I just mount a tablet in front of my radio and ignore all of the infotainment ‘features’. It’s just a bluetooth audio device.

Same thing with smartTVs, just ignore all of the ‘features’ trying to lure you into the data harvesting ecosystem and treat it as a dumb monitor.

Tabs are just bookmarks for people who can afford RAM.

He’s missing the sigh() function call at the start of the main body of the loop.

Most of the time I just copy/paste the terminal output and say ‘it didn’t work’ and it’ll come back with ‘I’m sorry, I meant [new command]’.

It isn’t something that I’d trust to run unattended terminal commands (yet) but it is very good when you’re just like ‘Hey, I want to try to install pihole today, how do I install and configure it’, or ‘Here’s my IP Tables entry, why can’t I connect to this service’ … ‘Ok give me the commands to update the entry to do whatever it was you just said’.

pihole, wireguard, qbittorrent, sonarr/radarr, Jellyfin, syncthing, NFS.

I’ve considered Airsonic but I haven’t found a good client that looks good and doesn’t behave weirdly. I had one launch about 500 threads trying to transcode the same song which ate up my CPU time on my server resulting in a stern e-mailing from my host.

Chatgpt is a camp for just YOLOing off into some new software. Unless it is after the knowledge cutoff it’s pretty accurate about configurations and such. It makes mistakes but it’ll get you started a lost faster.

I have a question: Do you think we should be trying to compete for these users? In order to do that, wouldn’t this instance have to try to grow very large?

I don’t mean this instance or any single instance specifically. The idea of the ‘defederate Meta’ pact is to create a separate network of instances that have all blocked Meta services. That network of instances would have a tiny userbase compared to the network of instances that federated with Meta’s services. If a generic user is looking to create an account on an instance then they’d likely just default to the network that has 8 billion users rather than the one with 10 million.

I agree with the idea of smaller communities being more attractive but I think that a social network, like the Internet, works best when it is fully connected with as little friction as possible. Communities and instances can grow or limit themselves as much as they’d like but the entire network itself shouldn’t become fragmented.

I think Meta’s goal here isn’t to take over the Fediverse and own it like they own Facebook. They likely want to be like Google where they control none of the content (and all of the associated costs and legal issues) but provide the core services and ad networks that are so profitable. Google’s “content” is the entire web, they simply provide a useful service (search) and, because of that service, they have the ability to mine incredibly valuable data which they use to generate revenue through ad targeting. I think Meta is aiming for this kind of business model so that they can dump the headaches that come from hosting massive amounts of user data/content.

I’m imagining 10 years into the future where you would, instead of using Google’s Ad Sense, use Meta’s ad platform since it would provide more money from advertisements as the ad targeting is using information gathered from the ActivityPub extensions that Meta develops. Meta devotes tons developer hours to extending the social media protocols so that people use them and Meta profits from the data collection and other services (hosting instances, storing data, etc) that don’t require them to actually run a social media website directly. This makes Meta more like an aspiring symbiote rather than a hostile instance that wants to ‘take over’ the fediverse.

I think that, to combat this, people who are motiviated should be looking at ways to create a software ecosystem that counters Meta dominance. Instead people are looking at this like it’s just another instance that they don’t like. I think that’s a very short-sighted way of addressing the issue.

I’ve had old oximeters get readings without even being on a patient before.

It was just picking up the environment’s oxygen concentration! 🤓

Let me know if I’ve misunderstood.

You did not misunderstand.

I don’t think this is the purpose of federation. Threads exists and has a huge amount of users.

Meta will ensure that it grows rapidly and defederating them ensures that users looking to join the largest ActivityPub-based social media network will likely go in the direction of Meta’s services.

The way that instances win this battle is to offer better services and a better experience than Threads. We simply don’t have the userbase to kill Threads by defederating with them. When given a choice the average user will default to using Meta’s services… it will take time and interaction with them to convince them to leave.

Don’t you see how that would make e-mail worse for everyone that uses e-mail?

Imagine having an e-mail address but you couldn’t send an e-mail to your friend because for whatever reason your e-mail server decided to not block Gmail. That makes e-mail worse for everyone.

It’s the same here, we’re trying to get away from social media silos and move towards a protocol that lets everyone participate. The kneejerk reaction here is to just create a new silo that has different owners instead of just being part of a network that shares a protocol.

What are you even talking about?

I referred to them as a Beehaw user because their posts and profile both indicate that they’ve moved to Beehaw as their primary instance.

Be nicer. Come on. The way you moderate this community will influence the way this entire instance operates. Your rudeness and dismissiveness sets the tone for the entire instance and how people will perceive users with @sh.itjust.works as part of their identity

That’s fair.

However, I don’t believe I was being rude or dismissive.

• The user’s question, asked in the title, was answered in the stickied announcement post.
• They changed their display name to ‘Leave This Instance’
• They announced in their profile that they were leaving the instance and accused the admin team of not acting in good faith.
• The body of the post is simply discussing the voting system. We already have a post announcing and discussing changes to the new vote system… creating multiple posts about the same topic only fracture the discussion.

The fact that the user was leaving the instance, encouraging others to leave and also accusing the admins of acting in bad faith doesn’t really mesh with the idea that they’re just a user attempting to have a good faith discussion about the voting system. Instead it reads like a concern troll by a user who wanted to get one last jab in before they left.

The thread is up and available for anyone to read, it’s just locked so that conversation about voting changes will be placed into the correct discussion thread.

Define an executive process for defederation, just as you already have an executive process for moderation. Defederation is part of moderation and 1 month is not a fast turn around for this sort of situation

I think a discussion about defining a policy for de-federation is a great idea and is probably more sustainable than having to have votes on every individual instance. In this case, the issue was fairly contested and had already been submitted for a vote so we used it as the topic of our first week’s voting. That doesn’t mean that all de-federations require a vote. There was another instance that was allowing content that, under Canadian law, is consider child pornography and it was de-federated immediately.

Increase the transparency of the audit scripts you’re using to tally votes by linking a link to a git repo containing the script. I think it’s fair to say that your automated script for what the vote talley is and what someone reading through the vote sees as being the vote results are quite different

It isn’t my script to share and the final count will be done by hand with the script acting as a check. If it is accurate to the hand count then we may depend on it going forward but currently it’s just a way to check the progress.

We didn’t want to have the thread full of comments that only say ‘Remove by moderators’ as that could be construed as vote manipulation since nobody can see the content of the removed messages so we decided to leave the comments and instead wrote a script to check to see if a user is flagged as ‘local’ or not.

It seems inevitable that some kind of ID system will be needed online. Maybe not a real ID linked to your person but some sort of hard to obtain credential. That way getting it banned is inconvenient and posts without an ID signature can be filtered easily.

It used to be that spam was fairly easy to detect for a human, it may have been hard to automate the detection of but a person could generally tell what was a bot and what wasn’t. Large Language Models (like GPT4) can make spam users appear to produce real conversations just like a person.

The large scale use of such systems provide the ability to influence people on a mass scale. How do you know you’re talking to people and not GPT4 instances that are arguing for a specific interest? The only real way to solve this is to create some sort of system where posting has a cost associated with it, similar to how cryptocurrencies use a proof of work system to ensure that the transactional network isn’t spammed.

Having to perform computationally heavy cryptography using a key that is registered to your account prior to posting would massively increase the cost of such spamming operations. Imagine if your PC had to solve a problem that took 5+ seconds prior to your post being posted. It wouldn’t be terribly inconvenient to you but for a person trying to post on 1000 different accounts it would be a crippling limitation that would be expensive to overcome.

That would fight spam effectively, it wouldn’t do much to filter content.

There’s a browser plug-in that can help you too: https://drmikecrowe.github.io/mbfcext/

And, similar site: https://ground.news

It allows you to look at a story and see all of the different sites reporting it as well as including a factuality and bias rating for the site.

yt-dlp

It supports YouTube playlists also, so you can just give it a massive playlist and let it go

You can also mail them a letter requesting your data and they have to honor it 🤣

To save everyone from having to type:

http://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request

I would not at all be surprised if the GDPR dictates a set time period to respond backed up by fines.