Scott M. Stolz

I think Hubzilla and Friendica are its only links to the rest of the Fediverse. Both support ActivityPub and Diaspora.

I guess I missed the drama. But it is to be expected. Many people came from centralized social media, and simply signed up for something their friends told them about. For those people, they learned about federation after the fact. It is a new concept for a lot of people.

I didn’t realize that Neil changed his name. ;)

The third logo is Gravatar, which allows you to set an avatar associated with your email. It is mostly used by blog platforms such as WordPress to associate an avatar with your comments. Many other platforms, such as Hubzilla and many forums, support Gravatar.

The biggest issue is economies of scale. Browser engines generally require a lot more coding and maintenance than social media software does (unless you are engineering to be the next Twitter will millions of users). This means more people involved and more organization is required than your typical ActivityPub-related project.

There actually have been many alternate browsers proposed and built, but they usually wind up being abandoned because of the lack of adoption and the amount of work it takes.

And, depending on the type of changes you are making, sometimes it is better to just use what someone else has built and modify it. That is why we have Waterfox, Opera, Brave, and numerous other browsers that use Chromium or Firefox as the base. Why build an entire car, when you can repaint it, change out the seats, add a quality sound system, and swap out the wheels for something nicer?

I do think that there needs to be more choices for browser engines, but I am not sure decentralization is the right word. What we need is more competition, or put another way, more players. The standards are open, so anyone with resources can build a browser. It is a matter of whether people will use the new browsers.

This sounds interesting. I would love to hear about how it could integrate with other platforms.