For a while vendors tried to lock down the BIOS pretty hard. Dell might still, I remember having to call and get assistance when a password was forgotten and they had to generate a backdoor key of some sort. Maybe that is less of a thing now that Bitlocker is widely used on corporate laptops and it is sensitive to tampering.

In the past they had jumpers for the same purpose.

What fediverse services are set up that way? For most projects, the flagship instance is by far the largest. For Mastodon it is something like 900k difference between the next most popular instance.

That’s why the government makes sure they can garnish you wages and even social security.

It’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.

Communities have moderators too.

It needs to affect revenue. To do that it needs to last.

Very, I think the only larger “Lemmy-like” instance is lemmy.ml.

Joining is immediate, where some Lemmy instances require manual approval even now.

The main page comes off as more approachable and familiar. They also have a ton of local communities (or “Magazines”) so people can do a lot even without the Federation. I find the Microblog stuff somewhat confusing, I think because it doesn’t have much of a UI built around it so it is less familiar than Mastodon. It is fairly centralized though, in the sense that there aren’t that many kbin instances out there.

The stats page lists users it knows about, including Federated (see also: the People tab).

Local counts can be seen at: https://kbin.social/nodeinfo/2.0 - currently about 22k.

FediDB uses the nodeinfo for its stats gathering, but has a delay.

It is reporting users it knows about, which includes federated servers. The local stats can be seen at https://fedia.io/nodeinfo/2.0, under users.

Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.

I think the Fediverse stuff is just a way of showing how open they are and differentiating themselves from twitter.

Twitter is doing stupid things but normal people find Mastodon confusing. I think Meta may be on to something here that appeals to normal people, and conveniently they can connect to the mastodon community too. Those are also the people who Meta will profit from.

I don’t think it’s a great thing, but in some ways it may benefit the rest of the Mastodon / Fediverse community if normal people are made somewhat more comfortable.

I doubt they will. They already added a 10 minute limit in airdrop for the “receive from everyone” setting (China first, now worldwide). From a security perspective it’s a good change but it does block the usefulness of airdrop as a tool for mass messaging.