Bluesky takes advantage of self hosters for more distribution and reliability, but still maintains centralized control over content and user management.

This is what I don’t understand, why would anyone choose to host when there is zero advantage? I sort of feel is by design so they can claim “decentralized” while still having full control over the data.

is decentralized

It’s not.

I assume someone else can just create a server and join the network of BlueSky?

They can’t.

in reality at the moment its controlled by only one big company.

…yep.

My hope is that they will one day cooperate with Fediverse.

ActivityPub existed before BlueSky did and they chose to make their own, incompatible thing. So I don’t have high hopes for this.

That doesn’t mean much unfortunately.

I like that snap support is included. You can’t easily add it to immutable distros and there is still some software out there only easily available via snaps.

I am not an expert but I don’t think Snap support can be added to an immutable distro after installation, meaning there is going to be some software that simply cannot be easily installed. Snap support is basically a legacy support feature at this point but I think it’s nice to cover their bases if they are trying to make something for widespread adoption.

I wonder what the differences will be!

I think you’re exactly right, honestly I think this has potential to be huge. Whether we like it or not, in order for a lot of mid-level savvy users to feel comfortable switching over they need a “default” option (like joining mastodon.social) to get their feet wet. A distro specifically built for KDE I think could appeal to a lot of people.

EDIT: Also for the people buying laptops in businesses and schools obv

How does it work self hosting? Is it querying other search engines or just maintaining a database on your server?

This could easily be done with AI. For a week or so, that is.

Not at all, Pixelfed is very polished and gets regular updates.

I found a Vivaldi blog post on this topic from 2022: https://vivaldi.com/blog/manifest-v3-webrequest-and-ad-blockers/

Will the Vivaldi Ad Blocker be affected by the Manifest V3 changes?

I made some architectural choices early on that I believe should keep it functional, regardless of the Manifest V3 changes. Of course, there is always a possibility that the underlying Chromium architecture will change now or in the future, forcing us to do some extra work to keep this working. ​> Hopefully, a more in-depth description of the architecture and some of the facts surrounding the Manifest V3 changes should help to show why I believe that our implementation is safe for the time being.

Yeah, chromium based means adblockers cannot work as effectively.

A “reply guy” (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a “redditor”. Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it’s also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.

Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.

I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be “people banned from too many subredits”.

I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be “zero reply guys” but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of “engagement” actually scares new users away.

I was just thinking the same thing. It’s rare that the bullshit from tech companies is so quickly identified packaged and labeled like that (even if we are still calling it “AI”).

I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in the intelligence of a woman who would marry a Lemmy user.

The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.

Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.

I do not think the future of the fediverse lies in general purpose instances but that said, IMO Beehaw is the gold standard of a general purpose instance.

What you’ve expressed is not pessimism it’s cynicism.