ATProto is almost there with the only missing piece being the AppView. I'm not sure if BlueSky is hesitant about releasing theirs as open source, but I don't think there are any barriers to a third party implementing one.
Apple does have an email service, but I think "Apple Mail" is the name is the client, not the service.
This looks like it's conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn't provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
Yes. I think it's good not to form opinions about subjects you don't know much about.
When it comes to voting in an election, it's possible to make good decisions about candidates without forming opinions about every policy issue. That's kind of the point of representative democracy.
That's enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.
It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.
It's almost certainly the number of candidates. On the other hand, top three out of a much smaller number doesn't present voters with a lot of choice.
I don't think many people have read RFC 5322 (I haven't), but most non-technical people I know understand these things about email:
- There are different service providers, and people can email each other no matter which provider they use
- There are different email apps
- Some apps are tied to specific service providers and others are not
I do lament the overall level of tech literacy.
The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn't require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.
That's a bit of a circular reference: "it got popular because it got popular". The question remains: why did BlueSky reach that threshold and Mastodon did not?
I'm inclined to agree that's a problem. Everyone's first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.
You can't middle-click them because they aren't links. That is to say, they are not a
elements but div
elements with an added click event handler that navigates to another page. There's a case to be made for doing things like that on a website that's trying to behave like a native application, but Ebay fundamentally behaves like a website and building its navigation this way is bad design.
Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it's headed.