Kickstarter coming sometime soon to get some more resources going for it and related projects. will be interesting to see if it’s effective.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

Dan tends to work on too many things simultaneously (which isn’t bad per say, and he thrives doing so) which means things get stalled and its a little hectic. Hoping more funds and community excitement will help spread the work out more and allow him to keep working as he does without other projects being on pause in the meantime.

Wild to me how much people here are celebrating the App ban.

I get that this is the fediverse and the goal is decentralized social media, but this ban also means thousands of small businesses will lose a primary or secondary source of income that they can’t just replacewuickly, tons of people will lose access to methods of communication that would otherwise be censored on US platforms, and it eliminates a platform that has excelled at breaking down governments placed barriers of communication between different groups (which is something the fediverse does well, too)

Celebrating this is rather selfish and anti-free speech.

Also a note that captial one has a similar service for their own credit cards. Def not as good as privacy.com, but still useful.

Perhaps social media has had an impact, but IMO the larger issue at hand is that people (especially in the US) have both less time and fewer places to have casual conversations. People are working more across the board and have more distractions and things vying for their attention (mostly because of the internet and social media, ofc), so even when a situation appears, there is a higher cost to interact, whether that’s in real life or on the internet.

Fwiw, direct messages can be a swamp of nonsense, especially for people who post a lot publicly on social media platforms. They may not be intentionally ignoring you, but you get lost in the mess. Women especially get harassed via DM on basically every platform so there is a tendency to ignore DM functionality. Platforms that are already set up to facilitate random chats like forums, discord, etc are going to be way better for having a real conversation that could even become a friendship

You can apply arkenfox or Betterfox to fennec in some somewhat hacky ways via adb (or less hacky if rooted)

Not exactly an unbiased chunk of evidence there, is it?

You can hide your number on Signal so people can’t start conversations with you unless they have your QR code/link.

But even if you leave it visible… it’s really not that big a deal. Tbh, thats a good feature if you want to use Signal as a way for people you don’t often interact with to securely communicate if they have your phone number but can’t utilize encrypted RCS. Once Apple gets on board with encryption then it’s less important for Signal to fill that gap for casual conversation.

Signal may not be perfect for all use cases. But it’s pretty easy to navigate for the normies and its got most of the features people would miss from whatsapp/facebook messenger. I got my family converted to Signal this week from facebook messenger and it went rather smoothly. Plus, Signal has been around for a long time. Even some among my less tech-literate family had already used it in the past, but everyone had heard of it so it was an easy sell.

The reality of communication nowadays is that there is no one size fits all solution. Signal, XMPP, Matrix, whatever else all have their pros/cons.

I know there’s been a lot more discussion around SimpleX lately, but tbh, the sudden noise about it + the VC backing just feels more like a coordinated advertising campaign and that makes me less interested in it.