It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.
Ok it's not growing at the crazy rate that hit when news of the Musk twitter takeover broke. That's not a bad thing as the infrastructure couldn't sustain it, but it is growing.
I'm following @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social and it reports a consistent steady growth in the number of user accounts. As of 48 mins ago ..
12,811,208 accounts
+594 in the last hour
+2,367 in the last day
+195,778 in the last week.
.. and it's quite typical to have just over 200k new accounts a week.
Then there was the news that on the 17th April 2023 the number of monthly posts across the Fediverse crossed one billion for the first time.
Personally my timelines are a hive of activity, far more than I can possibly keep up with.
My biggest anxiety with hardware-backed security is what happens if someone breaks into my house and steals my laptop and phone. Today I would buy a new laptop, login to Bitwarden using my strong memorised master password and carry on. If everything about me is linked to hardware-backed passkeys then my digital life walks out the door with the thief.
This is a totally valid concern. A mitigation is to have some other device or mechanism to generate a device that's part of sync fabric in escrow somewhere else. Of course, this introduces two new problems: Where do you keep it in escrow, and how do you authenticate to that escrow service given that your authenticators are gone. Safe deposit boxes are one alternative: They're authenticated by your presence and government-issued ID. Apple uses a 24-character key and keeps the encrypted record in its HSMs. Crypto wallets tend to use a 24-word recovery phrase to derive a key. These last two options you could also escrow with a third party or maybe even memorize.
For what it's worth, it's not an inherent problem with hardware backed security, at least not in the context that I was talking about. If you were using pure software implementations of WebAuthn, you could also authenticate to that sync fabric only using WebAuthn and you'd have that exact same problem you're describing.
I live in Northern Ireland (also part of the UK) and we're very well served here too. I switched from copper to fibre about a month back. Could have gone 1Gb but chose a cheaper 500Gb DOWN / 75Mb UP package (no data limits) as I didn't think I'd notice the difference. Speed tests show I get very close to both. Very happy.
And? If you don't trust TLS then I assume you don't trust web banking, or purchasing anything over the internet for that matter. Might as well give up on technology and go find yourself a nice quiet pastoral life.
For me personally, I don't actually trust any of that.
Any purchase I do online is done with a virtual card that links to a bank account that only ever has the amount I need to pay for whatever it is I am currently purchasing. That way it doesn't matter if the information is stolen etc. because there is no more money to use and I can cancel the card as easily as I can create a new.
For banking I also only use my banks official app, I don't know how exactly it works and I assume it does use some form of http and whatnot, but I wouldn't trust using a bank through the browser as you never know what kind of thing an extension or something have in there.
I trust the cryptography behind TLS. I don’t trust every website using TLS. The difference between end-to-end encryption and transport-layer encryption is the website operator can recover the plaintext. And the point of the comment I responded to was that Bitwarden data is not recoverable. I’m glad that you think E2EE is a waste of effort though.
Following up, I find it funny that this old meme comment thought orders and banking are our most trusted activities, and not our communications and data storage.
ChromeOS runs Debian in an LXD container. You can install desktop apps in it (e.g. using Flatpak) and they appear as launchable icons on the ChromeOS desktop. Being LXD you're not just limited to one container either. I have additional multiple containers with Ubuntu and AlmaLinux on my Chromebook and can use other LXD features to snapshot and publish them as required. This is far from being "useless".
You can? I thought it ran on a totally nonstandard stack meaning no X, PulseAudio, systemd etc. How do regular Linux apps work? Is there some sort of compatibility layer?
