“Extreme levels of data scraping” my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud “look-what-you-made-me-do” scream. And what on earth would “system manipulation” exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.
Most likely attempt to force people to pay if you ask me. Paid users have significantly higher limits according to him and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are not implemented for paying customers. Others have a casually low limit which can be reached easily.
For me, the biggest mistake he made was put the signup wall without an initial reading limit of 1-10 tweets. Tweets are used as citation by journalists in news articles because people use it as an official platform and many journalists use it to report on what’s happening to a fairly large audience of followers. This is only one example where the signup wall ruins it all. You can’t even go in to read a single tweet. However, look at Medium. I despise it on a personal level due to the quality reduction it caused, but at least it only shows the paywall after your 1sth/3rd/10th article. At least it provides a window to your website from the internet. Elon Musk has slain that dragon too now, and all the windows to look through have been boarded up. He has walled himself and all Twitter users in.
Only thing I’m messed up with is Reddit’s NSFW subreddits can’t be viewed logged out and I won’t log in either. Oh well. I won’t allow myself to contribute there.
From your language I assume you are just starting out with security, and it’s common to arm up right away and be very cautious. Remember that social engineering is by far the most exploited and successful method, and even if bots are attacking your home network, they’re automated and will move on. Simply don’t run services at home that are public or exploitable, and if you do use tools like fail2ban. You can self host a vpn or proxy on a cloud instance if you really want to maintain your privacy, but then quantum computers exist now and they can decrypt everything you do on the internet in moments.
At least for Kotlin it's literally just syntactic sugar for getter and setter methods. I really like them, don't get me wrong, but it's just the bottom approach masquerading as the top approach
Reddit is a read-only site for me now, and only when I’m searching for something specific. All my “forum browsing” time goes to Lemmy now. Can’t wait until I can unfollow the last few Twitter-only accounts (public transit alert accounts) so I can complete my migration to Mastodon.
I feel bad for the lemmy.world admins that have to keep up with the software needed and costs accrued to handle the world knocking on their doorstep. I hope advertisers hit them up soon so their bills become easier to pay. While advertising was annoying on reddit, I’m more than willing to put up with it on this instance of lemmy, the admins have earned it.
I think this is an unpopular stance here. I’m not certain how else admins keep things running, but my limited time on Lemmy suggests people are hostile to ad-influence on how things run.
I’m beginning to feel this way too. We need to distribute the load, especially at this early stage.
What is also missing from the big picture is a dedicated “About” link in the navbar of Lemmy instances, providing users with a statement of detailed information on the people/organizations behind a given instance, its location in the world, its hardware, etc. A byline in the front page sidebar isn’t enough.
I hate to be the one to say this, but yeah, there’s a big reason why they shouldn’t be pushed to another server, at least not right now at this switchover from Reddit point in time.
Most normal everyday people don’t even know what federation is, and tend to not like it when they find out, as it causes extra work on their part.
They just want a central location where everyone is socializing together, and don’t care at all about the fediverse, except as maybe an escape hatch if some c-suite type goes evil.
There’s already a hurdle people jump over on change in general, so we should minimize the effort of that change and coming over to Lemmy from Reddit.
Ruud also runs Mastodon.world which has 160k+ users and manages to survive on donations alone. Not sure where the cutoff point is for when that is no longer viable, if there is one. Mastodon.social is huge and takes sponsorships and also gets some grant money I believe. They don’t run ads per se though and claim all sponsors accept contracts stating Mastodon is not going to be run in a way that is influenced by sponsors.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it may become necessary.
Donations can be a saving grace if enough people donate regularly. But such is dependent on people’s willingness, their own financial stability, and how stressed servers are (how much it’ll cost to upgrade and/or maintain infrastructure.)
It’s great if it’s viable. Means there’s less outside influence. But that’s if.
As far as I’m aware, Wikipedia has been able to maintain it purely off donations. But I’m not sure if Lemmy could.
Maybe? One thing Lemmy does have going for it is that the majority of users seem to be aware how… Fragile? the fediverses can be. There’s arguably more passion behind the users and maybe willing to throw support out.
Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it’s enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.
Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).
Or maybe nonprofit organizations. Though I’m having a harder time imagining why they’d need a social network site, especially if it’s federated with our shit posting “sublemmies” or whatever we’re calling them here.
NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It’s absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.
But only if they’re able to survive and thrive. Money is a very tricky thing.
As for my example, I was talking more about something like Red Cross (random example) wanting their own Lemmy insurance. Why they would want that. I was really just jesting about the shit posting
Wikipedia is able to pull that off because wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia, not a social forum to add comments to or respond at a massive scale like lemmy is or reddit was. A majority of services either get their revenue from ads, or they start off not doing that but eventually have to cave in and let ads in.
I think ads can be annoying sometimes, but if they’re done in a similar way reddit did them before their downfall, then it would be tolerable and at least give the lemmy.world admins enough money to cover server running costs
I wouldn’t sweat so much picking a close server as long as it has enough users to be around for a while, reasonable rules, and isn’t under too much strain. Just by getting off the big servers, you’ll have a much faster experience and access to the same content.
I moved from lemmy.world to this one that specializes in my interests, and it’s running great.
Good tips! I should have explained a bit more, but by getting a server as close as possible, your ping should theoretically be lower than an instance that’s far from you (I know, the internet is not a straight line to the server).
The best way to test this is by pinging the server in a CMD prompt/terminal.
Indeed. If I remember correctly VLemmy is in Ireland, and yet I’ve gotten consistently fast responses from it except during server upgrades. I think the size of the instance really does matter here.
Some major spoilers below! Since there's no markup for spoiler text yet, here's a gap to indicate spoilers. If you haven't seen the movie yet, skip this comment.
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::: spoiler spoiler
Loved the movie, but found that the ending was the weakest part. I don't mind the resolution we got, it's just how we got that resolution that has some parts missing. How did the people suddenly go from fearing her to calling her a hero? Sure, she saved the city from getting blown up, but one act alone doesn't easily undo a thousand years of prejudice. After all, it doesn't seem like anyone knows the truth about what happened between Nimona and Gloreth. How did they clear Nimona's name of the Director's accusation? Who runs the kingdom now? Why didn't that dudebro knight get his face punched in? The ending was fine, but they glossed over a lot of parts that would have made the ending make more sense.
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Edit: Well, looks like the Lemmy spoiler code doesn't work on Kbin.
Holy wow, I had actually forgotten how shitty the site had become. I was always ready to open it and quickly scroll a couple times to get past the initial garbage, to hopefully find something worthwhile. That ask reddit post is peak “help the AI write an article” trash.
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