I haven't followed the tech of Bluesky or the AT Protocol closely: does this step mean that people can now set up their own Bluesky instances? Where can I see one in the wild?
Bluesky doesn't have "instances", it has PDSes, Relays, and AppViews. People can run their own PDSes but PDSes are kind of invisible so you won't "see" them. You'll just see the whole Bluesky network as usual.
The bsky.app web app is a JavaScript app that runs in a browser. It talks to an AppView (API server) which talks to a Relay which talks to all PDS hosts on the network.
If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.
But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.
But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.
If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.
Google can still kill your site even if you're a word of mouth, pateron, liberapay funded site...
That is by having scammers feed of the keywords of your product and selling shitty bullshit/scams siphoning the people that were told 'word of mouth' yet use browsers like chrome.
Firefox's unique selling point was that you could trust it. Mozilla taught me that open source software was free from skeevy used-car-salesman commercial advertising tricks.
This morning at work when I opened Firefox, instead of a blank tab it showed a popup advert saying “New device in your future?”. I found this string on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and apparently it's supposed to be an advert for setting up a Mozilla Account.
This is too stressful. I need a tool I don't have to second-guess all the time.
I've used Firefox for 20 years. I wish it would go back to behaving like a not-for-profit I can trust.
(Also, if anyone from Fedora is listening, please consider whether having this sort of user experience in an app installed by default harms your reputation more or less than GNOME Web would.)
Flathub, as the most popular repo, ought to be a sensible default for ordinary users. So it shouldn't be purist if that means losing widely-expected apps, but it should have distinctly less shovelware than the Microsoft and Android stores' reputations (and Flathub seems to be taking steps in the right direction here).
I'd like for there to be a well-stocked Flatpak repo with policies like F-Droid's: they insist on rebuilding everything themselves, and they enthusiastically label potential anti-features. But that doesn't have to be Flathub, because using several Flatpak repos at once is easy. (This is really my only objection to Snap.)
Come to think of it, what I'm describing is a traditional Linux distro, so maybe Fedora and PureOS's existing Flatpak repos already fit the bill.
> if it works in Chrome, all web developers will adopt it
This is why we, tech nerds who understand the problem, must resist monopolies: object to using such APIs. Chrome wouldn't be in quite this position if, instead of embracing the monopolist, more techies had warned their non-techy friends and family away from it, like they did with IE.
"Tech nerds" built web sites that only worked in IE back then and "tech nerds" are building websites now that only work in Chrome. Didn't have a clue back then, and don't have a clue now. Forget warning "non-techy" people and clean your own house first.
Ethics go out the window so long as the flow of shiny new features remains unimpeded. The only reason devs turned against IE is because Microsoft got complacent and essentially abandoned it, letting Gecko and WebKit steal the spotlight… a move that Google is smart enough to know to not repeat.
I have been rather loud about this and while I don't think my voice has meant much I think I have been part of a growing group of people who - together - are making a dent in this monopoly.
Becoming part of it isn't hard either, if you test software either as a SW engineer on a team or as a full time tester it might actually save you some time :
- If you use Mac, test in Safari first. On any other platform, install Firefox (or the Debian version, or Librewolf) and use it as the first tool to test applications.
- If it doesn't work (and the customer hasn't very explicitly said they absolutely only care about Chrome or IE^CEdge) report it as a bug.
I mean, seriously, who would have accepted a feature that only worked in IE 6?
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OK, some people might say: but IE 6 was an old and outdated browser, you cannot compare IE 6, or any version of IE for that matter to Chrome.
Or one might say: Chrome has already won, your idealism is appreciated, but you are too late.
Well, here is the thing: IE was at one point in almost the exact same postition as Chrome is now:
- biggest browser by far
- endorsed (or even enforced) by IT
- lots of features only worked in IE. (I remember one particular customer who seemed to be obsessed with security to the point were we had to keep a VM with Windows XP and IE 8 around with both Active X and Java Applets enabled to sign into them. This was around 2014..! Yes, if you find this notion of security absolutely ridiculous then we agree.)
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OK, one key difference:
Back in 2006 when I started fighting IE we had Mozilla on our side. Firefox was innovating like crazy. We had extensions that let us embed IE in a tab to render certain web sites. We could automatically archive a full website for offline access (full rewrite of links so they worked on our copy was included). Full developer tools that everyone knows from every browser these days started out as just an extension to Firefox, named Firebug IIRC.
Today, while I understand that the extension API had to be reigned in before a disaster happened, it went way to far and today we cannot even get a function in the API to programmatically remove the top tab bar when we add a tab bar on the side. And not only that, but if someone asks about that particular issue, someone will come and hush and hide the comment.
So godspeed to Ladybird devs and Orion devs, Librewolf devs and actually even Safari devs and everyone else who challenges the current monopoly!
Laziness and inertia is the reason monopolies exist, yet when you inquire individually everybody have their own inane reasons to keep the status quo alive.
Elsewhere in this comment section someone literally said they use Chrome because Reddit does not work in Firefox, which is utter nonsense.
This is a tragedy of the commons, rather than simple laziness. Choice of messaging apps is the same. I may know that the world would be a better place if everyone ditched WhatsApp and used signal, but I want to schedule tennis matches today, and the value of a open source future is distant and heavily discounted by the knowledge that it is low probability, even if I do my part.
Can LineageOS do major upgrades without needing support? (so once it's installed you never need to reinstall, and you can keep it safely up-to-date forever by clicking a button every so often - like Silverblue)
No. Not even Google Pixel can promise error-free major upgrade jumps e.g from Android 12 to 13.
But on LineageOS you can update through all the updates for the major Android version (mostly ASB fixes and some new features here and there) by clicking a button from the Updater menu, courtesy of Android's A-B dynamic partitioning update system.
