copygirl

copygirl , 1 day ago

except for visual studio code

But also:

• Telemetry everywhere
• Not permitted to use the official marketplace with OSS builds
• Not able to use certain extensions (like C# debugger) with OSS builds

Though I’ve been very happy about the direction .NET and C# have been going, especially the licensing.

copygirl , 1 day ago

What I’m saying is that Microsoft is, in fact, being hostile by limiting OSS builds such as Codium in the ways I’ve mentioned above. I guess that’s how they try to get people to keep using their proprietary build instead.

copygirl , 15 days ago

Not to be pedantic but I think the headline is fine.

If you simulated a fire in a building for training purposes and upon activating the fire alarm, it got broadcast to emergency services when it shouldn’t, you did accidentally broadcast the fire alarm, simulated or not.

The “accidentally” already implies it was done in error, suggesting it was not an emergency. On the other hand, if it was a real emergency, and just wasn’t meant to be publicly broadcasted, I feel like the headline would’ve looked different.

copygirl , 2 months ago

I use uBlock Origin + vaft from TwitchAdSolutions, which is currently working pretty well for me. I’ve had some issues before, and every now and then the stream can freeze up when an ad is played. But it’s so much better than having to endure even a second of those mind-rotting ads.

copygirl , 6 months ago

At the moment, upvotes and downvotes, while not used that way by many people, is more about what others will see, rather than what content you like. It’s more like a community moderating and rating effort. Upvotes make posts more visible, by pushing them further up in what’s currently popular. Downvotes do the opposite, and in my personal opinion, should be reserved for posts that don’t fit the community they were posted in, spam, or things that break rules – typically the same reason why you would (and should) report a post. They are not “agree” and “disagree” buttons. Topics you disagree with can still spark interesting conversations.

Using the same mechanic, voting, to tell an algorithm whether similar posts should have higher visibility on your own feed, would be incompatible with this existing system. Posts that get a quick reaction or emotion out of you are even further encouraged, while things you simply don’t want to see (but aren’t necessarily “bad”) get punished heavily.

This system works through subscribing to communities you are interested in and actively participating in improving the health of those communities, rather than passively consuming content. That takes some effort, yes.

All in all I think this proposed system is not compatible with Lemmy, and maybe not even a good idea.

copygirl , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

A personal instance generally doesn’t have a big reach, unless people actively follow the person who’s posting the doxxing information.* The fediverse may not be a good way to spread personal information of others, throwing up an instance like that is not much different than throwing up a website or forum.

There’s two things I can think of you can do: Contact the company that hosts the website to take it down – I’m unsure about how you go about this, but I’m sure you can find out more about that. And to report the instance to other instance admins to get it blacklisted, perhaps get it on a block list, limiting its reach and thus effectiveness. Get in contact with big instance admins, they likely have chatrooms you could join, and they might be able to help with the other step as well.

*edit: In the case of Lemmy, I suppose it would be people following a community, rather than a user directly. If moderators or admins act on the posted informated and delete it, the deletion will federate as well and any legitimate instance will automatically delete the content on their servers as well. This would also be true for Mastodon and such. If not, the above applies.

copygirl , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It could just have something to do with the fact that many people think ads are not only annoying but also highly manipulative, creating artificial needs in people, a tool to make already successful and rich companies even richer, … and the surrounding technology to power them is unethical, hoarding tons of information, building profiles of people, tracking which websites they visit, what search terms they use, …

When people talk about blocking ads, being frustrated about them showing up, it’s just kind of disrespectful to be like “well you could just pay for the service, you know?”. Besides, who knows how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets.

copygirl , 10 months ago

I think you’re wrong. Downvotes are literally meant to be to provide a community powered mechanism to push irrelevant content into out of view, as per the community’s purpose. They are not going to be used as part of an algorithm to push more relevant content to you specifically. Of course, that’s not how a lot of people end up using them, so whether it’s an effective mechanism is another question.

Meanwhile, I’m on an instance that doesn’t federate downvotes, so they don’t affect ranking here, maybe for the better?

copygirl , 10 months ago

Shonk.

copygirl , 11 months ago

From what I know, F-Droid compiles apps from source so you can be sure that the code you’re running is actually made from the source code that it claims to be built from. On most other platforms, the developers could be uploading malicious programs that actually have the code changed from what’s shared online as its source code. Then add the fact that other developers can and do look at the code, and what changes are made from version to version.

copygirl , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

On Mastodon, when you follow another user on another instance, your instance will send a request to the other, to be notified of new posts made by that user, as well as posts they’ve boosted. When such a new post arrives, a copy will be created on your instance so it can be displayed without nagging the original instance again for the post’s content and such.

Lemmy is similar of course, since it uses the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub). Think of communities as “special users”. Whenever someone creates a post or reply, the community will boost it, so it ends up on every instance where a user has subscribed to that community.

This part I’m not entirely sure on but I believe it’s how things work: The other way to send messages around other than subscription is obviously to send messages directly. In ActivityPub there’s a field that specifies the recipients of a message. When such a message is created, it is pushed to the instances of the recipients. On Lemmy, the recipient is the community you’re posting to. On Mastodon, the recipients are filled with all the users that you @-mention in the contents of the message. So for a Mastodon user to post to Lemmy, they have to mention the community, which is why you see some posts that contain the community’s handle.

Because you can’t follow / subscribe to users on Lemmy, the posts of Mastodon users that don’t involve Lemmy never end up being “federated”, meaning Lemmy instances don’t get notified of these posts, so they don’t end up being “copied”. This is the same on Mastodon by the way. Unless your instance sends out a request to fetch posts from an unknown user, it doesn’t know about their posts, since nobody so far has cared about them.

This makes sense because if you were to try and store all the content from the fediverse you would need a LOT of storage for little gain. Similarly it would be bad to never store the content and always fetch it, because that would generate a bunch of additional traffic, which especially small instances would suffer from.

To summarize: Lemmy doesn’t display Mastodon posts because it doesn’t have a mechanism to subscribe to those users.

copygirl , 11 months ago

Surely you know more than the lawyers Dolphin got help from.

copygirl , 11 months ago

Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?

Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.

copygirl , 11 months ago

If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don’t have to sign up to one that does something you don’t like.

Besides, you don’t seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn’t for the ability to defederate, we’d have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn’t matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.

copygirl , 11 months ago

This was perhaps a bad example. Though there’s the possibility of posts not being marked for NSFW that should be (and the instance not enforcing such), and ones that are mostly harmless but still labelled as NSFW for one reason or another. One person’s NSFW is not the same as another person’s NSFW. Feel free to replace the example rule with something else.

copygirl , 11 months ago

Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.

However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.

copygirl , 11 months ago

Falling in love? In this economy?

copygirl , 11 months ago

It’s a lot more legally dubious for them if you defederate. If your instance willingly connects and shares data out of their own volition, it’s like that instance giving permission. If an instance blocks communication via the ActivityPub protocol outright, what are the legal grounds for Meta/Facebook to be able to freely access that information? Even if it’s posted publicly to view.

As an example. I can have my own website and post some info there, write articles, have contact information. People can view it. Companies can index this information and make it available to search. But I’m guessing it’s not legal (or at least less so) to be collecting that information to process and sell. Companies can do that so easily because you agree to it in their terms of service.

(But hey, IANAL.)

copygirl , 1 year ago

• Just like there’s Lemmy and Kbin that powers the “threadiverse” / reddit-like portion of the fediverse, Mastodon is only one software that enables micro-blogging like experiences. There’s Pleroma, Misskey and many more. And of course there’s always the possibility for more to be developed over time.
• Of Mastodon there’s likely hundreds of so-called “forks” out there. Since it is open source, people can take that source code, and host their own version of the project. This means they can make their own changes, include changes by others, remove features they don’t like, and so on.
• Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them. Large parts of the project are contributed by volunteers, which can jump ship to another implementation as soon as they feel like the one they’ve contributed to is not acting in the interest of users.
• Admins which actually host Mastodon instances get to decide when to update to a newer version, or whether they want to use a fork that includes the features they like (which the “official” Mastodon project has not (yet) included) or anti-features that might’ve been put there due to pressure from outside (possible but less likely).

The power here is in the hands of users and admins. We just have to be careful not to let a company like Google or Facebook/Meta take control over a substantial portion of the fediverse. See also: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

copygirl , 11 months ago

Yes and Mastodon itself is a registered non-profit organization. There’s a few people they’re able to pay to work on the projects, thanks to sponsors and donations. But there’s a lot more contributors (over 800). I think the people doing valuable work on FOSS projects have a lot of opportunity to work elsewhere if they feel like they’re being made to do things antithetical to their values. Not to mention the amount of noise they could make to expose the project and its shady goals, if that were the case. Things do work differently for FOSS projects than your average for-profit investor-driven project.

copygirl , 1 year ago

Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it’s a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn’t actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It’s basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person’s day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?