Apple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.

This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.

That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.

It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.

It seems to me software designed to facilitate discussion shouldn’t have a downvote buttton. There should be a UI for marking comments as inappropriate, but it should require a second step saying why. Perhaps one of the reasons should even be “I disagree”, but that option should have no effect.

It’s not impossible to abuse of course, but it nudges people in the right direction. Those UI nudges can be pretty effective.

The higher-score comments there don’t seem to be particularly hostile to Lemmy. They talk about legitimate concerns like whether Lemmy as it exists now could deal with a Reddit-size volume of data, The top comment at this time speaks favorably of [email protected].

Of course people who are still using Reddit are more likely to view Reddit as favorable or acceptable and alternatives as problematic, or not quite there yet. I’m actively Fediverse-first in my use of social media, but I still end up on Reddit quite a bit for niche interests because that’s where the most people are.

It’s probably more fair to call its claim of being decentralized fake or disingenuous. There doesn’t seem to be any way to participate in the ecosystem without going through the Bluesky relay, a central point of failure with strong incentives to eventually do something shitty.

There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.

Even then, it’s likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there’s a problem, it’s your problem. I don’t want to discourage you, but understand what you’re committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.

The fact that it’s been out for a year and federation is still only half-implemented suggests to me the decision to add it was pretty late in the development process, even if it was early in the marketing process.

Threads is for whoever Meta can sell it to, and I think it was pretty far along in its development before they actually committed to ActivityPub support.

Threads users are much more likely to interact with other microblog software like Mastodon than with Lemmy. It might be possible to post from Threads to Lemmy now by tagging a community much like Mastodon, but I have never seen it done. Lemmy.world does not block threads.net.

You should not trust them.

I don’t think a Mastodon server attempting to attract a mainstream audience should block them though, at least not at this point. We have a chance to welcome millions of people who wouldn’t have even heard of the fediverse otherwise.

There are some loud voices in the fediverse who don’t want it to be very welcoming. Here are a couple examples:

Threads defederation - what could onboard people to the fediverse faster than a giant platform run by Facebook joining? Yes, I hate Facebook as much as everyone else here, but they’re making an offramp for their users and half the fediverse wants to close that off?

Overbearing enforcement of norms - yes, it’s good if people put alt text on their images and content warnings on stuff lots of people find upsetting. It’s harmful to hassle people about it until they leave.

I think people who a small network with strong social norms are better off on servers that are selective about what they federate with to ensure stricter adherence to the preferences of their users. One of the great things about federated systems is that users can pick a place that’s run in a way that works for them.

It was hit with a DDOS for an extended period of time. I suspect the attackers were successful in substantially hampering adoption of Lemmy as a whole.

They have marketing budgets.

Yes, it’s possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.

They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or one user might have multiple IPs.

That’s most of it. ActivityPub also makes it possible to know who is subscribed. It’s very hard to count how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed.

Telegram isn’t open source, so I don’t think you’re going to find forks of it.

I stand corrected. Telegram’s client is open source (GPL) and what OP is asking for is reasonable.

If an update to the proprietary Nvidia driver causes Linux to crash, that’s an Nvidia problem, not a Linux problem.

I’m guessing not a lot of users know about it. Their ActivityPub implementation is still only about half done.

It will be interesting to see of they promote it heavily when it’s more complete.