For example it is terribly difficult to self host email, and very few people actually do it.
I read this a bunch of times and put off trying it because it sounded like such a hassle. Eventually I did and… it wasn’t bad at all. I just had to add a few extra DNS entries. I haven’t had any delivery problems.
Sort of. This is apparently done on-protocol so anyone can issue verifications, but they’re only shown in the official client if they’re from BlueSky or someone approved by BlueSky.
A better way to do this would be to let users subscribe to verifiers the way they can labelers. Better still would be for the label to indicate what the verifier has verified about the account, like “nytimes.com says this person is an employee of the New York Times”, which is something labelers can already do.
So I really think they should have just leaned into labelers.
It appears to depend on Bluesky designating entities to do the verification.
I think the existing domain-based verification system is a better way of doing that. Something like Mastodon’s verified links might be a nice addition. This more centralized system is… not what I hoped for.
I’ve read that it’s because fairphone has to pay a fee for each unlocked device, but it sounds a little weird so no idea if that’s real.
The posts seem to suggest that Google is charging them a fee in that case, but that would be a little surprising given Pixels have a no-fuss unlock, and Google permits third parties to redistribute its proprietary add-ons to Android free of charge for installation by end users.
In any case, you’ve convinced me this probably isn’t Fairphone being evil, though some sort of public explanation would be nice.
I don’t understand why this requires a code rather than a toggle in developer settings like a Pixel. That doesn’t seem like openness and a commitment to treating users fairly since they could change their policy at any time.
Maybe. The bad actor here seems to be the government of China, and the linked page says:
The individuals most at risk include anyone connected to: Taiwanese independence; Tibetan rights; Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in or from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; democracy advocacy, including Hong Kong, and the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
I can imagine them casting a wide net.
It’s on a VPS. Whether that’s really self-hosted may depend on how much of a purist you are, but it’s fully self-managed, not SAAS.
It’s recommended to have a PTR record mapping your IP address to your domain, which you wouldn’t be able to do with a residential connection from a typical ISP. I do send mail from multiple domains though and I haven’t had issues with deliverability. What I do not send is any kind of high-volume mail, which would likely attract a different kind of scrutiny.