PorkrollPosadist

PorkrollPosadist , 10 months ago

It’s been a while since I used Arch, but it was smooth sailing while I did. In general, gaming means Steam, and Steam ships with its own runtime so it is not really impacted by whatever library versions are packaged by the distro. Gaming is a very common use case. You’d have to pick a pretty obscure one to find something where it isn’t tested and somewhat streamlined.

PorkrollPosadist , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?

This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.

Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn’t live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren’t cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.

When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won’t be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I’m not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).

Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn’t designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).

I might have some details wrong here. I’m more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

For the love of god, listen to some Citations Needed and stop self-congratilating your media literacy because some fucking dork with a website tells you the New York Times and Washington Post aren’t biased.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

Fuck off. People post all sorts of news on Hexbear. From sources like the US business press, to foreign state media, to individual radical organizations within various countries. Despite the shitposting, we actually do have a modicum of media literacy. We understand that if something is coming from RT, it is obviously going to paint the Russian Federation in a favorable light. We understand that if something is coming from the Wall Street Journal, it is Murdoch slop but needs to be honest about the money. We understand that if something is coming from Telesur, it is sanctioned by the government of Venezuela.

Still, we have a much clearer picture of what’s going on in the world than you do. We don’t just browse the whitelist of news sources made available on r/Politics and base our worldview on the congressional kayfabe. We don’t just float from headline to headline like a bunch of fucking goldfish. We also study history and political theory. We understand there is a context for all of this shit.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

Support for groups (i.e. communities on Lemmy) is coming to Mastodon sometime soon.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

On Discord, you cannot host your own server, and you cannot use any third party clients (without the threat of being banned).

You can host your own Matrix server, either on physical hardware, or a generic virtual machine you can rent from any number of ISPs. There are over a dozen compatible third-party clients (though many lack full feature coverage).

In summary, Discord is a service. Matrix is a tool.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

X11 used to require very cumbersome MANUAL configuration, where you would specify the exact parameters of your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. If you accidentally ended up overclocking your monitor it would melt. For at least a decade, it has been able to run with no configuration file at all, but in the 90s/early 2000s you had to produce a unique >75 line xorg.conf file for your specific hardware.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

I feel like PeerTube hasn’t broken through yet in the way Mastodon has, and Lemmy is kind-of broaching on. Mastodon itself is heavy for what it does. I need 8GB of RAM, >600GB of storage, and 2 CPU cores to run a 100 person instance. Lemmy is leaner (as well as some microblog style alternatives to Mastodon like Misskey / Pleroma). Peertube, on the other hand, can only get so lean. Hosting video content is orders of magnitude more intensive than hosting a text-based message board. It is much more costly to do this, and to compete with platforms like YouTube, it is not sufficient for just spin up a single instance. You also need to work out CDNs, caching, load balancing, etc.

Like Jack said, I’d just find an instance you vibe with and post stuff there, but it will take a lot of resources to grow the network as a whole.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

If some fuckstick from Nebraska asked me to snitch on my users for something which isn’t a crime in my state, I would simply tell them to fuck themselves, go ahead, and try to have me extradited. If my instance were bordering on a trillion dollars market cap, I’d hire a fucking lawyer.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

The only reason Threads has 30 million users right off the bat is because they leveraged their monopoly position with Instagram to push their users to Threads. It is absolutely no different from how Microsoft leveraged their monopoly position with Windows to push their users to Internet Explorer in the 90s.

Facebook has a long history of buying out any firm which poses the threat of competition. Peter Theil, the literal fucking vampire who sits on their board, has made very blunt remarks about this. They bought out Instagram and WhatsApp for this very reason. Make no mistake. To Facebook, the Fediverse is competition. Every minute spent on Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and other AGPL federated platforms is a minute lost from the commercial attention economy. Every user who makes the switch is a user which isn’t feeding them a steady stream of marketing data. Every user who makes the switch is lost ad revenue.

Facebook cannot buy the Fediverse the same way they bought Instagram. Instead, they will join it and apply incredible pressure to influence it in directions which are not harmful to their bottom line, and once the threat is neutralized, they will drop it like a hot turd. It could’t be any more obvious what their intentions are, but a lot of the tech bro dipshits still think a “wait and see” approach is warranted, including Eugen (initial creator of Mastodon) himself.

This guy made a blog post this morning saying that Mastodon is different from XMPP. XMPP was only used by a bunch of nerds and that’s why it died. It had nothing to do with Google employing the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy. Meanwhile like 75% of people on Mastodon have their fucking Linux distro in their bio (gentoo gang, btw).

We might have gotten lucky with one or two of these “Benevolent Dictators For Life,” but only WE can create a network which is liberating and empowering. Nobody is going to deliver it for us.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

Federation is managed at an instance level, by the administrators of that instance. Instances can take either an accept-list approach or a block-list approach. As an end user, you choose to de-federate from it by choosing an instance which de-federates from it (or by running your own instance). The moderation / personal block tools on Lemmy aren’t as sophisticated right now as they are on Mastodon, but ideally you should also be able to personally block instances from accessing your account as well.

A lot of third party communication occurs on the Fediverse though. If a community is hosted on server A, you come from server B, and another user comes from server C, it is reasonable to ask if server A will just hand server B’s content (replies, votes, etc.) to server C. On Mastodon, this is the default behavior, unless an instance enables the “Authorized Fetch” option. I am not sure how this works on Lemmy.

For the meantime though, Threads is focused on the microblogging format of social media, and compatibility with Mastodon in particular. Lemmy is probably less at risk. But you should still treat every public post like it is truly public. People run scrapers. People run bots. People can take snapshots on archive.org. Federated platforms are no different in this regard.

PorkrollPosadist , 11 months ago

Eugen’s naïveté is going to destroy this whole platform.

PorkrollPosadist , 1 year ago

The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).

The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”

Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.

PorkrollPosadist , 1 year ago

The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.

Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.

Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.