One edge case that I really want to see the team nail down is crash loops. In the EPTU build of 3.23, we noticed situations where recovery effectively acted like a rewind feature, but didn't actually prevent the cause of a crash from happening.
Having to experience a handful of the same crashes during a single play session is pretty painful.
Honestly? I'm loving it. The biggest improvement for me was getting rid of those awful PIT menus that were ugly and sometimes hard to use. The new system is way more usable, and I'm tweaking the mappings on my controller to see what feels the most usable.
The improvement to EVA is also phenomenally good. You move a bit faster, there's more precision, and traversal between EVA and ship is much smoother. As a salvager that gets in and out to scavenge cargo holds, this is a big deal to me.
The character customizer is also really fun to use, and feels pretty intuitive to use. There's still work to be done in explaining what all of these vertices do, but I think the customization is a lot more flexible.
Some pretty nasty bugs emerged in 3.23 and 3.23.1, but it seems like the team is making pretty good progress on improvements? So, there's that.
Basically, it's the second half of ActivityPub that's for mapping an instance to clients. Most platforms on Fedi use bespoke APIs or copy Mastodon, but C2S is kind of more fluid and lets you build custom experiences and logic that hooks into it?
What's cool about Vocata is that you can kind of just make up the vocab and activity you send out the Outbox. Vocata just shrugs and says "whatever, that's valid."
It could be brilliant for prototyping.
Honestly, I think this is an extremely cynical take. It takes a lot of effort to organize and run something like this, and nobody is getting rich off of it. If anything, it's pretty meagre compensation to set off infrastructure and organizational costs.
The talks themselves are also a informed by privacy concerns: some attendees are fine with being directly cited in notes / recorded / talked about, but a lot of people just wanted to be part of conversations and do not want that.
I think some of your suggestions in your last paragraph are actually pretty good, but I also think it's a little unfair to make demands here. No aspect of running this thing is easy, and the whole "why don't they just?" attitude from the sidelines is kind of unsavory when a lot of us went out of our way to pay extra to make sure there were more than enough $1.99 "almost free" tickets.
Like, if that's not good enough for you, I'm pretty sure nothing is.
So...it does do what it sets out to do, just not in the way you would think.
ActivityPods doesn't bring Solid to ActivityPub accounts. It brings ActivityPub protocol capabilities to Solid Pods. The reason this is significant is because Fediverse platforms historically use relational databases, whereas this is like using Google Drive and files to create a graph database. Additionally, ActivityPods is a framework for building apps on top of.
Damon, my friend and co-founder at We Distribute, is building a really killer app on top of it called Memory.
Nostr is more of a protocol / network in and of itself, as is Scuttlebutt. Both legitimate efforts in their own right, but not quite Fediverse in the traditional sense. Though, with bridging, it's getting harder to tell where one starts, and another stops.
Regardless, I would love to start a list of really esoteric Fedi software like what I have above. I know there's more, it's just harder to dig up.
Let me think...
That's just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there's more.
There were a variety of price points, including $1.99 tickets for people who couldn't afford more. General Tickets were 40 bucks, but quite a few people spent more to sponsor the cheap tickets to help out. Only corporate attendees paid $250 per person.
The demos were recorded and uploaded, extensive notes for each breakout session were written, and some of us did live-blogging for the entire day while attending. The general format of an unconference is pretty grassroots, conversational, and informal.
It's the third event of its kind, bringing in a wide variety of people building different parts of the Fediverse, from Trust & Safety to standards bodies to developers and advocates. There's a lot of awesome things happening as people try to grapple with some of the biggest challenges the network has ever had.
There are a handful of decent instances, but you really have to dig to find stuff, sadly. I run Spectra Video and basically have to curate sign-ups and which servers we follow.
It helps cut down on a lot of the crap, but it takes work.
Good to know, I was wondering about that!
It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.
I mostly meant the old system where all options were just a bunch of floating neon text. It was...functional, I guess, but the new system is so much better from a controller perspective. It's not perfect yet, things like elevator buttons are still in a weird spot, but most things are a lot easier to deal with.