I wouldn’t overthink it. It’s just a youthful rebellion/protest thing. Old people banned an app young people like and young people were like, “Ok, fine. We’ll use a different app, assholes.” And they found one even more Chinese just to be obnoxious.

But to answer your primary question, Instagram is a bloated app with a terrible algorithm made by a garbage company owned by a garbage person. But just as important, Instagram is also where TikTok users’ parents are. Youths don’t want to hang out with friends where their parents are watching. Hell, I’m middle-aged and I was annoyed when my mom followed me on Instagram. Like, “Stay on Facebook, mom. That’s the boomer app.”

I’m sure almost every TikTok user is a YouTube user too. But YouTube Shorts isn’t the same as TikTok. Shorts are basically a way for established creators who make longer, professional videos to make little casual ones between their main video releases. It’s not a drop-in replacement for TikTok. The vibe is different. (If Shorts had been released as a totally separate app with a separate algorithm, it’d be a drop-in replacement for TikTok but they just duct taped it onto YouTube proper.)

Plus, the data and national security excuses were always horseshit. Congress was trying to protect American dominance in social media and during the debate, members of Congress said their issue with TikTok was that it didn’t have an Israel boner. https://forward.com/culture/688840/tiktok-ban-gaza-palestine-israel-antisemitism/

Forward is a publication aimed at a Jewish audience, for the record, so that’s not some antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Bacon, lettuce, tomato, and guacamole

The ID checks will only make things worse. Like 4 free “tube” sites based in America and that are trying to be mainstream and ad-supported (Pornhub and ???) comply with Louisiana’s current ID check law while the 5,000 sites based anywhere else on Earth don’t give a shit. Most probably don’t even filter for CSAM.

Half the internet is porn. Reddit has porn. There’s a Lemmy instance for NSFW stuff. To imagine they’re going to stop teens from finding smut because the “reputable” site checks ID is just willful naivety.

Also, I realize the goal of the Texas law is to label anything GLBT+ as “porn.” I’m not the naive one in this case. But the arguments in the case aren’t about the hidden agenda of conservatives.

It’s vice signaling. There’s nothing virtuous about Meta or Zuckerberg. Let’s not forget his first try was a hot or not clone with pictures of women he used without consent.

And that new perm he got definitely isn’t virtuous.

It’s not something where any one person can really host their own instance long term — though people still do (for now). But AtProto is designed so a reasonably-sized company (or maybe a well-funded foundation) can host their own instance and either make a clone or do something novel.

As I understand it, the core difference is just the scale of what you’d have to host. ActivityPub only downloads what users on an instance interact with so you could easily run your own one-person instance on a home computer. A BlueSky instance downloads everything so you’d essentially need the scale of BlueSky (which is already in the terabytes)

The upside to AtProto for users is that your username and content are all portable and you can switch providers (or even use multiple) and not lose anything. ActivityPub’s downside is that it can leave you at the mercy of your admin. Not a big deal on the main instances but there’s been some drama moments where some admin freaked out and those users essentially lost their account.

AtProto/BlueSky was originally envisioned (pre-Musk) as Twitter being semi-decentralized so it’d essentially be the hub of a wider ecosystem. But, obviously, the world’s worst truck designer had other plans.

Hegemony over Europe? That seems laughable when they’re borrowing troops and buying bullets from fucking North Korea. This isn’t the height of the Cold War. Russia’s economy has been hollowed out by decades of kleptocracy and misrule. I’m pretty sure at this point any one of France, Germany, or Britain could win a conventional shooting war with Russia.

No one wins a nuclear war, obviously. Russia can still be a threat. But being a nuisance in the Baltic Sea and screwing with Moldova doesn’t make them look powerful enough to be a hegemon over shit.

I don’t want to rain on everyone’s parade but I think the law bans all apps with over 1 million users that are based in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea (“foreign adversary controlled applications”) where you can make a profile and share content. WeChat would definitely count. So, Red Note is probably/possibly going away soon too. I guess VKontakte is Russian and still in the app stores.

The media is focused on creators and TikTok, obviously. But a WeChat ban would probably suck for people with grandparents in China since that’s the “everything app” there. (I don’t know what China bans but even if there’s other messaging apps allowed in China, teaching your elderly Chinese grandma to use a different app on a ~12h time zone difference is probably not a fun activity.)

I disagree. I used to be a software engineer (and may be again at some point) and the problem with avoiding junior developers is that we need them if we ever want to have any senior developers.

Also, LLMs don’t replace 90% of what a software engineer does. Copilot or whatever is a nice tool that spits out code. It’s not able to architect shit or choose the right tech to use in the first place.

And to be honest, it seems like A.I. progress has hit a bit of a wall and the reality is that it may take decades, trillions of dollars, and maybe even an energy revolution to ever reach its imagined potential. Look at full self-driving cars. The tech seemed like it was 90% there about a decade ago but that last 10% of any big project is the real challenge.

BlueSky’s verification system lets you make your handle any URL you own (via DNS or a meta tag in your HTML). Like the Washington Post’s handle is just @washingtonpost.com

That seems like a pretty trivial thing for any institution to setup even if most users are just going to stick with the default (“whatever dot bsky dot social”), if only because a URL costs a few dollars a year.

Not that I disagree about institutions being on Mastodon. Important government agencies should be basically everywhere. (Like a local weather service that issues critical safety warnings should be on every service possible.)

I haven’t used it in a long time but I think Diaspora is intended as a decentralized FB clone. https://diasporafoundation.org/

I’m not sure if it uses ActivityPub or its own thing. It’s been around for awhile so it may predate ActivityPub.