Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.

That happens if you don’t have an actual legal team… I am sure they are doing their best, but if you don’t have a lawyer, you can’t do legal texts.

Sorry, no condescension intended.

Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don’t have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

So to get on the same page, I’ll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

• You don’t like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
• The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
• The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
• You prefer a centralized system?
• You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
• ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

Is this correct?

We have a few contradictions here.

You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can’t just create a new small server and interact with the network.

Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can’t do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

Kbin has a single guy developing it.

That’s the real reason why the UX is crap.

If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don’t have to register for each forum.

E-mail. E-mail does support small servers.

Btw, I think you are mixing up a few topics here, so let’s see what you actually want.

• Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.
• Federated services don’t have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service not a distributed one. To clarify that: I cannot log into lemmy.world with my feddit.de accout, same as I cannot log into hotmail with my gmail account. In both cases I log into my instance/provider and this allows me to communicate with people on other instances/providers. Federation is the process of sharing content between instances. SSO on the other hand is a centralized service that then communicates with other services to let you log into these other services. For example, I can log into my Google account and then use this to login to other sites. This only works because people trust Google. This would not work as a decentralized service with untrusted servers.
• Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons. First, it’s a kind of caching mechanism distributing the load. If someone posts something on one instance, it’s transferred only once to the other instances which then serve it to all their users. Without duplication, each individual view would have to be requested again from the original instance. The other advantage is that the admins of all the instances retain control over the content. If the other instance goes offline, users can still see “their” copy of the content. And if the other instance doesn’t moderate their content, the mods/admins of your instance can do that themselves.

So as you see, these concepts aren’t there just for fun, but for a purpose.

There are two issues with that:

• The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
• If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.

Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)

That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.

I said: Code changes are easy, all the other things in regards to supporting playing on Linux (anticheat, support requests, testing, …) is hard.

You said: But code changes are easy because steam has libraries to unify distribution.

Do you see the problem here?

What are you going to tell me next? That code changes are easy?

It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.

• Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
• On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
• Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
• There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
• There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
• Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.

So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.

We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.

Emails also go to other’s servers.

But you could just host an IRC server.

But as soon as you interact with literally anyone (or anyone interacts with you) your data is still replicated on other servers.

And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

• Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
• Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
• Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
• Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.

That makes the babies even smaller.

That’s a good vintage. That one is fine. But it will make your baby smaller.

It sucks a lot when people are so deep in their petty trench fights over brands that they think there is only “Me for this, You for that, You simp”.

I don’t care about Epic and neither do I care for Steam. I buy my games where I get them the cheapest: Key resellers. And I don’t care on which online store the cheapest price lands.

If I was still developing games, I’d deploy them on both or on the one who pays me the most for an exclusivity deal.

With that out of the way: I am only explaining simple backgrounds to people interested to listen.

But sadly so many people fight over an online shop as if it was politics.

Do you fight like that for your favourite online retailer? Or your favourite supermarket chain?

What Steam and Epic do is business. They are no charities. They do stuff that makes them money. So any sane user should see it as a business transaction and buy where the price is best for what you get.

If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.

There’s a difference though.

If the game doesn’t work for (some or all) Linux users, that’s not a big problem from Epic’s POV. They’ll lose a couple users that wouldn’t have been able to play the game without Linux support anyway.

But if the Anticheat faills on Linux, that is a completely different story. Then cheaters would all dual boot over to Linux to cheat all they want. That’s now a problem for the whole game’s user base and consequently for the publisher as well.

Something as low-level as an Anticheat would have to be rewritten almost from scratch to work on Linux and this one really needs to be tested with every possible permutation of installed relevant software. Because if one combination is found where it doesn’t work, you can be sure that the day after every cheater will be running this config.

(Just to check, do you have a background in game development and/or low-level Windows/Linux programming? I got all of that and I can tell you, nothing that looks easy from the outside is actually easy. I think you are vastly underestimating how much work goes into something until it “just works as expected”)

Companies just because they have money doesn’t mean they know what they are doing. And sometimes even less than random people.

Well, if half a million people are guessing on a choice of two options, some are going to get it right. But that’s not due to the insight of the people, but due to numbers.

Every time someone makes the business argument all I can think of Microsoft flopping with Windows Phone despite all their money. Google failing with Stadia and losing opportunity they had with hangouts to imessage. LG bowing out of smartphones. Blackberry and Nokia too late to enter smartphones despite prior dominance. Epic was so late into trying their hand at digital distribution until 2018 when doing it earlier over the past decade would have made entry easier.

These examples really don’t apply here.

• Windows Phone, Blackberry and Nokia were caught up in a massive market change where they where too little and too late.
• Stadia was a purpously risky gamble to be first at a potential “next big thing” and was scrapped when the global economy crumbled and cloud gaming showed no signs of wide spread adoption. If anything, this is the opposite situation than Epic and Linux.
• Hangouts was renamed and merged with other Google chat apps, but in the end they now have messages, which is the messenger with the highest install count worldwide.
• EGS is still a comparably new thing, considering that Steam is in the market since ~20 years while the EGS is here only ~5 years. They are growing steadily, so this is not an example that we can look at in retrospect, because it’s still unfolding. Also, sure it would have been great if they would have had to run a game distribution platform in 2003, but their money shower didn’t start until Fortnite exploded in 2017. And they pretty much immediately got into the business when they had the money to.

Also, there are some other factors in play that you didn’t consider.

Smartphones exploded between 2007 and 2010. It went from nothing to almost everything in just a few years, and those who got lucky and where ready at the right time managed to take the new market. Windows Mobile proves that it’s not enough to be super early. You need the right timing in both directions.

There is no indication that Linux will have >50% market share among gamers within the next 3 years. Yes, it nudged Linux over the 3% mark but at that rate it’s going to take a long while. Also, contrary to smartphones vs feature phones, the steam deck is an additional gaming PC for on the go. It doesn’t replace desktop gaming.

Also, when it comes to mobile gaming, the Steam Deck is a distant fourth between Android, iOS and the Switch.

And even if you limit the scope to x86 mobile gaming, they are by far not the only competitor. There are lots of others, many of them using Windows, who do the same.

And the biggest edge the Steam Deck is it’s value, because Steam subsidizes the Deck with their Store sales. Most people don’t care whether it runs Linux or not.

Did you read the second line of my post?

The code changes aren’t the issue.

Lone indie devs don’t have to care about giving support to players, testing or cheaters.

So sure, if you completely ignore the difficult/expensive parts, the rest is super easy.

Apparently, their cost calculation is different. Also, Fortnite has about 50x active users compared to Apex Legends. That also changes a lot.

Sweeny said it doesn’t make business sense for them and if it will make sense in the future, they will support Linux.

I’m pretty sure that someone who does know their business figures and frequently has to justify them to shareholders has a better overview about what makes business sense for them than anyone of us.