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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities

    As a thought, do you really lose them?

    For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.

    It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?

    Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.

    Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.


  • I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.

    I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.

    Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.

    Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.





  • Search also sucks because people suck.

    If I post a picture of a flower with the caption “Look what grew in my garden!”, that’s a terrible post from a search point of view.

    Later on someone will search for “flower” but I didn’t use the word “flower” so now search sucks.

    Of course a much more common post is someone posting a picture of text, from Twitter, Tumblr, etc. with, once again, a vague caption. You remember the picture, but not what the poster actually said.

    Searching comments will sometimes help, but that depends on the comments being related.





  • You’re not affected if (and only if)

    You always used the Brave browser or the DuckDuckGo search engine on mobile

    I found that odd, but reading the more technical write up (linked in the article) it seems Brave blocks localhost communication.

    The Chrome proposal references a single use case. I’ve never seen a website that sets up my local devices, but is this a new thing?

    Why did localhost not get blocked earlier? This seems like a huge hole browsers have ignored for years.


    Also the DuckDuckGo exception doesn’t make sense to me. Does DuckDuckGo have Facebook trackers on it to begin with? Whatever site DuckDuckGo sends you to, if they have the trackers, you’ll get tracked.




  • See but I would argue that five different version numbers across five different operating systems is broken. (Ok two of them do match up.)

    Specifically the watchOS version is the important one that stands out. watchOS version 1 works with which version of macOS? Which version of iOS or iPadOS?

    Also when it comes time to end support for devices, how do you keep track? If Apple provides 5 years of updates, do you know if your phone is still supported?

    If my phone is running iOS 14, is that supported? Is that new? Is that old?

    The key thing to keep in mind is that the entirety of this ecosystem is based on yearly releases.


    Just for “fun” let’s look at Windows. The current version is 11. It was released in 2021. So I guess as long as I have Windows 11, I am up to date. But… That’s not true. Windows 11 does have a version number that’s not directly end user facing. That version is 24H2.

    Now the “24” is the year, that’s useful. Now what’s stupid is the “H2”. Because sitting here in June 2025 I would expect “25H1” to be released anytime now. But Microsoft only used the H1 once, about five years ago. Now “Window 11 version 24H2” is better SEO vs “Window 11 version 24”, so maybe that’s why they kept it.


  • How would you prefer they handle it?

    Just to look at macOS version history,

    The first public release was “Mac OS X 10.0”, this continued until “Mac OS X 10.7 Lion”. The “big cat” became part of the marketing name because the OS & version were a mouthful and throwing numbers around wasn’t helpful.

    We drop the “Mac” next year, then switch to mountains, but it’s not long before we reach, “OS X 10.10” aka “OS ten ten ten”.

    Well it wasn’t long before we simplified further and just said “macOS”, but then took a while before we dropped the “10”. Now we just get “macOS 15 Sequoia”.

    For nearly 18 years the Mac operating system had an unnecessary “10” that conveyed zero information.


  • It’s not a matter of biggest number, it’s a matter of consistency.

    They have five operating systems, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS.

    So currently we have macOS 15, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, watchOS 11 & visionOS 2. That’s absolute confusion. Do I have the latest version? Dropping support for an older version, how many years ago was that?

    A version number should convey useful information, and the year it was released is useful information. Especially when major updates come every year.

    Edit: I forgot tvOS, also version 18. So six operating systems.