Skull giver

Mastodon is just one of many applications that uses AP for their own custom purposes. MissKey and derived software has some kind of emoji response feature to posts that’s basically unimplemented anywhere else. Lemmy’s boosting trick to make comment sync make interoperability with timeline based social media a spamfest.

Maybe I should check again, but last time I looked into it there were no commonly used ActivityPub compliant servers. Everyone does their own thing just a little different to make the protocol work for their purposes. Even similar tools (see: MissKey/Mastodon, Lemmy/Kbin) took a while to actually interoperate.

As far as I can tell, the idea behind the original design, where servers are mostly content agnostic and clients decide on rendering content in specific ways, hasn’t been executed by anyone; servers and clients have been mixed together for practical reasons and that’s why we get these issues.

It’s very useful in sealed devices (smart watches, ear phones). Much better than pogo pins on your skin; whatever metal they pick, someone is going to be allergic. Things like active pencils (Apple Pencil, but als the Windows open standard ones) also make a lot of sense to charge like that.

I also use a wireless charging stand for my phone. Most phone stands have an opening for a cable, but for some reason that opening is always at just the wrong space, or not right for the cable. K They’re also useful when using your phone for navigation in your car. I find a cable sticking from the bottom of my phone quite a handful to manage, especially as the USB ports are all so close to my gear shifter.

For those still sporting lightning iPhones, it also provides a universal charging option.

Oh, and then there’s the edge case of “I want to plug something into my phone and also charge it”. Tiny flash drives, 3.5mm converters, you name it. Most phones only have one USB port, so using it for anything but charging usually means not being able to charge unless you go wireless.

Still, wired is the way to to moet of the times. Wireless is just a nice backup, and maybe a fun gimmick in certain furniture.

Building trust is hard. It’s easier to trust a few companies than to trust a million unknown servers. It’s why I prefer Wikipedia over amazingnotskgeneratedatalltopicalinformarion.biz when I’m looking up simple facts.

Furthermore, Facebook isn’t selling data directly. At least, not if they’re following the law. They got caught doing and fined doing that once and it’s not their main mode of operation. Like Google, their data is their gold mine, selling it directly would be corporate suicide. They simply provide advertisers with spots to put an ad, but when it comes to data processing, they’re doing all the work before advertisers get a chance to look at a user’s profile.

On the other hand, scraping ActivityPub for advertisers would be trivial. It’d be silly to go through the trouble to set up something like Threads if all you want is information, a basic AP server that follows ever Lemmy community and soaks up gigabytes an hour can be written as a weekend project.

Various Chinese data centers are scraping the hell out of my server, and they carry referer headers from other Fediverse servers. I’ve blocked half of East Asia and new IP addresses keep popping up. Whatever data you think Facebook may be selling, someone else is already selling based on your Fediverse behaviour. Whatever Petal Search and all the others are doing, I don’t believe for a second they’re being honest about it.

Most Fediverse software defaults to federation and accepting inbound follow requests. At least, Mastodon, Lemmy, GoToSocial, Kbin, and one of those fish named mastodonlikes did. Profiles are often public by default too. The vulnerability applies to a large section of the Fediverse default settings.

I’d like to think people would switch to the Fediverse despite the paradigm shift. The privacy risks are still there if there’s only one company managing them, so I’d prefer it if people used appropriate tools for sharing private stuff. I think platforms like Circles (a Matrix-based social media system) which leverage encryption to ensure nobody can read things they shouldn’t have been able to, are much more appropriate. Perhaps a similar system can be laid on top of ActivityPub as well (after all, every entity already has a public/private key pair).

I don’t think dansup was in the wrong here. Yes, it’s a security issue I suppose, but the problem lies within the underlying protocol. Any server you interact with can ignore any privacy markers you add to posts, you’re just not supposed to do that.

Whether this is a 0day depends on what you expect out of the Fediverse. If you treat it like a medium where every user or server has the potential to be hostile, like you probably should, this is a mere validation logic bug. If you treat it like the social media many of its servers are trying to be, it’s a gross violation of your basic privacy expectations.

This is exactly why ActivityPub makes for such a mediocre replacement for the big social media apps. You have to let go of any assumptions that at least some of your data remains exclusive to the ad algorithm and accept that everything you post or look at or scroll past is being recorded by malicious servers. Which, in turn, kind of makes it a failure, as replacing traditional social media is exactly what it’s supposed to do.

The Fediverse also lacks tooling to filter out the idiots and assholes. That kind of moderation is a lot easier when you have a centralised database and moderation staff on board, but the network of tiny servers with each their own moderation capabilities will promote the worst behaviour as much as the best behaviour.

But really, the worst part is the UX for apps. Fediverse apps suck at setting expectations. Of course Lemmy publishes when you’ve upvoted what posts, that’s essential for how the protocol works, but what other Reddit clone has a public voting history? Same with anyone using any form of the word “private” or even “unlisted”, as those only apply in a perfect world where servers have no bugs and where there are no malicious servers.

The market runs Windows, so it would entirely depend on how well Windows runs on them. If you’re buying an Apple chip to run macOS, you’re already getting the best deal out of Apple anyway.

Given the history of Exynos I doubt Samsung will ever make anything high performance. If you want high performance ARM, you’ll probably want to go for something like Ampère, like the workstation that System76 is selling right now.

The modern Snapdragons seem more than fast enough for most desktop use. They have PCIe capabilities so in theory you could just hook up a GPU and use them in a gaming rig. The most power efficient gaming rig could hilariously be a Qualcomm CPU paired with an Intel GPU. Qualcomm’s media encoder/decoder is also leagues ahead of the desktop competition, so streamers may get an edge there if OBS can take advantage of the hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen on reviews, some games don’t like to run on ARM. Performance is just fine (very impressive for laptop GPUs!) but without stability, you’re not attracting many gamers.

If Qualcom targets the desktop market, I expect them to go all in on Apple Mini style computers. Their Snapdragon chips inside those ultra thin desktops Lenovo sells pack a surprising punch and they’re more than good enough for most desktop use. Taking the fight to gaming seems like picking an uphill battle for no reason.

Unfortunately, modern ARM designs all seem to go the same route as Apple, with unified memory for both CPU and GPU. You can run the CPU on swappable DIMMs, but the GPU needs more bandwidth than that, so you’ll need to get soldered RAM. I was hoping LPCAMM2 would fix that, but Framework and AMD tried and couldn’t get their new AMD chip to work without soldering the memory for stable performance, so I’m thinking the days of swappable memory are coming to an end.

ActivityPub has a feature where most post objects can actually have different language representations within one item. On a protocol level, MissKey/Mastodon/Lemmy can have the same message in different languages, and the client can pick the one to display. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen anyone make use of it. Seems like a waste. If used, users with their display language set to German/Japanese will see the “machine translated:” post first, and people with English as a language will see the original. English first, and good implementations would allow the user to switch languages to compare.