In my opinion, yes, the why does in fact matter. This blog post i’ve linked in other comments in this thread is by one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec. If you care enough to comment about it i recommend reading her analysis of what AT Proto gets right and wrong in comparison with ActivityPub.

but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel

you don’t have to wonder why if you take the time to read about why; see the links in my other comments in this thread if you’re curious.

Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?

There aren’t “instances” in the ActivityPub sense, where “instance” means single point of failure you’re married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.

See https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture and https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ for details.

There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I’m not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I’m also not sure if you can actually create a did:plc using a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to use did:web to create a new identity without using their AppView currently.

They mention ActivityPub in a few places, such as this blog post.

But I’d recommend https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ instead, which is the best discussion I’ve seen so far of the pros and cons of each of the two approaches.

have you read about why they didn’t?

Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.

• Audrey Tang confirms https://bsky.app/profile/audreyt.org/post/3lfn56wzdf22n
• Bill S. Preston Esq confirms https://bsky.app/profile/alexwinter.com/post/3lfmzjpszsc25
• Vox Media confirms https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342799/free-our-feeds-social-media-ecosystem-at-protocol-bluesky

username checks out

Having some distrust in Wikipedia is healthy; you certainly shouldn’t take it as the final word about facts you’re depending on the accuracy of. But, it is very often a good starting point for learning about a new subject.

Spending a minute or two reading that “source code” article (or another version of it which is likely available in your first language) would give you a much better understanding of the concept of source code (which is a prerequisite for understanding what “closed source” means) than any of the answers in this thread so far.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.

some of the privacy messengers here (like Briar) have blogging/forum features

many people incorrectly assume briar aims to provide some sort of anonymity, because it uses tor onion services and is a self-described “secure messenger”. however, that is not the case:

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#does-briar-provide-anonymity (answer: no)

tldr: briar contacts, even when only actually using onions, exchange their bluetoooth MAC addresses and their most recent IPv6 link-local address and last five IPv4 addresses briar has seen bound to their wlan interfaces, just in case you’re ever physically near a contact and want to automatically connect to them locally.

This is an excerpt of OP’s post in question:

Last android piece of garbage I buy. Is there even a single good reason it restricts .local, as is commonly used for local domains in LAN DNS to some hellish nonsense no one’s ever used called multicast DNS?

Is .local actually “commonly used for local domains in LAN DNS” or did you just see .local somewhere else (probably using mDNS) and decide to cargo cult it? I’ve never seen someone use it outside the context of zero-configuration networking.

fyi, besides Android, most Linux distros also ship with mDNS enabled by default, as do all Apple operating systems since the feature was first introduced in an update to Mac OS 9 in 2001. It’s mostly just Windows that doesn’t.

And before someone says “uhmm but m-muh RFC says so” - no. That RFC only suggests that some people MAY implement it as such, which yeah, sucks, because the RFC if it did it’s job right should forbid it altogether […]

Which RFC says that? I just checked, and RFC6762 (Multicast DNS) says:

This document specifies that the DNS top-level domain “.local.” is a special domain with special semantics, namely that any fully qualified name ending in “.local.” is link-local, and names within this domain are meaningful only on the link where they originate. This is analogous to IPv4 addresses in the 169.254/16 prefix or IPv6 addresses in the FE80::/10 prefix, which are link-local and meaningful only on the link where they originate.

Any DNS query for a name ending with “.local.” MUST be sent to the mDNS IPv4 link-local multicast address 224.0.0.251 (or its IPv6 equivalent FF02::FB).

Also, as per (the immediately prior) RFC6761 (“Special-Use Domain Names”), RFC6762 explicitly adds .local to the IANA registry of special-use domain names.

HTH!

CuriousMarc:

Videos documenting restorations of exceptional vintage electronics and early computers, space hardware and the odd mechanical calculator or Teletype. It often showcases my Hewlett-Packard test equipment collection and, from time to time, my R2-D2 robot build. Things rarely work when I start, but almost always do when I end. A nerdy place for your inner engineer, to celebrate engineering exploits of our predecessors, and learn a lot from it.

the title is referring to their “smart” speaker, but the post includes news about several other things which are (imo) much more interesting.

The campaign hasn’t made any progress since 2011 when Wolfram Alpha added support for it, a year after Google did. Google’s calculator still does support it, though, so you can write queries like like “1Zbit/s * 1 year in hellabytes” (3.9 hellabytes), or “mass of the earth in hellagrams” (5.9 hellagrams).

I asked this question the other day if I could somehow input my handwritten notes into programs like Trilium (or logseq whatever) and memos. OCR/HCR seems to far behind still so I am unsure.

I just left this comment on your post.

Via the pine64 blog update about their e-ink tablet TIL about inkput (using OnlineHTR) which appears to be a step in the right direction.

there is no provider on the planet that can freeze state of RAM in a way that would be useful for this

You are very mistaken, this is a well-supported feature in most modern virtualization environments.

Here are XenServer docs for it. And here is VMWare’s “high-frequency” snapshots page.

Sometimes, law enforcement authorities only need to contact cloud provider A when they have a warrant for (or, perhaps, no warrant but a mere request for) data about some user C who is indirectly using A via some cloud-hosted online service B.

A(mazon) will dutifully deliver to the authorities snapshots of all of B’s VMs, and then it is up to them if they limit themselves to looking for data about C… while the staff of company B can honestly say they have not received any requests from law enforcement. (sorry my best source on this at the moment is sadly trust me bro; I’ve heard from an AWS employee that the above scenario really actually does happen.)