Codeberg and other alternatives are used by 2 people, if not more
It last reported it has about 400 members (people who pay money) , liberapay shows about 190 supports (and the number is slowly but consistently growing for years).
This is very frustrating if you want to report just one issue or make one pull request. Self-hosted repos are even worse.
It takes about a minute to make an account and store it in a password manager, it might be better because a higher threshold for contributing might mean a higher average quality of contributions.
There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.
The junk food analogy is really good i think, There was already research showing people who read newspapers are more informed then facebook users iirc, Open source platforms should develop to give users higher content quality and eventually validate those design using scientific research (kinda like research on the Mediterranean diet). I think giving users better platforms that enable finding and prioritizing high quality content will lead to a better probability of achieving certain goals (better employment, better financial state, healthier eating, better mental health etc).
Peertube as far as i can tell does not have a flagship instance, and seems to be doing fairly well, venera.social works better for me then another instance i tried which had random log offs and seems fairly popular.
Seems like it is already possible, after clicking "permissions" when making a post it shows:
This post will be shown only to the people in the first box, to the exception of the people mentioned in the second box. It won't appear anywhere publicly.Start typing the name of a contact or a circle to show a filtered list. You can also mention the special circles "Followers" and "Mutuals".
Link returns "This site can’t be reachedThe webpage at https://files.catbox.moe/8g7agm.mp4 might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.".
I’ve noticed this quite a bit among people I talk to and honestly just doesn’t help move the conversation anywhere meaningful.
What do you expect? If you have a way to improve the fediverse then just start a project or at least make a suggestion (although i doubt that's helpful).
Having something like an open source version of good judgement open might make things more interesting, at least it will be possible to detect "superforcaster" and direct people attention to them.
This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.
wlroots has existed for almost 7 years and this misconception is still repeated.
Obligatory mention of Linus law of trail and error:
“Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.”
Create a instance and lets see what happens.
Overall i think allowing donation is a good idea, supporting independent creators is good because big companies tend to go after the Lowest common denominator.
There is a fair bit of research on what makes people good at predicting, see the good judgement project, in particular there is this article:
Participants were above average in intelligence and political knowledge relative to the general population. Individual differences in performance emerged, and forecasting skills were surprisingly consistent over time. Key predictors were (a) dispositional variables of cognitive ability, political knowledge, and open-mindedness; (b) situational variables of training in probabilistic reasoning
and participation in collaborative teams that shared information and discussed rationales (Mellers, Ungar, et al., 2014); and (c) behavioral variables of deliberation time and frequency of belief updating. We developed a profile of the best forecasters; they were better at inductive reasoning, pattern detection, cognitive flexibility, and open-mindedness. They had greater understanding of geopolitics, training in probabilistic reasoning, and opportunities to succeed in cognitively enriched team environments. Last but not least, they viewed forecasting as a skill that required deliberate practice, sustained effort, and constant monitoring of current affairs.
TL;DR: speculating is fun but you should also look at the facts
I don't think proprietary social media is going to collapse , mark zuckerberg got a perfact SAT score, Thinking he won't notice his platform will degrade in quality is IMO wishful thinking.
Yeah there was no rise in the number of servers, you might say that theoretically it means nothing but in practice i don't think i ever saw these two metrics not correlate.
Having some hardware mentioned on the site that is supported and ready for use could be helpful if someone wants to try it (say raspberry pi), There are probably people who are worried to will make their computer explode.
On top of what other said, the wayland project also maintains the wayland protocols repository which includes additional protocols that are approved by a "committee" that includes representatives from wayland protocol implementations (wlroots, kde , gnome , smithay etc). for example now they are working on color management.
There appears to be a consensus among people working on window manager implementations that X has to go and wayland is the future.
Wayland has technical benefits, if you want the nitty gritty details see this.
Basically X11 is bad IPC at this point.
Also be careful with what you read online, I see misinformation about it relatively often.
It's pitched as a open source operation system, yet the snap store is closed source and vendor locked, one of the reasons some of us use Liniux is because we prefer open source (and there are rational justifications for that).
Hate is a strong word, but there is legitimate criticism, I also think the closed source nature of snap led to the fact that it has no volunteers and that eventually caused malware to appear on the snap store multiple time, it never happened on flathub as far as i know.
Today for beginner i think opensuse and linux mint are better.
Regarding debian having old packages , i use nix but it is fairly immature, flathub should also work.
I had some issues that happened on debian and not on firefox nix package, maybe debian packaging is not great and this can help improve it.