@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@Naich @ardi60 Totally agree.

I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.

It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.

It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.

Because it doesn’t use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.

Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it’s default desktop environment with Ubuntu.

And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!

That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.

It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.

There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.

And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.

But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.

I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.

But.

Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.

#Linux #Windows #PC

@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.

So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).

You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.

@mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.

The development time and cost is an overhead. That’s divided between the number of units you produce.

If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.

But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it’s just 10 cents per unit.

Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.

I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.

It really should be the other way around.

@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.

Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.

In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.

Especially if they’re reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.

Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?

@thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)

But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.

What’s so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.

And there’s *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I’m not interested in.

They’re not there because I’m interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app’s owners.

Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they’ll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you’re interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.

And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there’s always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.

@deadsuperhero @nutomic I think the concept of a TikTok on the Fediverse is solid. And if short form videos help to get more people on the Fedi, and engaging with the Fedi, that’s a good thing in my book.

@AMillionNames @nutomic In which case the ibis, a species of bird that’s also known as the bin chicken, might be a fitting name for the platform?

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2018/apr/09/bin-chickens-grotesque-glory-urban-ibis-in-pictures

@nutomic That last question was me trying to get my head around how this works.

Will each page have a username, in the same way each Lemmy group has a username, which can be followed from Mastodon?

If you follow that username from Mastodon, will you see a series of posts? If so, will they contain page edits or something else?

What happens if you tag that account in a post from Mastodon? Or reply to one of those posts?

@nutomic Looks like an interesting project!

Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the front end?

And will you be able to follow Ibis pages (or perhaps edit them?) from Mastodon? Or potentially even Lemmy?

@tokenwizard @asklemmy I’m thinking of eventually doing three websites.

One that’s a '90s pastiche (that one), a minimalist personal website that takes some elements of the '90s web but tones them down a notch, and a blog.

@JimmyBigSausage I’m not sure if you’re replying to the right comment here?

@HobbitFoot I’m not yet, but if there’s a good one then I’d be happy to add it…

@neidu2 Done :)

@cosmicrookie @ardi60 “Why does this bloody thing keep asking ‘a/s/l’ and ‘Do you want a NSFW roleplay?’ even when I tell it no?!?!”

@zenkat @technology Totally agree.

But.

It’s a surefire way to get yourself in that mess in rapid time, when you otherwise wouldn’t.

@ada @haui_lemmy This is where it’s a bad thing that Tumblr hasn’t federated with the Fedi yet.

Having the “original” Fedi apps (including Mastodon) plus Tumblr would better balance the size of Threads.