Jajcus

URLs are definitely encrypted. What can be sent unencrypted are domain names and IP addresses. Which is not a problem when the host name is ‘youtube.com’, but is a bigger problem if it is ‘the-terrorists.com’.

Europe used to laugh at American big cars, but recently the cars on our roads get bigger and bigger too :-(

What is more interesting, Google came as a more friendly alternative, with drastically less ads than Alta Vista and other search engines of that time had. Today’s Google is only just approaching now the amount of ads on the search results page that those had. It is just a bit smarter about mixing ads with actual search results and the ads are more targeted (which is not necessarily a good thing).

Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.

I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.

Non-federated services keep data on their servers or share it with well-defined set of partners. This can be be done in accordance to GDPR. In fediverse that data is broadcasted to anybody who wants to listen (this make the network open). That is a big difference.

But e-mail is sent from one entity to another, through servers providing service for one or the other party. Most of Lemmy and Mastodon activities are publicly broadcasted and can be received and collected by any federated server.