That doesn’t answer the question, they asked if it’s open source. I agree, I don’t want to replace one sketchy data-harvesting service with another, I’d be a lot more comfortable giving shutup10 control of my system if it was on github or gitlab.

where do you find good sources to follow, then?

Ultimately I think it’s sort of like Python and C#. Python got big by being easy to use, with great community management, and it took decades to reach its peak of popularity. C# got big because Microsoft threw a ton of money at people to use it. Of the two, Python’s popularity seems to be lasting longer.

I suspect this will be the case for all the new sites and protocols popping up in The Web 2.0 Crash, or whatever the history books call it. We’ll see a few sites like TikTok and Threads that “buy their friends”, get a ton of overnight popularity and then fade away, and we’ll get a few “institutions” that take their time building healthy communities over tens of years. ActivityPub didn’t wow me with Mastodon but I’m pleasantly surprised by Lemmy, so maybe the Fediverse will be one of those institutions… but personally I still think there’s room in the market for RSS to make a comeback.

Hear hear! I thought I didn’t like the fediverse because Mastodon did such an awful job selling it to me. “Oh, I can’t view other instances’ local timelines without making accounts on them? What’s even the point of federation then?” But on Lemmy you can easily browse communities outside your own instance. So it’s not the fediverse’s fault, Mastodon just doesn’t have a clear audience.

And yeah, I can see how a lot of Mastodon’s features are “privacy-focused”, but I think it does TOO good a job, it’s so private that you can’t find anything!

in a word, intersectionality. you’re getting people who were already looking for an excuse to ditch reddit and twitter, and of that group, you’re selecting the ones with the most tech literacy. That tends to overlap people with progressive politics.

I agree in theory, but in practice, when Google dropped RSS and XMPP support it took most of my friends with it, which is what started this mess in the first place. I’m actually not a fan of mastodon; feels too ambitious to start a new protocol without a killer app. RSS and XMPP are extensible protocols and I really just want modern support for those.

Lemmings obviously