The problems that plagues Mastodon at the time have all been fixed as far as I know, but it's too late now. Other, more difficult problems remain, like the inconsistencies between server on how many likes/comments a post has and the inevitable perception that you need to create an account on every server to follow people because the follow button doesn't work by itself even if you're logged into your account in another tab.
People don't join a social media platform to go on an adventure and see what every button does. They came looking for a new Twitter rather than a new experience and Mastodon, and kind of still is, a bad Twitter. It's a great Mastodon, but that's just not what most people were after.
I agree and I personally think the whole preemptive Threads ban is stupid in general, but at least one major bridge has had to be turned off because people on the Mastodon/ActivityPub side of things got angry. I don't mean the people behind ActivityPub of course, I'm sure they were chuffed their protocol got buy-in from a major player.
If anything, large corporations using open standards is better, even in situations like Google Talk where Facebook and Google dominated the protocol for a while; at least the protocol is useful for regular people.
AKAIK, activitypub (on mastodon) only requests and receives content from individual users that have been followed by someone on the local instance, it wouldn't load all of bluesky at once, it would just need to have an up to date database of bluesky's users so they are easily searchable. With that model, even crappy PC's can interact with the mega servers.
Yes, but that's how you end up with the "I don't have anyone to follow" situation that people left Mastodon for during the first wave of the Twitter collapse. Now Mastodon has a feed of sorts, but for small servers (I host my own) you have to know the accounts of the people you want to follow, nothing will show up organically.
With the OP's point of ATProto being open-source, I assume the thrust of the argument is that at done point there would be a community hosted instance, which were it compatible, I think most activitypub se rvers would gladly federate with.
You can run your own ATProto servers but it the millions of accounts I think maybe 500 to a 1000 users aren't on the Bluesky instance. You'll have to ask the people who complained.
Ideally there doesn't need to be any, as the conglomeration of all smaller instances should be able to act as a large server. Unfortunately as it currently stands, the UI of most fediverse software makes interacting with that wider pool more difficult than it needs to be, and thus punishes smaller Mastodon servers with more difficult discovery of interesting topics or people to follow. But I think that can be overcome simply with better UI design.
From my attempts of convincing people to give Mastodon a try, the federation aspect confuses and scares the normal user. It's also what taught me that most people don't seem to realise that you can read your Gmail email without downloading the Gmail app. And that most people don't realise that mail servers can and will refuse email from other servers as they see fit. My expectations about how well-informed people who email every day are about the core concepts of email were way to high. It's stupid but it explains a lot of stupid questions I've heard of the years.
A large part of the problem is UX, following someone on another server is a massive hurdle that could be overcome (just register a web protocol so we can make links targeting web-activitypub:follow:user@domain, that way websites and apps can follow people without having to enter your username when you click follow...) but change is slow and there are many different projects that all have their own challenges to overcome.
Again, I think that's a UI problem. I don't use mastodon myself because of it, as I find it difficult to find people that interest me. However, Lemmy's use of Topics, and more critically, the existence of Lemmyverse.net which searches across all instances, make finding interesting things possible regardless of the size of your home instance. It's criminal that that functionality is not a native feature in the standard lemmy Ui, and I'm not aware of anything similar for mastodon.
ActivityPub just brings a lot of overhead. Especially with the way Lemmy uses it, which ensures that you actually get a somewhat view or the current replies on a post. My Lemmy server is constantly spiking in CPU usage because I've joined a few larger Lemmy instances. There's a constant steam of opening and closing HTTPS sockets, constant TLS key exchanges, and often minutes of latency submitting posts in burst. This is tough to optimise for without reaching out and coming to an agreement with every other server owner. ActivityPub is way more efficient for small communities than ATProto ever will be (because it doesn't take long to cache all keys and only the involved servers gain the information they need), but for larger servers that provide a more "social media" feel, you need to employ active scrapers.
As for the lemmyverse.net thing: you can't build that into Lemmy without sacrificing some level of independence. A fresh Lemmy server doesn't know about any other Lemmy servers so it can't suggest anything. You could add support for third party Lemmy directory services, but then the server owner of lemmyverse gets to decide what servers get to see what other servers out or the gate. Sounds like a good feature for the Lemmy devs to consider, but I'm not sure if they'd accept the pull request without discussing this beforehand. Plus, someone will have to update every Lemmy app as well (and apps can already integrate with lemmyverse of course).
ATProto exists because of ActivityPub's shortcomings for building Twitter 2.0. The protocol is much better suited for massive websites, and the "run your own data store but let someone else do the content tagging and filtering" approach is actually not a bad idea. The Bluesky firehose throughput is massive and any home ActivityPub instance that tried to enter the network would easily be overwhelmed just loading the basic home page feed. The Bluesky servers probably wouldn't enjoy the endless connections back home to verify the key material either.
Plus, many ActivityPub folks don't want to federate with big companies anyway. Threads is blocked by most small servers. A bridging service intended for allowing ATProto/ActivityPub cross communication was the center point of drama as well and had to go opt-in (and instantly became useless as a way to connect the two networks because nobody knows about the service anyway).
I don't think ActivityPub is made for large servers, and I don't think the protocol can be patched to support them well without upsetting a lot of people. AP works well for following friends and family, it's kind of terrible for the tailored topic based social media feed most people want out of social media apps these days.
They have to be pretty obvious because they need to have a directed beam running at something like 12W per direction to get more than a few meters of range, and that assumes you have a massive antenna (credit card shaped at the very least) in visual range. In theory you could use beamforming to hide the antenna better but you'd be sucking in and continously transmitting a lot of power just to scan tags on cars.
It doesn't make sense anyway. Everyone carrying at least one 4G capable device with them at all times these days. It they're not, they probably have a mandatory cell phone/WiFi beacon/Bluetooth beacon of some sort embedded in their cars. The government can track everyone's moves exactly if they wanted to, from kilometers away. Why waste kilowatts per street on RFID scanners when people give their location away for free anyway?
If these tags worked well enough for location tracking, I would've expected a lot more presence detection hardware for smart homes to use them.
UHF RFID and the passive RFID injected into people's skin are quite different technology. The credit card sized antenna combined with a directed radio signal (and a license plate scanner for backup) can do several meters, but a tag in your body won't be readable beyond a few centimeters. Unless you use an active radio, of course, but then you need to power that radio somehow.
4G can track you to a few meters accuracy easily. Probably even better if you're in a city. If cell response timings don't give away your location, there's a mechanism in your phone intended for emergency services that will have your phone turn on GPS and send back your current position automatically, initiated from over the network. Best to assume your carrier knows exactly where your phone is (as well as your car, as modern cars come with cellular modems as well).
mmWave 5G will give away your exact location all of the time. Exact as in down to the centimeter or less. The intent for 5G is to put a small transmitter on every street light so everyone gets gigabit internet everywhere.
This all works because these are active protocols. Passive protocols like RFID won't be very useful for tracking people. It's why airtags use Bluetooth and UWB for detection rather than RFID.
Downloading apps off app stores is easy. These sketchy websites can actually be real useful when developers decide to geolock their apps (i.e. when a local ride sharing app won't download because your Google account isn't from the country you're visiting). apkmirror has also helped me obtain various Google apps that didn't come with my phone's custom ROM, though that's one of the good ones that doesn't alter apps.
Many of the sketchier will take apps and alter it to inject malware, though. By removing in-app purchases/ads/DRM with tools like lucky patcher they can explain away why people's phones are calling these apps malware (because the alterations are to be expected), but the goal was never to give people free stuff, there's always money behind it.
The difference between movies then and now is that back then being gay, transgender, or wearing clothes not befitting your birth sex in general was always paid as a joke. Haha, everyone point at the man in the dress and laugh. These days media is starting to accept that sometimes someone born with a penis actually likes wearing a dress, and not just as a sex thing or a comedy bit.
Drag is kind of an outlier, but as far as I know that never had much of a mainstream appeal in most places. I think the exaggeration helps acceptance a bit, for close-minded people the excess can be interpreted as "someone putting on an act like in a play" rather than "someone wants to be something which my small world view cannot comprehend".
On the other hand, feminist empowerment made it pretty normal for women to wear suits many decades ago, despite the weirdoes disgusted by the idea of women wearing suits. These days, only dresses and skirts are treated weirdly by western media (unless they're Scottish skirts, of course, those are fine for Scottish men to wear because they get a special name).
A large part of credit card fees usually come from the banks themselves. Some businesses just increase their prices to cover the cost but that's not really a thing here, so credit card users will pay more by default. 11% sounds high (twice the amount for a non-EER card) but if you're using a card that's rarely accepted in a store rather than an ATM, the fee doesn't sound too extreme. I'm pretty sure I've paid more in Budapest.
That said, I've never heard of store cashback being called an ATM. You can get that in some stores, but it's usually not exactly an advertised feature. The fact it was a tourist shop makes me think they're doing this to take advantage of tourists who don't know any better. I don't think it's illegal per se, just a terrible deal nobody should take. There are real, legitimate ATMs around (most of them labeled "geldmaat" but there are others, like the GWX branded ones) that should be less sketchy. You can find them on most map apps (openstreetmaps have them, which Apple and Google regularly import data from).
It should be noted that even with "official" ATMs there are also fees for using non-EU cards but at least they're publicly documented. These are tiered prices, so depending on how much you withdraw there's a fee between 95% to 1% for using these services. These ATMs should give you the DCC option, though, after which the payment processing fee becomes 5%. So, when withdrawing more than 100 euros, going non-DCC may be cheaper, but you'll have to do the math on that.
These percentages are kind of shit because banks treat each other like shit. Foreign banks charge European banks through the nose, so European banks return the favour. For out of network cards, the foreign bank is essentially taking on all the risk, as stolen credit cards can hit banks with chargebacks and there's not much a foreign bank can do. Even with debit cards the bank is often paying out long before they'll get their money back from your bank, if at all, because the systems aren't lined up for direct transfer. Wiring cash from the EER to the USA can take ages because of this stuff and you're not waiting three to five business days to withdraw your cash from an ATM! Neither the EER nor the non-EER banks are eager to alter their payment infrastructure to take on the risk themselves, so you get terrible rates and a terrible experience to boot.
As for Maestro, that's on its way out because Mastercard (which is behind Maestro) is shutting down the system. Dutch banks are moving towards Mastercard debit cards now. I don't think I've seen someone use a Visa credit card here (I don't think they're accepted often), though the Visa sub brand V-Pay does get used by Dutch banks. The big difference between here and many other countries isn't necessarily the Visa vs Mastercard distinction, but rather debit versus credit. Credit cards are pretty rare and they generally cost more for little benefit, so they're rarely used. And, because you're not borrowing money, the payment processing fees are generally lower too, which helps keep prices down. Dutch credit cards also don't usually come with stuff like cashbacks (which really are just a bank's customers paying for their own "gifts" from the bank, a ridiculous system IMO) so there's little reason to use them. As a result, many stores will either not pay for credit card processing capabilities or have the worst possible deals/surcharges because the probability of someone coming in with a Visa credit card is just so low that it's not worth the monthly fee. It you're staying here for a while, you're better off taking out a European bank account (one of those online banks will do) and using that to pay, because EER debit card fees are almost always 0% here.
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On Windows 11 you can select+copy text after taking a screenshot with the snipping tool. I think the same goes on macOS if you have games that run on that. iOS does the same, Android does it either natively or from the Lens app depending on the manufacturer.
CAPTCHAs are made specifically so computers have trouble reading them, so you'll need more advanced software for those. I also don't know of any tools that do this for live video if you're looking into automating this.
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