I use a redirector extension for YouTube so PipedBot is useless and annoying for me. I’d rather someone just give me a YouTube URL and let the redirector extension do its work.

TL;DRbot is okay, I guess.

Sometimes it might be sold off. I know LTT sold their Steam Deck to DankPods because Valve still haven’t brought it into Australia.

I use an iPad, am subscribed to Apple Music and also use a Hackintosh setup (aiming to replace it with a MacBook of some kind in the future).

• The tablet market is pretty much “ignore everything else and just buy an iPad”. There is no tablet really worth your time on Android, most of it is due to Google and the Android ecosystem practically abandoning the tablet form factor. Meanwhile Apple still supports the iPad to this day and there are plenty of great apps that support the iPad form factor, such as Mona for Mastodon
• I used to use Spotify for streaming, but found that it was getting increasingly annoying to use. So many long-standing bugs including one where if I download even one song on my phone that’s in my Liked Songs list, the entire app takes like 30 seconds trying to load it. Apple Music handles large lists so much better. The library management is also so much better than on Spotify too, with it basically just being “iTunes but as a streaming service” and I can have smart playlists for whatever purpose I want. Their consistency with regards to UX across the different target platforms aren’t great (iOS and Android can’t create or update smart playlists, Windows and Mac don’t have word-for-word lyrics) but even with all that, it’s the least annoying streaming service for me right now. (and yes, I maintain a local music library with MusicBee - streaming is helpful for discovery)
• I’ve been recently using my Hackintosh more and it was really comfy using it. I have issues focusing on a single task (which might be ADHD, might not be, idk) and the full-screen mode allows me to focus on the tasks on my screen.

As for your point on bloatware, this happens on Android too. I can’t remove Facebook, OneDrive or YouTube from my phone, only “hide” it. (Samsung btw)

Jay Graber is the CEO, dunno about the investors but I don’t care tbh. If Bluesky does go to shit, the protocol lets me move away without losing my data.

Bluesky’s development has been pretty democratic, moreso than Mastodon where one guy basically leads the entire trajectory of the fediverse (at least from a mainstream perspective) from what I heard.

As for Jack, hasn’t been on Bluesky for a while now - he prefers Nostr. Even though he’s on the board, he’s not attended any meetings nor has he dictated how the platform should go. He just threw money at it and ran after the community didn’t take him seriously.

This all implies Bluesky can be considered a massive tech corp (which it honestly isn’t even with investors, definitely not compared to Meta, or even Mozilla at this point), and can even be monetised.

In the event that they do attempt that, users can move to a different PDS and not lose any of their data - that’s how AT was built. While on AP, it’s dependent on if the software powering the account supports migration, and even then I’ve not seen an implementation that carries over all of the user’s data (Mastodon only does followers/following, Lemmy has no migration whatsoever). That’s not to say it’s impossible, but I’ve not seen it happen.

I think the moderation will be an uphill battle for Bluesky. I haven’t seen a clear answer over how legal issues are going to be handled and generally, people want some form of moderation. Maybe not the extent that the fediverse has with its blocking drama.

But the resiliency against corporate capture and community ownership, meh I’m not really worried. I work with and use open-source projects that have been backed by corporations, Mastodon.social has already said they wish to federate with Threads, and there are corporations sponsoring (in the case of mastodonapp.uk) or outright owning instances (in the case of Flipboard, Mozilla Social and Vivaldi Social). Bluesky seems to be built on the notion that it too will be a possible adversary in the future, so the protocol is being built with that in mind.

Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn’t give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can’t blame them. They don’t want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I’ve only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it’s exhausting to be part of.

There’s no native iPad mode. 😩

Thankfully there is an app that’s iPad native named, uh, Skeets.

AFAIK, Bluesky started on ActivityPub at first, but then it was decided to make a new protocol which resulted in Atproto. It also started as an internal project at Twitter, was funded by Jack, but then as it got popular amongst a more regular audience, he left when he kept getting pestered with @ mentions and anti-crypto stuff. He hangs out at Nostr now and from what I’ve been told, isn’t really involved in Bluesky’s meetings.

There was an effort to bridge Bluesky/Atproto, ActivityPub and also Nostr together - Bridgy Fed - for when Bluesky started getting their protocol federating outside its own network. The issue was, the creator made it opt-out rather than opt-in. The AP fediverse collectively shat themselves, spreading their delusions about Bluesky, one guy called the creator a rapist for using public data and another threatened to sue/fine the creator. It was absolutely bonkers and that incident exemplifies a good part of why people find the fediverse to be toxic, moreso than anything involving Threads.

Yeah, from some cursory glances and following of AT devs, some things I understand the logic of and some things I’m thinking “isn’t this a bit over-engineered?”

The Lemmy instances that are popular right now likely won’t sell it like Reddit would. However, you don’t really need to, to grab publicly available data from Lemmy instances. The data is publicly available to view and for scrapers like Common Crawl (one of the datasets used for machine learning, used as one of the training datasets for GPT-3) to scrape. I don’t know if Lemmy allows admins to hide comments without an account or not.

I feel like the people who got scared of Bluesky joining the AP fediverse don’t even actually want a fediverse. They want a bog-standard, non-federating bulletin board instead.

From what I saw, fedi people were mostly freaking the fuck out while most of the Bluesky users were just making fun of the whole ordeal.

AFAIK, no bridges to Bluesky are actually active yet, and Bridgy Fed is considering ways of going opt-in.

How Not to Drown by CHVRCHES feat. Robert Smith

I think the fediverse, and that includes Lemmy, have this warped idea of what Bluesky is and what ActivityPub/the fediverse actually is. They think ActivityPub is the de-facto protocol for microblogging, when it has glaring issues that Bluesky wanted to solve with Atproto (the queer.af debacle is a great example of this, imagine if you’ve got an account on queer.af and you want to move your data to a new instance). If you’re a Linux guy, you might have seen parallels between ActivityPub/Mastodon vs. Atproto/Bluesky and X11 vs. Wayland.

It’s exactly this. Bluesky has its problems but there is a massive overreaction from the fediverse crowd that it makes it hard for me to sympathise with them even if I agree on the principle.

EDIT: JSYK, the Bridgy Fed developer is working towards making the bridge opt-in! https://tech.lgbt/@ShadowJonathan/111925391727699558

Yup! The fishy glue smell is real, but there’s no legitimate reports of the Cybertruck emitting those, as much as people would believe that.

Someone on Bluesky claimed that the Tesla Cybertruck was emitting “human sewage” or “fishy glue” smells with a convincing edit of a Insider News article. Then they convinced me more by editing/making from fiction a Cybertruck owners discussion board to say someone was posting about their Cybertruck smelling like dog pussy. To be honest, when I saw that I should have known it was fake, but I can absolutely believe the Cybertruck smelling rancid from failing electronics.

I believed the fake article since I had a similar situation with a failing minifridge. There was a strong electronic smell coming from it and while it wasn’t really “fishy glue” I knew something was failing and disposed of it immediately. I also remembered a YouTuber having issues with her home wiring emitting a fishy glue smell.