Yea. The question is completely absurd. There is no such thing as “reasonable ads”. It is also completely against the philosophy of the project and the developers would never agree to it.
Also, ads are very much “give an inch, take a mile” in nature. Once you open that door and have say a tiny banner ad, then it’s like “well that didn’t do much harm, let’s do a slightly bigger one”, then before you know it it you have sponsored posts, sidebar ads, videos and all that nonsense.
It’s just one of the avenues where enshittification creeps in IMO.
First off, there is such a thing as reasonable ads, namely, ones you want to see. Sometimes you are looking to purchase something or some service, and you have to go out of your way to look for options. Ads for what you want, when you want is ideal. However, the point where advertising goes to far is trying to solve this problem by learning everything about you in order to effectively read your mind. That’s where it becomes unreasonable for me.
Second, the philosophy of lemmy (and federation in general) was not to tell all instances and users of said instances how they should use the internet, it was to give them the freedom to use the internet however they want, without sacrificing the connection with others who want to use it differently. It would not be equivalent to using reddit, because an instance that serves ads would have to compete with other instances who don’t. Whereas reddit is a walled garden where you are forced to take their ads along with their content, if a lemmy instance with ads became too “unreasonable”, the users have nothing to lose by leaving, the content is all federated.
The reality is, it’s not a matter if, but when we will see instances who try to fund themselves using ads. They’re free to serve them and you’re free to defederate from them in protest. That is the lemmy philosophy.
The issue with your first point is that in order to be served ads you actually want to see, the provider (instance admin) needs to know what you like and that way leads to tracking scripts.
That’s not “the issue” with my first point, that IS my first point.
In a perfect world, a “reasonable ad” shows you exactly what you’re looking for, without leaking any information about yourself. I understand that it’s tempting to say that’s not possible, but “proof by not being able to think of a solution” isn’t a proof, that’s why I’m hesitant to make such a strong claim.
Zero Knowledge proofs were thought of as impossible until it turned out they weren’t. Can someone serve “Zero Knowledge ads”? Maybe one day, idk.
Even if you don’t like ads, you can’t deny that they’re a powerful means of funding projects that otherwise can’t be sustainably monetized. We learned this lesson 20 years ago when the first federated internet platform hit the mainstream: the world wide web. So imo there’s no reason to think the fediverse isn’t about to relearn the same lesson.
It’s entirely possible, I agree, but as of right now, there’s only really two ways to show a person ads - targeted or not targeted. And that applies to all forms of advertising really, not just online. I don’t know enough about marketing to say how long it might take to develop zero knowledge ads but in terms of funding development and hosting we’re very long way away from that being a possibility.
And the ethos of the Fediverse was, in part, formed around the idea of not being served ads that were either utterly irrelevant and thus irritating or scarily relevant and thus unsettling. The Fediverse is pretty closely aligned with open source and privacy philosophy. I think any instance that runs ads is going to see either no revenue as they’ll be adblocked or the instance will see a sharp drop off in users.
There are no ads I want to see. If I am looking to make a purchase I will specifically seek it out. There is no advertising for anything I want that is acceptable.
Implementing ads is more against the philosophy of free and open source software than it is with Lemmy or any piece of FOSS software specifically. As for Lemmy we just won’t see any ads on Lemmy.ml in particular which is run by the Lemmy developers. It’s also not entirely true that there is nothing to lose by just cutting off the Lemmy instance that starts implementing ads if people start getting to attached to specific communities or user accounts of theirs. It would be nice if Lemmy had some kind of community and user migration to mitigate this risk.
You can say what you believe the “philosophy of the fediverse/foss” is until you’re blue in the face, but there’s literally nothing in place to enforce what you’re saying except for the users. Someone could start an ad supported instance tomorrow, and if people use it, then they use it. The Lemmy devs can’t compel them to remove ads, that’s not part of the license (afaik, I’d be glad to be proven wrong), nor would they compel instances to defederate from them. That is the opposite of the fediverse philosophy.
I’m getting down voted for acknowledging reality, but it is my firm belief that the moment we ignore this reality is the moment someone steps in and exploits it. In order to maintain the fediverse as we want it, it takes a user base that prioritizes choosing instances that don’t serve ads over ones that do, and not a user base that thinks ad supported instances aren’t possible. Meta’s Threads was an obvious attempt, and I’m glad that most instances unanimously agreed they were antithetical to Lemmy, but it won’t always be that easy.
And I 100% agree that migration of communities and accounts between instances should be top of the list of Lemmy features. Without that, then yes, as you say, any communities/accounts on that instance are lost, or worse, keep users on an instance that hurts the community. But even still, unlike reddit, that would only amount to a small subset of communities/users, and not 100% of them.
I agree there is nothing stopping someone from starting an instance with ads. It’s just that the overlap of people that agree with such a thing and are enthusiasts of free and open source software must be very niche.
I’m also not suggesting the devs could or should do anything about it. I’m just saying it isn’t something they would do. It would be worth determining which license is being used, but I doubt it is one that prohibits commercialization of Lemmy.
At any rate I don’t think such an instance would survive as the type of user that would agree with both ads and Foss is limited. It is unlikely to ever become a real issue.
My hope is that Lemmy/the fediverse can survive growth beyond just the tech enthusiast demographic, though. I would prefer to see the platform be the best option for social media for everyone, and not just one that makes compromises to maintain privacy for people who are interested in that sort of thing.
In 50 years I don’t want to see the lion’s share of content still being generated and only existing on proprietary platforms. I would much rather it be in openly accessible ones.
And given the power that ads have at monetizing platforms that are otherwise unmonetizable, as the platform grows, it’s inevitable that we will see instances start to leverage them.
Then our goals are fundamentally at odds. My hope for the future is the minimization or elimination of the ad driven internet. I’d rather see Lemmy die than succumb to ads and commercialization.
In 50 years from now maybe we will have found a better way. Perhaps instead of leaving the idea of social media and the Internets “public square” to corporations we could fund it in a more socialized way and have it be some kind of tax expense. I don’t want to see companies profiting off the simple act of communicating online forever. Maybe in the past it was novel enough to be a real technological hurdle that could only be done with privatized companies, but at some point I think it should be more like a public utility.
I feel that you’re still misunderstanding me. I have never said that my goal is an ad driven internet.
I would not be against govts running publicly funded fediverse servers, and I would not be against public funding going toward fediverse and open source projects, but I hope we would agree that we would not want the fediverse to be “owned” by any govt. The ability to run your own instance free from any govt control is vitally important.
Publicly owned servers introduce a new set of difficulties too. Unlike privately owned platforms, things like freedom of speech would actually need to be guaranteed. But that doesn’t mean you want any random account to be able to spread any info it wants, which would make the platform a target for manipulation. I would guess most publicly owned servers would thus resort to deanonymization to simplify the challenge of moderation. Which I wouldn’t be interested in.
Obviously a bit thin skinned, but IMO lemmy.ml can do what they want with their moderation. It is not anybody else’s decision how they moderate, except of course keeping it legal.
Seems to me almost all those comments are somewhat offensive, for instance calling people tankies, I’m guessing rule 2 is something about not being rude. Personally I find that perfectly OK not to allow rude comments.
OP should “read the room” better, then maybe they could have a proper debate.
This is also up to them. If the admins are ok to get corresponding consequences - they can do this.
Posts like this posted here from time to time.
And I think the main problem is: the fact that an instance has a very strong political view and even a censorship becomes a big surprise for people using this exact instance.
It looks like an instance and community policies must be somehow better visible.
No it’s not, they may walk the line, but if they cross it, the law will ultimately be enforced. So in the long run, a service can only exist if it is kept legal.
Posts like this posted here from time to time.
I’m not sure what you mean, but yes there are repeated attacks on lemmy.ml, and it’s getting tiring, because it always turns out bullshit.
an instance has a very strong political view and even a censorship
They are moderating according to their own rules. Rule 2: “Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.” Clearly the above poster violated this rule over and over.
It looks like an instance and community policies must be somehow better visible.
That rule is enforced capriciously and randomly. I just caught a rule 2 ban (I’m in the screenshot) for using the word “genocide” in a way they don’t like.
Meanwhile, I’ve reported literally dozens of hexbears for posting their pig shit memes and not a single one got removed. Apparently that’s more respectful than wrongthink.
Let me get this straight. You defend the moderation by suggesting that most of the removed comments were offensive or rude. But when someone provides a counterexample to that, you tell them to just go somewhere else if they don’t like the moderation?
Yeah it’s pretty fucking obvious you’re not acting in good faith here. You don’t see anything wrong with what their mod team does, even if it’s to ban dissenting opinions.
Lemmy dot ml is like, one step away from becoming another Lemmygrad.
and I think thats probably by design, Since lemmygrad is defederated from a lot of the better instances, what better way to get back into them than to take over a federated instance.
Especially when the admins and lemmy creators are down with your tankie ideology and support you taking over the instance.
I mean, if you’re gonna lie about it, you could at least lie in a way thats not provably false. defed.xyz/check/lemmy.ml
also, dot ml is one of the lemmies i frequented (well, used to, until the tankies became such a fucking problem), so I can tell you from personal experience that lemmygraders are there, in droves, and posting constantly, from their lemmygrad accounts.
Excuse me for giving you the benefit of the doubt of just typing .com by habit, instead of assuming you are trying to actually, legitimately talk about a site that doesnt exist.
They are literally run by the same people and everyone can look and see they are not defederated. Why are you blatantly lying about something that is easily verifiable?
Again, lemmygrad.com is literally on the blocked list, and it’s easily verifiable. I did not know that lemmygrad.ml was where it was at now. Sue me ig.
About 30% (just my estimate) of the people here from Reddit had a problem with mods having too much freedom granted to them by Spez. There is an irony that such people would be attracted to a decentralized network where instances have even more freedom to shape their communities, but as you said- it doesn’t really matter what people think when anyone can go start their own.
Just my estimate based on observation. It’s been my experience that most of the people on the Fediverse seem to want strong moderation tools, but there’s definitley a contingent that would prefer a looser form of moderation (or none at all). The cool thing about the Fediverse is that both can peacefully coexist.
The cool thing about the Fediverse is that both can peacefully coexist.
Ya I love this feature of the platform. Some instances can be strict on what content they want to have (e.g. beehaw and exploding-heads) while others can be the libertarian platform of their dreams (e.g. personal instances).
It would be interesting to see some polling on this, but I’m no statistician and wouldn’t be able to perform it in a way that wouldn’t be bias, nor could I account for that bias. 😔
Yeah the first ban I got was warranted, but this time it was just using the word “genocide” consistently with the UN definition. That’s chilling as fuck and goes way beyond simple “stated moderation standards.” That’s straight up information warfare.
“Don’t worry, if you correctly call this a genocide, hexbear will ban you for genocide denial without a hint of irony.”
If you were already on thin ice, this shouldn’t have really been a surprise. Like most internet dwellers who get banned somewhere you’re dressing up your offending comment to make it seem like persecution, but while it’s not a heinous comment on its own, but if you have history I can absolutely see a mod not wanting to deal with you trolling the hexbears. And it certainly wasn’t just “using the word genocide”.
This is the only good take I’ve read on this thread so far. People are mad their opinions, vitriol, and/or FUD aren’t tacitly approved by the mods of another instance.
Thank you. I find it sad that so many people don’t seem to understand that their right to free speech, is not a right to dictate other people, or force themselves on whatever forum they want.
“We’ll wait a few more minutes for person X to join, then get the meeting started,” like the other ten people who made the effort to show up on time deserve to be punished with extra meeting time for being responsible. Bonus points if this causes the meeting to run a few minutes long.
I talk to the C suite and lab staff regularly, sometimes, you can’t duck out of front the muckity mucks, sometimes you can’t leave a conversation with researchers and partners. But, I’m frequently the one who say, we’re 5 minutes from close, 2 minutes from the end of our time, ok, we’re going to have to drop off. With either.
Yeah, I’m totally cool with being late sometimes, but I know various folks where it’d be an exception, if they’re not late, because they have meetings back-to-back all day long.
Always makes me feel like the official meeting start should be 5 minutes after or something, but I know that those folks aren’t late for the fun of it. They’d definitely overrun those 5 minutes, if they knew they had them.
My frustration is less with the people who are late and more with the meeting host making the rest of the attendees sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for the late person. Unless the late person’s presence is the point of the meeting, just get started and let them catch up.
They tried to fix this at my work by changing the default values for an hour- or half-hour meeting. Half an hour would automatically become 25 minutes and an hour would turn into 50 minutes in the calendar.
The idea seemed to work at first, but people quickly adjusted and used those extra minutes to extend the meeting regardless.
My place of business has this dysfunction with meetings—Zoom being the biggest offender—where people just keep talking through the end of a meeting. 30-minute meetings become 35-40. 60-minute meetings becomes 65-70. And, with meetings frequently being back-to-back-to-back, invariably one or another person is late to the next one.
I think it’s because scheduling a meeting with all necessary parties is so difficult that if you don’t finish the thought, the next chance is at least a week away.
To top it off, we had a company-wide survey that spawned a working group to tackle the problem of meetings, whose suggestion was to update Outlook settings to automatically shorten meetings by X minutes—to allow people transit time, bathroom breaks, etc. Almost no one set that setting.
Maybe I am crazy but I always thought it was lazy as fuck to have meetings for absolutely everything. Like, how about you spend some time researching and analyzing a subject on your own before calling a meeting for every little step of the way.
Now I understand that there must be a balance, but man there was so many of those meetings where nobody has a clue on the subject and it is just pointless talking for over an hour. Another meeting is scheduled with another party as soon as that one meeting is over, and it is just back-to-back meeting with everyone in the company, slowly but surely deriving a solution from everyone opinion. Seems to me like people who do well in those environments are the lazy workers who just want to spend their whole days chatting in meetings.
Can we, at some point, derive a solution based on experimentation and verifiable facts? Can someone come up with a summary analysis with recommendations and possible solutions? Why does everything has to be the result of endless meetings, endless compromises with people without a clue, and end up being a shitty design-by-committee feature.
Anyway, could be just be a me thing, or specific to that place I worked at.
I do think of this quote as being something awesome that Picard said, but something also bugs me when I think of it that way… I’m attributing a great line, and advice I follow a lot through life to a fictional character, instead of to the man that actually said it.
David Kemper wrote that episode of TNG, and while he may have heard it elsewhere or paraphrased it from a common saying in some distant land or who knows, at least we can attribute it to him as best we can :-)
I might even go so far as plant a few policies in their heads. “We are in a climate emergency, and we should address it immediately with policies such as carbon tax-and-dividend, ending subsidies for harmful industries such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, investing in both established and promising renewable energy sources such as solar and wind and tidal and geothermal, reducing our dependence on cars with more electrified public transport and denser urban design, and encouraging better urban land use patterns with land value taxes.” One sentence = one thought, right?
Knowing humans, if we didn’t use this magical power to guide them to good solutions, a good number of us would conclude, “That’s it, we need to nuke China and India to save the Earth!”
I’m not sure that just putting the message in their heads would make them actually do it. I feel like the (American) right wing party would just start campaigning with “The commie liberals are using Jewish space lasers to plant their eco hoax in our brains! We must vote the out before they use it to turn your children trans!!!”
Interesting points. Blender has always been a great example that shows how well FOSS can work. To not just be as good as closed-source alternatives but to actually outperform them in many ways is incredible. Kinda disproves any excuse for intrusive DRM implementations.
Blender was always capable but was held back by funding and some weird outdated design choices (right click for selection instead of following the rest of the world). Luckily both issues are solved these days and it gets more and more third party support from other 3D software.
right, since blender 2.8 it has been way more accessible for users to get into. I’ve always really liked blender’s unique approach to design though. The Blender Devs work in the same building as their in-house animation studio. This kind of synergy has always come up with unique workflows that are crazy powerful and useful once you get behind it. right-click-select is one of these things. The devs at the Blender Institute are always surronded by artsists who have tons of ideas on how to make things faster to use for the artists.
I'm going to stop you. Blender developers never care about artist. There are many features they never included even after they were told to added it. Blender still lacks modern day tools that are available in other programs. They don't respect ideas of abandoning old things like shortcuts for everything. Not everything needs a shortcut. Blender lacks the ability to work with other free open source programs while Maya and Adobe are fine. You never think to gain a better understanding of Blender developers, they aren't the good guys. They are the greedy lazy type like Elon Musk.
I don’t really want to argue in detail as I don’t feel like your critizism is constructive or specific. You’re right though, the blender devs aren’t the good guys… they are the best!
I guess discourse in software development is very normal (and needed) and in the case of free software, it is generally held publicly. Well they still give away their code for free. Everyone is allowed to do the same thing the blender foundation does - aquire resources to fund blender’s development and sharing the product with everyone who wants to use it.
edit: reading the thread on blenderartists… that developer seems to be a bit of a drama queen… I can’t comment on the technical things as I know close to nothing about it, but him being rude like that is not good for any working environment.
This is not normal, this is just Blender developers ways of "Their way or highway". People had found better ways to make certain things work better, the Video editor, VR, sculpting, game engine, etc. All of the things you wanted were never added because of jerks inside of Blender who became egomania like Elon Musk.
they give you stuff for free. Send them money if you want them to have more resources to manage all the contributions, or give money to someone who you think knows better than them. Calling them egomaniacs is absurd, wrong and rude, and will get you nothing but downvotes on Lemmy
They got millions from gaming companies, money is not the problem and even if i give them money they will not do what i want. They handle money differently.
Ignoring Blender developers because you love blender to death isn't going to make Blender better. If no one stands up to the developers than you don't have the right to insult people or anyone.
I agree with others that the concept of "mega threads" are fundamentally broken and not something I'm interested in carrying over from Reddit.
This is a place for discussion where users vote to decide what rises or stays obscure. Let the system work how it is designed. If there are too many posts about a particular topic, it's either extremely relevant at the time or there are other moderation rules that could be considered to make sure low-effort posts are not dominating more substantial posts.
Tagging. Flair. Hashtags. Some kind of meta information.
Even in reddit posts can have flair. Lemmy have come to the edge of not having a filtering system, and need one asap. community specific tags or lemmy-wide tags or organic loose tagging, something is needed.
I agree. Even when the megathread included a list of posts relevant to a topic, whatever nuance was there gets lost in the grand comment thread. We really need a tagging and filtering system so that users can opt out of topics.
That way, it’s not incumbent on mods to make a Megathread, or make a judgement call on whether there are too many posts on any one topic.
Next time you feel the need to tell everyone how useful something is it might be good to include what it actually does so others do not have to google it themselves.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot). You can also browse ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files in local disks and boot them. x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI and MIPS64EL UEFI are supported in the same way. Most types of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/ChromeOS/Unix/VMware/Xen…)
If you are going to use this account to auto-post, yes you should be tagged as a bot, alternatively I would recommend making a second account for this task.
The moment I start seeing Meta content here is the moment I leave. People are being very, VERY naive in thinking that the Fediverse is immune to corporate interest. Judging by the Mastodon response, we are already seeing that it’s not.
In email world, gmail became so successful that now its a problem when they decide to blacklist any other email domains that Alphabet don’t like. We should never allow profit driven entities get their foot in the door. We should develop a strong immune system against such profit seeking groups/companies etc. We should remain open to people, non-profits, universities and the likes only.
I think the immune system is federation itself. Everything is in the open, users have the control, how do you develop a competitive advantage in that context? I think it’s the end of “winner takes all”.
There’s a slight gradient in literacy when looking at grade level but it’s not really accurate with illiteracy. Seems cities can still have a considerable population that can’t read.
Note: Not talking about legitimate, regular curriculum, “online school” for kids that can’t attend normal school for whatever reason, (e.g. bullying, immunocompromised, etc). I’m referring to religious/cult garbage home schooling stuff that doesn’t teach kids much of anything. Parents that put girls through these programs often end them at the fifth or sixth grade (because that’s all they need to be “good wives”).
I grew up in New York city, and lived in the Bronx. Most of the people living there are literate in their mother tongue, less so in English. Is that what you were trying to say?
To add to this, I think people often underestimate how “easy” it can be to function in society without being able to read well. I know that some folks who either don’t read at all or read at a very low level have just gotten used to interpreting the world around them without the language part. For example, visually recognizing a username and password field on a website and knowing what they’re for, or recognizing the symbols and colors used for certain objects or meanings, all without the actual words needing to mean anything to them for them to understand what it is and what to do with it. And for those who can read at a 5th or 4th grade level (and would thus be included in the stat mentioned in this post), they’re likely then very capable of reading and understanding the majority of text they’re going to come across in their day-to-day lives.
Of course, I don’t want this to sound like I’m saying being illiterate is easy, I’m sure it creates MANY barriers and difficulties for the person, but I do think humans are also flexible and resilient, and are able to survive using other cues.
But I believe it. I work in law and often need clients to respond in writing to questions (so we have a record of their answers). The barely-coherent poorly-spelled responses we get are astonishing - and often from pretty well educated, smart people with high level jobs (after all, they can afford a lawyer).
You have it backwards actually. You need to walk further into the cities to see the really poorly-educated.
Here’s the actual data. Look at Illinois for example. All the rural counties are right around 8% functional illiteracy. Then Cook County (Chicago) is literally double at 19%. The trend seems to repeat in every state. Queens and Brooklyn are the most illiterate parts of NY, while far-away Ontario County is the most literate.
The only real exception is in the Southwest. California’s most illiterate county is rural Imperial County with a whopping 41% illiteracy because of all the immigration.
Most rural people hate me and want me to be murdered after I’m publicly humiliated.
I live in a rural area and I am just really tired of having to hate all of my coworkers. They’ll all try to rant at you unless they know you’re lgbt, in which case they’ll never talk to you and report you for everything.
If it keeps happening, prefers middle of the night (to where you live) hours, and you often get a really big batch in a row, then yes, it’s probably an attempted hack.
In any case, I would making sure your password is strong and isn’t reused anywhere else, and set up multi factor authentication…
Edit: It was pointed out to me that this has an approve/deny on it. Looks an awful lot like an MFA Fatigue attack. The attacker plans to keep doing it until you slip up and approve it accidentally while fumbling to unlock your phone at midnight sometime.
You should change your password immediately, if you haven’t already.
Weird. Sure looks like MS may be sending these without requiring your password. That’s…not great. Because of the fatigue attack aspect. See what you can configure. I would disable this function on my account, if I could.
Again, that’s if you’ve gotten dozens of these. If you got 3, it’s someone who mistyped their email as yours.
This is a common attack tactic, then, called MFA Fatigue. It also means they probably have Ops password already. Or Ops service provider is doing something dumb. (MFA requests shouldn’t be sent out without the other factor being known.)
Edit: There’s no approve link there. Just ignore these. If you got a lot of these, do setup MFA.
I was a volunteer treasurer at a youth homeless shelter.
Sadly, it’s not possible to evaluate someone’s intentions when they knock on your door and ask for a sandwich. They might truly just want a sandwich, or they might have other intentions entirely.
That’s not very true, unfortunately. Knocking allows someone to somewhat figure out if anyone is home, allows a person to gauge who is home (a man or a woman) and how easily the knocker can gauge overtaking them. Breaking in means the homeowner may have time to get a weapon and means the knocker will have to search for anyone home.
Getting them to come up to the door and see if they’re armed makes it easy if a person is looking for a victim. People just breaking in are usually hoping no one is home and just wants to rob the place.
I guess it partly depends how far out in the woods you live. The dogs will announce an intruder before they even get 100 feet close to your home, and I had my cats trained to knock on the door knocker, when they weren’t out eating rats anyways…
Honestly, the fella I helped didn’t even knock on my door, I knocked on his ‘door’, while he was resting at a local bus stop.
I had already known the fella for a few months in passing on my bicycle rides. I realized he was a good decent honest person, but he needed a haircut and beard trim.
Well, I happened to have trimmers, and figured that was the least I could do to try to help him out. That, and a pizza and a beer, just because…
Edit: Yes, I went out of my way to help this particular fella, he didn’t actually knock on my door. But, what if it was 120⁰F outside, and some stranger knocked on your door asking for help?..
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