Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it’s inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

The article or the thread? The article is just a list of who’s demanding payment from Twitter and how much Twitter owes each company. The thread explains why Twitter has a confusing system of multiple offices and a brand new expensive building (that they are not paying rent on).

USB-A is one-sided, unlike USB-C, so you can’t do direct data transfers between two devices with USB-A ports. It’s much slower too. Electronic waste is not ideal but it has to happen for a large-scale hardware upgrade. I try to reduce it by recycling my USB-A bricks and cables.

I also cannot understand why, unless you use Apple devices exclusively, you would be happy that one company’s series of devices has to use a completely unique charging system from every other device in the world. I don’t care if Lightning is better when it’s proprietary. If Apple “sticks two fingers up” and doesn’t integrate USB-C charging into the iPhone 15, I won’t be buying another device from them, because I’m tired of having to carry two different cables around - one USB-C for my laptop, Android phone, power bank, speaker and other devices, and one Lightning charger for nothing else but the damn iPhone.

Seeing the community get destroyed is hard, but seeing the whole company the community relies on being taken over by someone who doesn’t care about is okay?! These unpaid janitors seriously need to re-evaluate their priorities.

This goes completely against the principle of “federated network”. It’s directing new users to join one instance, with plans to expand the list of instances that can be joined through this website to… four. To be selected as one of the four (actually three, since mastodon.social will always be one of them) instances, the instance has to abide by mastodon.social’s rules, and selection is done by mastodon.social staff. At what point does “make onboarding easier for new users” become “return to centralized social media except Eugene Rochko instead of Elon Musk is CEO”?

I don’t understand why these types of people come to the Fediverse if what they want is total control of their community and all interactions within it. Just create a closed message board with restricted sign-ups.

Great timing for this post because Beehaw just defederated two very large instances for having open signups. Kbin is big and has open signups too, so you guys are next on the chopping block. Yes, it is a good idea to cultivate multiple communities so that if one instance makes a stupid decision like that, there will be a good replacements available.

PiHole, Adguard Home and the like can’t block ads on smart TVs? Or is it something like the TV refusing to start if it contacts the ad server and doesn’t get a response?

Yes, by default files are stored directly on a volume on the disk but it’s possible to configure pict-rs to use object storage, although there isn’t much documentation for configuring and using it with Lemmy yet. Kbin has support for S3 storage in its environment variables. I’ll do some research and see if I can add it to Lemmy.

Imgur was created as an image host for Reddit back when Reddit did not support direct image uploads, so any self-hostable image storage solution including Lemmy’s built-in pict-rs will work. Federation of the file host is not necessary as there is no need to mirror the files between instances, they are linked to federated posts and the file can be viewed directly on the uploader’s instance. As for the community features of Imgur, the “community” on Imgur is, as one Redditor put it, “the sewer rats who don’t realize they’re living in the sewer”.

Oh that would be reasonable then, a 2 day on-site work hybrid schedule with 40 minutes of commute and no overtime certainly isn’t something I would complain about (unlike my current workplace, lol). I assumed the commute was much longer and also read the comment incorrectly because I read it as the new workplace was pushing for fully on-site work as well.

Thanks for the information. I set up a Matrix instance with a friend before and noticed it had significantly more resource usage than expected of a little chat client, then someone else explained that Matrix was trying to discover all of the other nodes on the network so I assumed it was true. What causes so many state changes to be generated?

Anyone can scrape data and corporations are already doing it. But data scraping is considered a legal gray zone and companies can be prevented from accessing data that they are not legally authorized to use, which is why companies like OpenAI retrieve their training data from data dumps and don’t just run web crawlers across the entire internet. A publicly announced platform with an appropriate clause in its Terms of Service can grant Meta the legal ownership of all data from the fediverse that arrives on their platform.

Matrix’s client UX is improving a lot, there is the Cinny client that mirrors Discord’s layout perfectly. The issue with Matrix is its protocol, which faces scaling issues because each instance joining the network is supposed to replicate the entire Matrix network, which will make it difficult for small hobbyists to add instances without crumbling under the load when the network gets too big. There is another Discord-like alternative, Revolt which is self-hostable and uses its own protocol but doesn’t have federation yet.

Sounds like the problem here is that your colleagues are your only social circle outside of family rather than remote work being isolating. I think it’s unhealthy to have work relationships take up a significant part of your social contacts in general, because you’ll have a less rational perspective on your job when you associate it with friends. You might be reluctant to leave a job with poor compensation and hours because all of your friends are there, for example. My commute to work and back takes over 2 hours a day and it’s much easier to be peer-pressured into working overtime when you can see everyone else doing so. All of this only benefits the employer. I’d rather work remotely and spend the saved time with people I choose to be with.

Meta’s main income stream is data mining and they will take advantage of federation to collect data (not metadata, but human-generated content is still very valuable for AI model training) of users on federated instances. Any content that federates over to this instance will be cached on Meta servers where they can do whatever they like with it. There is no legal data protection framework for content retrieved from federated networks and Meta’s lawyers will try to argue that federating with this platform counts as giving consent to the platform’s TOS. Meta platforms introduce lots of advertising and bots to the network. Don’t just ignore this platform, give them the Gab treatment.

@[email protected] has a good in-depth answer, but the TL;DR non-technical answer is that when you connect to a website, your browser requests the website data from the server the website is running on, which allows you to get information about this server like its location and service provider. This way, you can find out the identity of a website’s owner. With port forwarding, the website admin can pass the website data through Mullvad’s servers instead, so the it looks like the server running the website is Mullvad’s and the true identity of the host server is unknown. Law enforcement was pressuring Mullvad to reveal the information about the hosts of illegal websites, which Mullvad refused to give, so they decided to shut down this service instead.

I don’t think Mullvad’s port forwarding decision can be compared to Reddit’s greed. They were getting in trouble with law enforcement for providing tunnels to illegal websites, so they had to either identify those customers or stop port forwarding if they didn’t want to get the entire company shut down.