Former Diaspora core team member, I work on various fediverse projects, and also spend my time making music and indie adventure games!
Hey, thanks for sharing this! The site seems to be down right now, and needs to migrate over to new servers anyway. I’ll be investing time into that process - for now, I’m writing weekly articles over at the fledgling FediNews publication.
This is such a sad situation. On the one hand, the tech is legitimately outdated, and the company was struggling to make enough money to keep advancing its development. On the other hand, it improves the quality of life for a lot of people. Not being able to get any support with failing hardware is the worst possible outcome.
It would be amazing if, at the very least, the designs for these devices could be released to the world for free, so that people could find ways to hack on them and offer improvements. I know that there are other companies out there now, which are offering better, more modern solutions…but, being able to modify this tech easily would go a long way towards improving quality of life for patients with implants.
I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing to have some platforms be specialized around really particular kinds of activities, but I have like 7 different accounts floating around. It’s tiring. I’d really just prefer a good generalist platform and a handful of different apps that all hook into the same account.
That being said, I don’t mind the concept of following someone’s Pixelfed to see their neat photography pics, or another person’s PeerTube to watch their videos. In fact, if my hypothetical server can interoperate with them without any major issues, I’d consider that a win for me.
I somewhat agree with the author on how inter-instance politics can often feel like an endless, self-referential hellscape, but I feel like it’s not really that different between two separate forum communities that have beef with each other. It’s a problem as old as online communities. The only spot I kind of disagree on is the political compass thing; I do think that each quadrant represented is very much a sliding scale, and the user communities are much more variable than given credit.
That being said, I think a big chunk of the problem comes down to the fact that user-level moderation still isn’t a first class citizen in fediverse platforms. Things are a lot better than before, but I think users deserve to have the ability to easily filter and curate their online experience without being tedious.
My account is dsh_videos@video.deadsuperhero.com; right now there are three separate channels attached:
BreadTube runs a PeerTube instance that might fit what you’re looking for: https://watch.breadtube.tv