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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don’t want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.

    The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.

    The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody. a screenshot of the first page of stats for lemmy on fedidb.org. The collective stats across all servers is 391,326 total users and 45,189 monthly users. The individual servers shown are (in order): lemmy.world, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, hexbear.net, lemmy.dbzer0.com, feddit.de, lemmygrad.ml, programming.dev, lemmyblahaj.zone, and lemmy.ca. The user and "status" counts approximately follow a pareto distribution.  lemmy.world has almost half of the total user count and monthly active user count on its own. The notable outlier is hexbear.net, which has 10% more statuses than lemmy.world made by 10% as many montly active users.

    Maybe it’s too soon to make such a judgement call, we’ll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.


  • You may also interact with countless bots without ever knowing, because creating fake identities is free.

    Maybe. Bots don’t seem currently capable of holding a conversation beyond surface level remarks. I think I tend to engage with thought-provoking stuff.

    On the off chance that I reply to a bot, it is as much for my reply to be read by other humans viewing the conversation. So I don’t understand how interacting with countless bots is supposed to be such a big downside.

    Plus, I don’t see how public/private key pairs prevents endless “fake” identity creation/proliferation. It’s not like you need a government-issued ID to generate them (which, to be clear, still wouldn’t be great -just got other reasons).

    Fair, some people value their identity.

    To be clear, I’m talking about online identities. In which case, I would argue that if you value it so much you should not delegate it to some third party network. My IRL identity is incredibly valuable to me, which is why I don’t tie it up with any online communications services, especially ones I have no control over.

    For average people nothing changes, the app can hold their key for them and even offer email recovery.

    …so then the app can post on my behalf without me knowing? And it’ll be signed as if I had done it myself. I don’t understand preferring this if you’re not also self hosting.

    That’s something having signatures and a web of trust solves.

    But as I wrote in my previous message regarding gpg signing circles (a web of trust), that doesn’t “solve” things. It just introduces more layers and steps to try and compensate for an inherently impossible ideal. Unless I’m misunderstanding your point here?

    Besides, you fail to see another problem: Whichever centralized, federated site you use can manipulate anything you read and publish.

    I just take that for granted on the internet. It’s true that key-signing messages should make that effectively impossible for all but the largest third parties (FAANG & nation-states). But you still need to verify keys/identities through some out-of-band mechanism, otherwise aren’t you blindly trusting the decentralized network to be providing you with the “true” keys and post, as made by the human author?

    Anyway, if you don’t see a need for tools like nostr you don’t need them.

    Maybe I’m not expressing myself properly; I don’t see how nostr (and tools like it) effectively address that/those needs.

    Sort of like how there was (arguably still is) a need for cash that governments can’t just annul or reverse transactions of, yet bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies I’m aware of fail on that front by effectively allowing state actors (who have state resources) to participate in the mining network and execute 51% attacks.


  • It weirds me out that most of the arguments for nostr I come across are around how “you can’t loose your identity, it’s just a private/public keypair!”. Maybe I just don’t get banned enough to understand the perspective, but to me the real problem is the content/discussions being lost, not usernames for some corner of the web.

    I really don’t care about loosing my identity on a social media website; I’ve found it healthier to view social media accounts on the same level as my customer account at my isp and power utility. When I change ISPs, the old account is closed down and I start up a new one at the other ISP. What’s important to me is the service getting delivered, not that it remembers that I’m the same person from however many years ago. It’s still the same me here in my body, interacting with the web. I know what I need from it, it doesn’t always need to remember who I am (and sometimes I’d rather it forgot or never knew in the first place).

    My final point is a bit of a troll, but also kinda serious: how decentralized is it when your identity is “centralized” in your key pair? Loose your keys or loose your password to the key, and your identity is similarly effectively gone. Even worse in this case, no-one can restore it for you. Which is why I don’t tie my identity that much to any online service, especially ones I don’t host. The only thing that truly preserves my identity is the flesh-and-blood body that I inhabit (and even that isn’t fail-proof).

    I’ve interacted with GPG signing circles before. So many people are losing access to their keys. So many more are considering some of their keys as compromised. In either case they’re regularly generating wholly new keys, essentially rebooting their “identity” from scratch. When they do so, they always rely on flesh-and-blood interactions to have their new identity verified and trusted by others.

    Maybe it’s a question of which circles we’re involved in; mine are already regularly hopping accounts, without being forced to by bans or server outages. I’m used to interpreting the tone & content to recognize “people”, and ignoring usernames. On top of that so many people regularly change their display names on social media for vanity and expression purposes that I can’t reliably use them anyways for recognizing accounts.



  • Jayjader@jlai.lutolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldShit...
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    29 days ago

    Maybe nowadays, with Elon’s imbecility so publicly visible.

    I’ve run Arch for close to 10 years, and was pretty jazzed by Musk in the early days of his presiding over Tesla and Space X. Then again, I was barely an adult at the time, and I hadn’t yet come across the first reports of terrible working conditions and his overall shittyness as a manager/exec.



  • I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a “fediverse browser” is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.

    However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it’s own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we’re originally trying to avoid.

    I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr’s approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the “content” tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else’s server or your own.


  • Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don’t know if anything has changed since, as I don’t self host masto and have been spending more and more of my “fedi-time” here in lemmy.

    Not surprised that someone who “led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years” ended up back on mastodon.social, but that’s probably neither here nor there…


  • I don’t know if “appliance” is how I would describe it but, yeah, something that’s as plug-and-play as possible. I guess in the sense that off the shelf, it would be as easy to use as a dishwasher or toaster.

    Until I became aware of the fediverse and activitypub, I thought that any such project would be doomed to fail - like most of the smart home market, you’re tied to the manufacturer not only for compatible hardware but more crucially to talk with their servers.

    Now I’m starting to think it is feasible, but still too many unknowns to bet a business on it.




  • I’m kind of surprised that isps are not injecting ads into your browsing and forcing you to watch ads just to use the internet that you paid for.

    If I recall correctly, during one of the more recent public debates around Net Neutrality in the US, it came out that certain ISPs were doing just that. Some people were showing screenshots of ads showing up inside their steam client (which runs the storefront and community sections as webpages).


  • For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

    I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.


  • Kinda disappointing.

    The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

    FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

    Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?