I look forward to the day I can get rid of my physical displays

I already did and love it! But definitely looking forward to lighter and higher resolution HMDs, I'll get the Quest 3 next, but hopefully for next year I can go with the AR glasses if they are as good as the Q3, even if a bit pricier, just for the convenience and comfort.

I really love working from Immersed, even with the Quest 2, but I do hope future HMDs will be lighter and more comfortable, but I understand that not everybody would enjoy working from VR or AR headsets.

In my case I work from home, and this is such a space saver, I work with virtual giant monitors that there is no way at all for me to place at home, plus the cost would be prohibitive.

I like Kbin, but if it's just the Lemmy interface bothering you try accessing your lemmy instance from Voyager (formerly wefwef - https://vger.app) or one of the many lemmy clients.

I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!

And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don't want you to leave, they don't want you to "be done", they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that's part of what they sell to advertisers.

If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).

If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.

If you don't like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.

Dang, what a bunch of atheist here... we'll all just burn in Reddit and our torture will be ads and posts about Zuckerberg and Musk. 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I absolutely agree.

Reaching the masses and keeping all of the mass content requires money, since investors are starting to realize that gazillions of views do not necesarilly equals profit, they are asking about ROI, which in turn makes the masses-reaching platforms look for ways to monetize those views, and that does not sit well with privacy caring people, but the masses don't care about that.

I really hope the masses never fill the fediverse with their nonsensical content.

Brave does support opening tabs from other devices, sync works good so long as it always has at least 1 device in the sync chain, so if you only have 1 device and have to reinstall it the settings might be lost, but if you have 2 devices and reinstall one the settings are still saved whenever you rejoin the chain. The reason is there are no accounts saved in brave, so the only way to ID your browser is by the sync chain. If the sync chain has no devices it may be removed from the sync servers.

All of the crypto rewards stuff can be disabled with 1 switch, and a second switch if you also want to turn off wallet, but it's not really active unless you configure it. Rewards is there as a way for them to make money without having to make Google or Bing the default search engine as other browsers do.

Brave is a great browser, but Firefox is also great and very configurable. And thanks to this thread I learned that FF's interface can be customized, which was one of my main reasons not to use it anymore. I'll play with it again, it's important to have a non-chromium based browser as an alternative.

Awesome! Dang, Second Life... we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣

Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!

C - It'd be cool to have C with the background of B.

For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).

I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I'm back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.

I use the same as you for virtuals(os-mainFunction), and similar for physical (brand-lpt/dsk/srv-mainUsage - Len-lpt-VR1, Srfc7-work, hp-srv-pve1).
I am boring like that.
I also don't name vehicles.

Dell had a Linux line some years ago where everything worked out of the box, never got the popularity needed to keep it alive.

System76 has Pop!_OS so that they can provide great out of the box experience with their computers, but they are not as big as other vendors.

A good way to really get a product like that to mass market is to make it available in general stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Etc.), the problem is that most of those customers will not understand why their system is so different and they cannot install that MS Office 2003 they have always used, or that Norton Antivirus that their cousin's son recommended to them 10 years ago that was working fine on their old computer.

And then you have the younger generations that use every other device but a computer. They'd rather do all their school and college work on their phones and tablets rather than open a laptop, if they even know how to use a computer (you'd be surprised how many don't even know how to use a computer).

Really makes you think about its "Security through obscurity" approach! 😆😆

Oracle: Hey RedHat, there's only enough space for one open-source-crippling company, and it's already occupied by us!

At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.

Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.

They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).

My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:

If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.

Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.

I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.

If I'm not mistaken, it's only on the GUI app store, you will still be able to launch a terminal and install deb from the CLI using apt. I could be wrong as I've read different things from different sources.

Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap and many other registrars offer dynamic DNS via API or a ddns client very easy to setup.

It's already being used for security audits, so it is definitely possible to use it that same way in a malicious manner.

Also, there are companies like Lakera (creators of the Gandalf prompt injection challenge) offering products to sanitize and secure LLMs, so there is a market for it, because the risks are definitely there.

Yeah, but also no. This was reported last year, and the scientists studying it did not mention it was an attempt to contact us from another planet, but the "remains of a massive star’s death."

From this article on CNN:

Flaring space objects that appear to turn on and off are known as transients.

"When studying transients, you’re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind,” said study coauthor Gemma Anderson, ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist, in a statement. “‘Slow transients’ – like supernovae – might appear over the course of a few days and disappear after a few months. ‘Fast transients’ – like a type of neutron star called a pulsar – flash on and off within milliseconds or seconds.”

This new, incredibly bright object, however, only turned on for about a minute every 18 minutes. The researchers said their observations might match up with the definition of an ultra-long period magnetar. Magnetars usually flare by the second, but this object takes longer.

“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker said. “But nobody expected to directly detect one like this because we didn’t expect them to be so bright. Somehow it’s converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we’ve seen before.”

The researchers will continue to monitor the object to see whether it turns back on, and in the meantime, they are searching for evidence of other similar objects.

“More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we’d never noticed before,” Hurley-Walker said.

Adding to all the previously added reasons, there's also no native mobile app yet for Kbin, and that seems related to having no API released yet.

That is hopefully going to change soon since at least 2 apps are being worked on by the community - This unnamed one with the goal of being like Apollo, and Artemis which seems to be looking for beta testers - besides the hopefully soon-to-be-released Official Kbin mobile app by the Kbin team.

There's no all-in-one app for it yet, as there are different implementations and different APIs for different platforms (is like asking for a single app for facebook, twitter, reddit, instagram, youtube, tiktok). However, all of the ActivityPub platforms can interconnect (aka Federate) whith each other, so while the interface will not be optimized for it, you can view content from Mastodon on Kbin, or from Kbin on Lemmy, etc. The most popular services in the Fediverse right now seem to be Mastodon and Lemmy, but also Pleroma, Peertube, and Pixelfed are getting attention lately. View more Fediverse projects at https://fediverse.party/

Kbin is the one I like best, because it has a view for Threads (similar to Reddit) Microblog (similar to Twitter & Mastodon), People (a directory of users you can follow), and Magazines (similar to a directory of subreddits). And from Threads you can suscribe to threads in Lemmy or kbin, from Microblog you can suscribe to Mastodon or Kbin users to follow, from People you can follow users, and from Magazines you can suscribe to topics you like.

They are working on an API for it as well as some apps for it, but for now you can access the website of your favorite instance and install as a progressive webapp on your mobile.

Very cool! Thanks!
Suggestion: add Brave Search (search.brave.com) as an option as well. It's a smaller search engine but they have their own index and does not track users.

@ono there are relay services to help with that. I am going that route.

@ernest Yunohost was a great suggestion, installing it right now in a brand new VM. I'll play with a lot of the applications and see which ones I like best. Thanks for that I wasn't even aware of it.

I hope Kbin makes it there soon too. I like this interface better than Lemmy as a reddit replacement.

@Trekman10 I get that, but it seems it federates with Mastodon, Lemmy, Diaspora, Peertube and many other platforms, kind of having one account to rule them all... LOL

@ernest Thanks for the feedback! I've been reading and learning a lot. I am starting to get a better grasp of the Fediverse. Will definitely be playing soon with selfhosting an instance or two for myself and family.

@GeekyOnion Thanks! That's really helpful!

On this topic, I now stumbled upon Friendica, it seems it can federate with pretty much everything else, not sure about the Facebook kind of UI, but there seem to be different templates.

Anyone has experience with it? Pros or cons?

@vibrantleaf Thanks! Just the kinds of info I was looking for.

@Trekman10 not sure on kbin but I don't think so. On lemmy it's not possible for sure. But that's why I want to begin now, I only have a few comments on each, and this is my first post. I was part of the twitter and now reddit migrations.