What type of products? There is !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net, and if you are looking for consumer electronics there is !hardware@hardware.watch
This is a controversial issue.
Some people don't care about having an unique identity and actually favor creating multiple accounts on each service, to present themselves with different avatars depending on who they are interacting with. They are not "attached" to their identities and see this an opportunity to stay pseudonymous online and protect their "real" identity.
Some people think that the instance you join should be also somewhat indicative of your tribe and that they should be able to filter out who they talk about by checking the domain. This view is especially favored by the Mastodon crowd.
And then some other people (I think I would include myself) would like to be able to not just "use" a single identity, but to have portable identity in the Fediverse as a way to ensure that we can remain sovereign over our online presence. I would personally love for Communick customers to be able to use their personal domain, because that would mean that if even if I closed down things tomorrow, they would be able to migrate easily and without depending on me.
There are multiple communities?! So what?? "Oh my God, I don't know which one to write!" So what?
This is the type of nerd-sniping "problem" that should be way low in the priority queue for developers. In practice, people can figure this out and navigate the system. Go for the most active one and it will naturally become the canonical one. The people on the other, smaller, communities will find out about the main hub and subscribe to it as well.
It seems like people have grown so used to centralized systems and walled gardens that they lost the capacity to exercise their independence. Decentralized systems are capable of self-organization, and we should be glad we have the autonomy to choose and to move freely.
So if your comment hasn’t been sent out out to other instances, they don’t have it.
What's stopping malicious actors to create an account on the same instance as you and follow you (or your RSS feed) exclusively to pull your data?
Remember "information wants to be free"? That adage works both ways. If people want (or need) real privacy, they need to be equipped with tools that actually guarantee that their communication is only accessible to those intended to. The "ActivityPub" Fediverse is not it. They will be better off by using private Matrix (or XMPP rooms) with actual end-to-end encryption.
public timelines, enable whitelist federation and require authorized fetch for federating
And all of that can be circumvented by pulling the data via the RSS feeds or plain old scraping.
Authorized fetch and domain blocks may be effective to stop drive-by trolls, but do nothing to stop anyone with a minimal amount of resources and interest in scraping data from a social network.
The reality is simple: all information that you put on the web should be considered as publicly available. Those that want or need absolute privacy should not use information in the fediverse and resort only to provably secure communication protocols.
You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We'll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.
Could you please take a look at https://fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?
That's not what I mean.
I mean that Ramus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) by his own account was never worried about big architectural thinking or consistent design, and it shows. PHP3 is just a pile of functionality thrown together, and it wasn't until PHP 4 or 5 (depending on who you ask) that things started to get cleaned up.
Some counterpoints:
I like the idea of a system where users get a share of the revenue from the ad networks, which then can be used to support other content creators or businesses online. I think that if most of the web worked like this, we wouldn't have people being treated as eyeballs and we would still have the power to vote with our wallets to choose who is actually worth of our attention. Is there any other browser or company doing anything like that?
People keep talking about Firefox as if it's a paragon of virtue, but casually forget that they are only alive because they are completely dependent on Google to survive and are nothing more than "controlled opposition" nowadays. They also have done a ton user-hostile shit like sponsored links in the frontpage and completely crippled pocket, and let's not forget that current Mozilla execs are raking in millions while laying off people and disbanding key projects.
The crypto part keeps called a scam, but their system has been working perfectly fine and it has always been liquid enough for me at the exchanges. Is their BAT token needed? Certainly not, and I would be fine if the 3-8 euros worth of BAT I receive every month (depending on my mobile usage and on their success as an network) were sent to me directly via SEPA. But can anyone realistically say that there is any efficient worldwide way to distribute payouts? For every dollar you sent to someone via Patreon (or Ko-Fi, or any alternative), how much do they get to keep? With the Brave creators program, all of the $15/month that I send to the different people get to them.
All in all, I will stop using Brave in a heartbeat if there is anyone else providing any alternative with a slight chance to fight Surveillance Capitalism. None of the Chromium or Mozilla forks are doing that.
If not, why?
How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe's suite?
If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?
No, one does not follow from the other, especially for open source projects. Quite the opposite: for the project to grow, it will need to attract more people. To attract more people, they will need to dial down their extremist positions. If they don't they will end up having their project forked.
Also,
being exposed to their beliefs
Great. Let more people be exposed to their beliefs so that they can learn how stupid they are.
I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the "Mah privacy" crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.