lvxferre

lvxferre , 6 days ago

If you're in doubt if some content violates the rules, report it, and let the mods decide if it's okay or not okay. That is not abuse of the report function.

Include a short description on why you're reporting some piece of content. Specially in larger comms, the mod queue can get really large. If reasonable mention the rule being violated; a simple "r1 off topic" goes a long way.

Context is everything. If what a user said only sounds bad in a certain context, say it. If the user is clearly problematic due to their profile, say it.

You're probably better off not interacting with the content that you're reporting.

Don't boss the other users around. It's fine to be informative; it is not fine to act as a moderator when you are not one. If moderative intervention is necessary, report it.

Stop giving shitty mods a free pass. Honest mistakes happen; but if the mod in question is assumptive, disingenuous, trigger-happy, or eager to enable certain shitty types of user, spread the word about their comm being poorly moderated. And don't interact directly with the comm. I think that at least here in the Fediverse we should demand higher standards from our mods.

lvxferre , 6 days ago

I have definitely erred in this regard several times!

I think that everyone did this at least once, so don't worry too much. Still, it's less work for the mods if you don't do it.

lvxferre , 4 days ago

If your description of the events is accurate: that's a shitty mod, and a good example of what I wrote in the last paragraph. We should be denouncing this sort of crap, and avoiding comms where it happens.

It’s not always so easy to assume that mods are going to be fair. Reporting people comes with a risk.

I'm not assuming that the mods are going to be fair. I'm taking into account that shitty mods do a favour to you when they out themselves, as they're basically showing you which comms to avoid.

lvxferre , 7 days ago

I'll mostly share tips regarding what you said, OK?

Quite a few programs still rely on files in ~/.config/. So if you feel like the options in a program are "missing", give its config file a check. (To see hidden directories: Ctrl+H)

There's another MS Paint alternative called Kolourpaint. I personally prefer it over Drawing; once you install it you'll need to install quite a bit of stuff from the KDE environment, but I think that it's worth.

The super key can be configured to your taste. For example mine brings up composing, so if I type Super+e+1 I get ɛ, Super+a+1 I get ɐ, so goes on. (I open the menu with Alt+F1, by the way.) As implied, as a further tip - if you need certain characters you can create custom keystrokes through a file called .XCompose.

lvxferre , 15 days ago

That sounds a lot like a weird spin on the Slashdot effect, caused by content mirroring. It seems that it could be handled by tweaking the ActivityPub protocol to have one instance requesting to generate a link preview, and the other instances copying the link preview instead of sending their own requests.

But frankly? I think that the current way that ActivityPub works is outright silly. Here's what it does currently:

• User is registered to instance A
• Since A federates with B, A mirrors content from B into A
• The backend is either specific to instance A (the site) or configured to use instance A (for a phone program)
• When the user interacts with content from B, actually it's the mirrored version of content from B that is hosted in A

In my opinion a better approach would be:

• User is registered to instance A
• Since A federates with B, B accepts login credentials from A
• The backend is instance-agnostic, so it's able to pull/send content from/to multiple instances at the same time
• When the user interacts with content from B, the backend retrieves content from B, and uses the user's A credentials to send content to B

Note that the second way would not create this "automated Slashdot effect" - only A would be pulling info from the site, and then users (regardless of their instance) would pull it from A.

Now, here's my question: why does the ActivityPub work like in that first way, instead of this second one?

lvxferre , 15 days ago

"A" Users would need to send requests to some server anyway, either A or B; that's only diverting the load from B to A, but it isn't alleviating or even sharing it.

Another issue with the current way that ActivityPub works is foul content, that needs to be removed. Remember when some muppet posted CP in LW?

lvxferre , 15 days ago

I'm aware of Nostr. In my opinion it splits better back- and front-end tasks than the AP does, even if the later does some things better (as the balance between safeness and censorship-resistance). It's still an interesting counterpoint to ActivityPub.

lvxferre , 15 days ago

Got it - and that's a fair point. I wonder however if this problem couldn't be solved another way, specially because mirroring is itself a burden for the smaller instances.

lvxferre , 14 days ago

replication is a feature, not a design flaw!

In this case I'd argue that it's both. (A problematic feature? A useful bug? They're the same picture anyway.)

Because of your comment I can see the pros of the mirroring strategy, even if the cons are still there. I wonder if those pros couldn't be "snipped" and implemented into a Nostr-like network, or if the cons can't be ironed out from a Fediverse-like one.

lvxferre , 15 days ago

I follow a "rule of seven" with tabs: once I open the 8th tab, I check the other 7 to see if

• I don't need it any more - close it down
• I'll need it in a near future - keep it open
• I'll need it in a far future - bookmark it, close it down

Seven is small enough to keep track of them, but large enough to be flexible.

lvxferre , 21 days ago

As I mentioned in another thread, about the same subject: that's mostly for show, with zero practical impact on the population. They might jail someone but you'll get 10 new streamers in their place. Same deal with the alleged seizure of TV boxes, mine is still working fine.

lvxferre , 23 days ago

And at least some people are already ranting at how Ubuntu treats deb support as low priority, in comparison with its [nowadays effectively default] snap format.

lvxferre , 25 days ago

I use them mostly for

• practical ideas on things that I can reliably say "nah, this doesn't work" or "this might work". Such as recipes.
• as poor man's websearch, asking them to list sites with the info that I want.

lvxferre , 25 days ago

Enshittification requires two specific conditions:

1. when a company can get more profit by decreasing the quality of the goods/services that it offers; and
2. when the company is willing to do so.

The company being publicly traded can cause #2, as the investors won't be as emotionally attached to the goal of the company as the founders. However, it is not a prerequisite, with Reddit being an example (it started enshittifying way, way before the IPO).

lvxferre , 29 days ago

!hackernews

lvxferre , 29 days ago

For me, at least, Lemmy comms mirroring HN links are the best of both worlds: I can discuss the subject without "taking part" of the discussion with a cesspool of context-illiterate, assumptive and oversimplifying morons. HN commenters are so fucking stupid that they have negative value on my experience.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

I taught my nephew and I wouldn't see a moral problem on teaching my hypothetical kids how to.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

I wouldn't expect any different from Colossal Order, given its close ties with Paradox Interactive: they don't care about making good games, they care about milking the players.

lvxferre , 28 days ago

The name is solely Arya. However there's more than enough context here to associate it with Aryan. Just like "Austrian Painter" (that @neoman4426 mentioned) clearly refers to Hitler instead of, say, Klimt or Kokoschka.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

The "distributions" argument always smells like bullshit. Developers actually interested on supporting Linux usually stick to one or two distros of their choice. (Typically Ubuntu.)

Beyond that: I don't play LoL, but the fact that they need such an aggressive rootkit as anti-cheat hints poor game design. As in, why are your players so eager to cheat?

lvxferre , 1 month ago

I don't use Discord much, but apparently it works a lot more like IRC (real time discussion) than like Lemmy/SubLinks/PieFed (asynchronous discussion) or Mbin (asynchronous disc + microblogging).

If that's correct, perhaps it would be simply better to code a Fediverse alternative to Discord, and make sure that it's well integrated with Lemmy.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Someone smarter than me might have better ideas, but I picture a "Fediscord" (federated Discord) working this way:

• There are multiple "Fediscord" servers. Each has its own chatrooms and users.
• Users from one server are able to interact with chatrooms of other servers, as long as they federate.

Then, when federating with Lemmy instances:

• You can use an account from one of those services to interact with the other, no further registration needed.
• You can follow "Fediscord" chatrooms from Lemmy as if they were communities. For reference, we can already follow PeerTube channels this way. (I feel like allowing the opposite would be unwise, given that Discord tends to be fast-paced; not sure though.)
• You can quote Lemmy threads/comments to discuss them in Fediscord, as if you were quoting something from another server.
• Shared DM system.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

Discord isn't just "chat text", it's also "real time discussion". That's why for example you see indie game devs often creating Discord channels, to contact their userbases.

In this sense, it partially overlaps with a forum+link aggregator like Lemmy, that allows deeper and asynchronous discussion. But they're still distinct enough so both a hypothetical "Fediscord" and Lemmy would benefit from federation:

• If discussion in a "Fediscord" server is getting a bit too deep for the medium, you can redirect people to a Lemmy thread.
• Conversely, if people just want to chitchat, in Lemmy they'll end creating noise. They can simply do it instead in a "Fediverse" server.
• A Lemmy mod team meeting in "Fediscord" to decide how they're going to moderate their Lemmy comm.

Nota bene: privacy is a concern and federating all content would be certainly unwise. Even across "Fediscord" servers. But some content is sensible, as long as you have a clear division between "public" and "private" rooms.

Similarly, why would I want to view a chatroom through Lemmy? Why wouldn’t I just want to go to that community through it is app or site or whatever?

CBA (can't be arsed) is one of the main features of the race that we belong to, humankind. If you're interested on a single "Fediscord" chatroom but can't be arsed with the rest, you could follow it through Lemmy instead - it'll be less optimal (F5, F5 all the time to see if there are new messages), but still useful.

It just feels a bit like blockchain all over again. Federation and activitypub are great tools for some purposes but people seem to want to use them for everything.

I get that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that isn't my case here - I genuinely think that the "Fediverse forums" (Lemmy, Kbin/Mbin, and any potential newcomer) are in a central position within the Fediverse, and should capitalise on it by federating as much as reasonably possible with other Fediverse services.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

mander.xyz account: 100~150. Sometimes I browse "all" and "local" but it's specifically to look for new comms to subscribe to.

ani.social account: 15~20. I typically browse there by "local".

lvxferre , 1 month ago

The core idea of the fediverse is the same as democracy - that nobody should control the whole. Both are similar enough to allow comparisons.

Threads in the Fediverse is like a powerful dictatorship trying to "deepen its bonds" with a small but democratic government. The dictatorship will eventually exploit the power asymmetry to control the democracy, direct or indirectly, effectively erasing it. In that situation, the best approach is to simply not play along the dictatorship. (Defederate Threads.)

Another threat to democracy is internal: the centralisation of control over the whole into a few hands. In the case of the Fediverse, this is the reliance on central systems (front-end software, back-end software, instances, discovery systems, etc.). I see what the author proposes as a "Universal Declaration on Fediverse Rights" as, potentially, a new mechanism enabling those central systems - who gets to decide what goes in that declaration?

So yes, I think that instances should defederate Threads and encourage other instances to do so. However, they should not do it too hard, to the point that you're effectively dictating what others should be doing.

An important detail is that the author falls into the fallacy of conflating epistemic and moral matters. This is specially explicit here:

Because without believing in the existence of a objective truth (which they don’t, because they attribute themselves to moral relativism),

That fallacy has a deep impact across the text because the author believes that people can eventually agree on moral grounds based on reason. Often they don't - because it depends on the moral premises that each adopt, and moral premises are not true/false matters to begin with.

the actual problem is that the Fediverse is internally shattered and cannot agree on anything, including basic moral rules and principles.

That is not a problem. That's a feature.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

It's less about the separation of powers and more about the fragmentation of each power. As in, you should be able to ditch any governing power that you dislike, and curb down its influence on your experience to a bare minimum.

So perhaps the best analogy with RL politics would be a confederation with lax citizenship laws and federated entities being free to choose which other federated entities they interact with. With a key difference:

The Fediverse can be completely acephalous. And the reason becomes evident once you analyse the UN of your example - it's effectively Europe and USA wearing a bunch of sock puppets, pretending to talk in the name of the "nations" (actually countries, but whatever) of the world. An acephalous Fediverse would not develop a similar problem.

In this case (Threads), it means that, while we should promote defederation, how to deal with it should be, ultimately, up to each instance.

NATO example

I don't pay taxes to any NATO country so what I'm going to say is solely based on the Fediverse situation, plus whatever I parsed from your example:

We should not need to rely on "trust" on first place. Instead a better approach is to acknowledge that people will fuck it up, they will do things that counter the best interests of the whole, and that the system needs to handle it.

For example through a ActivityPub commitee that exists anyways or a popular meetup of Fediverse servers.

What happens if said commitee becomes hostile, defending its own self-interests in detriment of the ones of the rest of the Fediverse?

I think its good that different moral rule sets can easily develop and implemented; but I think sooner or later it will become a problem, at the latest when more radical parts become pre-dominant.

Or we could leave those moral matters up to each instance to decide. And the ones screwing up on moral matters get isolated.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

That won't go well.

If you're investing in paid moderation, you don't want different mod teams moderating different subreddits - that would be a waste of money, and a pain to coordinate. Instead you want to gather the whole "Reddit mod team" as a single unit, and give them a single set of rules to enforce over the whole site, across multiple subreddits.

In other words, it makes no difference if you're in a small and specialised subreddit or a large and generic one. Say hello to people posting memes in discussion subreddits, rhetorical questions in "ask" subs, so goes on.

And since now subreddits are more similar to each other, there's less of a point to stay in the smaller subreddits. People will congregate even harder into the larger ones, that are way harder to moderate than the smaller ones (more users = more activity, conflict, and trolls per user). This might create a paradox, where more moderation will cause lower enforcement of the rules, since users are breaking them more often.

The same applies if they're investing in automatic moderation. With an additional issue - it's easier to exploit it.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

This is the ideal of course and Reddit is, well, Reddit so you might be correct.

Yup. Couple it with Reddit taunting the moderators to leave; [shitty] replacement mods (the free ones) for large subs are a dime a dozen, since it comes with bragging rights, but the smaller subs got specially harmed. (I wouldn't be surprised if some are still private.) The paid mods will be the only ones enforcing rules in these subs.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

That post made me go full nostalgia - I started on Linux with KDE 3.5, and Trinity preserves its "feel" rather well.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

It probably would for me too, if it didn't become my default DE.

...it's weird to think about it. When that trainwreck of the initial KDE 4 release kicked off, I switched to GNOME 2, so I didn't give Trinity a chance; but when the trainwreck of GNOME 3.0 kicked off, I simply couldn't be arsed - instead I kept using it as MATE.

lvxferre , 1 month ago

I want some. Not as my pets, but as my pets' pets. I can't help but think on my cats hunting one of those robots.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Depending on how you define social media this sort of platform like Lemmy/Mbin/Sublinks/etc. is still social media. We're still interacting with each other, aka "socialising". It's just that the focus is less on whom you talk with and more on what you talk about.

YMMV though. I get your point - I don't want Facebook/Orkut tier shit either.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

You'll only be one of us once you go through the no-poop challenge! Before that you're still a redditor.

I'm joking. Welcome! Things are rough but improving; nothing is perfect here, a lot of things suck major balls, but it's getting better. In the meantime Reddit, Xitter /ʃɪt.ə/ and Faecesbook are all going downhill. Long term you'll feel glad for migrating.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Habsburg AI? My sides went into orbit. I didn't know that I needed to know this expression!

I don't fully agree with the author but that was an enjoyable read. The initial chunk about Reddit is mostly there to provide context for the general trends and directions that the internet is following; the "core" is the impact of generative models into the internet.

Unlike the author, I don't think that the internet is dying, but instead entering a new phase that resembles in some aspects the old internet: search has become unreliable and those mega-platforms enshittify themselves to death, so people shift to smaller (often non-commercial) platforms and find new content to follow by the hyperlinks provided by other people. It's a lot like the internet before Google Search.

If that's correct, the impact of those generative models was only to speed up the process, not to cause it. At the end of the day the main concern is that it works a lot like spam - as undesired content avoiding being detected as such, and tweaked to steal your attention from the content that you actually want to consume. And spam is not something new for us (or the internet), what's new is GAFAM and their vassals (Twitter, Reddit etc.) eating it for lunch.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Instead of being this gen's September 1993, I feel like the changes being sped up by the introduction of generative models are finally forcing us into October 1993. As in: they're reverting some aspects of the internet to how they used to be.

also to an “every company that doesn’t get the most expensive AI will start lagging behind” economy.

That spells tragedy of the commons for those companies. They ruining themselves will probably have a mixed impact on us [Internet users in general].

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Yup, he does. And what he is saying in this excerpt is great (insightful) too, not just how it's said.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Let's hope that the new bells and whistles* increase its resilience enough against Big Tech control over the internet. Otherwise we'll get into a cyclical situation.

*namely, federation and other anti-centralisation aspects of design.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they're able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:

1. Corporate landscape.
2. You got a few federated alternatives growing.
3. Federations grow enough to become the main landscape.
4. Corporations do something [I do not know what] better than federations.
5. Corporates grow to the point of dwarfing the federations, into a corporate landscape.

For example, it's possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I'm just conjecturing though.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

A lot of this boils down to the tragedy of the commons - what you said about book DRM is a textbook example of that.

And usually the tragedy of the commons needs to be solved through agreement or arbitration. But agreement across a huge number of people is almost impossible; and arbitration would likely need to rely on governments - but governments exist primarily to defend the interest of the power-holders, not of their citizens.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

The article asks a similar question: The researchers do not attempt to explain these differences. However, they show once again that ‘dated’ gender stereotypes don’t always match with reality. And when they have little explanatory value, one can question whether gender is even relevant in a piracy context.

lvxferre , 2 months ago

My guess is that they're offering early sales because they predict that the stock value will tank after the public offering, so this way there's a slightly higher margin of profit for the current shareholders. If that's correct then it's completely scummy. (i.e. extremely typical for Reddit)

Another possibility is that they're trying to "force" power users to be more cooperative towards the platform, by giving them a financial incentive to do so - "if you shit here you'll be tanking your own shares".

lvxferre , 2 months ago

I have two hypotheses to explain the gender gap.

1. The effectiveness of the threats is inversely proportional to the tech expertise of the person being threatened. And your typical woman knows less about files, piracy, internet and the likes than your typical man.

If this hypothesis is true, then splitting cohorts based on tech expertise should show a smaller gap between men and women.

2. Society trains women and men to react differently to threat. In simple words: men are expected by society to fight back, while women are expected to passively accept the threat and play along.

If this hypothesis is true, you should be able to see and measure the different answers in other situations that don't involve piracy.

---

With that said, "perhaps" those anti-piracy messages would be more effective if they didn't rely on bullshit, to the point that sounds a lot like "I expect the viewers of this message to be both tech-illiterate and gullible".

lvxferre , 3 months ago

I'm neither an HP fan nor queer so take what I'm going to say with a grain of salt.

I think that the idea is mostly good, but don't underestimate the amount of work necessary to keep your instance safe. Make sure to have admins online 24/7, that they're all on the same page regarding rule enforcement, consult often the queer community on stuff that matters, and make sure that it's part of your admin team.

The main thing that I believe that you need to watch out for is users lacking discernment. They'll come in two "flavours": the ones trying to sell JK Rowling's transphobia, and the ones trying to sell hate against the fanbase.

Also, I'm not sure but I think that "no tolerance towards transphobia" sounds easier to enforce than "queer-friendly". The goal is the same, the difference is less subjectivity. (In general it's better to approach rules and their enforcement as objectively as possible.)

lvxferre , 3 months ago

Read it fully dammit - OP outright said "Instead, it has a no tolerancy policy against transphobia, which is more clear and probably easier to enforce."

The matter here is subjectivity. What two people consider "friendly" depends on a thousand factors; and that won't change just because they're both queer.

As such, "this is queer-friendly" is a hard promise to keep. It breaks once the first queer person says "I'm queer, and I don't consider this friendly". And since queer people are individuals, they're bound to find different things "friendly".

However, once you say "no tolerance towards transphobia", the picture changes. Transphobia exists on a discursive level; it's shit that people say that denigrates trans people. And the discourse is not something inside someone's mind, it's the stuff that is shared by people, thus far more objective.

For example, if I were to utter something transphobic, I wouldn't have room to say "well, that person there is queer, and they didn't feel offended". It's transphobic so it gets the chop.

Alternatively, think on it another way. Would you rather stumble upon a community and then realise that it's friendlier than it looks like? Or one that promises something vague, that won't hold true for your personal experience? I'd probably prefer the former, and I think that most other people - including the queer ones - are the same.

lvxferre , 3 months ago

I disagree with the use of “theme”. It evokes a visual for me.

"Theme" is much, much, much more than "visuals". It's a collection of things put together in a certain place (often metaphorically). Cue to narrative themes, thematic vowels, or the Eastern Roman troops in Anatolia. It does not need to be visual.

[from your other comment] context. we’re on the internet, talking about a website not a carneval.

Context in this case it also includes the fact that we're talking about a place for discussions, leading to the interpretation of "theme" as "discussion topic" (or "the collection of discourses related to each other"). Thus a "Harry Potter-themed instance" in this case should be understood as "an instance where you can discuss Harry Potter stuff".

lvxferre , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I think that the "controversy" died down. Simply because there was no controversy on first place - just a conflict of interests, where you can see both sides being reasonable but ultimately wanting mutually incompatible things.

lvxferre , 3 months ago

This, too. And additionally, perhaps some entitlement? Like, from my impression a lot of people were expecting Beehaw to conform to what they want (access to the comms and users from there), regardless of that going against Beehaw's goals.

lvxferre , 3 months ago

You made me realise that I worded it really, really bad. (I need to fix it.)

I'm glad that you guys got the meaning that I was trying to convey though - that Reddit Inc. is scum, you can trust on the fact that they're scum, and spez et al. are likely distorting the situation to make Reddit look more profitable than it is.