From your link:

W3C Candidate Recommendation 22 August 2017

2026-2017 = 9

9<10

Diaspora

Launched November 2010

2026-2010= 16

16>9

XMPP/Jabber

The first major public release was released in May 2000

2026-2000=26

26>9

OpenMicroBlogging

Released in early 2008

2026-2008=18

18>9

OpenMicroBlogging took XMPP/Jabber as a proof-of-concept and created something similar for the purpose of Microblogging.

Ostatus (replaced OpenMicroBlogging, and the influence of ActivityPub)

released March 2010

2026-2010=16

16>9

Ostatus was the precursor to Activitypub and is what Mastodon and other federated social media sites used prior to ActivityPub.

From the very first paragraph of the ActivityPub Wiki:

The creation of a new standard for decentralized social networking was prompted by the complexity of OStatus, the most commonly used protocol at the time. OStatus was built using a multitude of technologies (such as Atom, Salmon, WebSub and WebFinger), a product of the infrastructure used in GNU social (the originator and largest user of the OStatus protocol), which made it difficult to implement the protocol into new software.

Activitypub was built on top of nearly 20 years of existing protocols and was an attempt to make one protocol to rule them all, it is literally the exact thing the xkcd strip is talking about.

No, it wasn’t. ActivityPub is less than 10 years old and was developed as a solution to the fragmented landscape of federation protocols that existed 1-2 decades prior to it. Activitypub is literally the meme

Kind of, but that’s what every creator of every protocol in existence did, including ActivityPub. Thats just how stuff gets made. One thing to appreciate about ATproto is that they made the protocol extensible so that you can shape the standard to fit your own needs in a way that other protocols like ActivityPub don’t, at least not as easily. Since the base of ATproto isn’t your home instance but rather your own personal PDS which is just a database, anyone can define a new schema for records on your database and stand up new functionality, like with Standard.site.

This means that you can connect practically anything to ATproto by simply creating records that match the same schema other ATproto apps expect. Like you can connect a simple blog that is just a static site to the “Atmosphere” (ATproto’s term for fediverse) with a simple script that adds a record when you make a new post.

So a couple things here.

But everything is open, and everything is indexed.

Even who you block, who blocks you, when you usually use an app, your daily time, what your previous usernames were, etc… and more are all recorded.

You really can’t have an open, decentralized social media system without things like this. Privacy was never a promise of the decentralized web because privacy is more or less a result of there being fewer people with keys to the kingdom and you trusting those people not to share your data. But by its very design federation and decentralization protocols need there to be more than one entity with the keys to the kingdom because all the kingdoms have to interact with each other. The only alternative here would be running your own social media service that doesn’t federate with any other à la Truth Social, so you can have total control, but then that wouldn’t be very social or decentralized.

However, actually understanding it and managing it is far from easy for most ordinary users who know little or nothing about programming or technical systems.

Does this mean that Bluesky and the entire AT Protocol community are ultimately designed only for programmers, developers, engineers, digital experts, and people with technical expertise?

No, the opposite. The AT protocol was designed specifically to combat this issue because ActivityPub is so unintuitive and complicated for less technical users. A standard user will pick a PDS service hosted by someone else and unlike with ActivityPub, they really only need the one and can switch between them without losing all their followers and follows with ease.

If I were to sum up your grievances, I would say that your issue is that you don’t like social media and don’t appreciate how social ATproto is, but that’s what it’s designed for. And in fact that’s what Lemmy and Mastodon and all these ActivityPub apps are designed for. It sounds to me like what you want is to just not use social media. Or at the very least, you want a centralized private platform where you can be in total control. Those exist, but ActivityPub and ATproto are antithetical to that goal.

How would it, or any software for that matter determine a given request is malicious before it does something malicious?

Try https://nostalgicpod.com/

A bit of a party foul on my end as I already knew none exist. Although there is at least an open streaming box OS in the works, but you’d have to bring your own hardware.

It would at least be harder, and have real constitutional ramifications.

Which open source TV stick do you recommend?

This type of thing was definitely happening 10 years ago and people were actually less worried about it than they are today

You’re half right, in that ultimately they can compel you to hand over your data, but there is a higher bar to clear for them to get your personal data stored locally.

For one, they can’t compel you to turn over your data with a subpoena, they’d have to actually go in front of a judge and get a warrant.

You were born to a world without the internet. It’s easy to get along without something in a world where it doesn’t exist or otherwise isn’t important. Existing without the internet today would be orders of magnitude more difficult.

Fluxer just finally finished their big refactor that brought their code to GitHub for public contribution and they released their revamped selfhosting experience

This is the selfhosted community. Not the Free, Open Source community.

I think you can infer the rules from the name here. The stuff you post must be related to software you can host on your own hardware. It need not be free, nor open source.

Now your point about spam from brand new accounts that are literally just ads on the other hand is valid.

Soviet Union TLD is an interesting choice lol

Supposedly you can’t use Calibre to remove DRM from Kindle E-books anymore since Amazon no longer lets you download the raw files to a computer. The only workaround I’m aware of requires you have a kindle device.

Of course you could find an alternative form of ebook acquisition

I wonder if this means their selfhosted server is finally production ready?

Nice try, begone bot. Come prepared next time. You are banished back to big tech land. Back to Gmail with you

You’ve failed to explain yourself properly or make any coherent point or provide any evidence of your baseless claims.

You clearly don’t understand how payment processing works, but since I do I will tell you that yes, there’s a big difference between an ephemeral VPN service that doesn’t need to tie any long term data to your account, and an email service that has to secure and maintain your data for you over a long period of time. These are two wildly different service models and There is in fact a requirement to hold onto payment data in this case. This is why all of Protons competitors do the same thing.

Your technological ignorance and naïveté to the world is not an indictment of Proton. And since you still after all of this time haven’t make a single coherent argument against proton or provided any proof to any of your claims, I’ll have to call it here.

They market on privacy and fail to deliver as I keep pointing out.

You haven’t pointed out a single way they’ve failed to deliver. They deliver on all of their marketing promises, and I have yet to see any proof to the contrary. You saying they failed over and over again is not proof.

"We do not retain full credit card details, we only save your name and the last 4 digits of the credit card number. " -Proton

So Proton is keeping only the bare minimum amount of information necessary? Sounds like something a company keen on privacy would do lol.

I am not a fan of any corporation, but to illustrate a point Mullvad VPN does not store this information on their servers at all.

Mullvad is a VPN service, they don’t provide private email services like Proton. Mullvad doesn’t need to keep any metadata because you’re not paying them to maintain or store your data. It is a transit system for your data, not a destination. You’re comparing apples and oranges.

The actual comparison you’d have to make is with other private email providers like Tutanota or Fastmail, both of which store the same payment metadata as ProtonMail, because they have to.

If you are going to pay for privacy, you should expect excellence. Not exactly what state law allows.

When I pay for privacy, I expect to receive privacy, and preferably the most privacy, and that’s what ProtonMail delivers quite successfully. Moreso than its competitors in fact, because I also understand that paying for a commercial service means that service is subject to the laws where the service resides, and Tutanota is in Germany, and Fastmail is in Australia/US.

Have you found any proof for your claims yet? You’ve had plenty of time now. If you can’t provide anything with your next comment I’ll be forced to determine that you just don’t have any, and that your only aim was to spread misinformation from the start.