danijelb

In Croatia more than 55% of households have AC installed, and only 10 years ago it was less than 25% of households. It got more popular as our summers are getting increasingly more hot and humid. Average salaries in France are probably double compared to Croatia. It definitely can't be classified as luxury if more than half of the country can afford it, in one of the poorer EU member states. I assume in the next 10 years it's probably gonna be 70+% of all households.

Regarding technical sophistication, AC is more or less using the same technology as a fridge, just scaled and adapted for room cooling instead of food storage.

It could lead to decentralization of both consuming and publishing. There could be a native timeline UI integrated into iOS/Android. Mobile network operators could host fediverse instances for text/audio/video and bundle them into phone plans which everyone already pays for. The possibilities are endless.

In such scenario search engines would also play a bigger role because if people are hosting videos on 50 different services instead of just Youtube, you need a separate search engine which crawls all instances.

I think the current fediverse servers like Pixelfed and Mastodon are emulating centralized services because we are used to how they function and it would be too confusing. If it catches on, then those services can slowly morph and adopt the benefits of the new paradigm

If ActivityPub gets really popular, there won't be a single service that's winning. For example, if each Youtube profile is suddenly a fediverse account which you can follow, the owner of that Youtube profile doesn't need a separate Twitter or Wordpress account - simply the act of uploading the video to Youtube will appear in user timelines of twitter, mastodon and all other services. Same would happen with blogs, instagram accounts, etc.

And if we get to such future, it's possible that we won't even need a Mastodon/Twitter account to have a timeline. iOS and Android could build native support for following accounts and displaying timelines in the operating system.

It's great they are adopting the standard but those aliases are ugly.

Instead of openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com@openprotocolfanblog.wordpress.com it should be [email protected]

I agree for ads - I don't think it would be acceptable to push ads to other servers. I'm not sure if it's even possible in the standard because they'd have to have some sort of an ad account, but if the user on your instance is not following that account they'd never see the ad.

As for missing out, I guess it's a matter of perspective. I would assume that right now most Mastodon users have at least one more account on a mainstream corporate social media site - Twitter, Instagram, whatever. What they are missing out from Mastodon, they get on other places.

But if we imagine a scenario where ActivityPub becomes mainstream and all providers start supporting it, there are two totally different experiences.

An experience of a person on a server that federates with everyone could mean having just one account and follow everything from one place. For example Twitter would support ActivityPub so you can follow Twitter users without an account there. You could follow a Youtube channel and have it in your feed. The owner of the channel wouldn't need to create a separate account on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, or something - their channel is their followable account on all platforms.

The experience of a person on a small mastodon server that defederates from big corporate servers would be exactly as is today. To follow users of Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Youtube, etc you'd maintain another account. But in the future where ActivityPub is mainstream, that other account is also activitypub-compatible. So, why have two when one is less "powerful" than the other?

Letting the imagination run wild, in such future scenario ActivityPub feeds could be integrated deeply into your iOS/Android phone UI, without needing a separate app. Perhaps also on TV. Most people will want an account that doesn't limit them.

Resistance from Mastodon enthusiasts doesn't matter. Governments and companies can still decide to run their own ActivityPub infrastructure, running on Mastodon or something else. Threads and other services will federate with them, users will be able to follow accounts from those government and company instances.

Small Mastodon communities can choose to not federate, but they would be missing out on a lot, assuming ActivityPub takes off.

The government shouldn't provide that service to ordinary citizens, same as they don't provide email hosting on government email servers. I think it helps if you think about Mastodon as email. Government runs their accounts on government server, other users can interact with their content from other servers.

As for people caring about a server for functional programming or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and experimental technology.

I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will support it), different media companies could run their services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by enthusiasts for a variety of topics.

Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own instances, because an account on an official well-known domain acts as verification.

The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.

Current federation looks like that, a bunch of small independent communities focused on a single topic like tech or photography or whatever, but it doesn't have to be like that. If federation catches on then the most likely the pick will be between 5-10 huge general instances run by corporations.

In such world, Twitter and Facebook could add support for ActivityPub, Google and Microsoft could build their own, different ISPs and media companies could run their instances, and so on. Then the benefit of choice becomes more clear - who do you trust the most to provide you an account. Basically, it would be like the situation with email where most people use a 3-4 biggest services, but the ecosystem is open to new competitors.

The current state of federated social networks is very experimental. If it catches on with big corporations 90% of people will use that, and these small communities can still survive but would be more or less irrelevant.

The web went in the wrong direction when we abandoned the initial concepts of user agents, which was that the browser has the ultimate choice of what to render and how. That concept, transferred to today's world of apps would simply mean that any client like Apollo is essentially a browser locked on Reddit's website, parsing HTML (which has the role of an API) and rendering the content in a native interface. As long as the user can access the HTML for free, they should be able to use any application (a browser or a special app) and render the content however they wish.

Unfortunately with today's SPA apps we don't even get the HTML directly, but with the recent resurgence of server-side rendering we may soon be able to get rendered HTML with one HTTP request. And then the only hurdles will be legal.

Another great success that didn't exist 15 years ago - no more roaming charges

Reminds me of how AI image generators draw stuff slightly wrong

Activitypub goes in both directions. For example, people using Mastodon will be able to follow tumblr users, interact with their posts, comment, share it on their profile, all from Mastodon apps. And vice versa. Same applies to all services that fully support activitypub. Another example - right now you can follow a peertube channel on mastodon and see their videos in your timeline as if they are using mastodon, not peertube. If you post a reply on mastodon, it is automatically shown as a comment under the video on peertube.

Because one of the main issues with negotiation is that people have different idea on what's a good salary depending on their educational and cultural background, the environment they grew up in, etc.

For example a company might be willing to pay up to $175k for a certain dev position. This amount of money seems completely crazy to a developer who comes from a poor family and is the first one to have a skill that can pay so much. It will never occur to them to attempt to negotiate for this amount, because even $90k seems like a great salary compared to what their parents had. $175k would seem unreal, especially in a country where talking about money is taboo.

But if this number can be seen often in ads as an upper range, it becomes normalized in the eyes of everyone who is applying for jobs, no matter their educational and cultural background.

The interview process will determine if the candidate's skills are suitable for the position and if they are not, they don't get hired. If there is a more suitable position open, the company can offer to hire the candidate for the other position.