It’s amazing how far a table scan will scale. But yes, I think replacing this by PostgreSQL Full Text Search will probably need to be done sooner than later.

This will give some benefits such as stemming but will have some tradeoffs such as only allowing searching by full words. (but for Lemmy this is probably what people want 99% of the time.)

Probably not? I rarely write but there are still times. I have a whiteboard in my living room that is sometimes useful for tracking games or whatever when people are over. When doing woodworking or construction making marks and writing down measurements is very convenient.

I could maybe see these be replaced by AR, but even 50 years seems too short for complete replacement.

I do think cursive will go away. It seems to already becoming very rare. At this point writing large amounts of text by hand is a niche feature and slight speed improvements seem marginally useful. At this point written will largely look like typed text which means that writing will still be easy, you just mirror what you see on the screen rather than learning a separate set of figures. (IDK how this applies to other languages.)

Probably not? I rarely write but there are still times. I have a whiteboard in my living room that is sometimes useful for tracking games or whatever when people are over. When doing woodworking or construction making marks and writing down measurements is very convenient.

I could maybe see these be replaced by AR, but even 50 years seems too short for complete replacement.

I do think cursive will go away. It seems to already becoming very rare. At this point writing large amounts of text by hand is a niche feature and slight speed improvements seem marginally useful. At this point written will largely look like typed text which means that writing will still be easy, you just mirror what you see on the screen rather than learning a separate set of figures. (IDK how this applies to other languages.)

I don’t think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.

1. Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
2. Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
3. Trust. Your identity is “owned” by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
4. Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.
5. Moderation. If they block too many other instances you won’t be able to see content that you want to see. If they block to little then you may be seeing content that you would rather not. Or the instance may be blocked by other instances if it becomes known for spamming.

Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.

I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.

To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).

Yes, that is a large part of what I meant by “development has picked up”. IIUC there are now multiple full-time devs on K9 (which I guess will be called Thunderbird Mobile or something eventually)

I use Thunderbird on desktop and K9 on mobile.

I can’t say I love either but I’ve tried a bunch of options and they were the best for me. Plus development has picked up on both recently so I hope they get polished up.

In settings there is a checkbox “Bot Account”. Just check it and save.