Andreas

Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it’s inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it’s annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.

Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it’s not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that’s just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.

People who don’t care about tech don’t think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don’t consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.

Yes, it started from this terminology change at Twitter in 2020. They’re the reason that version control systems call the primary branch ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ by default, because ‘master’ comes from the master/slave terminology that is used in electronics hardware design.

There’s a comment here saying that master/slave in hardware design is being replaced by primary/secondary because of the software trend, which I think is stupid. Master/slave works much better in that context because the master device controls the slave device. Primary/secondary implies that the slave device is a fallback of the master device.

It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

This instance is hosted in Germany, one of the countries with the strictest anti-piracy laws? Seems like a very risky decision (I’m aware that a lot of the good and affordable hosting providers are German).

This made me realize that I relied on Reddit a lot to decide on making tech-related purchases. I assumed that the contributors to Reddit’s tech subs are enthusiasts who genuinely want to help others improve their systems and avoid scams. Thank you Reddit for being so open about sneaking sponsored content into discussions so that I can stop trusting your site!

That makes sense, but I think what Smoke assumes from the federated mod logs is that if Beehaw bans me (a remote user) from beehaw.org and the ban message federates over to my home instance feddit.dk and lemmy.ml, I will be banned from feddit.dk and lemmy.ml as well. While it’s unlikely that bans can federate between instances, I don’t have any proof of this.

I believe it’s ban logs that are federated, not the bans themselves, but I don’t have any proof. Could someone running a personal instance test this by banning a remote user and see if they can still interact with other remote instances?

Note that if a user is banned by their home instance, it’s expected that they can’t interact with any remote instance either, as all of their posts will pass through their home instance first.

The history is that Lemmy was originally created as an independent forum for communists. Later, the devs experimented with ActivityPub federation and created the first federated Reddit alternative. The software itself is neutral and can be used by anyone, but the original communist users of Lemmy before federation was implemented are still around. The politics of Lemmy’s original community scared off a lot of potential users from exploring federated Reddit, but bringing more users and awareness to Lemmy will also attract politically neutral developers who can maintain a good alternative.

An alternative is not even necessary if the devs are able to leave their ideologies out of the software’s design, which I believe they are doing well.