Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.

This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.

Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?

#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse

Why are open source projects too rigid and stuck in dogmatic position ?

take for example mastodon, its CEO recently posted a toot asking who has already considered deleting facebook / threads after the recent controversies, but on the other hand ignores that his stubbornness about certain points like not adding quotes just doesn't make the project appealing for ordinary people, this feature has been the most request since twitter exodus two years ago. and at every surge of new users mastodon struggles to keep them using the platform, why do these projects struggle to acknowledge what people want the most and deliver on it.

another example is LibreOffice, I was trying to get acclimated to this new office suite and was happy to find that I can theme it to my liking to ease up my transition. but it wasn't long before I found out how tiny dogmatic decision really pushes to give up on it. I found that LO doesn't auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in "proper English". line breaks don't qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.

For people coming from proprietary software that among many short comings still strive to offer the best features and smoothest user experience, it is hard to try and stick to open source projects and even contribute back.

Should big OSS project shift to more democratic structures, where decisions are made based on consensus? or do you think the actual models are fine, and I am an entitled user ??

A video I highly recommend you all to watch about the death of the open internet. this was posted on a peertube instance. I hope this won't be taken down just because it is a video format

This the developers version so it probably comes with a bunch of bugs. test it and report back to the devs.

Hi

I am looking for projects of links agregators or micro blogs, that don't rely on centralized servers and especially no mods. I've had it with mod's power trips. and how personal biases affect heavy moderation.

I want to try something with no governance, maybe p2p, and with better transparency than lemmy.

TLDR: I uploaded a video to youtube but youtube's trained AI script kept avoiding picking a thumbnail I emebeded in the video no matter all tricks and changes I made to it. prompting me to deleted the video instead of sharing my phone number for the privilege of uploading a custom thumbnail.

First time trying to upload anything to youtube I knew that my effort will be wasted but I went with it none-the-less. I had spent two days recording a tutorial and hopping for a small view count, now I must say that I have dealt with google services in the past and my disappointment with them was unwatchable so I kinda had a previous taste of that.

I uploaded the video and worked on the thumbnail to only find out that I can't add the thumbnail without adding my phone number to the account. I was hesitant considering I care about my privacy but also wasn't sure if it was worth it, considering I didn't have high hopes for the channel. so I was given the choice of three thumbnails, one screenshot at the beginning one at the middle and the last one at the end of the video.

so I thought why no take advantage of that and re-encode the video with the thumbnail at the start and have youtube's script pick that. guest what ? I re-rendered the video six times changing the placement and length of display of the thumbnail at the beginning of the video. trying to animate the elements of the thumbnail and all sorts of tricks and nothing worked, youtube kept changing the time at which they picked the thumbnail and kept moving it further to the middle of the video all of this just so you can never post a video thumbnail without sharing your phone number.

I knew they were vicious but not to the point of allocating resources and training AI on these sorts of shenanigans. I miss those times when we had workarounds for every thing.

give your estimation in percentages !

Are you guys fine with these new shenanigans from Github. I found a bug and wanted to check what has been the development on that, only to find out most of the discussion was hidden by github and requesting me to sign-in to view it.

It threw me straight back to when Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure, now microsoft is exploiting free work from the community to train its AI, and building walls around its product, are open source contributors fine with that ?

Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through