Max-P

It doesn’t have to be Mastodon or a social platform. It could just be a news/blog kinda deal that happens to support ActivityPub and people can subscribe to it to get it on their feeds.

Wouldn’t it still count like a USB stick though?

Because phones are a mess of out of tree patches specific to that phone model with zero hope of being upstreamed into the Linux kernel without a cleaner rewrite because it’s not good, it’s made to work and nothing more. They do stuff like just copy pasting the drivers into the project for the next chip, make some changes, and now you have several versions of the same driver for a whole bunch of slighly different chips. The community can’t keep up with that or make it generic enough.

It’s improved but companies like Qualcomm also used to basically drop the code to the manufacturers when the chip launches and then move on with little maintenance for the code and stop maintaining the code once the chip is not produced anymore. Manufacturers don’t have the expertise to maintain that forever nor the will, so you end up with a kernel that keeps aging and isn’t keeping up with Android and the community hasn’t been successful in integrating it all either.

Google’s been pushing hard for this to improve but they’re the only ones to even care. Samsung and others would much rather sell you a new phone.

There’s also the problem that phones don’t really have a BIOS, the kernel is expected to just know where the devices are via the device tree. So each phone needs a specially built kernel for it too.

Projects like LineageOS often manage to push those phones a couple versions longer but eventually interest dies as well because of kernel pains.

Good luck with “exhaustive” because people have different unique reasons to come to the fediverse. It would be a very long list.

For the average user I’d approach it with points that affects everyone:

• We can’t have a Twitter-style take over
• We can’t have a Reddit API disaster
• It’s distributed so while parts of the fediverse come and go, you’ll never lose the platform as a whole.
• It’s distributed geographically so one hostile country can’t silence information from other countries like Facebook and Twitter are doing.
• No algorithms designed to keep you scrolling forever
• No ads or commercial content being pushed by the algorithm
• Loads of choices for instances and moderation style for everyone’s taste.
• Users get to choose how they want to browse and with which apps: you’re not stuck with the latest crappy redesign you hate. You’ll never be forced to have reels and stories in your feed if you don’t want that.
• Not controlled by big corporations like Meta and Google, but rather the community for the community.
• If you have sensitive communities you can own the servers to ensure it’s survival in situations where Facebook would immediately ban that page/group.
• No bullshit AI products shoved in your face like Grok or Reddit Answers.
• You as a user are in control of what you see and don’t see.
• No advertiser friendly content policies forcing you to use stupid words like “unalive”, “pewpew”, “corn” or algorithmic downprioritization because you swore.
• If you prefer to browse Instagram-like, you still get to see Twitter-like post, and you friends can see your photos from a Twitter-like interface. Or you can have a Twitter-like interface and interact with Reddit-like posts on Lemmy.

It’s harder to onboard and figure out by the common people but it would be the final platform switch. You may move instances over time but you will never be left looking for a new platform because the old one enshittified. You just move to an instance that hasn’t, done.