In my opinion, yes, the why does in fact matter. This blog post i’ve linked in other comments in this thread is by one of the authors of the ActivityPub spec. If you care enough to comment about it i recommend reading her analysis of what AT Proto gets right and wrong in comparison with ActivityPub.

but you have to question why they’re choosing to reinvent the wheel

you don’t have to wonder why if you take the time to read about why; see the links in my other comments in this thread if you’re curious.

Is there any instance other than Bluesky where people can register?

There aren’t “instances” in the ActivityPub sense, where “instance” means single point of failure you’re married to (its name is literally part of your identity) which is simultaneously responsible for keeping your data available and curating your view of the rest of the network; AT Protocol decomposes these responsibilities so that they can be delegated independently to different operators.

See https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture and https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ for details.

There are many people running their own Personal Data Servers, AppViews, Labelers, and Feed Generators, but I’m not aware of anybody else running a large-scale Relay yet (which is one of the things this new foundation says they are planning to work on). I’m also not sure if you can actually create a did:plc using a self-hosted AppView or if maybe you need to use did:web to create a new identity without using their AppView currently.

They mention ActivityPub in a few places, such as this blog post.

But I’d recommend https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/ instead, which is the best discussion I’ve seen so far of the pros and cons of each of the two approaches.

have you read about why they didn’t?

Any confirmation this is real? The donate button goes to GoFundMe.

• Audrey Tang confirms https://bsky.app/profile/audreyt.org/post/3lfn56wzdf22n
• Bill S. Preston Esq confirms https://bsky.app/profile/alexwinter.com/post/3lfmzjpszsc25
• Vox Media confirms https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342799/free-our-feeds-social-media-ecosystem-at-protocol-bluesky

username checks out

Having some distrust in Wikipedia is healthy; you certainly shouldn’t take it as the final word about facts you’re depending on the accuracy of. But, it is very often a good starting point for learning about a new subject.

Spending a minute or two reading that “source code” article (or another version of it which is likely available in your first language) would give you a much better understanding of the concept of source code (which is a prerequisite for understanding what “closed source” means) than any of the answers in this thread so far.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

As a leftist myself (communist), I generally enjoy the content and discussions on Lemmy.

some of the privacy messengers here (like Briar) have blogging/forum features

many people incorrectly assume briar aims to provide some sort of anonymity, because it uses tor onion services and is a self-described “secure messenger”. however, that is not the case:

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#does-briar-provide-anonymity (answer: no)

tldr: briar contacts, even when only actually using onions, exchange their bluetoooth MAC addresses and their most recent IPv6 link-local address and last five IPv4 addresses briar has seen bound to their wlan interfaces, just in case you’re ever physically near a contact and want to automatically connect to them locally.

CuriousMarc:

Videos documenting restorations of exceptional vintage electronics and early computers, space hardware and the odd mechanical calculator or Teletype. It often showcases my Hewlett-Packard test equipment collection and, from time to time, my R2-D2 robot build. Things rarely work when I start, but almost always do when I end. A nerdy place for your inner engineer, to celebrate engineering exploits of our predecessors, and learn a lot from it.

The campaign hasn’t made any progress since 2011 when Wolfram Alpha added support for it, a year after Google did. Google’s calculator still does support it, though, so you can write queries like like “1Zbit/s * 1 year in hellabytes” (3.9 hellabytes), or “mass of the earth in hellagrams” (5.9 hellagrams).

I asked this question the other day if I could somehow input my handwritten notes into programs like Trilium (or logseq whatever) and memos. OCR/HCR seems to far behind still so I am unsure.

I just left this comment on your post.

Via the pine64 blog update about their e-ink tablet TIL about inkput (using OnlineHTR) which appears to be a step in the right direction.

there is no provider on the planet that can freeze state of RAM in a way that would be useful for this

You are very mistaken, this is a well-supported feature in most modern virtualization environments.

Here are XenServer docs for it. And here is VMWare’s “high-frequency” snapshots page.

Sometimes, law enforcement authorities only need to contact cloud provider A when they have a warrant for (or, perhaps, no warrant but a mere request for) data about some user C who is indirectly using A via some cloud-hosted online service B.

A(mazon) will dutifully deliver to the authorities snapshots of all of B’s VMs, and then it is up to them if they limit themselves to looking for data about C… while the staff of company B can honestly say they have not received any requests from law enforcement. (sorry my best source on this at the moment is sadly trust me bro; I’ve heard from an AWS employee that the above scenario really actually does happen.)

fun fact: Phoenix was the original name of the browser we now know as Firefox

Similar to this: https://github.com/alibahmanyar/breaklist

Relatedly, there was a company was selling a cloud(🤡)-based product called “Little Printer” from 2012 to 2014; after their backend predictably shut down, some fans of it recreated it as https://tinyprinter.club/ and later https://nordprojects.co/projects/littleprinters/

somehow input my handwritten notes

I’ve heard the reMarkable e-ink tablet’s cloud service has good-enough-to-be-usable handwriting recognition, but sadly I haven’t heard of anything free/libre and/or offline that is.

Brendan Howell’s The Screenless Office is “a system for working with media and networks without using a pixel-based display. It is an artistic operating system.”

You can “read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input”.