JubilantJaguar
@JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
- Comment on 6 months ago:
You’re both right!
But I see a terrible paradox in the case of ads. The creator pays their bills with ads, but I have no intention of acting on those ads. Possibly the contrary, since I did not want to see the ad and I dislike being manipulated. So in my case the ad is making precisely zero money for the company who is paying the creator’s bill, as well as annoying me. Presumably I am not the only one. There is a paradox here that is hard to resolve.
- Comment on Bringing the power of books to the fediverse 6 months ago:
That requires putting one’s faith in the vapor-currency that is crypto. Not saying that it won’t happen one day, but neither is it necessary to solve this problem.
A simple Paypal button, for example, does not require DRM spyware if done from a website on a FOSS stack. The Paypal tax is is mere pennies compared to Amazon. A bank transfer has no tax at all, tho it’s not great in privacy terms.
But where do I get the author’s Paypal ID or bank number from? I want you pay you directly, dammit, but you insist on allowing to Amazon tax the transaction and to force me to install spyware to read your damn book.
This is a cultural problem as well as a technical one, of course.
IMO we need to get to world where enough authors are happy to allow ordinary folks to “pirate” their work, and enough readers are happy to pay them even though they could get away with not doing so. In that world the technical solutions could so easy, so frictionless, in theory. But it takes a leap of imagination for everyone involved.
- Comment on Bringing the power of books to the fediverse 6 months ago:
In theory, if a good number of public libraries and and the Internet Archive each has a paid-for digital copy of a book, and decent infrastructure to ensure redundancy, plus a paper copy as the ultimate backup, then it seems unlikely the book’s content will actually be lost before centuries have passed.
The problem I want solved is this: how do I get my money to the author of a book without needing to use DRM software and without paying tax to gatekeeping corporate monopolists?
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless.
Completely agree. This is how Hacker News does it.
IMO a first step is to get rid of the downvote counter. On a healthy forum a comment will generally have far more upvotes than downvotes. So it seems to me that showing the exact number of downvotes is putting disproportionate weight on the negativity. 400 upvotes but 9 people downvoted it, what bast***s! You often see this kind of indignant comment, which suggests that people love to focus on the negative if given the chance. We should not be pushing people to focus on this number. It’s completely counterproductive if the objective is quality and not just mindless engagement.
- Comment on [deleted] 7 months ago:
where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with
This is the scourge of any forum. Downvoting apologists need to think about what they are doing. Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you don’t agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?
Personally I never downvote any comment that is made in good faith, no matter how much I disagree with it. Occasionally I even force myself to upvote them if they’re thoughtful. It’s not that hard.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
What should they be doing instead? Begging for donations? I do agree in general, tho. Seems they should at least be squirreling away some (or most) of that money into a foundation, because they’re obviously going to need it one day.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
Yes, bloat and mission creep is going to be an issue with any big non-profit. But maybe that’s also their advantage: any organization that becomes focused on sustaining itself is going to provide decent long-term stability. I guess it’s a bit like a state.
- Comment on Mozilla Senior Director of Content explained why Mozilla has taken an interest in the fediverse and Mastodon 7 months ago:
Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and resources and slow procedures to guarantee accountability. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.
- Comment on My new favourite password manager 8 months ago:
So, biometrics, master password, and USB key - 3 whole options and 3 things I personally will never be letting near Android. Unwarranted caution, no doubt.
- Comment on My new favourite password manager 8 months ago:
Not bothered about the potential for keyloggers or even OS-level snooping on what is presumably your privacy-free Android device? Personally I would never type the master password into anything other than a computer running a FOSS stack that control, but perhaps that is excessive caution.
- Comment on My list of services I still miss in the fediverse 8 months ago:
Impressive. Framasoft seems to be holding up much of this space all by itself.
- Comment on Lemmy developer, @SleeplessOne1917, argues for the killing of Israeli civilians and children 8 months ago:
IMO believing that someone’s work can become tainted by their beliefs is a form of magical thinking.
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
Stopped reading at “drives engagement”
- Comment on [deleted] 8 months ago:
Finally, confirmation that I’m not dumb and that this is really missing! Seems very odd that something so basic as sort order has been left out of the settings.
I for one am changing the sort order to Top, manually, on Every. Single. Page.
- Comment on A little rant about lemmy.ml 8 months ago:
As I recall, there was a split in that Reddit community about whether to migrate here. Most of them decided to stay there on the (reasonable) grounds that they wanted to reach as many people as possible with their (IMO justified) message. So presumably the ones who came here are the dogmatic ideologues who prefer hating to persuading.
- Comment on Another good reason not to open port 22 10 months ago:
If Fail2Ban is so important, why the h*** does it not come installed and enabled as standard?!
Security is the number-1 priority for any OS, and yet stock SSHD apparently does not have Fail2Ban-level security built in. My conclusion is that Fail2Ban cannot therefore be that vital.
- Comment on Locations, maps, and more 10 months ago:
Your frustration is warranted. I consider mapping to be the major unsolved problem in the FOSS universe. It’s certain my one, and I have much more limited aims than you. I just want my personal POIs on a map, with access to that map on desktop and mobile, read and write. I’ve gone with the serverless route, just syncing the two devices, but the Nextcloud method is not so different.
Well, it’s hard. Osmand is amazingly powerful, and apparently has the most advanced POI features of any Android app, but still there are catastrophic flaws. For example, in the GPX it marks up POI categories with its own bespoke GPX markup - totally invisible to desktop software (I had to write a Python script to add it to POIs created on desktop, just so that I can actually see their colors in Osmand). Next, syncing the GPX is made unnecessarily cumbersome by the fact that all the DB files and cached tiles are in the same file tree (I literally use an Android file sync tool to sync the GPX within Android to a place where it can be synced again with my desktop).
What a mess. Pretty sure I haven’t overlooked anything for my simple use case of POIs-on-a-map. It just seems not many people want to do this. Or perhaps they tried and then gave up.
Oh well. This rant is not much use to you, but please accept it as consolation.
- Comment on Japan Earthquake Alert App Says Sayonara to X - Unseen Japan 10 months ago:
Exactly. And well done for being a busybody in a good cause! The world needs more people like you.
- Comment on Japan Earthquake Alert App Says Sayonara to X - Unseen Japan 10 months ago:
This looks like a glimpse of how Mastodon (specifically: ActivityPub protocol) can really detrone Twitter. The world is full of governments and agencies and other Very Serious Organizations. They must hate having to depend on a single private company to get their message out. They must be itching for an alternative that gives them the kind of control that have with phone numbers and email addresses and websites. Surely this is Mastodon’s golden opportunity.