I saw an interesting video suggesting that the real motivation is to give megacorps like Google a new business acting as "banks" for identity, i.e. the Internet would get so inconvenient that people would just save their identity with Google (or Meta, etc) and then use them to log in to other websites.

I probably explained it badly, but the video I saw is here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAd-OOrdyMw

People in the comments pointed out that those companies would also have the ability to delete or suspend your identity verification if you did something they didn't like (or refused to do something they wanted). Reminds me of the SIN from Shadowrun .

Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn't have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user's computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

The main differences are:

• package management (how you install new programs)
• release model (fixed vs rolling)
• default desktop environments (the GUI / look and feel)

Besides the trackers and malware, ads can be categorised as a flaw in technology. A kind of software parasite that uses a computer's resources without providing any additional functionality to the user.

Using Kiwix you can keep older versions of Wikipedia locally on your computer, so if the online version reaches an unusable state, you can still view the articles as they used to be. Of course, it won't have information about anything that happened after that point, but it could still be useful for some purposes.

Browsers should be designed from the start for the benefit of the users. There are too many "features" that only benefit the server owners. It's been this way for a long time. Like the "Referer" header. Old as dirt, but how do I benefit from telling a server what page I was visiting beforehand?

If a Fedi or BSky instance wants to support connecting to the other side, they should implement both protocols. Bridges are just a duct-tape solution.

The root of the issue is this idea that a web browser should be an "everything app" that can basically recreate the functionality of any other app on the system. It's total feature creep, and in addition to privacy issues, creates a barrier-to-entry that makes it very hard for people to create new browsers because of the sheer amount of features they're expected to implement.

The term "social media" is already toxic. When I started using the Internet, socialising and media were two separate things. Conflating the two implies that every time we say something, we are publishing an article and should care about how many views and likes we get, instead of making a genuine attempt at connection. And it suggests that every reply should be some kind of review of the post it replies to.

In the days of forums, people would just post what came into mind. They were more honest because there was no number next to your comment rating how good it was.

But why do people want their text editors to do completely unrelated tasks? Genuine question.

Upvotes/downvotes are unfortunately a fundamentally flawed concept. They originally served as an superior alternative to forums' previous sorting method of most-recently commented, but they are far from flawless themselves.

My ideal alternative would be some kind of customisable sort order chosen by the user that uses some kind of sentiment analysis of the text to find the kind of posts the user is interested in. For example, you could sort by whether post look serious or joking, how long they are, ratio of words to hyperlinks, etc. Could also filter out ragebait and similar rubbish.

Of course I can see downsides - performance considerations, and it would only work for text posts and comments, but it's just an idea off the top of my head.

Quite the opposite in fact. Microtransactions offer the promise of fun, but never deliver, because in order to incentivise users to purchase them, the player must feel like the game is 90% of the way to being fun and that tiny additional purchase will get it there.

It's like the cartoon image of the donkey rider holding a carrot on the end of a rod. The donkey keeps moving to try to get the carrot, but never quite reaches it.

Perhaps some kind of fediweb that allows sites to rank other sites for trustworthiness. Then as a user you mark a few sites as trusted, and use their judgement to find more sites.

Other popular Linux distros include:

• Debian
• Fedora
• OpenSUSE
• EndeavourOS
• Arch Linux
• Bazzite
• Zorin

Quite the opposite in fact. Microtransactions offer the promise of fun, but never deliver, because in order to incentivise users to purchase them, the player must feel like the game is 90% of the way to being fun and that tiny additional purchase will get it there.

It's like the cartoon image of the donkey rider holding a carrot on the end of a rod. The donkey keeps moving to try to get the carrot, but never quite reaches it.

If anyone has recommendations for ways to preserve personal computing, please share at !homecomputing@piefed.social

There needs to be a Fediverse platform just for viewing and commenting on videos without being a video publisher yourself. Then we'd see a lot more traffic coming to PeerTube channels. It also needs to provide a good mechanism for discovering channels you're not already aware of.

Since anyone can create their own subreddit and become a mod there, does this mean that anyone can look at these profiles?

You can view and post in channels on other instances from your home instance without switching. For example, I'm commenting from piefed.social

I've often felt that the web should work more like Git, so you can keep the content locally and just pull updates when you need.