 'sex-positive' content (intentionally or mistakenly) is why people are criticizing it.
Only major bug I noticed with Steam under Wayland was that the Steam Chat window would render at like 1fps (or at least the textbox) if all the Steam windows weren't unminimized (in other words, if you had just the Steam Friends Chat thing open, but the main Steam window minimized, it'd horribly stutter). I've noticed this under a Wayland session of gnome-shell (mutter?) probably a few weeks ago.
Otherwise I'm still under an X11 session and weirdly I've had issues of Steam just going completely unresponsive any time of day in the background for the past week or two, when it hadn't before (I am on the Steam Client beta branch, to note).
Only still using an X11 session for being able to VR, as when I last tested SteamVR under Wayland it couldn't get exclusive access to the headset or whatever.
Plenty of these seem like trivial ideas, and I understand there's probably many differing ways to implement such, but to my knowledge there's not a single project or standard within this field, from what I'm aware of.
I'm asking solely for technical reasons, I'm not asking about ideological explanations (since many of the answers for that are self-evident).
For some reason I keep running into other Neos folks on fedi, than I've seen on any other platforms. I wonder if it's just a trend of Neos users usually using platforms based on technical merit, versus those that crowd to things only based on what's 'the most popular'.
Protip: If you have the LUKS/dm-crypt tools installed, there is a benchmark tool that comes with it for checking your performance of different algorithms per the Linux kernel crypto API, by simply invoking cryptsetup benchmark. I just wish it also benchmarked some newer ciphers as well, like those used in WireGuard.
Some examples of numbers:
Intel(R) Celeron(R) 2955U @ 1.40GHz (no AES extension support):
We also went from: Internet Explorer, because it was preinstalled on Windows, and Windows was the most abundant platform to access the internet, to: Google Chrome, because it's preinstalled on Android, with Android being the most abundant platform to access the internet now
Chrome also rode on the wave of being "the hip new thing", being a new browser alternative to the previous options of IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.
But invariably I'd chalk up part of the bulk of it being purely just a shift to mobile devices.
Also, using Firefox or Chrome was reactionary to IE being poorly maintained, whereas you had so much more development capabilities in other browsers, as well as them being far more performant and customizable. There's not as much of a shove that'll push the average person to into install Firefox to replace Chrome on an Android phone, for example, as compared to using ANYTHING to replace IE.
I strongly disagree because Fidonet and E-mail don’t need to teach its users they’re not centralized. The UX and UI don’t need to explanation it for users to use it effectively.
For email, it’s because it’s commonplace, as many are even growing up in an environment where email has existed as a norm before they were born, as people have to understand email for some work environments, or for even getting a job. I don’t think that people think much on how email works, of knowing that it’s a federated protocol, just merely “that’s the way it works”. Hell, majority of people likely don’t even configure their own email client themself, they likely just use the vendor’s application instead.
Nonetheless, federated content platforms are an emerging thing, and thus people have to ‘re-learn’ that there are different ways to intercommunicate than email.
Technically speaking, don’t even need to do that. Just have generic specific agreed upon webpage domain for this. Phones apps can intercept that URL, non-app aware browsers landing on that page (…)
It’s been at least 6 years since I last touched mobile app dev. Last I remember it was an ‘Android thing’ to ‘intercept’ certain registered URLs to a mobile app, whereas I think the iOS way was only with registering custom URI schemes. It may be a big risk to trust one entity to host said address, unless they’re someone universally trusted and heavyweight enough to keep it up for near-eternity. The “Web-based protocol handler” would be a ‘web native’ way of handling it, without requiring any installed app. In fact, it can be both: if there’s registered handler for ‘web+activitypub’ (for example), it could present that URL, if not, then present the landing page handler (which Android clients could intercept and handle).
…A delete & redraft later: it would be nice if Soapbox had a Markdown preview…
and not forget that a post was set to Markdown syntax, when delete and redrafting (which gets unset).
I strongly disagree because Fidonet and E-mail don’t need to teach its users they’re not centralized. The UX and UI don’t need to explanation it for users to use it effectively.
For email, it’s because it’s commonplace, as many are even growing up in an environment where email has existed as a norm before they were born, as people have to understand email for some work environments, or for even getting a job. I don’t think that people think much on how email works, of knowing that it’s a federated protocol, just merely “that’s the way it works”. Hell, majority of people likely don’t even configure their own email client themself, they likely just use the vendor’s application instead.
Nonetheless, federated content platforms are an emerging thing, and thus people have to ‘re-learn’ that there are different ways to intercommunicate than email.
Technically speaking, don’t even need to do that. Just have generic specific agreed upon webpage domain for this. Phones apps can intercept that URL, non-app aware browsers landing on that page (…)
It’s been at least 6 years since I last touched mobile app dev. Last I remember it was an ‘Android thing’ to ‘intercept’ certain registered URLs to a mobile app, whereas I think the iOS way was only with registering custom URI schemes. It may be a big risk to trust one entity to host said address, unless they’re someone universally trusted and heavyweight enough to keep it up for near-eternity. The “Web-based protocol handler” would be a ‘web native’ way of handling it, without requiring any installed app. In fact, it can be both: if there’s registered handler for ‘web+activitypub’ (for example), it could present that URL, if not, then present the landing page handler (which Android clients could intercept and handle).
One difference is that Twitter doesn't have to educate it's users about federation since it's centralized, so there will always be that requirement out of a fedi user to at least cognitively handle that concept; if they can't handle that, then you're just trying to appeal to the most fickle person who will likely never be won over.
It shouldn't need a tutorial or extensive guide, the only requirement anyone should be expected to know (or all that should be explained) is just: anyone can be on any server and still interact between each other. If you want to interact with some post or user on another server's website, just copy/paste the URL of that webpage into the search of your instance's website (or mobile client), and it'll be able to decode it and give you options to reply/follow/whatever through your account.
The thing I think needs to be improved amongst instances is of providing a redirect for any ActivityPub requests to a post that's actually from a remote server (e.g. https://example.com/@user@someotherhost.com/posts/abc123). There should be a simple conformance test for server admins, and a 'how to' for each server software to iron that out, as well as any backend fixes necessary. THAT is the bigger thing of UX issues, because it feels unnecessary to train users what URLs are 'bad URL' and which ones are 'good URL' (to click through the post, and find the URL of the origin server, and then copy THAT into your search instead). That is the biggest thing to fix over any frontend issues.
As for interactions starting from a remote server, some of that can add unnecessary complexities and slower experience (e.g. the 'remote follow' workflow of typing in your WebFinger ID, authenticating, action confirmation, etc). There's not a lot available to simplify it without expecting browser extensions or similar.
The only thing that could be done is designating a protocol handler URI scheme, such as 'web+activitypub:' for remote actions, whereas if a protocol handler is detected as registered, it'd provide a URL to invoke that handler instead. E.g. you could have a Soapbox install (or pleroma-fe, or whatever) register as a handler for 'web+activitypub:' URIs, thus when someone's on a remote website and wants to follow someone from the remote website, they could click a link that points to say 'web+activitypub:action=follow;resource=https://example.com/users/bob' (or whatever formatting) which would kick them over to their instance, and give them the option to just click 'confirm', versus typing in a WebFinger ID and a longer follow. The only thing is that it'd only be useful if you only use a single account, since it'd be bound to handling any of those custom URIs at one instance.
I don’t know if their pricing structure has changed a lot since, but I had used this service in the past when trying to get something published in the iOS App Store, or in the Apple Books store thing, for a client.
Last it was just fill up $30 of credits or so, and get billed $1/hr out of the credit for how long you’re logged in.
I have a lot of gripes in my past experiences of the iOS/macOS ecosystem, especially with ebooks and them trying to make you author it only in their macOS desktop app, for something that’s effectively just an ePub creator with proprietary extensions. You can’t even upload the ePub on the web management portal, it has to be done through the macOS application, which brings you to the web portal for the rest.
But yes, I also used it for iOS app dev and publishing. Last time I did, it was $100/year just to even have a developer account, but allegedly that may be waived now. Also you had to have the serial number (or whichever) of an iPhone registered to the developer account, even though you have a full iOS emulator in Xcode. It didn’t even matter if you actually launched it on that iPhone or not, just merely that it was registered that you allegedly have hardware.