LedgeDrop
@LedgeDrop@lemm.ee
- Comment on Half-Life 2 is currently 100% off for its 20th anniversary, plus a major update 5 days ago:
There’s also the “Unofficial Half Life 2 VR - unleashed”, which looks really exciting (I haven’t tried it yet).
- Comment on Broken thumbnails in lemm.ee? 3 weeks ago:
I think it’s related to this issue (re: lemm.ee is fetching and caching images (to improve performance) , but often get is throttled (because the Lemmy’s cache implementation was not designed to work with larger Lemmy instances ), which results users seeing broken images).
- Comment on Google Will Pause Ads Related To Elections After Polls Close On November 5th. 4 weeks ago:
Facebook, now it’s your turn…
- Comment on Concerns Raised Over Bitwarden Moving Further Away From Open-Source 4 weeks ago:
It’s the “stringing it all together” that could be problematic.
If you have multiple clients (desktop/cellphone) modifying the same entry (or even different entries in the same “database” ). You need something smart enough to gracefully handle this or atleast tell you about it.
I did the whole “syncing” KeePass and it was functional, but it also meant I needed to handle conflicts - which was annoying. I switched and really appreciate the whole “it just works” with self-hosted bitwarden.
- Comment on Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images) 4 weeks ago:
It’s sad, but I think you’re right.
I assumed/hoped that Lemmy’s architecture was more decoupled.
According to the ChangeLog, it hints that the image reverse proxy is built-in, maybe using Pict-rs.
Which certainly reeks of Not Invented Here Syndrome, as image uploading/storing, reverse proxies, and caching is a well understood problem.
- Comment on Seeking feedback: how should lemm.ee move forward with external images? (related to frequent broken images) 4 weeks ago:
Wow, thanks for the full transparency. You are awesome!
My opinion would be option 2 (proxy requests) , but with a higher cache TTL or simple a LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache.
If you’re getting throttled, it could be mitigated by increasing the cache retention period (or improving the cache hits).
Another improvement : Would it be possible to change the proxy, so that if the proxied requests are throttled, it simply sends the user a http-302 to the origin (instead of a broken image)?
Regarding option 1 (full cache) : I greatly appreciate your desire to hide/protect your users ip, but it is outside the scope of what I expect from a Lemmy server. Maybe you could market and upsell this increased privacy as a subscription based feature. However, if I want privacy - I’ll use a VPN.
Regarding option 3 (User fetches content from origin) : From a users perspective, I really don’t want my Lemmy experience to be based on hitting a bunch of (potentially) unreliable services. When I, as a lemm.ee User, request a post from Lemmy.world (for example), lemm.ee will proxy and cache that post and the comments. This is the distributed nature of Lemmy (as far as I understand). Why restrict this caching to just posts/threads/comments and not include images (which, let’s face it, are as meaningful as pure text - especially wrt memes).
- Comment on California launches electric trains as US lags behind world in rail electrification 3 months ago:
Innevitably whatever public transportation you use the route will end up in the ghetteo.
This is a mindset that many people in the U.S. will need to get over before the “quality” of public transport improves: that busses, trains, subways are for “the poor”.
I’ve been on the subways in New York and busses and trains elsewhere in the States. They’re gross. Especially, compared to most of Europe (Italy, Denmark, Germany, etc). In Asia, they’re also a clean. The mindset in Asia and Europe is “this is what people (not just the poor) take to get from point A to point B”. There aren’t school busses, the kids just take the same city bus/train/subway that all the other people take to get to work.
I’ve spent 45 minutes in the States on my daily commute staring at (and riding on) the bumper of the car in front of me. I’ve also spent 45 minutes, in Europe, peacefully riding the subway to work. I’m able to surf the web, watch a video, relax. I definitely enjoy/recommend the later experience.
- Comment on 2024-07-18 lemm.ee downtime 3 months ago:
Seriously, your professionalism in handling the situation and in reporting it is fantastic.
It’s totally above and beyond anything we should expect for a service powered by donations!
Thank you!
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
I wanted to thank you for creating and promoting an agnostic platform, like lemm.ee.
I’d started exploring Lemmy on beehaw, but was confused and frustrated why I couldn’t do “simple things” like downvote (spammy) topics (especially, outside of beehaw channels) . Then beehaw started to do more and more defederations. Although, I respect the transparency the admins have in their communications, I’m not interested in their curated form of Lemmy. As an adult, I can make responsible decisions. Fortunately, the federated nature of Lemmy allows me to easy “pack-up my stuff” and go elsewhere.
Thank you for providing me with a place to go!
- Comment on Firefox 120 ships today with massive privacy improvements - gHacks Tech News 11 months ago:
I expect to have some website compatibility issues with Firefox/librewolf, as it does have a 3% share of the global browser market - so, website development energy is focused on the chrome/safari experience. However, 8+ years ago I felt I needed to use chrome at least every other day to view certain websites - it was frustrating.
I’m hoping (and willing to try it out) to see if this has improved.
- Comment on Firefox 120 ships today with massive privacy improvements - gHacks Tech News 11 months ago:
Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)
- Comment on Firefox 120 ships today with massive privacy improvements - gHacks Tech News 11 months ago:
Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.
I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)
- Comment on Petition demands that Microsoft extends Windows 10 support 1 year ago:
Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…
Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.
With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)
This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).
You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.
- Comment on Do posts from instances that don't allow downvotes have an unfair advantage? 1 year ago:
Well Beehaw’s rational is explained in this thread.
The reason I wanted to downvote was because Reddit communities like GameDeals is one of the new equalization I cannot easily find on Lemmy.
Thus, I found !gamedeals@lemmit.online / https://lemmit.online/c/gamedeals. It uses a bot to scrape the content from Reddit, but the scoring and popularity is missing.
When I joined there were only 13 people subscribed (now it’s 150+). If I’m limited to upvotes, it was difficult to “vote for the threads I liked” vs “vote for the shovelware” that appears in that channel.
With downvote, I was able to downvote shovelware and upvote threads I thought others would be interested. Everything else would be left as neutral.
- Comment on Do posts from instances that don't allow downvotes have an unfair advantage? 1 year ago:
I was on Beehaw and they block downvotes. I didn’t think much of it until I went to a federated channel with low participation (it was a new channel) and I wanted to downvote some bot-spam… but couldn’t cause Beehaw didn’t allow it.
I understand (but don’t agree with) the site operators intention, but their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you’re registered with.
Fortunately, it’s easy to “vote with your feet”.
- Comment on New rules for bots on lemm.ee & Lemmy programming stream 1 year ago:
I really think the “simple” approach of categorizing bot VS non-bot and federate vs defederate are only masking the underlying problem : all posts do not have the same amount of “value”.
However, with Lemmy they do. And I think this is what’s broken. If you or anyone in the community has time or interest, I think focusing on rewriting the “what’s hot” algorithm would reduce/remove many of these “workarounds” (like the one you’re suggesting).
(I’m just thinking out loud) but a better “what’s hot” would have each post weighted:
- Against the number of people subscribed to a channel (more subscribers == more relevance)
- Against the average number of comments by different users/ post / community. (many comments from different users == more relevant) This would implicitly address the issue of bot spam, that you mentioned.
- An upper limit on new topics / community. This would avoid the meme community from hijacking all of “what’s hot”.
Of course this cannot all be done in real time. Things like “average number of comments per post” could be precalculated daily, but I think it’ll be “good enough” and a radical improvement to what Lemmy currently offers.
- Comment on How do I prevent hackers from stealing my debit card information? 1 year ago:
As others have mentioned use a credit card instead of debit.
But if you need/want to use a debit card, then take a look at services like Revolut or Wise (non-referal links included).
Both provide you with debit cards that you can enable/disable instantly within their app. Revolut gives you “virtual cards” which can be used for online subscription, so you can create a dedicated virtual card for each subscription (minimizing the impact if/when one of your cards is leaked). Revolut also has “one time use cards”, so a new debit card number for a single purchase. In practice, more and more vendors are disallowing “one time use cards”, but you can create a similar effect with the virtual cards.
Both platforms also allow you to set up dedicated (monthly) spending limits on either the physical or virtual cards. So you can limit your exposure that way too.