Sudo Sodium

Good luck…

Federation is not something familiar or comfortable for an average normal person

Mastodon is just like Threads : a hype , wait for the hype to end and you’ll see that it doesn’t offer something that would impress an ordinary person who isn’t a nerd or tech savvy enough to continue using it… What I’ll say now is more like random thoughts about federation and it applies to any federated service but this post inspired my thoughts so …

The two best features I can think of for Mastodon are :

• Open source: an excellent thing but it’s probably not important for an ordinary person who still uses the products of big companies just because they are “convenient” and “common” even when his data is the cost
• federated: although it provides freedom to choose where you want to join, it creates a lot of confusion and inconvenience as well : I personally have somewhat specific interests and I usually tend to avoid public instances dedicated to “everything”, however, every time I decided to join a federated service I got the same confusion : “which instance should I choose?” , I had two accounts on Mastodon before I deleted one of them ( and I’ll probably delete the other soon ) and I felt this confusion the two times I created an account, I have two accounts on Lemmy and I felt this confusion the two times I created an account, one account on Peertube and it’s the same ( this was the most difficult of them honestly because Peertube’s filters are very bad and whenever I could find an instance that I considered good, it turns out that registration is closed, or needs approval), the same confusion also happened when I created an account on Kbin/Mbin , the same on Pixelfeed , the same when I searched for an instance of friendica and it will be the same when I think in the future to repeat the experience on any other federated service… Now, someone may come and say the famous sentence “it doesn’t matter which instance you choose, at the end you can follow anything from any instance” and honestly this sentence is a pure myth imho because … first : when you register an account in an instance, you will constantly notice the “local” section, which shows you what’s happening on the instance you are in , and it’ll form part of your experience in the instance depending on the instance itself and people on this instance , also , let’s suppose that a large number of annoying users existed on a popular instance and the moderation of this instance couldn’t solve the problem ( or didn’t do anything about this in the first place) , what might happen is that moderation of other instances might decide to defederate with this instance, and this might affect an ordinary user who has done nothing but joined the instance - and any other person who isn’t annoying but but ended up on this instance -, I know that this point is unreal currently but it might be real one day especially that some instances are known for not being tolerated with specific behaviors
• Another confusion that might happen … I’ll explain it with my own experience : when I was still using my first Mastodon account, I left the account for a few months and then decided to return … but guess what happened ? I forgot which instance I signed up for in the first place ! fortunately, after two attempts in two different instances, I found the solution : I searched on a random instance for my Account (I still remember the username ) and was able to find it … I was lucky in this, but I can’t guarantee that everyone will be as lucky as me and will find a way to remember ( this is both a good and bad point for the federation , on the one hand I forgot where I registered because the instances are similar , and on the other hand I found the instance which I registered in using another instance )

I wasn’t sure whether I’ll say something similar or I’ll keep it to myself

• So far this is the only discussion about its privacy …

• I’m currently using it as a daily driver on PC ( switched from Mercury browser ) and even though it’s still in Alpha , it works fine and I didn’t face any problems with it

The fact that all of these softwares are owned by one company is creepy , regardless of Israel

Thank you, I deleted the comment because I searched and found out

deleted by creator

Chromium based browser

On desktop I use Mercury Browser - a Firefox fork - but I’m not sure how " privacy focused " it is other than that it’s Firefox based

On Android I use Brave Browser , because it meets my needs , while it was good compared to other browsers in privacy tests , I still won’t recommend it 100% for privacy for the following reason ( unless you’re ok with changing some settings to make it more private ) :

If you care about your privacy , you can read this browser check series for both desktop and mobile ( in German , you might need a translator ) by security expert Kuketz , the rest of the browsers are linked in the same page

• If you don’t have a specific interest and/or lack the skill of finding new content that you like , RSS mostly won’t help you unless it has a " suggestion " feature , while on ActivityPub ( or any other social media ) you can find new content that might or might not suit you just by browsing
• RSS is read-only , ActivityPub is not