I share your hope. I’m just offering the caveat that it might not go as quickly and smoothly as you expect (unless I’m reading your comments wrong - do correct me!)

It’s my perpetual gripe with many of those open tools that I love ideologically, but practically find lacking in some respects, typically UI/UX (including the pre-experience of the decision whether to use them). I don’t have all the skills or knowledge to fix the issues that bother me, as it’s often far eaiser to know what’s wrong than how to fix it.

I understand and endorse the philosophy that it’s unfair to demand things of volunteers already donating their time and skills to the public, but it creates some interdisciplinary problems. Even if capable UX designers were to tackle the issue and propose solutions or improvements, they might not all have the skills to actually implement them, so they’d have to rely on developers to indulge their requests.
And from my own experience, devs tend to prioritise function over form, because techy people are often adept enough at navigating less-polished interfaces. Creating a pretty frontend takes away time from creating stuff I’d find useful.

I don’t know if there’s an easy solution. The intersection between “People that can approach software from the perspective of a non-tech user”, “People that are willing to approach techy Software” and “People that are tech-savy enough to be able to fix the usability issues” is probably very small.

It’s so big that it can take a lot of bleeding before it dies. It doesn’t help that there is no significant enough consensus yet on an alternative.

It seems like some people are flocking to bsky, probably because it has better visibility and seems more accessible than Mastodon (“What’s an instance? How do I pick?”). Others are heading to Threads just because it’s there already.

If enough people move to some other platform to generate a critical mass, they’ll pull others too. Until then, inertia will keep X rolling a good while to come.

I prefer Mastodon to what is ultimately still a for-profit corporation (“public benefit” notwithstanding), but both are better than Twatter.

The value of distributed redundancy

Linux in general and Arch in particular are kinda laissez-faire in that they’ll allow you to shoot yourself in the foot. Some distros may put barriers in your way, others practically hand you the gun, but at the end of the day, the gun is freely available and it’s your own foot that you’re shooting.

That… that’s what they were saying, no? Companies should worry about their shit.

Butterfly gang

The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.

Curiously, that last bit is the first time I’ve seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you’re registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there’s a hole in that logic, but I’m not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)

Of course, there’s a caveat: To discover content, you need an index (“relay”) of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won’t see your content.

In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a “competitor”/alternative index, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: “In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers” ^src

Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays’ rules.

Much decentral. Very open.

(I’m being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it’s easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a “public benefit corporation” doesn’t mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)

That’s the distinction between “should” and “will”

Then it seems like it’s too out there

If you have no idea how long it may take and if the issue will return - and particularly if upper management has no idea - swapping to alternate solutions may seem like a safer bet. Non-Tech people tend to treat computers with superstition, so “this software has produced an issue once” can quickly become “I don’t trust anything using this - what if it happens again? We can’t risk another outage!”

The tech fix may be easy, but the manglement issue can be harder. I probably don’t need to tell you about the type of obstinate manager that’s scared of things they don’t understand and need a nice slideshow with simple words and pretty pictures to explain why this one-off issue is fixed now and probably won’t happen again.

As for the question of scale: From a quick glance we currently have something on the order of 40k “active” Office installations, which mostly map to active devices. Our client management semi-recently finished rolling out a new, uniform client configuration standard across the organisation (“special” cases aside). If we’d had CrowdStrike, I’d conservatively estimate that to be at least 30k affected devices.

Thankfully, we don’t, but I know some amounts of bullets were being sweated until it was confirmed to only be CrowdStrike. We’re in Central Europe, so the window between the first issues and the confirmation was the prime “people starting work” time.

…and just how many PCs do you intend to “reboot into safemode delete one bad file and then reboot again”? Manually, or do you have some remote access tool that doesn’t require a running system?

Having seen Excel used creatively, I think it’s an exaggeration. It would make collaboration entirely impossible. I assume they have several smaller ones, with more or less - but not exactly - the same layout as it has been adapted for new use cases, and the only way to transfer records from one to the other is to manually copy and paste the info to the relevant cells, but mind the order you do it in and double check, or the Frankenstein’s Macro running half the logic will crash.

I think it’s time to expand the Clown-Empire and add ClownSocialServices.lol and ClownFlare to its Vassals.
What do we call the head of state? The Witish Clown?

Accessible through my corporate network. Fun thing, that.

…provided it runs on CrowdStrike-protected systems. I would expect the site’s operator to make sure to avoid that if they can help it.

But what would it even change? The businesses would no longer be able to make an explicit agreement, probably have to pay a fine, but can they be forced to advertise or will they just proceed to coincidentally all decide not to advertise without explicitly colluding?

Why would you want backwards compatibility? To play games you already own and like instead of buying new ones? Now now, don’t be ridiculous.

Sarcasm aside, I do wonder how technically challenging it is to keep your system backwards-compatible. I understand console games are written for specific hardware specs, but I’d assume newer hardware still understands the old instructions. It could be an OS question, but again, I’d assume they would develop the newer version on top of their old, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t support the old features anymore.

I don’t want to cynically claim that it’s only done for profit reasons, and I’m certainly out of my depth on the topic of developing an entire console system, so I want to assume there’s something I just don’t know about, but I’m curious what that might be.

27, I dimly remember what Winamp was (never used it though) and extrapolated what Skins would be. I assume they’re essentially an archive of image files used to give a music player a custom look? Except they’re not technically restricted to image files and can apparently contain other files too, which I assume will make them invalid as skins, i.e. corrupted.

How far off am I?

Mind, I’m far from representative for my age group, given my IT expertise.