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.

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

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.

Obsidian is super nice, but people need to remember that commercial use is paid, and fairly broad.

Very easy to download it at work and end up violating their license. Probably better to stick to something the office provides or a truly FOSS alternative for work, unless you’re willing (or able within company policy) to pay for it.

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 gel much better with forum format than microblog, mostly I don’t think I have anything worth saying on a microblog. I could see using it to follow people I’m interested in, but I can’t think of too many who fit that criteria. Also, they are all on TikTok. The only time I really used twitter was to get notifications when the ps5 was in stock somewhere.