I’d argue the phone apps are instant messaging and I’m a little surprised none of the previously-dominant PC-based IM apps made the transition successfully. Most of the ones currently popular do have web or native PC options though.

I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction. Ideally, we’ll be able to offer a more compelling pitch than just “not corporate”.

I was nearly 20 years younger than I am now and was definitely ignorant of free, public XMPP service providers, which is kind of the point. If someone tech-savvy enough to be running Linux on a laptop in 2004 and liked the idea of XMPP tried and failed to get started with it, what hope was there of attracting a mainstream audience? You could argue I didn’t try hard enough, and you’d be right in a tautological sense. I did later use third-party XMPP clients for Google Chat.

I don’t expect a Pony from Meta. Meta is a face-eating leopard and I expect it to try to eat my face. If blocking their users from seeing the pictures of birds I share on Mastodon prevents that, please tell me how it does. This isn’t a rhetorical question; I self-host and can block, or not block whatever I want.

Then somehow “broke” in a way that messages from GTalk were coming through, but anything coming from Jabber wasn’t arriving.

Google intentionally turned off XMPP federation in its chat product.

I’d attribute it to malice, but looking at how badly Google has repeatedly mismanaged its chat offerings I’m going with Hanlon’s razor here. They did claim spam was an issue as well.

It does not. I set mine up more than a year ago and followed these instructions.

People already familiar with Ruby on Rails will not find any surprises there; Mastodon’s hosting requirements are typical of a Rails app.

I’ve done it and it’s not a whole lot harder than that. The additional steps are:

• Install dependencies - exact commands are provided in the instructions for Debian-based systems
• Create a more complex web server configuration file - for which a template is provided
• Set up systemd services to start it at boot - templates are provided

It is harder than managed hosting where you might only need to create a database user in a web control panel and upload files for PHPBB, but there’s managed hosting available for Mastodon.

is Metastasis is allowed in the fediverse it will consume the fediverse

How?

I’ve seen the article about Google and XMPP, but I don’t agree with its analysis. It wasn’t easy to find service providers offering XMPP accounts to the public in 2004. I do not believe that Google embraced, extended, and extinguished a thriving ecosystem; there never was a thriving XMPP ecosystem.

There is a thriving ecosystem for federated microblogging, and federated discussions. While I’m sure Meta would like us to join their service, I’m not sure how allowing their users to interact with us will have that effect, nor how blocking that communication protects against it.

We’re far from court cases. What we have right now is politicians asking the Department of Justice to investigate. I suspect that’s more likely to go nowhere than it is to go to court.

If it did go to court, either side of the smartphone/messenger equation could be argued as anticompetitive use of market power, or both; they could claim that Apple used its market power in smartphones to popularize its messenger service, which it then used to increase its market share in smartphones.

The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:

a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry

It further explains that “market power” means:

the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors

Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.

Yes it does.

I don’t think every list of disposable email providers that incorrectly includes ProtonMail deserves a post to !technology@lemmy.world. Lists that are widely used deserve that kind of attention, but this has two stars on Github.

As BombOmOm points out, this list includes free email providers and the inclusion of ProtonMail is correct.

mosseri@threads.net is the head of Instagram and Threads and has 627k followers on Threads, so not exactly low-profile. I have my concerns about Meta’s intent here, but I do hope it goes well.

I’m surprised @zuck@threads.net isn’t one of those select few accounts.

It’s big, and that’s absolutely a threat from an embrace/extend/extinguish perspective. A big node on a decentralized network is still part of a decentralized network unless they start breaking the decentralization.

If true, I would expect this link to work, but it’s 404 at the time of this comment:

https://mastodon.social/@zuck@threads.net

The Threads software will still be centralized, but the network won’t be. It’s a bit like saying outlook.com email is centralized.

If it federates with ActivityPub, it won’t be.

For larger models, replaceable batteries would improve this situation a lot. Of course that would hurt the manufacturers’ planned obsolescence strategy.

my headphone wires break all the time due to heavy use

Some wired headphones have a detachable cable. Large ones use a 3.5mm jack on both ends, but there are standards for small ones.

WhatsApp already had a very large userbase when in started charging, and IIRC only charged after the first year of use to better hook people. Given its dominance in certain markets (Europe comes to mind), WhatsApp could probably succeed with a paid model even today, but something with a tiny userbase isn’t going to grow that way.

Apple is very good at spinning things like this and anti-repair measures that benefit their bottom line as being in the interests of users. They’re so good at it they don’t even have to lie; using hardware IDs as part of their anti-spam strategy probably works, and locking down repair probably does reduce device theft.

That’s not the world I want to live in though.