Using federated forum solutions would at least partly solve the chiken/egg problem. Forum software like NodeBB and reddit/HN-type variants like Lemmy, opens the possibility of having a topic based communiy, while still being open for interactions from the entirety of the Fediverse.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
It also gives you something hacker news mostly lacks (besides the occasional Ask HN) and that is discussing topics organically vs. just discussing what people elsewhere have said.
I think this is also an important distinction older type of forum software have before the newer "link share" type.
I recently discovered NodeBB while looking for Discourse alternatives, and it turns out they just released support for federation (ActivityPub)!
What does federation mean in this context? If you set up a NodeBB forum, you can interact with other thread based and federated websites, like Lemmy ... or just another NodeBB forum.
A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives.
This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
When I worked in an office with my linux machine, Libre office worked for me. No issues really. I didn't do anything super complex, but it was nice to be able to open those file formats.
Though to be fair, I didn't really have a choice in the matter. its was that or the web version of office.
Yeah. I'd go further: Office is a clear exception to the rule that the alternatives tend to be better than the complacent market leader with the massive lockin. Using LibreOffice (or cut down stuff like Pages/Numbers or Google Docs) gets me missing Office features pdq even when I don't need the compatibility, despite me not particularly loving Office's last couple of decades of interface changes, having limited interest in "cloud" and "AI" features, not exactly being a power user of Excel and even having fond memories of other systems' features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. And the compatibility issue is obviously massive
This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago.
It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
Heh! Maybe 14-15 years ago I got my small employer to start using OpenOffice. They couldn’t afford Office licenses for everyone, but it was super handy to give everyone a word processor.
One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs that a customer was able to open and view correctly. After much back and forth, it turned out they were also using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and started sending them OOo’s own native docs. Problem solved!
I know that’s far from the common case, but it made me so happy at the time.
> Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
I feel exactly the same way about that. And I often use it for stuff I don't need to collaborate on. But for paid jobs with stuff I need to round-trip with people who I know are using Microsoft products, I just use the Microsoft products myself.
It's cheap insurance against giving the people who are paying me to collaborate with them a bad experience.
I have used OnlyOffice for my collaborative writing needs the last year, and it has been great. They offer a free hosted version, everything is open source and it can be self-hosted.
I can invite people in with SSO so they do not need to make yet another account.
I am not a power user by any means. In fact I use Word and Excel maybe no more than 5 times a year for both professional and personal use. Yet I quickly run into things that are not well supported in other word processor/spreadsheet applications and need to go back to Office.
GNOME? It is super simple. I have used Fedora/GNOME on my elderly family members laptops for many years now, and they just get it. Even the ones who came from Windows 10. The hours I spend on support has dropped significantly. Windows is such a hassel, and its desktop design philosophy is just not that great for casual users.
IMHO, GNOME is not simple, it's dumbed down. They've obviously tried to copy Apple where it suited them, but missed on a whole bunch of important details, like a unified menu system, a powerful terminal emulator, desktop icons (omg), while badly aping all of the worst parts - from requiring 4 clicks to shutdown/reboot (where macOS requires 2), thru a mostly useless top bar that steals the real estate from browser tabs (Fitt's law), to asking SDL to link against libadwaita to draw window decorations. And this is the worst part, they not only do not want to accommodate their users, but also ignore the developers - those who wish to integrate with and therefore empower the free desktop ecosystem.
Apple can get away with all of that because they're a trillion dollar company, but unlike Apple, the power of the open source community doesn't stem from an unimaginable pile of cash, but from interoperability and cooperation.
I tried to use GNOME for about 8 months but there was just too many WTF moments (one caused by Ubuntu's own dock extension). There's plenty to love about GNOME but missing features, bugs, and design/usability issues makes it feel like beta quality software.
A few months ago, someone wrote a blog post[1] cataloguing many of these issues. One thing not mentioned was the lack of a caps/num lock on-screen indicator, this is a feature that is present in GNOME 2, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, KDE, and Windows 7/8/10/11 out of the box and toggleable in their settings window. The only way to gain this functionality in GNOME is through a third-party extension. Many laptops continue to be manufactured without a caps/num lock indicator on their keyboard, it's insane this isn't a supported feature in GNOME.
I don't get the feeling that GNOME team has ever implemented accessibility research in their design choices. For those with disabilities, GNOME is unnecessarily difficult to use [2][3].
So far, my experience with people above 60 is that they quickly understand how to find and navigate between the apps they use every day. The ones coming from Windows adapt suprisingly fast, and are very pleased that the fullscreen popups and forced updates are gone. Shortly before I moved them over to Fedora, they started developing a fear of using the computer because they never knew when it would 'lock them out' because the screen was filled with a fullscreen Office365 ad that had no obvious exit button.
ActivityPub is today what Paul thought he saw in Twitter in 2009. Except AP it is not owned by a private company, which in hindsight, seems like a critical factor if a protocol should be able to survive and thrive for decades.
I would really like to see AP get some more implementations. Mastodon dominates most of the AP usage on the web as far as I know, so the specific Mastodon quirks on top of the AP spec are sort of de facto standard now. It's not quite like a private company, but it does shoehorn AP into being just what Mastodon does, rather than a more generic publishing protocol.
or maybe we need more generic clients. Something that can consume mastodon et. al. posts! Would be neat to have Lemmy + Mastodon + personal blog posts etc mixing together into a single feed, RSS style.
Mastodons share of the AP network fell to ~70% the last few days alone, due to a huge influx of users to Pixelfed (fleeing from Instagram). I myself run my own GoToSocial server at home, so I am doing my part to increase the diversity of AP implementations :)
I have also been thinking in the lines of a generic "all-in-one" client. The only reason this is not common yet, is old habits from decades of captivity in silos. I believe we will see such clients developed in the next few years.
I have had Bonfire [0] on my check-later list for a while, they seem to aim for a more generic use of the AP protocol. They also offer their services [1] to make custom implementations on top of their toolkit. Seems promising!
Was going to say the same thing. I guess some people are just firm in their beliefs. It's only data if it supports what you were otherwise going to say, or something like that.
I use WireGuard to access all in-home stuff as well, but there is one missing feature and one bug with the official WireGuard app for android that is inconvenient:
- Missing feature; do not connect when on certain SSIDs.
- Bug: When the WG connection is active and I put my phone in Flightmode (which I do every night), it drains the battery from full to almost empty during the night.
Many commenters argue that free speech is being infringed upon, but isn't this really about protecting user data and preventing an adversarial and autocratic foreign power from influencing U.S. citizens? Sure, it is hypocritical to not protect the same user from U.S. companies harvesting their data, but you get my point.
Shutting down TikTok in the U.S. doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions. There are countless other ways to share and publish thoughts freely.
None of these platforms, like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, are public squares where citizens have any of these rights. They are privately owned and regulated by unending terms of service agreements, with users often moderated or banned for minor infractions by company algorithms. Free speech has never truly existed in these spaces, nor is it likely to ever do so.
This already works well for Mastodon and Pixelfed; I follow accounts on mastodon.art from my Pixelfed account.
The reach of folks at the art focused Mastodon instance is not limited to their community. The same is possible for reddit and forum like communities!
Look at it like this; every forum becomes a potential sub-forum in the global network.
reply