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.

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!

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.

Yeah, it’s not SSO, that’s why I wrote “of sorts”, but the post is precisely of how Pixelfed will now allow Mastodon users to log into a Pixelfed instance with their Mastodon account, meaning they will not see the current view of pixelfed as looked from a Mastodon interface but should look as if the user had a pixelfed account, since they are using the pixelfed interface.

It’s not released yet, so I have not tested it, but hopefully soon.

You can view Pixelfed from Mastodon, but the interface of Mastodon is more focused on text microblogging than on image sharing. By federating the logins they are kind-of making an SSO of sorts, so now you can use the full pixelfed interface but your suscriptions and history stay on your Mastodon instance and just federate over to the pixelfed instance you are login into.

That’s how people new to the fediverse were expeting it to work (myself included when I joined last year), so it’s nice to see it starting to shift that way.

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.

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

deleted by creator

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.

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?