Afaik all 2-letter TLDs are ccTLDs, which means they must be a country code of some country and are managed by it. There's no country with "os" yet, so to make the TLD available one would need to found a new country first!
This is extremely unethical to offer as a service. Apple account credentials have to be stored as plain text to continuously reauthenticate with apple's servers and the broken e2e means they can store whatever they want from your messages (as well as all other parts of your apple account, like photos and icloud backups).
If they wanted to do this properly the answer is to reverse engineer whatever protocol imessage uses under the hood and make their own client - this is most likely just a simple rebrand of the few FOSS tools that already do the same imessage relay thing.
And of course, when apple inevitable does fight this, the average person will chimp out thinking it's apple doing apple things when in reality no other company would allow a third party to harvest their user's credentials and data in this manner.
There are of course significantly less users compared to the main instance, but it should give you some confidence that federation dev work is on the right track.
Well, for one you can download all data on the network (posts, likes, follows, ...) using a free public API, even in real-time. If you want to try Bluesky without an invite code, you can run your own PDS (personal data server) today and federate with the official sandbox network, there are already 100 servers doing that: https://atscan.net/pds
You can download and keep your data and keep a backup, it's all content-addressed (like git repos), and just upload to another instance
Like moving from GitHub to GitLab.
Each instance then has its own moderation policies, again, kind of like GitHub. But your identity is still your identity, and you can keep a copy of your data.
> You can download and keep your data and keep a backup
> and you can keep a copy of your data
Is this really a selling point / concern for anyone? I’ve never heard anyone express that the problem with tradition social media is that they can’t download and keep a backup of their data. Its about a central corporation being able to decide what is allowed to be said.
That specifically is not the selling point, but it is how one of the selling points works.
You can just take your data to another instance whenever you don’t agree with the policies of your current one. And all your connections/interactions/data should stay intact.
If it works as well as it seems to in the federation sandbox, you shouldn’t even be able to tell that you’re using a different service, the app just sends requests to a different server, and the web url may be different, and your default feeds are generated somewhere else.
Now, you may say that users won’t care about backing up their data, but that can be solved with some open (or paid) archival services.
As far as I know, It's not decentralised at all at the moment.
But do you have more info on this wiping data and removing people claim? All I've seen is people pissy because someone wasn't banned for something rather minor.
I am working on a very similar project (decentralized app distribution on Android) called SkyDroid (https://skydroid.app/), with the difference that it is based on Sia Skynet (a Filecoin/IPFS competitor) and uses the DNS system for global app discovery - so for example the SkyDroid app itself is available on the skydroid.app domain inside of it. I'm curious about how they will try to solve the discovery issue, because if they just have one global decentralized pool of apps, it will be very hard to ensure that no malicious apps get in. But if they keep it a central repository of apps trusted by F-Droid by default, there's not really much decentralization going on. Most developers would still publish their apps in the main repo directly.
We're taking a hybrid approach right now, where we incorporate IPFS support into our working stack. Then we can transition more and more to IPFS as it proves mature enough to replace the more centralized methods.
> it will be very hard to ensure that no malicious apps get in
Well isn't the whole idea of F-Droid is that the app can be build from the source that is available and the build checksum will match the source from anyone? Sure there can be malicious code, but code for that malicious code will also be available publicly.
SkyDroid can update apps without user interaction (even on non-rooted devices) using a workaround which requires a one-time ADB setup. You however still need to open SkyDroid and click a button to start the mass-update process, but this is an intentional design decision - it makes sense to check which app updates are available before blindly updating everything.
