On most public roads, if you’re driving fast enough for downforce to be an issue, your poor judgment is the primary factor in any resulting crash.

There are lots of hypotheticals here.

I expect the lemmy.world admins to block servers that are frequent sources of hate and extremism. I don’t expect them to speculatively block servers because some people guess they might be. I’m pretty skeptical that a majority of users want preemptive blocking. I don’t, and the votes and comments I see in most conversations on the subject suggest that’s a position held by a very loud minority.

I’m not sure Threads users will be all that interested in interacting with Lemmy. It’s an awkward UX to participate in Lemmy conversations from Mastodon, and I believe Threads has essentially the same format. Threads is likely to have a bigger impact on Mastodon servers, and I don’t think any of us can reliably predict what that impact will be yet.

An account is required to post on Threads. It is not required to view content posted on Threads, which is different from Facebook and Instagram.

ActivityPub means that servers other than Threads will receive content from Threads which they can serve to visitors.

as long as Meta services keep forcing you to sign up for an account to view anything of value

Threads doesn’t do that, and won’t be able to if it wants to support ActivityPub federation.

I’m not sure what Meta’s goal is with adding federation to Threads. Some options include:

• Preempting government scrutiny for monopolistic practices
• Gaining a competitive advantage against Xitter/Bluesky/etc…
• Giving Threads users access to more people/content

As for why I think the flow of users is likely to be away from Threads:

• People who already actively use Mastodon and the like tend to be fairly technically sophisticated and anti-corporate. Not many of those will switch to a Meta product when they can reach the same audience without it.
• Most people who joined Threads got there via Instagram. Those sorts of mainstream users mostly haven’t been exposed to decentralized, non-corporate social media. The added exposure of seeing it from Threads is more marketing than these open source projects could ever hope to buy.

I’d argue the phone apps are instant messaging and I’m a little surprised none of the previously-dominant PC-based IM apps made the transition successfully. Most of the ones currently popular do have web or native PC options though.

I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction. Ideally, we’ll be able to offer a more compelling pitch than just “not corporate”.

I was nearly 20 years younger than I am now and was definitely ignorant of free, public XMPP service providers, which is kind of the point. If someone tech-savvy enough to be running Linux on a laptop in 2004 and liked the idea of XMPP tried and failed to get started with it, what hope was there of attracting a mainstream audience? You could argue I didn’t try hard enough, and you’d be right in a tautological sense. I did later use third-party XMPP clients for Google Chat.

I don’t expect a Pony from Meta. Meta is a face-eating leopard and I expect it to try to eat my face. If blocking their users from seeing the pictures of birds I share on Mastodon prevents that, please tell me how it does. This isn’t a rhetorical question; I self-host and can block, or not block whatever I want.

Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving.

Google intentionally turned off XMPP federation in its chat product.

I’d attribute it to malice, but looking at how badly Google has repeatedly mismanaged its chat offerings I’m going with Hanlon’s razor here. They did claim spam was an issue as well.

It does not. I set mine up more than a year ago and followed these instructions.

People already familiar with Ruby on Rails will not find any surprises there; Mastodon’s hosting requirements are typical of a Rails app.

I’ve done it and it’s not a whole lot harder than that. The additional steps are:

• Install dependencies - exact commands are provided in the instructions for Debian-based systems
• Create a more complex web server configuration file - for which a template is provided
• Set up systemd services to start it at boot - templates are provided

It is harder than managed hosting where you might only need to create a database user in a web control panel and upload files for PHPBB, but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.

is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse

How?

I’ve seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don’t agree with its analysis. It wasn’t easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.

There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I’m sure Meta would like us to join their service, I’m not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.

Thanks. I knew Google changed the name, but I didn’t know about the new module. So far the old one is still working for me, but I suppose I should update.

Universal Safetynet Fix solves a lot of the banking app issues.

Absolutely not.

Dilettante gets used as an insult when someone wants to discredit the position of another for having insufficient dedication, credentials, or experience. People who really know what they’re talking about address positions directly rather than the person who holds them.

We’re far from court cases. What we have right now is politicians asking the Department of Justice to investigate. I suspect that’s more likely to go nowhere than it is to go to court.

If it did go to court, either side of the smartphone/messenger equation could be argued as anticompetitive use of market power, or both; they could claim that Apple used its market power in smartphones to popularize its messenger service, which it then used to increase its market share in smartphones.

The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:

a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry

It further explains that “market power” means:

the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors

Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.

Countries have laws both protecting people who host content provided by third parties and imposing certain responsibilities on them when they become aware of illegal content hosted on their servers. Some of them, like Germany’s NetzDG impose specific procedures for reporting (though no Lemmy server is large enough for NetzDG to apply). US laws about child pornography, for example are very specific about removal and reporting requirements, come with a risk of prison, and can include things that are legal other places such as cartoon drawings.

Laws don’t need to specifically address whether the content arrived via a federation mechanism or a user uploading it directly, only what a server owner must do once they’re aware of illegal content on their server.

Yes it does.

I don’t think every list of disposable email providers that incorrectly includes ProtonMail deserves a post to !technology@lemmy.world. Lists that are widely used deserve that kind of attention, but this has two stars on Github.

As BombOmOm points out, this list includes free email providers and the inclusion of ProtonMail is correct.

Yes, most people in western Europe use Whatsapp. Yes, they have to download it before they can use it. Maybe some phones have it preinstalled, but most smartphone users do know how to download apps. More tech-savvy and privacy-conscious people often have Signal as well.