Matt

It’s on Codeberg, here’s the link: https://codeberg.org/Bazsalanszky/Infinity-For-Lemmy/releases

It’s specifically on the IzzyOnDroid repo, instructions here:

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/

I tried Sync for a little bit, but I didn’t really vibe with it to be honest, Infinity is still by far my favourite phone client.

Really, you should just download it anyway and try it, you’ll find out quickly if it’s for you or not.

Technically the idea is that if Chrome has barely any market share (will never happen, but let’s pretend), they cannot implement this as it will anger and lock too many users out of day to day life.

However…

With Google Search and YouTube being by far the most 2 popular websites in the world, I think they still could. The vast majority of people would never give those up and if they’re told to use another program to access them, they absolutely will, meaning in an ideal world with a browser competition, they can easily destroy it immediately.

Note that setting up a Revolt instance means it will literally only be you that you can talk to, and others that sign up on your instance.

Revolt is not federated (and most likely never will be). You might be aware of this though, but it isn’t like Lemmy or Mastodon at all.

Unique usernames cause issues with having to come up with wildly “creative” names to be able to be called the same thing everywhere if the platforms get big enough, or start adding loads of numbers to everything. Unique usernames also create prestigious names, which people most certainly care about, especially for branding or clout.

The discriminator system was clever, as it let people just pick names that they felt resonated with them better, while also keeping everyone equal - you didn’t have a prestigious name like “adam”, and everyone else who just wanted to go by adam on the internet had to add extras to it. Instead, everyone was given the extra numbers so nobody was special.

Now obviously, the username in itself is not that special, and nobody really goes by their username, but a lot of people do assign some value to their online identities and handles, and Discord just sidestepped that by putting everyone on the same level.

There were issues with the username system, but I don’t think the 4 numbers were it. You absolutely do memorise your 4 numbers if you’re adding people constantly for some reason, and if you’re not, it’s not exactly a major inconvenience.

From my experience, people who are happy with the new system already go by somewhat unique names, so this makes it easier for them.

There’s no way I’ll actually use the platform, but I personally have no qualms with federating with it on my instances so I can communicate with friends who may be using it that haven’t made the jump to the current fediverse.

Whether we like it or not, this is most likely the best chance for regular people to be introduced to the Fediverse and hopefully gain a good understanding of it, providing that Meta doesn’t hide it from people too much or make it complicated enough that people are “encouraged” to use their platform instead.

I’m using Startpage and it’s been mostly fine. The biggest issue is that the “nested” results that come from Google (e.g. a forum and related posts) don’t show in Startpage, it will only show the main result.

I really wanted to use something like SearXNG, but I get basically zero results whenever I use an instance, no idea if I’m missing something in how they work.

They’re just different softwares that communicate over ActivityPub. They’re both link aggregators, so they’ll be similar in functionality.

For an easy comparison using established names: One is Reddit, one is Digg, but they can communicate with each other and show each other the same content, and you can just pick which one you want to use.

The Fediverse allows people to just choose the platforms they prefer, and then talk to everyone else on the Fediverse regardless, instead of having to create multiple accounts all over the place to talk to specific people.

Right - I think people are willing to learn things, but only if they have an incentive to do so.

Using bigger platforms such as Twitter or Reddit took some learning, but people and content were already there, this gives people the incentive to figure out how things work.

When you sign up to something like Mastodon, you have to learn how it works, and while it is not particularly complicated at all, why put the effort into figuring out Mastodon when you can just go back to Twitter and have the content and community already there for you?

It’s hard to predict - because despite the bad decisions from platforms like Facebook, Twitch, and Reddit, they are still always going to be immensely more popular than Fediverse / FOSS equivalents due to the network effect.

Despite all the bad moves from YouTube, Twitch, and Reddit, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in another platform, they just want the current platform to not be rubbish, so they don’t lose their current communities and contacts.

While I’d like for all the Fediverse platforms to become relatively “mainstream” that people will sign up for them, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen any time soon, but I’d love to be proven wrong.