Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.

I think that is utlimately valid - although I think the other options are all coming with their own problems. You will then have to instead live with the interests of tech corporations (including nonprofits who ultimately need funding) and advertisers collecting your data, whose interests will ultimately not be much less malignant - or small free software projects of a sometimes quite limited scope. The latter, I think, is also a valid niché, but will leave the overall standards of the internet to corporate interests.

Considering how the CEO here acts for Brave, in my opinion, this is not simply about him being an asshole or being politically questionable. To me - everything about him screams “grifter taking advantage of people’s legitimate concerns” - and he has a material interest in your data as well. Brave always felt to me like trying to sell and market privacy instead of proving to me, in their fundamentals, that they actually have my interests in mind.

Which is why I, personally, do not really understand choosing Brave above LibreWolf (or Tor Browse, occasionally), if privacy is your #1 priority.

Oh, yes, it wasn’t a direct answer, also, I’m not the person you answered to. Ultimately, my comment was more meant as an overall addition to the discussion, building on the idea of what a solution to:

Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.

might be.

But as answers to your two points. #1 - I have no idea where they got that from, myself #2 - I think you answered that one yourself rather well, and I wanted to build on that one.

Sorry if that was confusing, my brain is also good at confusing myself at times, can’t imagine how that is for others at times.

I can somewhat understand the overall criticism, because Librewolf - as far as my understanding goes - would be in trouble without the work being done on the code upstream.

Personally, I know that this does not exist (yet), and to some people that put privacy above everything else with a more libertarian slant, this might sound like the worst option imaginable, but my “dream” way to handle it within the current economic system would be:

Have an open source, FOSS base, web-engine and all, developed with public funds similar to public broadcasting in many countries (Bonus if carried by international organisations instead of just national. Think a UN institution like UNESCO or WHO, but focused on making the internet accessible neutrally and to all). On top of that code, projects that want to put privacy above all else could still feasibly built projects like LibreWolf (an even Brave), relying somewhat comfortably on secure fundamentals.

I know, sounds like a dream, which it is at this point. But every other solution within the current economic status quo I personally thin of, I see no chance of enshittification not always encroaching and creating crises, if not outright taking over.

Ah, that makes the context more understandable. Also, good job on providing that service, I think it’s actually great to have that in the ecosystem.

I do not put any limits on the database and even my lowest capacity plans have a very generous soft-limit 100GB media storage.

Actually, wow, yeah, having a quick look at your site, that is a very good and competitive offer for these prices and services provided, all things considered.

Yeah, I personally wouldn’t choose them, but I think they do fill a niche for non-techie users, who will gladly pay a (sometimes hefty) premium for having less hassle on the setup and maintenance sides, when compared to getting A VPS or dedicated server somewhere (or setting smth up at home).

Their videos are also usually pretty informative, including e.g. the one about managing mastodon storage - since it’s topical here.

Wow, you’re right of course. I completely forgot kwrite still existed, tbh.

I genuinely do a lot of coding in Kate, the standard KDE editor. It’s enough to do a lot of things, has highlighting, and is more than enough when you just need a quick fix.

I am also still using nano when editing stuff in the terminal. Please, don’t judge me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.

I can’t be certain in this case, but the usual suspects are not being connected to as many servers (e.g. not scraping some because of robots.txt settings), delays in scraping the stats, or excluding some servers consciously because their stats are deemed a bit suspicious.

The one shown is from join-lemmy:

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Also of interest for people that love statistics (which I do):

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

EDIT: As you can see, the Fediverse being what it is, it’s basically impossible to get an exact, definitive count, so the numbers will always be a bit fuzzy. But they clearly show trends

Now, as much as I genuinely respect what their scientists have achieved with DeepSeek, especially with limited resources and import restrictions on hardware, and how it is Open Source and all - this will most likely end up enshittifying 90% of what it touches, still, just as “AI” like that does anywhere. “Good” to see those dynamics are the same on both sides of the Pacific (and Atlantic, actually), including overvalued stocks from hype.

Also, is archive.ph down? I tried .ph and .is and both timed out for me, when I tried to generate an easy-to-share link to the article.

As far as I know, it is possible on piefed since a recent update - you may want to check it out!

https://join.piefed.social/try/

If you want to get a gist of what it looks like, https://lemmy.world/u/mesamunefire maintains one for PeerTube and other Fediverse videos:

https://piefed.social/f/fediversevideos

Ha, I knew setting up my own server would attract more people!!! /s

But it is a great development, happy to see it 😀

I understand concerns about fragmentation, but recently, I have been more and more in favour of “why not both” as an approach. Basically: One de-facto “central” community, and many local communities. Main reason being, that this will help the Fediverse grow without losing it’s “soul” so to speak. Where - hopefully eventually - there will be those central communities with a reddit-like experience for the topic, and then also local ones, where smaller communities around the topic, without the traps of large, “mainstream” communites, can form.

Sadly, as I’m not from the US, it would not really help me (in fact, make it harder). Funnily enough, Iceland was actually occupied by the US during World War II - which they did pre-emptively, worrying the Nazis may pull off another stunt like with Norway and endanger shipping from there if they don’t.

God damn, if I had the money, I’d escape to Iceland. Has been a dream for a long time now, but it just gets more and more desirable.

I see you talk about EU regulations in your instance. Is it hosted in the EU? If that’s the case, I’d love to join it! :D

Yupp, hosted in Finland over a German provider (Hetzner)

By now: Yeah, there are some nice creators on PeerTube. Overall, it feels a bit more like old YouTube, many more people just creating because they want to, instead of chasing fame, as well as bizarre and weird little videos here and there. One advantage of it: It has much better native embedding into Lemmy (at least on newer versions)!

Much like in other fedi-places, it’s work to curate your own feed instead of having algorithms feed you. I have ADHD, so usually, I have some video or something running on my second screen while working on other stuff, and whenever my attention is spent, I switch to there and scour the recent or trending feed (or new vids from subscribers) for something interesting to share and watch.

For anyone interested - I am always happy to plug [email protected] - we recently hit 200 subscribers and have been steadily growing. If you are looking for an instance to join, I am still tinkering with it, but mine is open to new applications for as long as the server resources allow.

I’m currently busy setting up my own Lemmy instance and PeerTube instance. Before the Fediverse, YT and Reddit were basically the only things I used, I was never a big fan of twitter-like social media. So those slot in nicely into those itches to scratch. (although there are still some creators I follow on YT, I have been watching it a lot less after getting serious with PeerTube)