It’s either this or we go outside, but the sun is out there. And people.

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.

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.

Multiple. Locally I have Timeshift doing btrfs snapshots every so often. This is mostly to roll back to a snapshot if something breaks. I’ve never had to use it (and probably should).

I use Pika backup every once in a while for a local backup to an external drive. Mostly because it’s easy to restore quickly.

I have duplicacy doing backups to a cloud provider. I used to use duplicati for this, and it was fine - although I didn’t like that it seems to be forever in beta. I like that duplicacy can do deduplication between backups of different machines which most other solutions I’ve seen cannot. I like its selection of cloud providers vs Borg/Vorta and some others.

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.

They do share significantly more OS code than Microsoft, and I think their usage and ownership of CUPS is probably why printer support has gotten better on Linux. I think they could share significantly more, especially enabling third party distributions of Darwin again, but I also find that few people seem to be that aware of what they do share and just assume they don’t.

On the iOS I should be able to toggle a Developer Mode, click through a warning about being out of support, and break my stuff if I want to. They should encourage the tinkerers.

Mobile Safari has supported content blockers for a few years now.

You might want to check what those calls are, specifically. Out of the box they use the iCloud Private Relay to hide network traffic, essentially a VPN. If you go onto the wifi settings of her phone and turn off the “Limit IP Address Tracking” it will likely be a lot less chatty. Otherwise there is iCloud stuff, but overall they do not collect all that much data at all (they allow you to request a copy of what they do collect on their privacy page). You might also help her review the privacy settings on her phone, there are many things that can be disabled.

How does anti-privacy fit in there, and what mainstream alternatives are better?

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.