This is almost too interesting

Cool find, thanks for sharing!

I think what they’re saying is that, to a lot of people (myself included), Signal is currently the best option despite being centralized. The decentralized options have UX issues, too small a user base, or aren’t well known enough to have gone through robust security/privacy reviews. While you can’t see what’s running on the signal servers, the app is open source and so far it looks to be encrypting the information correctly and it’s not sending anything but the minimal data to their servers.

‘A lot of eyeballs on the code’ is only relevant for open source apps. They were making a comparison between Signal and the many other open source mobile messaging apps.

You might also find this chart helpful if you’re looking for other alternatives. Personally, I found Signal to be the best one to get my friends and family onto

https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

Neat

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse?useskin=cologneblue

If you’re on mobile, set it to desktop else it looks weird

Looks good, I’ve added it to this post and the two pinned ones

Finally! This was keeping me from recommending Signal to more people

If you do decide to opt in to secure backups, you’ll be able to securely back up all of your text messages and the last 45 days’ worth of media for free.

If you want to back up your media history beyond 45 days, as well as your message history, we also offer a paid subscription plan for US$1.99 per month.

That’s excellent to hear. Hopefully no one abuses the media backups, I would understand if they did it by file sizes

It could mean faster development if they can spend that time on other things

I found that after a good part of a year, I wasn’t using the widgets menu at all and it would take me more time to find the right tag than if I had folders that benefit from muscle memory

I do get the appeal though, it’s very polished

Lawnchair is what I’m currently using, and it’s improving. They’ve had a large development push recently. Another one I’ve looked at was SmartLauncher.

I tried Kvaesitso for a while but ultimately it wasn’t for me

For people asking about alternative communities, we put together a list a while back when closing !askmen@lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/post/48642221

“Ask” communities (for starting a discussion):

• !asklemmy@lemmy.world
• !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
• !ask@piefed.social
• !askbeehaw@beehaw.org

For questions that are more specific to your situation:

• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

Group specific communities:

• !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
• !dullsters@dullsters.net
• !dadforaminute@lemmy.world
• !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone

Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):

• !casualconversation@piefed.social

There are some other projects in this space already, with varying levels of open source / selfhostability / features

https://zulip.com/

https://revolt.chat/

https://mattermost.com/

https://www.rocket.chat/

Zulip and Revolt looked the most promising for Slack and Discord replacements respectively

You might like !foss@beehaw.org, which is specific to software

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

I see, I’ll edit my other comment. So what even changes then, were they even making exclusive deals in the past? The discussion I remember was about how being the default made it difficult for others to compete since most people don’t change the defaults.

I think they’re referring to Firefox’s funding, a lot of which was through search deals

An article from 5 years ago: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox

edit: seems like that hasn’t changed by this ruling either

United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/09/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox-search-deal

It might, but I think it might be a federation bug between our instances. I haven’t seen one like this before, but I’ll keep an eye out to see if it happens again / there’s a pattern.

You could also try setting yourself as a bot, saving, and then reversing it again. That might prompt your instance to send out the information again.

Oh sorry about that, it’s still showing up as a bot for me but it’s fine on your instance. I think the information just hasn’t federated over to lemmy.ca yet

Your account is marked as a bot by the way, you can fix that in your user settings

That’s what I was surprised by. Maybe barrels were very common and the round shape was more resistant to stress/impacts than crates at the time? Although someone said the crackers at the bottom didn’t hold up that well so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Also brick walls don’t really go through iterative changes, which is an important issue with tech debt.

If the wall works, then it works

A software project will work now, but may not hold up when you need to change something

I love it 😄

Did you extract those clips for this post, and do you have a recommended method for doing that? I sometimes find clips on getyarn, but the site barely loads half the time

I blame all the similar sounding terms and organizations in the fediverse space. It’s actually pretty cool

What SWF is:

In a gesture that’s been a long time coming, Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation. The organization aims to tackle the various headaches and challenges the ActivityPub ecosystem has faced over the last decade of its development. Their mission? A bigger, better Fediverse.

From this article:

the SWF has been working on several interesting projects outside of these stated scopes, and it’s something Evan Prodromou has been bullish about: leveraging the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API. Historically, this piece of the ActivityPub protocol is rarely ever implemented, due to complexity as well as the fact that Mastodon’s own client API has seen widespread adoption.

To really understand the C2S API, we have to go back in time to when the protocol was being developed. The basic concept was that any ActivityPub implementation would effectively act as a generic server, with clients providing unique experiences. Compared to Mastodon’s dedicated API, C2S isn’t explicitly limited to microblogging or statuses. Instead, clients dispatch activities to and from an Actor’s inbox and outbox.

Instead of every new social experience in the Fediverse acting as a bespoke server, the C2S API instead lets a wide range of clients interact with an instance. Instances no longer become specific delegates of what activities can or cannot be used. C2S opens the floodgates for any kind of application to hook in to a Fediverse account. Instead of an instance doing all the hard work, clients would handle much of the advanced logic themselves.

Setting aside unique applications for a moment, one of the key killer-features that ActivityPub C2S could offer the Fediverse is a coherent and streamlined login system for any Fediverse account.

It then has some other examples of how this protocol is being used