It doesn't have to be this way. There are instances focused only on basketball, soccer, American Football, Tennis...
Do you know that story about the pottery teacher that made an experiment by separating students into two groups, one was going to be graded by how many pieces they made (quantity), the other by their best piece (quality), and that in the end the group that worried about quantity ended up producing better work than the ones focused on quality?
It's the same thing with the internet. You are familiar with Sturgeon's Law, right? Instead of looking at the 90% of crap (quality), we should find always to churn out as much content as possible so that the non-crap 10% can be of a reasonable number.
I honestly do not care about the dimwits on YouTube, but it pains me that I can not convince someone like @geerlingguy@mastodon.social to leave YouTube to post his content on an open alternative, because that would be the same as asking to stop having the resources to keep doing the amazing work that he does.
sub.rehab is definitely the first, but it has not been active for quite a while, is not focused on fediverse groups (also list Discord as alternatives) and I reckon that our database is already larger than theirs.
I agree on the importance of content, but I do not worry about "only one shot of making a good impression". People are willing to turn a blind eye for the things they want to work out - in Brazil orkut (remember that?) was so successful that the "server error" due to overload page a meme in itself. Twitter's "Fail Whale" as well.
This is why the idea is to focus on one single subreddit, and why we need the support from their moderators. If we successfully turn this into a mission for the community, then all of the missteps can be forgiven and used as lessons of what not to do in in the next one.
it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy.
Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.
That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the "login with reddit" functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).
It’s nice and cosy and rather friendly here
And absolutely irrelevant in terms of impact. We have at best a few hundred MAU on a good month. Facebook/Google/TikTok are controlling billions of people.
If we truly believe in the superiority of the Fediverse and that it is possible to have an alternative social media for everyone, we need to go and fight Big Tech. Defederating on the grounds of "I like it the way it is" is coward, selfish and completely lacking ambition.
Gitlab is open source, but some features are only available in their Enterprise Edition. As the name suggests, unless you are looking for an alternative for a large company, the open source "Community" Edition is enough for all your needs.
How old are these disks? If wouldn't trust anything of value to an HDD (better to save them on a bunch of good quality DVDs or BluRay disks than relying on such old disks.
1998?! Try 2008.
having multiple accounts has been accepted as the “correct” way of interacting with fediverse?
No. You are right that there should be a better separation between your identity and the servers that you use to connect/interact with the fediverse. It just so happens that the existing solutions have been "good enough" for the majority of people, and there are many other issues (content discovery, reputation, server scalability...) that seem to be more pressing than that.
However, there are some other projects which are on the way to make it possible for people to use one server but have their identity separate. Mitra uses Ethereum wallets as a way to login to the server, while Takahe keeps separate domains for the server and the user's actor ids, which would let you, e.g, sign up with your own id to any server. This would essentially turn ActivityPub servers into a commodified provider, and people could migrate between servers transparently.
And... that if "activitypub just works" , so does XMPP.
And... XMPP servers offer better performance and taking less resources than any of the leading AP projects.
And... XMPP already has E2EE.