Interestingly, I (in my 20s back then) also asked the question in the early 2000's.

I had a CS background.

Could you please explain exactly why you think no one you know uses Mastodon? I'm trying to figure it out. I, personally am hesitant to use it first and foremost because Mastodon (and many of its lesser known alternatives) is a variant of micro-blogging (I'm appalled how extending character limit beyond 500 apparently counts as a feature in Fediverse!)

No, nothing cute like that.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

The instance owner has absolute anonymity and absolute power to snoop with no access logs and no known identity. CCPA? GDPR? Access controls? Good luck! You can leave the instance, but you're leaving all your data behind for them or any future owner of the instance to do whatever they want with... forever.

And even if you trust them and everyone they will ever meet, people can and do store their server logs unencrypted.

Then argue they can't help it and you don't "get it" because that's just how the architecture has to work in order to... well it's not clear why this is a good design for the user or any better than other social media.

1) You still don't own your data 2) You still don't have any privacy 3) Every single part of the user experience is inferior or confusing and the people making it don't care because they're focused on doing what they can to connect kids with anonymous instance owners.

What do you mean by 'the fediverse that missed the Twitter alternative'? I thought Mastodon is the Twitter alternative. Sorry; I didn't het it.

Bluesky became that, while Mastodon had months of head start.

I can see some Fossil Gen 6's on eBay in the US. (I only learned about AsteroidOS today and I'm not in the US)

Doesn't install on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS due to dependecy problems. Filed a bug: https://github.com/OlaProeis/Ferrite/issues/6

Thanks for reporting! This is a build environment issue - v0.2.1 was built on Ubuntu 24.04 which has newer glibc (2.39) and libssl3t64.

*Fix:* I've updated the CI to build on Ubuntu 22.04, which will make the .deb compatible with 22.04+.

This will be included in v0.2.2. For now, workarounds: 1. Use the `ferrite-linux-x64.tar.gz` (standalone binary) instead of .deb 2. Build from source: `cargo build --release`

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Er, do you think that's a poor choice?

What's done is done; but I was pissed and am not a native English speaker, so I asked LLM to reword what I wanted to say in a polite and proper way, so that as many people as possible could support it.

Is it ok?

Yes, a poor choice for a bug report.

> I asked LLM to reword what I wanted to say in a polite and proper way, so that as many people as possible could support it.

A classic stocastic parrot fail. It is trained on polite suggestions and less polite bug reports.

On January, 3, 2026, Telegram messenger, which I use a lot, introduced AI Summaries [1] for all posts after January, 3, 2026 with no way to switch them off; neither for the readers nor for channel admins.

I find it unacceptable and filed a bug report about that (marking that as an issue; not feature request, which in my view it is), requesting for this feature to be opt-in.

[1] https://telegram.org/blog/new-design-ai-summaries

I, on the other hand, turned off YouTube recomendations with UnDistracted. Maybe I'm missing out; who knows.

build-your-own-x*, a popular compilation of "well-written, step-by-step guides for re-creating our favorite technologies from scratch", contains some.

* https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x

How easy is it to become their (Cerebras) paying customer? Last time I looked, they seemed to be in closed beta or something.

I signed up and got access within a few days. They even gave me free credits for a while

That's gone now. They do drops from time to time, but their compute platform is saturated.