I’m not some big technical guy, but there is a pretty fundamental difference in how the protocols work. Mastodon uses ActivityPub, Bluesky uses the AT Protocol.

ActivityPub is like email, it’s an exchange protocol. So basically you create a link between two accounts by “following” and that says “whenever A posts something, deliver it in this format to B”.

ATProto is a bit more complex. It’s based around the idea of nodes. A node in this sense is basically a pile of letters. If I decide to post something, that letter gets thrown into the pile with some info like user tags, etc. Another user somewhere else who follows me is in essence just telling their client “pull out all the letters that A has thrown into this pile and shown them to me”. And then you have a front facing client that displays the result of that filter in a convenient way. On the one hand, this is why topic lists (I think called collections?) are much easier/better in Bluesky because at the end of the day it’s just another filter onto the pile, whereas with an ActivityPub based collection would be a bit more complicated.

In practice what this basically means is that Bluesky is federated in name only. If the Bluesky board decided one day that you couldn’t post about cats, but I really wanted to post about cats, I would have to then host the node, the filtering apparatus, and (potentially) the front end. The node hosting specifically is the most technically onerous. If I wanted the Catsky node to federate with the Bluesky node, I would need to set up a tunnel between the two, then posts from Bluesky that the Catsky users would want to see would also be deposited into my node meaning my storage requirements would go up quickly. Conversely, you can run a stable Mastodon instance on a raspberry pi because you only need to be able to store what you want to see, not the entirety of the platform. I personally have only heard of one other successfully hosted node (Blacksky for Black Twitter refugees) and I’m not sure it federates with Bluesky.

In the end, Bluesky works a lot like OG Twitter, which was just a lump of storage and the actual product was the API, but with a couple ropes dangling out the sides with a sign saying “go ahead, hook up, and federate, we don’t mind”. This is unsurprising as Bluesky and the ATProto were made in essence by the OG Twitter people

My advice here then would be to buy a used Pixel from not Google (either through a carrier or a site like Newegg or Backmarket or similar). Google won’t get any additional cash, supports keeping waste out of the landfill, and you can use Graphene. For longevity, you can get used Pixel 9s and 9as for not too much so it’s still a decently new phone

Not sure how to do this

I’ve been trying, but haven’t found anything. When I first turned off secure boot, it worked great, but stopped working again once I updated

Going great! Loaded up Fedora on my HP laptop which has given it a new lease on life. Only downside is that it won’t just boot straight into the OS, otherwise GRUB freezes (not dual booting, secure boot is off), so I have to spam F9 on startup and select linux to boot into, then it works fine.

Started self-hosting some things on an old desktop I had lying around, and am planning on moving from iPhone to Graphene with my next phone

Sounds like I need you as my IT lol. Tried to convince them to let me use linux when I went remote as well, but I’m stuck with Adware 11

While I use a combination of Waterfox and LibreWolf on my personal computer, unfortunately for work I need to use a Chromium based browser to work with all of the corporate spynet type stuff. I used to use Opera for a decade plus but recently switched to Vivaldi because it feels more like OG Opera instead of an amalgamation of stuff

I’m interested where this comes from too. Is it just because they aren’t a FOSS project?

I’m not some great logician or anything, but in its most basic framing “You don’t need to worry about surveillance if you have nothing to hide” would be along the lines of a proving too much fallacy as the conclusion is much too broad for the argument of just having nothing to hide. As with a lot of informal fallacies (fallacies made due to content and/or context of the argument), you could probably ascribe a few of them to this statement, for example you could probably correctly state that this is a thought-terminating cliché as well.

Depending on how it is deployed, as described in one of the comments of the linked post, this could also constitute a formal fallacy (reasoning with a flaw in its structure), specifically denying the antecedent. As a TL;DR, the structure would have to be “If you have something to hide then you should worry about surveillance [if p then q], therefore if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t worry about surveillance [if !p then !q]”.

In my personal view call it a fallacy or not, the strongest arguments against “nothing to hide” have nothing to do with its fallacious nature or lack thereof. Additionally, demonstrating that an argument is fallacious just demonstrates that the argument needs to be reconstructed, rephrased, or better supported, not that its conclusion is false (else you fall victim to argument from fallacy, aka the fallacy fallacy).