Apple.

I uses to be a huge Apple fan pre-2010. Everything worked, was smooth, wasn’t Windows, and it was fun trying out the terminal despite it being pretty useless for most things on Mac.

At the new decade is when it felt like Apple was becoming what it is today: a walled garden with priority of mobile devices at the detriment of Macintosh. Started to really look at Linux as an alternative (only tried Ubuntu in a VM around the time of Unity coming out) early 2010s, but didn’t make the full leap until around 2013 when I installed Linux Mint and got a Raspberry Pi to begin to mess around with. Now I solely run a mix of Debian and Void on all my machines and I couldn’t be happier.

There’s a huge difference between expanding the Fediverse and allowing it to grow organically vs allowing communication with an entity as large and insidious as Meta, which Eugen doesn’t seem to get.

There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

This is the most ridiculous part to me. If Meta get to the point of locking people out and created a walled-garden separate from the Fedi, it’s because they accomplished their goal of taking users and content away. And until they reach that goal, the Fediverse would be harmed by the outpouring of shit, spam, corporate product placement, ✨influencers✨ etc. that plague mainstream social media. Also XMPP was disallowed growth because of Google abandoning it, and that would happen here as well.

I just hope that most instances out of principal block them, but it isn’t looking so great.

I’ll disagree on Mastodon being unique given it’s an animal and a band - for a long time in its history it was always under those. It’s been helped on the search results front though given it’s increasing popularity (and I’m guessing yet another new surge due Twitter’s rate-limiting). In time once Lemmy continues to grow, I’m sure it’ll get pushed up in search rankings as well.

The absolute hypocrisy of sh.itjust.works banning lemmygrad, a communist instance dedicated to the working people of the world and the antithesis of fascism, yet allowing the potential for fascists to find a community on their server.

helix is incredible, completely replaced neovim for me. Granted I never used many plugins outside of language servers, so it was fairly easy to not worry about a lack of features.

aerc on desktop, K-9 Mail on mobile

People who complain about “censorship” and “authoritarianism” while espouting the benefits of “freedom of speech” are exactly the type of people you don’t want around.

If there’s been discussion on lemmy.ml about this topic, I haven’t gotten around to seeing it. But from what I’ve noticed from witnessing this type of discussion all over the web is that these calls always come from either the most reactionary users or enablers i.e. those that would rather sit on the sidelines and either let it happen or put up a weak front because they have a right to “free speech.”

Unfortunately, this libertation-esque ethos runs deep in so many online spaces, where they’d rather have vague notions of freedom that obviously benefit them at the expense of others. Spaces like lemmy are not for them, and while there’s nothing lemmy can do about it, going against the grain and purging that type of vitriol is the best way to keep it from turning into the shitholes ranging from Reddit’s “enlightened centrism” to outright fascist spaces like *chans or gab.