I love the top gear reference, but surely May would have been the obvious choice, Hammond is just asking for a crash!

This whole episode is giving me flashbacks to the ActiveX days.

The tyranny of the default.

“Here mum, I’ve installed Firefox for you, it’s better than Chrome in every way!”
“My knitting circle website doesn’t work, I can’t download patterns, it says I need Chrome”

Internet Explorer was effectively abandon-ware for a decade after Microsoft used their OS pseudo-monopoly to crush Netscape.
It took another tech giant abusing THEIR monopoly to relegate IE to the trash heap it should have already been on.

Comforting and Terrifying.
Comferrifying?
Terriforting?

So you won’t use your banks website?
Or your utilities (gas/water/electricity/internet)?
You won’t let your kids use the portal at their school for submitting assignments?
Your government sites for renewing your drivers license or scheduling hard refuse pickup?

I can think of lots of reasons that will force me to have chrome installed if this goes ahead.

The US (which is where I assume you are), has the second largest one in the world in current operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station

Short answer, it scales fine.
Now you need to find someone to pay for it.

The Back to the Future trilogy is good for a re-view.

The annoying thing to me is that it’s taken a further 13 years to reach a point where another social network is feasible.
I’m not saying there haven’t been attempts like diaspora and the early mastadon etc, but now we’re actually reaching a critical mass of participants where a move is worth it.

The same is true of Signal. I’ve been using it for nearly a decade, but it’s only in the last 2 years that people haven’t rolled their eyes when I mention it’s my preferred comms app.

I mean yes, but that’s not a federation problem.

To completely strawman AND slippery slope what you’re saying:

As a car safety pro, who primarily deals with car crashes:

STOP

TOWING

TRAILERS

Agreed, dangerous, I don’t want numpties doing it.
But it’s a large part of why I have a car.

I want to be clear, that I disagree with his “federation is stupid” point, but email has problems right now.

Theoretically it’s federated, theoretically you can spin up your own mail server and self host.

But even if you do that absolutely perfectly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), you can falsely end up on spam list, that effectively block delivery of your email to large segments of the network for days if not weeks.

Whilst theoretically federated, email falls under the broad dominion of google, microsoft and a couple of other large players.

I never owned a console, but I distinctly remember playing this, so there must have been a PC port some time in the early 90s.

Classic game.

The condescension in that makes it clear that the smug social network is whichever one the author happens to use.

I’m not goin to shit on Briar, I hope they build out their dream.

It’s fundamentally not as easy to use.
My Grandma already has a phone with a full addressbook.
If she’s told to install Signal, it’ll just work as a drop in replacement for iMessage.

Briar meanwhile suggests sharing your contact info using another such as signal: https://briarproject.org/quick-start/#:~:text=When you choose “Add contact at a distance”%2C Briar,choose a nickname for them.

Briar is chasing different goals.

That single point of failure is to facilitate ease of use, with minimal reduction in security.
The messages are e2e encrypted and the server is designed in such a way that attempting to listen in would bring it down.
The signal org doesn’t even have your address book.

If your concern is “I don’t like signal”, you’re not going to make much traction.

I also use this.
Have had to update it in tiny ways in the last ~ 7 years?

Main stream reporting.

Get John’s attention, hope he does a segment on it.

I hope he not only does, but that he drives attention here, it will bring new users.

https://lemmy.world/comment/206680

The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.

By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to [email protected] AND upvote boobs.

The stated reason is that there’s too many bad actors coming from here, so it’s too hard to moderate:

https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Hopefully (as they state in their post), federation will resume once things settle into a new norm.

Or I forsee beehaw losing relevance as it continues to pursue an isolationist policy.

I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷‍♂️

I don’t want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it’s beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.

I personally use a bash script triggered by cron on my server to first determine my external IP address: curl http://v4.ident.me/ then if it differed from the last check, would update one of my dns entries via the godaddy API.

This can be a simple or as complicated as you like.