Zak
@Zak@lemmy.world
- Comment on Is the Fediverse Too Complex? Can It Embrace Simplicity Without Losing Its Identity? 3 weeks ago:
From what I can tell, Bluesky is both decentralized and federated in terms of the protocol and software, but in a practical sense, trying to run the whole thing independently doesn’t seem quite there yet.
The things that are easy to do are use a domain name as an identifier and host your own personal data server
- Comment on Is the Fediverse Too Complex? Can It Embrace Simplicity Without Losing Its Identity? 3 weeks ago:
Choosing an instance has gotta be culled.
The trouble with that is having many instances is the core trait that makes it a federated system.
There are certainly ways to de-emphasize that step during onboarding; an onboarding site that picks an instance from a curated set of general-purpose instances would be a good way. Bad ways include joinmastodon.org making mastodon.social the default, and join-lemmy.org asking a couple questions and presenting a list.
- Comment on Startup will brick $800 emotional support robot for kids without refunds 1 month ago:
What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there’s a chance they don’t own all of it.
- Comment on What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? 2 months ago:
I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances.
It’s the largest by far, with five times the monthly active population of #2. One of the main things people want out of federated systems is decentralization, and having one huge dominant server goes against that goal.
I should note .world wasn’t the biggest when I signed up. I picked it because mastodon.world was a known quantity, which led me to believe the same team would run a stable server.
- Comment on What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? 2 months ago:
Most servers don’t micromanage community moderation. That sort of thing could happen almost anywhere.
- Comment on Is there any truth to this? 2 months ago:
If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.
Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn’t have a useful text search feature. If you’re on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn’t see it because I didn’t follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.
Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.
- Comment on How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Growth 2 months ago:
It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.
- Comment on Do people actually use Mastodon for something else than posting cats and hiking photos? 2 months ago:
Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.
Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn’t great (and some people claim that’s a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is fedi.directory
- Comment on Apple Removes Ability to Run Unsigned Apps in macOS 15.1 2 months ago:
It’s absolutely an issue for hobby level open source projects.
- Comment on Apple Removes Ability to Run Unsigned Apps in macOS 15.1 2 months ago:
It looks like you have to have a paid Apple developer account to do it.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 2 months ago:
That’s interesting. This post had suggested it isn’t yet possible to host an AppView. It seems the reality is more complex.
- Comment on The Great Migration to Bluesky Gives Me Hope for the Future of the Internet 2 months ago:
Whether it soon becomes possible to self host an AppView, the one remaining centralized component will tell us a lot about where it’s headed.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 months ago:
Apple does have an email service, but I think “Apple Mail” is the name is the client, not the service.
- Comment on Why BlueSky Isn’t the Alternative to X (Formerly Twitter) You’re Looking For — and Why Mastodon Is the Better Choice Over X, Threads, and BlueSky 2 months ago:
This looks like it’s conflating service providers and clients. Thunderbird doesn’t provide email accounts to the public as far as I know.
- Comment on Is it currently possible to completely self-host ATProto and interact with BlueSky users? 2 months ago:
That’s enlightening. It links to an article about self hosting a relay, which explains that, as I suspected, a relay does not have to mirror the entire network. It also seems that using a relay at all is an optional optimization.
It looks like the BlueSky AppView is not (yet?) open source. I wonder why nobody has built an alternative yet.
- Submitted 2 months ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 3 comments
- Comment on Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun 3 months ago:
I remember getting a boarding pass from an airline that was only offered in their app or printed at the airport, no email/download image/PDF option. I didn’t have to install their app, but I would have had to waste time at the airport otherwise. I removed it when I was done and left it a negative review.
- Comment on Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun 3 months ago:
The number I remember seeing was that on average, app users are seven times more profitable than web users. Sorry, no citation.
I suspect there’s some selection bias in that regular/loyal users of a particular product or service are more likely to install the app, but it also affords the company greater access to send notifications and collect data. On the rare occasion that I install some random company’s app for a specific benefit, I remove it when I’m done.
- Comment on Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic 3 months ago:
It’s likely the harassers can be prosecuted for false imprisonment, a misdemeanor. It is illegal to use deadly force such as hitting people with cars to prevent/terminate a misdemeanor.
- Comment on Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete 3 months ago:
here’s not really anything of that nature for tech stuff
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act does not exclude tech stuff. The problem is that it’s a lot harder to work on tech stuff without insider information than 1970s cars.
- Comment on Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete 3 months ago:
He can’t. He’s paralyzed and his exoskeleton is broken.
On a more serious note, the 404media article (login wall) reports the problem was that the wristwatch controller for the exoskeleton had its battery wire’s solder joint break. They seem to be trying to frame it as a right to repair issue, but that’s a trivial repair for anyone with basic electronics experience.
- Comment on Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic 3 months ago:
If I feel threatened in my car, I am not allowed to run over the person
You are not allowed to run people over merely because you feel threatened.
You are allowed to use deadly force, in the USA when you reasonably believe that it is necessary to prevent someone from unlawfully killing, causing serious physical injury, or committing a short list of violent felonies. The harassment described in the article probably does not rise to that level, though an ambitious lawyer might try to describe intentionally causing the car to stop as carjacking or kidnapping.
- Comment on I tried to selfhost Nextcloud at work 4 months ago:
There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.
Even then, it’s likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there’s a problem, it’s your problem. I don’t want to discourage you, but understand what you’re committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.
- Comment on Meet DAVE: Discord’s New End-to-End Encryption for Audio & Video 4 months ago:
I’m confused by why they would do this, and at the same time, why not for private text messages.
I’m in favor of encrypting as much communication as possible, but I don’t think many of Discord’s users were complaining that their voice chart wasn’t secure. I’d expect more of them to care about text chart, which is less effort to spy on.
- Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? 4 months ago:
Yes, it’s possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.
- Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? 4 months ago:
They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or I’ve use might have multiple IPs.
- Comment on What can ActivityPub do that RSS can't? 4 months ago:
That’s most of it. ActivityPub also makes it possible to know who is subscribed. It’s very hard to count how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed.
- Comment on Ad industry initiative abruptly shuts down after lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X 5 months ago:
Musk: starts allowing Nazi shit on Xitter
Advertiisers: Hey, we don’t like Nazi shit. We might stop advertising if that keeps happening.
Musk: Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.
Advertisers: stop doing business with the guy who told them to go fuck themselves
- Comment on How the Frontal Lobotomy Won the Nobel Prize in 1949 5 months ago:
They gave one of those to fucking Henry Kissinger. It clearly doesn’t mean what you think it means, if it has any meaning at all.
- Comment on Is there a fork of telegram that works with a self hosted XMPP or other chat server? 5 months ago:
Telegram isn’t open source, so I don’t think you’re going to find forks of it.