I exclusively scroll Lemmy in new mode. I scroll I see a post I already have seen. Then I leave. That doesn’t mean I hate it, I’m just done!

And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don't want you to leave, they don't want you to "be done", they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that's part of what they sell to advertisers.

If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).

If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.

If you don't like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.

I absolutely agree.

Reaching the masses and keeping all of the mass content requires money, since investors are starting to realize that gazillions of views do not necesarilly equals profit, they are asking about ROI, which in turn makes the masses-reaching platforms look for ways to monetize those views, and that does not sit well with privacy caring people, but the masses don't care about that.

I really hope the masses never fill the fediverse with their nonsensical content.

Brave does support opening tabs from other devices, sync works good so long as it always has at least 1 device in the sync chain, so if you only have 1 device and have to reinstall it the settings might be lost, but if you have 2 devices and reinstall one the settings are still saved whenever you rejoin the chain. The reason is there are no accounts saved in brave, so the only way to ID your browser is by the sync chain. If the sync chain has no devices it may be removed from the sync servers.

All of the crypto rewards stuff can be disabled with 1 switch, and a second switch if you also want to turn off wallet, but it's not really active unless you configure it. Rewards is there as a way for them to make money without having to make Google or Bing the default search engine as other browsers do.

Brave is a great browser, but Firefox is also great and very configurable. And thanks to this thread I learned that FF's interface can be customized, which was one of my main reasons not to use it anymore. I'll play with it again, it's important to have a non-chromium based browser as an alternative.

Awesome! Dang, Second Life... we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣

Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!

C - It'd be cool to have C with the background of B.

For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).

I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I'm back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.

I use the same as you for virtuals(os-mainFunction), and similar for physical (brand-lpt/dsk/srv-mainUsage - Len-lpt-VR1, Srfc7-work, hp-srv-pve1).
I am boring like that.
I also don't name vehicles.

Dell had a Linux line some years ago where everything worked out of the box, never got the popularity needed to keep it alive.

System76 has Pop!_OS so that they can provide great out of the box experience with their computers, but they are not as big as other vendors.

A good way to really get a product like that to mass market is to make it available in general stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Etc.), the problem is that most of those customers will not understand why their system is so different and they cannot install that MS Office 2003 they have always used, or that Norton Antivirus that their cousin's son recommended to them 10 years ago that was working fine on their old computer.

And then you have the younger generations that use every other device but a computer. They'd rather do all their school and college work on their phones and tablets rather than open a laptop, if they even know how to use a computer (you'd be surprised how many don't even know how to use a computer).

Really makes you think about its "Security through obscurity" approach! 😆😆

At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.

Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.

They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).