I think you're right that the best response is no response, but the protests do have an effect beside driving traffic. Investors won't want to be involved in a company at war with its userbase, so if protests are loud and long enough it could mess us reddits IPO plans. So for the users who just aren't ready to give up reddit, spamming protest comments is probably their best bet.

This is exciting. I think code forges are one of the biggest opportunities for ActivityPub to really go mainstream and change the internet. Not only because it'll make working with open source way easier since you can work with any compatible forge, but developers will be more exposed to ActivityPub just by working with the software and so more likely to participate in AP dev. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the fediverse. There's been a lot of talk from various organizations/companies but this will be the first large project adopting AP. I'm interested to see how development goes for them and for other fediverse projects.

I wonder what changes it will force on Mastodon. Masto won't be the biggest project anymore and won't be able to throw its weight around as much. Just like the recent influx of users forced the implementation of full text search and has reenergized conversations about quote posts, I think federated gitlab would force masto to rethink some things.

Users can block those with extensions so the data isn't as reliable

I don't see it withering away anytime soon. My entire career has been enterprise web development (which is why I roll my eyes at all the web dev rants). Every company I've worked at has used Java on the backend and some JS framework for the frontend. Java has only been improving in that time and getting much easier to write. I don't see companies taking an (in their view) unnecessary risk that makes it harder for them to hire and lose efficiency, at least in the short to medium term.

I think the only way that changes is if developers are interested enough to try Rust, or any other language, in their free time. If they like it enough, they'll suggest it at work. If enough developers are doing that, it'll slowly shift the local scene.

Entirely unmoderated tags are not an option for lemmy as the moderation workload would be too much. Additionally users being able to type out tags themselves introduces splintering in the tag contents due to typos. A better solution is a curated list of tags users can attach to their posts

I vehemently disagree with the main idea behind this RFC. Just let users put arbitrary tags on their posts and other users can search for whatever tags they want. The rest of the fediverse has unmoderated hashtags and it works fine. I don't see a good reason hashtags should require moderation. And typos can be corrected by editing the post.

Adding those restrictions just makes this feature more complex than it needs to be and reduces compatibility with the fediverse. Users of any fediverse software can create a post in a lemmy community and those posts may have arbitrary tags. Why should lemmy users have less capability on lemmy than external users?

Finally, hashtags could be a useful way to filter posts within a community if these restrictions are dropped. I posted this in the github thread, but imagine a general programming community. Posts could be tagged with a language, paradigm (OOP, functional, etc), or whatever else to allow users to browse subtopics within a community. Having to request moderators add a tag is an unnecessary extra step.

Apple's implementation of other PWA standards requires an app to be opened from the home screen. A user can't access features of the app if they can't add it to the homescreen.

We're talking about converting unused office space into affordable housing, though. Charging half the rent would qualify it as affordable housing and is still better than no income from an unused building.

This article seems needlessly antagonistic. Lemmy and kbin are new software (kbin has been live for about a month). Of course there are incompatibilities right now. Those will be worked out. Also, I'm not really sure which incompatibilities they're talking about. Lemmy/Kbin posts show up and can be replied to on other fediverse services. you can even create a post in a lemmy community from a microblog acct.

A key thing to remember is that the entire fediverse is built by hobbyists. Gargron and mastodon did a bunch of marketing to get grants/donations but the rest of the fediverse is built by individual people in their free time. Fixing these issues will take much longer than a corporate network would take.

Sidenote: There is no primary fediverse application. I know they meant mastodon because its the most well known but that's happenstance and bad journalism. Mastodon wasn't the first fediverse application and I think lemmy/kbin will outgrow it soon.

EDIT: To address OPs callout:

no one has done an especially good job explaining why the fediverse is better than centralized solutions

This feels like the author is ignoring a lot of writing about this. The main argument is its better because you're not beholden to someone else's interests, especially corporate interests that will never be aligned with the average user. (See reddit debacle)

Because what use would a bodega be on it’s own? They aren’t large enough to have the inventory to replace a supermarket.

I didn't mean the store would have to be a bodega; that was just an example of a small store sustaining itself with that size customer base. I meant that it could be a small grocery store, one that doesn't qualify as a supermarket. And like I said, if we're talking about a whole district, there are multiple buildings available so you don't have to get everything from one store. You could have a butcher in one building, a produce shop across the street, the grocery store with just nonperishables beside that, etc.

These kinds of commercial districts with nothing but office buildings are terrible sad places to be. I’m not sure why anyone would want to live in such a depressing place.

Because they don't have many other options. We're talking about affordable housing, which is needed by people who are increasingly getting priced out of non-depressing areas. And areas like what I'm describing, with small, locally owned stores colocated with housing with shared ammenities can be incredibly vibrant communities. You could even close off the interior roads and make something like the superblock concept that's been growing (I've heard about it the most in relation to neighborhoods in Spain).

It's not as common to push users to apps on desktop, but its a tried-and-true practice on mobile. I'm sure companies would do it if they could, but app stores and app lockin aren't as strong on desktop as on mobile

Agreed. This is a lemmy bug. The OP is on mastodon (where video previews are fetched and displayed) and has no control over how its rendered over here. It'd be nice if lemmy fetched the title and description

nodebb and discourse are working on activitypub support. See https://crag.social/@devnull/111732273308478221

Accessibility wasn’t the main topic discussed in the article

That's part of the problem. All these rants about the glory of Web 1.0 are ignoring the fact that Web 1.0 wasn't usable for anybody with accessibility issues and the modern web is better for them. A tiny acknowledgement at the bottom of their rant shows how they value accessibility lower than all of their other concerns.

TiddlyWiki via TiddlyPWA is what I use. I don't know if it supports the S Pen and the notes are all saved in a single HTML file.

The numbers for lemmy are probably way outdated. Take a look at https://lemmyverse.net/communities. It lists 636 instances but FediDB only has 302. And remember most of this growth has only come in the past week or two.

Also, mastodon only has 1.25 million active users according to FediDB, though that's probably outdated too.

there is an initiative for federated git "forges" called ForgeFed. I'm on mobile but will find some links when I'm on desktop

An extension could work, but some users won't want to install an extension and other users can't install them (work computer/mobile browser).

A lot of kbin users are coming from reddit and don't care about its additional (microblogging) features. Using a Lemmy-API powered app would give them exactly the experience they're looking for. And there's nothing stopping these Lemmy-API apps from adding support for the kbin extended api.

Fedilab is an app that was originally built for Mastodon and uses the mastoapi but also supports some Pleroma specific features. Apps don't need to be directly one-to-one tied to services.

The lead dev of kbin has said he's evaluating implementing the API.

kbin has a totally different backend and also additional functionality that is not available in Lemmy apps.

This doesn't make it less likely. They can implement the lemmy api for compatible features and add their own api (or more likely use the masto-api) for the other features.

I should have checked the issue tracker before posting this. There's already an issue related to community discovery at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951