“users will be frustated and leave” exactly the same thing can happen to an instance that adds an instance (or wildcard domain) block. I’d be very surprised if no instance has ever rolled back a block.

Users don’t need to worry about instance blocks on ActivityPub, any more than they have to worry about DNS RBLs for email.

if gmail could just randomly decide to stop receiving emails from outlook addresses and there’s nothing any user can do about it

This is the case right now.

There’s good reasons GMail doesn’t do that, but there’s absolutely nothing technical preventing from doing that, and I can’t think of anything that legally prevents them from doing that.

Using another ActivityPub-based interface is a LOT to ask for many users. They want a simple to pronounce name, they can stick in their browser’s universal bar and be on a sign-up page in less than 3 clicks without making any more choices.

😞

There have been some complaints about Mastodon for years; both specific (“quote tweets”) and vague (get rid of shitty, often bigoted replies for profiles with a lot of followers or with a marginalized identity).

Mastodon largely hasn’t implemented them. Maybe Bluesky has. (I don’t have a BS account.)

Chameleon Linux: Changing Stripes Edition

A Distribution Named SUE

The other suggestions are probably better, but you can technically self-host Wire (from Wire Gmbh) but I’ve never done it successfully.

Late to the party. Idris had a bash backend (i.e. you could compile Idris to bash), and it’s already bit rotted with new Idris versions.

I hope the language is at least as cool as Idris.

I primarily operate in strict standard compliance mode where I write against the shell specifications in the lastest Single Unix Specification and do not use a she-bang line since including one results in unspecified, implementation-defined behavior. Generally people seem to find this weird and annoying.

Sometimes I embrace using bash as a scripting language, and use one of the env-based she-bangs. In that case, I go whole-hog on bashisns. While I use zsh as my interactive shell, even I’m not mad enough to try to use it for scripts that need to run in more than one context (like other personal accounts/machines, even).

In ALL cases, use shellcheck and at least understand the diagnostics reported, even if you opt not to fix them. (I generally modify the script until I get a clean shellcheck run, but that can be quite involved… lists of files are pretty hard to deal with safely, actually.)