I’m content if my shoe cost is under $10/month. You’re just over a tenth that. It would be hard to get the number lower and still have reasonable comfort and protection from the shoes.

It had been the norm for phones, then Android came along and a much more PC-like level of capability became the norm for phones. SafetyNet didn’t show up until five years later and it didn’t get significant negative press.

It’s weird this didn’t get more pushback on mobile. Even the mainstream press was critical when Microsoft proposed it for PCs.

What happened to old Internet Forums?

Some of them still exist; some of them shut down. It’s not just a matter of Reddit siphoning off all the users (though that’s a factor), but that administering and moderating forums is a lot of work without a lot of reward. In addition to the baseline effort being significant, a changing landscape including reduced organic search traffic, more spam, and increased legal liability in some jurisdictions has reduced the number of people who want to attempt it.

banned for not adhering to Left Wing orthodoxy

Reddit has many problems, but in my experience this is not one of them. Of course you’re very likely to be banned if you bring politics into a community that isn’t about politics.

a mid tier graphics card?

GPU inflation is getting silly when 1000€ is just mid-tier.

I’m sure there are several I would consider fine for me.

I’m skeptical that they can be fine for someone who doesn’t know what federation means, isn’t especially upset that a handful of megacorporations control most human communication, and already finds the fact that I’m asking them to use anything different from what they’re used to annoying. XMPP has more things for the end user to think about than Signal does even if a client is very polished.

Huawei was forced to offer non-Google Android due to USA sanctions. I don’t know whether that has created difficulties for them in the Chinese market, but a quick search shows a significant decline in market share in Europe.

I do think Amazon launching an Android phone in 2014 without Google’s ecosystem is the main reason Google launched SafetyNet. Of course the Fire Phone failed because it wasn’t very good and Amazon didn’t iterate, but I imagine Google didn’t want them or anyone else to try again.

Sometimes people make things that are useful to Google or find bugs for them. It has no meaningful cost to them as long as non-Google Android isn’t appealing to mainstream users.

That’s a risk, and a reason I’d like to see something federated succeed in this space. Unfortunately neither Matrix nor XMPP has managed to achieve quite the level of UX necessary for mainstream adoption, nor have the average person’s tech skills and comfort level improved.

Signal’s status as a well-funded nonprofit gives me hope that the current situation is reasonably stable.

No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal’s key exchange and encryption. WhatsApp was an independent company for years and had rejected several acquisition offers, but $19 billion is a big number.

One of WhatsApp’s founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.

Mastodon’s federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.

Servers don’t remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There’s work being done on both, but I’m surprised it wasn’t prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.

I think the fediverse has a built-in legal risk in that any time someone posts, data is sent to a large number of servers when then make it available via the web or sometimes push it to additional servers (e.g. by user boosts or community subscriptions). This is currently done without any explicit license for the IP contained in that post.

I’m inclined to think that irrevocable permissions are the right thing here, in large part because it’s impossible to guarantee that any subsequent signal from the original poster propagates to everyone who has a copy of that post, or that the server software responds how someone else expects it will.

There is a legal basis: congress passed a law, the president at the time signed it, TikTok sued, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against TikTok. That’s a legal basis by definition.

Perhaps you mean that there is no rational basis. That’s a reasonable position you can argue for.

I use a variation of this approach to display fediverse comments on a statically-generated site. It does involve a manual post to Mastodon, but I’m not very inclined to redo the whole site.

No single entity can ruin it. We’ve seen that happen over and over when someone’s political or economic goals conflict with user interests.

BlueSky actually talks about this quite a bit, viewing the company as a potential future adversary of the current developers’ goals. I’m not sure their design choices align with that in practice, but they articulate the argument well.

Another cool thing is the broader reach federation provides. Someone with a Wordpress site need only install a plugin and people can follow it with Mastodon and the like. Tag a community in a post and it shows up on Lemmy too. This is underused so far, but I hope to see it continue to grow.

And that is what I would recommend against, even on a server that does not ban that age. If someone’s (young) age is relevant to a discussion they wish to participate in, I would suggest a throwaway account.

How were they revealed?

Why do you care?

If it’s just about following the rules as a matter of principle, I suggest not doing that. Nobody is checking, and saying your exact age on public social media is oversharing anyway.

If it’s about content moderation being strict enough to satisfy some comfort level, I wouldn’t rely on that, but I also think 13 is old enough to start learning there are shitty people online and how to deal with them, preferably with some adult support.

Android, iOS, or desktop?

I’ve noticed the occasional slow delivery, but I have had reason to believe the recipient has an unstable internet connection when that has happened.

When I have a reason to use a Chromium-based browser, it’s usually Ungoogled Chromium. Otherwise, I use Firefox, and I’ve been playing with Waterfox in case Firefox ever asks me to agree to the terms of service that were discussed a little while back.