Expert developer, Buddhist

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Well…

    If you follow the link to fedidb, refer to the “mau” monthly active users. Do some brief math and realize that lemmy.world accounts for about 50% of all active users

    Email market share is harder, but many estimate that Gmail accounts for over 40%. Many many orgs use Google apps to make custom branded gmails with their own domains too

    This is the typical “business power law” that states that the top player should control about 50%, the second player about 25%, etc. This is just kinda how the world works


  • VPNs don’t help here, the website asks you for your driver’s license. Tbf giving your credit card to them is typically enough for them (big tech + govt) to construct a full profile of who you are anyway, and that was the original “age gate” – though there are some services that make CCs modestly privacy preserving – not the case for IDs




  • Well, I took the time to read the whitepaper, and it’s yeah, pretty dumb sounding. The gist is that it’s p2p post sharing with lots of captchas & a crypto edge that it probably doesn’t need https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/eb02f20b-e787-4a02-b188-d0fcbc250ba1/pleb.tex-6d2e1bf.pdf

    The similarities to Lemmy are substantial, it’s just not on activitypub, but rather its own pubsub thing. If you want to host data, you still have to keep a node running at all times, it’s not the case that “there are no instances”. Those instances can moderate the content, so it’s not the case that “there’s no moderation.” The whitepaper mentions that “its possible to delegate running a client to a centralized server…” rather than having to have a fat syncing client running on your own machine … in lemmy, it’s more like “its possible to run your own node if you want”. Plebbit doesn’t care about maintaining history of posts, it expects that servers will go down over time, and the data will be lost. Lemmy is pretty similar in that regard too, if all instances hosting the data go down, then it’s lost. The expected outcome is that there’s a handful of big nodes, as is the typical result of this form of “decentralization” - same as Lemmy, Email

    Ultimately, I don’t see Plebbit doing anything particularly smarter/better, and having private/public key cryptography involved doesn’t really matter. They talk about blockchains and using coins as anti-spam mechanisms, but I don’t see why that’s relevant to the implementation



  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    Y’know, you’re right & that’s wild. I guess I should have known, but didn’t assume that they have like 600m in unrelated investments. Though the burn rate is quite a lot too, so they probably would scale back browser dev a lot if it lost its profitability & become a pure VC kinda org


  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    Not only does it need to do everything from memory management to job scheduling, it also has all of the UI and graphics driver complexity blended in. Usually that’s a different layer that the kernel historically didn’t worry about, it would be as if GTK is part of Linux, along with the programming language. Then there’s shit like WebAssembly and WebGL, databases, sandboxing, permissions, user management… A Brower is like a cross platform OS built to run on another OS


  • Lung@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    The thing is it’s never been more expensive and time consuming to write a browser, it’s bigger scope than a kernel in many ways. Stuff like Epiphany isn’t even close, despite relying on Apple’s webkit. Most distros just push people to Firefox now, despite a history of KHTML and all that. We would need something like the Linux Foundation to pick it up (which runs on corporate sponsorship for a shared resource)











  • Are you high?

    Why am I writing this post? Not because I hope for something or believe in change. These are just words. I could write this at the end, but then you would be looking for answers for me while reading, and I don’t need them. They won’t change anything.
    So here it is. I don’t claim to be a software development guru or a C language expert. I’m just a simple developer.

    What? People stopped using C because it takes forever to write. You’re still stuck adding null terminators to string arrays and stressing about memory leaks and overflows. Even the Linux kernel / Linux Torvalds are moving towards Rust. That’s evolution, and sometimes evolution is messy

    Then the rest of your thing seems to be about how people shouldn’t make money from coding? That’s one of the most valuable skills of the information age, and you can become a millionaire in a decade doing it

    Just contribute to open source if you want to do some “good deeds”