The title isn’t accurate, so I can’t assume it is.
Fiat currency works precisely because the planet is finite. What you’re thinking of is a currency that’s tied to a finite resource, like a gold standard. Fiat currency works precisely because monetary supply is able to be increased to keep pace with both the population and economic growth. Likewise, fiat currency can be removed from the economy when the economy shrinks (although this hasn’t happened before).
Gold isn’t finite, its supply increases every year and is the main reason for the stability in its prices. Obviously this can’t continue forever, hence the finite resources on the planet
Two things you’re assuming is fiat can be evenly distributed with population growth and at some point the issuing body will reduce excess supply, neither of these things are common practices and rarely happen
Gold is the definition of finite. There is only so much gold in the world–by which I mean the 3rd planet revolving around the sun in the solar system that we both reside in–and the only way to make more gold actually makes radioactive gold. THe fact that we haven’t discovered every last atom of it doesn’t make it any less finite.
Different infinities of a particular finite resource do not exist though. Yes, we discover more every year, but that does not make it an infinite resource. If a country was dumb enough to link their monetary supply to a resource, and then their economic growth outstripped their domestic production of that resource, they would experience deflation, id est, the money you have now would be worth more tomorrow than it is today. Periods of deflation, while rare, always have a catastrophic effect on economies, because no one wants to spend money when the value of that money is increasing. People tend to hoard their money when that happens, which rapidly leads to recession and then depression.
Your core premise is, again, flawed. You want a good way of storing ‘value’–which is a nebulous concept to start with–and then condition that premise on not using a fiat currency. Fiat currency is the best way of storing that value, and using that value at some point in the future. You could invest in stocks, bonds, money market accounts, or real estate, but that’s all still based on a fiat currency of some kine.
Value is vague on purpose, since it means that something retains its “essence” tomorrow as good or better than today. Otherwise humans would not even be able to feed themselves since the only reason I can have food in the winter is because I have something to exchange for food from places that have figured out to grow or store food. It also would be a terrible place if we worked very hard today and our returns depreciated rapidly, because there will be times when we can’t work
Sure, stocks and bonds have historically held some value, but is near impossible to out perform base inflation and has gotten worse the last 20+ years. Physical land and tangible long term goods have held up, but difficult to use for trade, hence currency
I’m pro-fiat because it works. Crypto is okay, but it’s too volatile, and has too many unknowns, to be a good investment vehicle. Crypto is only useful if you’re actively buying things. Real estate is illiquid. Gold can’t be used readily without being converted to a fiat currency; you aren’t going to be able to convince any grocery store to accept an ounce of gold in place of currency. Treasury bills and bonds nearly always outperform base inflation, even if it’s not by very much. If I’m reading things correctly, the current rate on short-term US treasury bills is about 2% over inflation. Longer term bonds tend to have higher yields. Both are lower than you could expect to get with a money market or index fund. And an index fund is going to have lower yield than a growth fund.
Almost everything out-performs base inflation rates over the long term, because if it didn’t, no one would invest.
My opinion: I do not want to get paid to develop mbin. That creates an obligation and turns it into something like a job. I already have a job and intend to keep it, additionally I don't want to take the fun out of developing mbin. To commit to it full time or apply for grants or anything would currently be a big mistake I think
Maybe in the future. Currently so few people are using mbin that I doubt it would be any substantial amount. It also creates a lot more work when doing your taxes. So yeah if mbin gets a user base like lemmy currently has this would be another story. But it does not and it does not look like we will be there any time soon
So you usually take the piss out of sick people who struggle to do things they once did, but are good to let it go if they “prove” themselves enough to you by pushing themselves to their painful limits? How very magnanimous ableist of you…
E: it’s an easy fix btw: Celine Dion gave a great performance! - that’s literally all it takes.
Except their desktop “app”, which is total shit. It’s just a webview in an electron framework. If I wanted to keep a webview, I’d just keep a tab open in my browser. Or a separate browser window if I wanted to keep it separate.
I’ve hosted my Mail with them for over a year, still have them as my backup. I wouldn’t really recommend them, as they don’t adhere to the standard protocols which infuriates me. As a result, you can only use a proper email client on PC with the back they call bridge, you cannot use a proper client on phones, forget syncing of calendar and contacts.
There is more, especially for the non-mail products.
To what standards protocols do you refer? (I’m honestly asking; I’m not very knowledgeable about email architectures.)
As a result, you can only use a proper email client on PC with the back they call bridge
I thought that is kind of required simply due to the nature of their email service being end-to-end encrypted and with the decryption key being stored locally only.
I meant IMAP, SMTP, POP3. It’s true that they do some encryption shenanigans, but firstly I don’t really see the benefit over just using encrypted SMTP and encrypted IMAP, and secondly we already have PGP for that, IMO it would be better if they made that more accessible.
Some people might not be bothered by this, but it bothers me a lot. Which is why I left. The reduction of usability is not tolerable.
Besides that, they also don’t support CalDAV and CardDAV (syncing of contacts and calendar), which is something that groupware absolutely needs to be viable for me.
You might disagree or not care, if so, good for you, there is definitely much worse than proton.
To call it “shenanigans” IMO doesn’t give it due credit.
As for the PGP thing, I’ve been with ProtonMail since they were in beta way back in 2013-ish and one of their founding goals was to provide encryption that was accessible to even casual users.
And like it or not, PGP is a thing that is quite confusing to most people, assuming they even know what it is.
Besides that, they also don’t support CalDAV and CardDAV (syncing of contacts and calendar), which is something that groupware absolutely needs to be viable for me.
Couldn’t agree more. They really need to extend Bridge to support calendar sync.
If bridge could have the DAVs and we could host it on a non localhost IP, it would be a compromise I could live with. As it is now, you’d have to install it in any VM you have, and of course it also doesn’t run on phones.
Better mod tools. From a moderator (not admin) PoV:
modmail
ability to tag users and annotate things about them, preferably in a way that is visible for the rest of the mod team
a list of the most recent comments+posts in the community EDIT - already there, as pointed out by ericjmorey. I feel dumb for not noticing it before.
some sort of automatic warning, based on keywords
Specifically for the desktop browser interface (IDK how much it applies to other interfaces), it would be great if the [M] for moderator was a tiny bit less evident when you’re just posting/commenting as a user, but there was a stronger highlight when speaking officially. Plenty times I feel the need to start the comment with [speaking as a mod], as that shield icon is easy to miss.
For admins I can’t speak personally, but the list Beehaw admins provided seems IMO sensible.
I think what it boils down to is hackability. The friction comes from people being unable to modify their experience, or the experience of their users, without going through this crazy process that involves it going all the way up to two Lemmy devs for the entire universe of users, and then something getting changed, and then it going all the way back down to the moderator or whoever, after the site admin upgrades the entire site. Or, going rogue and starting to change the code for their instance, which of course only the admin can do and voids the warranty.
I wasn’t trying to become a Lemmy dev. I just wanted to make my instance neat, and I like to tinker. But I’m glad that people took the question seriously enough to give real, detailed answers about what would make things better. Lemmy is already designed to separate the backend and frontend very cleanly. I think it wouldn’t be too hard (famous last words…) to make the frontend more hackable to make at least some of these into easier things to do at an end-user or end-administrator level.
It might be good to look at other software, too. I was thinking Lemmy, but the goal is the neat stuff, not the Lemmy part of it.
This is outstanding. What I was thinking was UI plugins or custom frontends per-user, effectively, so it would fill in a needed niche on top of the backend plugins. Maybe they’ve done something in the UI area already.
Well they’re still working on it. I don’t even think it’s planned to get into v0.20.0. They’ve been hoping to get feedback from people but they haven’t really gotten any feedback yet and not many people have tried making plugins for it yet.
Modmail is like direct messages, but with a message box shared by all moderators of the same community. Any mod of that comm can see the messages sent to that box, or use it to send messages to the users.
This has a few benefits:
Typically, users don’t know which mod they should contact for clarifications, ongoing issues, etc. Because they don’t know who’s active, or even who can solve that issue.
Sometimes a mod needs to issue a warning, but that would be insensitive or impolite to do through comments; for example if it involves the privacy of a third person. Doing so through DMs sounds like the specific mod picking on the user, instead of issuing an official warning.
It reduces the likelihood of miscommunication between users and mods. For example: user contacts mod A, mod A allows the user to post something, user posts it, mod B sees the post, and remove it. With a shared message box, mod B would see that mod A allowed the user to post it, and leave the post alone.
It isn’t currently a big pressing matter, as current mod teams are kind of small. However I think that it’s necessary for Lemmy’s growth.
Ernest, the lead dev for Kbin, has had a lot of big events happen in his life recently, so he has a tendency to just kinda disappear for weeks/months at a time while the project gets put on hold. He'll usually come back, announce new plans for development, maybe push out a few updates, and then inevitably go radio silent again.
I believe he's got a few people assisting him now, but development has definitely slowed to the point of becoming concerning. I think it might be time for the Mbin team to start getting a little more free with the fork.
I believe that currently, Mbin isn't making any drastic changes, and relying mostly on Kbin's existing code as its base. As far as I'm aware, the Mbin team are mostly just doing maintenance-level development; fixing things as they break and making optimizations, but not so much in the way of developing new features. Mbin is currently just basically a copy of Kbin, without much distinguishing the two.
Since Kbin doesn't seem to be moving much at all, I think it might be a good idea for Mbin to start flexing their own muscles a bit, and making it into its own separate project. Otherwise, having a copy of a stale project just leaves you with two stale projects.
youre not wrong, they spent a lot of time refactoring things, and still are.
that said, the list of changes in the last several versions is very long, and the code base is no longer trivially similar. looking through the waiting prs, there are a lot of interesting bits like extending microblog AP connectivity (tag handling).
the mbin guys have been pumping out releases steadily since the fork, including implementing managed documentation and version numbering. it has well exceeded kbin at this stage.
theyre prepping for a 1.7 release soon. when was the last kbin update? to me, theres only one stale project here.
Thanks for the insight! I'm not super familiar with how the development cycle goes, so my thoughts are coming from the standpoint of a user experiencing both platforms. I'm sure that a lot of the back-end stuff has probably had a lot of improvements, but the end-user experience between Kbin and Mbin are still largely identical, I feel.
I was gonna load up Kbin to try to do a live comparison but, uh... Yeah, who knows when that'll be possible again lol
and relying mostly on Kbin's existing code as its base
This one most certainly not. We actually stopped porting kbin code a few months into the project, because it just was too much work and it was obvious that Ernest didn't want us to. So everything which changed on mbin in the about 8-10 months since, was purely our own work. Of course the basis will always be kbin, but the form will most likely change
We've been keeping the UI mostly as is, because we all like it, however on the backend site of it a lot has changed. The biggest problems kbin had were compatibility wise (federation) and scaling wise. These were the points where we made huge changes. The federation compatibility has improved a lot (yes there is still a lot to do) and scaling/performance has also improved a ton.
The biggest UI changes we made are:
new filter designs that work for threads as well as microblogs
a subscription panel
a usable instance wide modlog
a cake day display
and more stuff that I am forgetting at the moment (it's been a while since I looked at kbin and I am mostly a backend dev)
The backend changes we improved are (imo) more impactful:
(next release) direct messages are federating
(next release) pins federate
deleting users federate
magazine descriptions are federating correctly
mods federate
reports federate
incoming likes are working
the "hot" sort actually makes sense with lemmy content because it also looks at upvotes and not just at boosts
completely redone the hashtag system so it scales at all
completely redone the background worker system so it scales better (partly next release)
And these are only the changes I could think of in 5 minutes. We likely changed a lot more things, which I just forgot.
its a community. anyone can generate a pr, code it up and it gets discussed. so far there has been no crazy drama about what to include or not.. no one has proffered any incompatible ideas. its been quite pleasant
its all public though, in the matrix or github channels
That was the message that was pushed out when @melroy started the fork, because a lot of people were not particularly fond of the way he did it. We were trash talked a lot in the first months and obviously (and sadly) that kinda stuck on a lot of people.
I’ll never fully understand why humans are so quick to judge and offer non-constructive criticism on someone else’s creative work. It seems like the least knowledge are most often the loudest in this regard.
Communication is difficult, especially over text, and emotions can get strong as there is a lot of work involved. Software developers are not always the greatest diplomats. Well-intended constructive feedback is often read as criticism, and situations escalate. And for whatever reason people love picking sides.
At least Mbin seems like a healthy project now, and since Kbin.social went down for good it's hard to argue a fork wasn't needed. Hopefully Ernest is alive and recovering well - he did us all a huge service by creating Kbin and making it open source.
Crocs. Fuck your ugly, very gross-looking wannabe sandal. And why the fuck do they always look like you just pulled them from a landfill, and marinated them in toxic waste?
kbin.life
Oldest