• 15 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Simply by choosing a lesser used fedi software you’re helping keep the fediverse from being dictated by a single software’s whims. So that’s a big plus there. Federation issues with kbin/mbin/azorius/other lesser used instance software will inevitably happen as people only test against the largest player in the field (in the ““threadiverse”” that’s Lemmy, in the microblogging fedi that’s Mastodon). So simply by not picking the largest you’re, even if in a small way, helping not only mbin but all the lesser used fedi software as a whole.

    Your own local communities being “dead” mainly boils down to communities themselves having a network effect around them where the largest one keeps growing larger as everyone focuses on it. And the largest communities are usually on lemmy.world (or occasionally other Lemmy instances). There isn’t that much you can do there.

    In my experience, it’s always the smaller software that innovate. The same is true in the microblogging fedi (emoji reactions, quote posts, markdown, nomadic identity, reply permissions) just as it’s true in the ““threadiverse”” (combining communities together, the ability to follow people, polls apparently (?)).

    So really, don’t worry about the size of your own instance’s communities. As long as you trust your instance’s staff to keep you safe there’s no real reason not to get on a smaller instance, or on different software. Especially on here, where “discoverability” is not as much of an issue as it is in the microblogging fedi.












  • i’ve been filtering hexbear’s communities from my all feed with uBO[1] because of the tankie vibes, but outside their own communities hexbear people seem to behave themselves reasonably well. considering lemmygrad is defederated i can expect them being defederated as well just because of the politics, but they don’t seem too brigade-y to the communities here.

    to be fair i’ve been blocking all the politics and politic-adjacent communities left right and center so perhaps i’m just not seeing the bad parts of hexbear, but shitposting wise they seem alright.

    the only real gripe i have with hexbear is that lemmy’s handling of emoji in general suck and man do they like their emojis. but that’s a software issue more than anything


    1. lemmy.blahaj.zone##.post-listing:has(.community-link[title$="@hexbear.net"]) ↩︎


  • A popular misconception is that Firefox runs Gecko. And while that is kinda true, the real problem is much more interesting when you come down to the technical details.

    Because it’s the other way around. Firefox doesn’t run Gecko, Gecko runs Firefox. Firefox is built in Gecko. In a similar vein, Thunderbird also runs inside Gecko. It’s why they look so similar despite one being a browser and the other being an email client. Gecko is, in a way, a proto-Electron.

    You cannot “rip off” Gecko from Firefox and embed it inside something like you can do with Blink/Chromium (unless you’re on Android and use GeckoView), which means the only way to have a “Firefox based browser” is to fork the entirety of Firefox. There are forks like the TBB or Librewolf that do this, but the embeddability of Chromium makes it much easier for devs to make something that diverges from Chromium in major ways (stuff like Qutebrowser, for example)