Unmoderated user generated nsfw forums were (are?) a beacon for dubious to illegal content. I forget the specifics, but didnât Pornhub have to pivot from accepting a firehose of free user submitted content after failing to moderate sufficiently? User generated nsfw + free just seems like an impossible balance.
Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesnât seem exceptionally high.
The rise of distributed computing was at a time that CPUs didnât really throttle down. CPUs in general were just a lot more power hungry. But if you had to leave the computer on for some reason and had spare CPU cycles, it made sense to contribute them to a distributed computing project - the power was being spent anyway and it seemed like a good cause. Today, modern CPU sip power and throttle down and you are actively driving power consumption by taxing the CPU. There is a much less favorable cost/benefit equation today, but in terms of the cost of the power consumed AND the climate cost of the power consumed.
I donât use SimpleX, but itâs hard to argue against a well developed open source privacy focused messaging app. There are a million âprivacy-focusedâ messengers out there with various flaws around security or sustainability. Matrix is great but the goals seem a little different. Plus, it wasnât that long ago that Matrix was struggling to find funding.
Good to see prose moving along.