Skip to content
Thoughtful, detailed coverage of everything Apple for 33 years
and the TidBITS Content Network for Apple professionals
Show full articles

#1644: Explaining Mastodon and the Fediverse, HomePod Software 16.3 and tvOS 16.3, GoTo breach

With Twitter awash in controversy surrounding pretty much everything Elon Musk does, millions of people are decamping to Mastodon. But, as Glenn Fleishman explains in a pair of in-depth articles, Mastodon is only superficially a Twitter replacement. Underneath a familiar microblogging interface, Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse, a distributed, community-driven infrastructure that hearkens back to the early days of the Internet, when our lives weren’t ruled by tech giants. It can take a bit to get started with Mastodon, but the friendlier community and lack of drama may be worth it. Also this week, Apple finished off its latest operating system release by pushing out tvOS 16.3 and the rather interesting HomePod Software 16.3. Our ExtraBIT this week points you to the acknowledgment from GoTo that data stolen in the breach of its LastPass subsidiary also contained sensitive information about GoTo users. Notable Mac app releases this week include Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher 2.0.4, BusyCal 2023.1.1, MarsEdit 5.0.2, and Lunar 5.9.5.

Glenn Fleishman 6 comments

Is Your Future Distributed? Welcome to the Fediverse!

A growing set of services let users on independently operated servers interlink with standard, open-source protocols for microblogging, photo sharing, and dozens of other purposes. Could the Fediverse be a solution to the ugliness of commercial service algorithms designed to drive outrage and titillation?

Watchlist

Lunar 5.9.5 Agen Schmitz No comments

Lunar 5.9.5

Display brightness control utility adds support for the new M2-series MacBook Pro models. ($23 new, free update, 21.7 MB, macOS 11+)

ExtraBITS