You don’t have to make an informed decision.

Correct, but you are still presented with a decision that adds friction to the onboarding experience. I was aware of how Mastodon works and that I could migrate and it took me a while to create an account because I didn’t want to “waste my time”. I can’t imagine a regular user being prompted to “select an instance”, decide to go with the first one they see, and registration is either closed or invite only. That’s a huge barrier to entry compared to being forced into a single login that is always open.

Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587

100000% agree with you. I would never create a bluesky account because of that. Unfortunately people aren’t as informed and most really just don’t care.

Having to make an informed decision is a barrier to entry. it took me a while because I wanted to make sure I didn’t join (and waste time/effort) something I didn’t align with.

You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat?

Any evidence to support this claim?

Because I’m aware Signal introduced a beta crypto wallet 7 years ago, which was originally only available in select countries, and has had minimal resources allocated to its continued development since. They make zero mention of crypto/payment on their website, and best of all, the crypto wallet isn’t even enabled by default.

Shit app with horrible management.

And here you expose your personal emotional trauma by lashing at at the most inconsequential “nothing”: the development of a privacy preserving crypto wallet, “feature complete” half a decade ago, and disabled by default in a privacy preserving messenger.

Signal is the best free, open source, E2EE messenger that doesn’t leak metadata and has decent UX. Best of all, its completely free to use. Simplex is a good contender, but the UX is still lacking.

Its in a very alpha state, but check out Zen browser. Based on Firefox, incredibly fast and customizable. Their github page: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop

Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head as their initial seed funding starts running low. I’ve doubled my donations for Signal because I’d like to help prove that its a working model and I encourage everyone who uses it to donate, even if it’s just once. I’d love to see Firefox head in that direction where funding goes directly to the browser’s development. If I donate to Firefox today it might go to one of their dozen or so other pet projects that are unrelated to the browser. I think their side projects are great and glad they were able to do them while they had the cash, but funding is clearly drying up and they need a whole restructure to keep the browser alive.

First I’ve heard of browseraudit, thanks for sharing!

EDIT: For comparison I got the same scores on Firefox (duh) and the following on Edge.

Score :

• Passed : 392
• Warning : 39
• Critical : 0
• Skipped : 0

Bonus! Browserbench.org speedometer 3.0 scores:

• Firefox; version 132.0.1 (64-bit)): 13.9
• Firefox nightly; version 134.0a1): 18.6
• Zen; version 1.0.1-a.17 (Firefox 132.0)): 17.6
• Edge; version 130.0.2849.68 (Official build) (64-bit): 19.8

and if you’re technically capable, self host and share with friends/family. fuck corporate greed

most logical take. people seem to forget that modern apps are tied into all kinds of features that regular users expect to just work. if you want a bare OS with minimalist apps, install lineage or Graphene and only use apps from F-Droid.

It allows Linux developers to package their app once and it will install across more than 40+ Linux distros without any additional effort: https://flathub.org/setup

when did you last try it and what clients? I’ve got friends/family accessing my library and I see them playing back stuff constantly and never seen or heard of any issues. This is across web, AndroidTV, Chromecast, Roku and mobile devices.

Check out Proton Pass. I migrated my Bitwarden to it and its not just fast compared to Bitwarden but the UX is really nice. That said, I’m still sticking with Bitwarden, but will happily move away and give my money to Proton if they ever actually stop making their client open source.

Linus Torvalds has been sold out to big tech companies like Google and Microsoft. He himself is a billionaire and no longer writes any code.

I can’t take that seriously

Proton pass client doesn’t currently use a proprietary SDK, but they also haven’t made the same blunder as Bitwarden, which they’ve since fixed, but still not a good look.

On another note - I did export/import all my passwords into proton pass and WOW the speed and UX feels so much better. I’m still sticking with Bitwarden as they’ve been really good so far, but there’s a real good alternative should they ever “turn evil”.

Same here. I have to trust/use an extension and third party desktop application (Progressive Web Apps for Firefox) to get this feature to work and not have to rely on Chrome/Edge/etc.

I can easily see less patient or understanding users dropping Firefox if they find out it doesn’t work with Progressive Web Apps.

Looks like I might be moving to Proton Pass after all! I’ll give them some time to see what they do about this, but will happily give my money to someone else and migrate friends/family as well.

Here’s what Google’s Gemini had to say about it when I asked:

🗣

What does this say?

VVu7 d0 y00 4ll th1nk 4b0ut 1337$p34k? 1 h4v3nt 8u$t3d 1t 0ut 51nc3 m1ddl3 5ch00l, 8ut m4y83 th3r3’5 p0t3nti4l #3r3.

🤖

This is written in l33tsp34k (leetspeak), an internet language that replaces letters with similar-looking numbers and symbols.

Here’s what it says when translated:

“What do you all think about leetspeak? I haven’t busted it out since middle school, but maybe there’s potential here.”

Would really suck if people said “fuck it”, did return to work but intentionally decreased productivity. Best to get laid off than quit.

Personally I think its great to have online discussions/questions available on a forum (like lemmy) that are federated and accessible anonymously as it allows answers or discussions to be created and available for others to search and find in the future. There’s a lot of content that I find where answers or discussions were posted on reddit, but I can’t access it if I’m trying to reach it anonymously (bad for privacy).

I would encourage these kind of posts as:

1. They generate content for lemmy/the fediverse.
2. The new content brings in more people, perspectives, and collaborations.
3. People seeing active discussions on this site will inspire others to post more and help bring in other perspectives.
4. Understanding the “Ten thousand” XKCD ^(xkcd.com) perspective lets you realize that people are learning all the time and that trying to get feedback in a forum is not a bad thing regardless of how many other options there are.

Posted this previously:

yes. use any of the following, in no particular order:

• ecosia.org - A non-profit certified B corp that plants trees by serving ads in your search results. Bing search underneath.
• duckduckgo.com - A privacy friendly search engine. Primarily sourced from Bing but mixes in a few other sources.
• any SearXNG instance - A self-hostable search front-end to various search engines.
• marginalia.nu - specifically ‘random’ - An independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.

Any sites out there even serving JXL? With a “global usage” of 13%, I don’t see many developers wasting their time on it unless there’s some niche use case that requires it.