JubilantJaguar
@JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
- Comment on My attempt at explaining the fediverse in a way that is more fun and engaging 3 days ago:
That’s an idea too. But personally I think this worrying about the dominance of a single site is a bit misplaced, assuming that the server uses the same software and protocols. There’s advantages in having some centralization. More resources can be put into the chosen instance to improve its reliability and its moderation. These need to be absolute priorities when trying to attract new users.
A certain encyclopedia site has a de-facto monopoly of the encyclopedia space. That’s not a problem because it has the right governance and ownership structure. I think the discussion space could perhaps use a similar site.
- Comment on My attempt at explaining the fediverse in a way that is more fun and engaging 3 days ago:
Alternative: just send them to World and do not even mention the whole federation thing. Federation is essentially a power feature for a few people who care about it.
For normies, the real killer USP will be something much simpler: no ads.
- Comment on The Economy and the Environment are two sides of the same coin. 4 days ago:
The usual analysis is that the economy is a subset of the environment. In other words, the human economy is a (small, fragile, entirely dependent) part of the wider natural economy.
Unfortunately, orthodox economists have still not received the memo.
- Comment on some fediverse and open web thoughts 1 month ago:
Sound advice.
PS: punctuation and capitalization are conformist and bourgeois but they do make it easier to read.
- Comment on Email is still great for DMs if you only use it for talking to individuals, and not to sign up to things 1 month ago:
Somewhat true if you have anyone left who wants to talk to you by email.
First people stopped using it for socializing, and now it’s slowly on the way out for work communication too IME. Not secure enough. Better to use a secure messenger which requires login. And personally I quite like this, assuming the messenger is on the web and requires no software install.
The reality is that the main surviving use case for email is as a notification engine.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
From an Atlantic article yesterday:
Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”
- Comment on We should have elections with no candidates. 2 months ago:
Your contradicter is right. You’re basically describing the list system, which is the purest form of PR and pretty common in Europe. You vote for a platform and a list, not for individuals.
- Comment on Maybe the concept of nothing does not exist. Maybe the fabric of Spacetime is always there. 2 months ago:
Time to rinse off and get out of the shower.
- Comment on Having $270 billion dollars and spending the bulk of your time trying to make more money is like weighing 900 pounds and thinking "ooh, I bet I can get to 1000". 2 months ago:
But it doesn’t work like that. Wealth is a status symbol, and status symbols are comparative. Millionaires compare themselves to slightly richer millionaires, and billionaires to slightly richer billionaires. Everyone else is irrelevant to them.
- Comment on Some (Slightly Biased) Thoughts On The State Of Decentralized Social Media - TechDirt 2 months ago:
But a very, very credible voice on this subject. Let’s not fall into the easy trap of tribalism.
- Comment on Excluding shorts from Youtube RSS feeds in FreshRSS, regardless of #shorts in the title 2 months ago:
Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.
NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find thechannel_idburied in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though. - Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
By no reasonable definition of the word “liberalism” has it caused those things on a scale remotely approaching that of communism. This is not controversial.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Arguing is tiring, and here the payoff will be small since the conversation has moved on, few others are reading. I’ve made my point.
Look on the positive side. Humans being what they are, it’s not usually reason that wins debates, but rather the agreeableness of the participants. So you’ve probably won this one by default.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
This feels like arguing with a Jehovah’s witness. To your credit, you’re not getting annoyed or abusive in the face of my contradiction. But then that’s also a hallmark of religious people: absolute certitude, which provides a certain peace of mind.
I’ll admit that I had to look up “AES”, which appears to refer to countries that pass the magical litmus test of Marx-Engels Compatibility.
I will simply sum up my own analysis. The precise terminology of the PRC’s political system is unimportant. What is important is that wherever the recipes of Marx have been tried, the result has been violence, brutality, oppression, famine, economic ruin. I say that as a student of history. Literally: it was my degree. But the facts are in the public domain for all to see. And so I agree with Orwell, who saw it before so many others: there comes a point where you have to accept that the thing is irredeemable, and instead try something else.
That’s really all I have to say on the subject. Of course I respect your right to your own viewpoint.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Do you not think your remarks have a bit of a religious flavor to them? Quoting a couple of eccentric academics from 150 years ago as if transmitting their divine revelation. Defending your interpretation of their holy words as if you were a lawyer or a priest. Why not just look to first principles instead, to the values you considerate important, rather than citing a gospel like this?
I must admit that I am puzzled by people’s determination to defend the record of communism. It’s not worth defending. There are much better ideas for how to replace capitalism, though - spoiler - none of them involve a bloody revolution. This doesn’t mean that Marx had nothing interesting to say. Of course he did. His description of society was revolutionary. But the prescription was disastrous and I feel we would do well to just move on from it at last.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Seriously? I’m not trying to convince you, I’m trying to convince the people reading us. That’s the way a forum debate works! But I admire your earnestness.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Hair splitting. Some ideologies are more dangerous than others.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
This is a bit reductive. I accept that liberalism and capitalism are closely intertwined in the historical reading. But the fact is that capitalism won the economic battle, for better and (I agree) for worse. Attempts to replace it completely, in an interconnected world, invariably end in disaster or (China) in a reversion to capitalism. Just look at the list of them. To me this whole question feels like a disconnected high-school philosophy debate.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
True but that is a proper name, not the generic definition. Russia’s Liberal Democrats are ultranationalists.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Disingenuous or ignorant. By definition a Quaker or a Jain cannot commit brutality in the name of their beliefs. Conversely, an ideology which puts the collective before the individual, such as fascism or communism, is, a straightforward recipe for brutality.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
When I say right, I am using the typical definition, supportive of Capitalism. Social Democrats, Liberals, American Libertarians, fascists, and all their myriad forms.
For two of the words this is not a typical definition. Social democrats do not code as “right” anywhere in the world. And liberals are only “right” when viewed through a partisan US-progressive lens, or else perhaps in southern Europe (where the word is mostly an economic term). Elsewhere they would be closer to left or center. This whole discussion illustrates the limited usefulness of the left-right axis at describing ideas.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Many would say that this is disingenuous reasoning. The fact is that the brutality was committed in the name of the ideology, and that whenever the ideology has been tried out, it always - always - ends the same way. For exactly the reason you suggest: any ideology that precludes dissent is ripe for abuse.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
Yes, sure. As a liberal, I’m pretty suspicious of even speech-policing, let alone bans or (here) defederation. But I just wish more people understood that the ideas these people claim to support are not anodyne. They’re not just sticking it to The Man, they’re not democrats or even Swedish-style socialists. They’re defending the indefensible.
- Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this. 2 months ago:
The solution is that an instance that cheerfully associates itself with an ideology that wiped away the lives of many tens of millions of people and immiserated possibly a billion more - that instance should be relegated to a dusty basement room where new users won’t easily find it.
- Comment on Transphobia in the fediverse 2 months ago:
The tone of this ostensible appeal for tolerance strikes me as disturbingly aggressive and inquisitorial.
- Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website? 2 months ago:
Yes yes, I know all that. The fact remains that a permanent IP associated with an individual is personally identifying information. Even the variety in browser requests counts as such according to the GDPR, and that is usually pooled with lots of other users. This is clearly a level above that. It’s why, for example, I would not use the VPS for proxy web browsing: zero privacy.
- Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website? 2 months ago:
What’s the downside you see from having a static IP address?
What’s the downside to having one’s phone number in the public directory? There’s no security risk and yet plenty of people opt out. It’s personally identifying information.
I don’t know if any companies provide reverse proxies without a CDN though.
Exactly.
- Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website? 2 months ago:
You still need encryption between your CDN and your origin, ideally using a proper certificate.
It can be self-signed though, that’s what I’m doing and it’s partly to outsource the TLS maintenance. But the main reason I’m doing it is to get IP privacy. WHOIS domain privacy is fine, but to me it seems pretty sub-optimal for a personal site to be publicly associated with even a permanent IP address. A VPS is meant to be private, it’s in the name. This is something that doesn’t get talked about much. I don’t see any way to achieve this without a CDN, unfortunately.
I guess it’s popular because people already use Github and don’t want to look for other services?
Yes, and the general confusion between Git and Github, and between public things and private things. It’s everywhere today. Another example: saying “my Substack” as if blogging was just invented by this private company. So it’s worse than just laziness IMO. It’s a reflexive trusting of the private over the public.
- Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website? 2 months ago:
I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That’s definitely a good option.
Agree. And hard to get security wrong cos no database.
If you want to make it faster by using a CDN and don’t want it to be too hard to set up, you’re going to have to use a CDN service.
Yes but this can just be a drop-in frontend for the VPS. Point the domain to Cloudflare and tell only Cloudflare where to find the site. This provides IP privacy and also TLS without having to deal with LetsEncrypt. It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.
Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website. I know that’s not your case.
- Comment on Do you selfhost your own blog/website? 2 months ago:
This is a bit fuzzy. You seem to recommend a VPS but then suggest a bunch of page-hosting platforms.
If someone is using a static site generator, then they’re already running a web server, even if it’s on localhost. The friction of moving the webserver to the VPS is basically zero, and that way they’re not worsening the web’s corporate centralization problem.
I host my sites on a VPS. Better internet connection and uptime, and you can get pretty good VPSes for less than $40/year.
I preferred this advice.