I love the top gear reference, but surely May would have been the obvious choice, Hammond is just asking for a crash!

This whole episode is giving me flashbacks to the ActiveX days.

The tyranny of the default.

“Here mum, I’ve installed Firefox for you, it’s better than Chrome in every way!”
“My knitting circle website doesn’t work, I can’t download patterns, it says I need Chrome”

Internet Explorer was effectively abandon-ware for a decade after Microsoft used their OS pseudo-monopoly to crush Netscape.
It took another tech giant abusing THEIR monopoly to relegate IE to the trash heap it should have already been on.

Comforting and Terrifying.
Comferrifying?
Terriforting?

So you won’t use your banks website?
Or your utilities (gas/water/electricity/internet)?
You won’t let your kids use the portal at their school for submitting assignments?
Your government sites for renewing your drivers license or scheduling hard refuse pickup?

I can think of lots of reasons that will force me to have chrome installed if this goes ahead.

I don’t know if Leo cares about that anymore. He’s been saying he’s done with Twitter for a few weeks at least.

At least a year.

But in a recent TWIT (2 weeks ago maybe), all of the guest panelists admitted that they were all still maintaining their followings on Twitter and hopeful that they could move to Threads.

It’s all just whores being whores, which is what Elon is relying on.

The US (which is where I assume you are), has the second largest one in the world in current operation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Station

Short answer, it scales fine.
Now you need to find someone to pay for it.

The Back to the Future trilogy is good for a re-view.

Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.

I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.

These are cool ideas.

The annoying thing to me is that it’s taken a further 13 years to reach a point where another social network is feasible.
I’m not saying there haven’t been attempts like diaspora and the early mastadon etc, but now we’re actually reaching a critical mass of participants where a move is worth it.

The same is true of Signal. I’ve been using it for nearly a decade, but it’s only in the last 2 years that people haven’t rolled their eyes when I mention it’s my preferred comms app.

I mean yes, but that’s not a federation problem.

To completely strawman AND slippery slope what you’re saying:

As a car safety pro, who primarily deals with car crashes:

STOP

TOWING

TRAILERS

Agreed, dangerous, I don’t want numpties doing it.
But it’s a large part of why I have a car.

I want to be clear, that I disagree with his “federation is stupid” point, but email has problems right now.

Theoretically it’s federated, theoretically you can spin up your own mail server and self host.

But even if you do that absolutely perfectly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), you can falsely end up on spam list, that effectively block delivery of your email to large segments of the network for days if not weeks.

Whilst theoretically federated, email falls under the broad dominion of google, microsoft and a couple of other large players.

Threads will mainstream threads.
Any good content here will be available to the Threads users, who will be oblivious to where it is coming from.
Eventually, Meta will take steps to break compatability, and lots of the most prolific contributors from here will move to Threads exclusively (for a host of valid reasons).
When it is no longer in Meta interest to federate, they will stop.

The fediverse will continue, but it will be weakened by it’s temporary reliance on Threads (who could afford to host large images/videos/etc, have lower latency, etc etc).

The issue was the owners choice of not federating with anything nsfw.

By moving to lemmy.world I could still post as much as I wanted to !australia@aussie.zone AND upvote boobs.

I moved from aussie.zone to lemmy.world already to get around federation issues.
Now beehaw.org has stopped federating with lemmy.world 🤷‍♂️

I don’t want to have half a dozen accounts so that I can access all the niches of this system, and yet it’s beggining to look like the dream of federation is stillborn.

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you’ll need to update it dynamically.

It’s becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.