I have setup a rustdesk server with docker, it was surprisingly easy to get started. It was for a friend who is managing the IT services of a small factory, the completely switched from TeamViewer and they are satisfied. More importantly their users, who are worse than your average windows user, found the transition relatively painless.
That’s compatible with information theory. You have a piece of information, the moment you encode it (turn your idea into words) that piece of information is transposed to a little different piece of information, then the channel of transportation adds a bit of noise (depends on the environment, most often literal background noise), and then the receiver decodes the to a different piece of information (turn your words into an idea of their own).
Understanding this concept is an important communication skill. Information theory gives a bunch of tools to minimize the difference between the idea in your head and the perception of the idea by your peer.
I have been using for the past month. I am not a power user, I mostly use it when I need to access libgen. Previously, I was using nordvpn. I feel proton is faster both when connecting to a server but also the connection is faster/more reliable. For example, if I forget to turn it off, I can watch a yt video without any issues.
I can provide some context from Greece.
First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven’t been employed within the last few years are not accounted.
As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.
While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much “our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation”.
We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.
IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.
One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).
For context, I am the top donor at my instance, I recognize that there is a need for funds. BUT, I believe it’s important for the fediverse to be accessible to everyone regardless if they have the funds for that.
Dopamine received, initiating hyperfocus protocol!
As a rule of thumb, we’ve observed that a team of 5 trained moderators appears to provide ample coverage and redundancy for servers of about 1,000 active users
That’s a fascinating bit of information. I would expect 5 moderators to provide coverage for more users. I am wondering how they came up with that statistic (will update the comment if I find an answer).
Remember that offliine/IRL community management experience can be just as important as online experience
Interesting idea, wondering what’s the IRL presence of the fediverse…
If you’re building toward participatory or democratic governance, consider establishing a proposal and voting system (some teams we spoke with use Loomio, but multiple options exist) for major policy decisions.
That’s soooo important, I love when communities create polls to decide on policy changes.
Avoid promoting brand-new members unless you already have a pre-existing relationship with them
I have followed some discussion on multi-level hierarchies on the fediverse, wondering if there are any instance implementing that…
Consider charging for accounts or offering paid memberships.
Hell no!
We hope there will be more resources available in the future, particularly tooling around legal compliance. This is one of the big infrastructural gaps we point out in our main report
That’s a big issue, I would be interested in hosting an instance available to other people, but I don’t want to end up in jail and I lack the resources to make sure that won’t happen…
That was an interesting read, it seems there is an in-depth analysis of the report here.
Can someone ELI5 so I can get enough dopamine to go read the whole thing?
Not sure if you are being sarcastic or not but I found this review.
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/5/858
I had done some research about a year ago, but I don’t have the papers saved.
While the consumption for AI train can be large, there are arguments to be made for its net effect in the long run.
The article’s last section gives a few examples that are interesting to me from an environmental perspective. Using smaller problem-specific models can have a large effect in reducing AI emissions, since their relation to model size is not linear. AI assistance can indeed increase worker productivity, which does not necessarily decrease emissions but we have to keep in mind that our bodies are pretty inefficient meat bags. Last but not least, AI literacy can lead to better legislation and regulation.
If you are worried about duplicates, aka a single bot spamming multiple votes, then that’s feasible to mitigate.
If you are worried about multiple bots spamming one vote each, that’s harder to mitigate and it comes down to how the instances handles bot accounts in general. IMO it’s best to ignore the bot problem and instead focus on designing a vote weighting system that favors similar instances.
For anyone interested, there are a few papers on cryptographically secure voting, where both voter anonymity and election integrity are preserved.
Most designs consider three separate entities, where if you accumulate the information between those entities you would be able to identify a voter and his vote, but each entity on itself does not hold enough information.
Follow people from other instances, if you find them interesting, chances are they will find you interesting and follow back.
Use tags, especially popular ones.
Gitea and forejo are doing some amazing work
Is that adhd? That’s definitely adhd!!!
I would add spaghetti in the middle
It depends on the field you are studying. I was into CS, using Linux was recommended because the machines they used to test our code were also running linux.
Most fields are going to be okay with linux, the only exception being fields that rely on specialized software like architects, engineers, and audio/video editing. Also, some software like MatLab are possible to run on Linux but it’s a pain to set them up.
I am definitely guilt for that, but I find this approach really productive. We use small bug fixes as an opportunity to improve the code quality. Bigger PRs often introduce new features and take a lot of time, you know the other person is tired and needs to move on, so we focus on the bigger picture, requesting changes only if there is a bug or an important structural issue.
I have been thinking about this for quite some time, feel free to add me on matrix (link in bio) if you are interested to collaborate/discuss.
It’s interesting to consider a few potential use-cases, as you can see below the technical requirements for each use-case can be vastly different.
Notice, I am assuming that accounts are connected, aka if someone creates a post, that post can reach users of other instances. See the “Connecting Instances” section below.
Let’s say Alice wants to organize a trivia night at the coffee shop she works at. After all the preparations, Alice needs to invite people, so she makes a post with the location, the date, and the announcement of the event.
People following Alice’s (or the coffee shop’s) account, will be notified of the event and choose to either attend or not. Some may even “boost” the event, so it’s reaches more people.
Discovery is not optimal. It’s possible, people that live nearby the coffee shop, and would have otherwise attended the event, weren’t following the account, as a result weren’t notified and missed the event.
Instead, if a location based feed was available, it would have allowed people to find Alice’s post and attend the event. The UX for such a feed can be complex, but the backend requirements are pretty straightforward, we need to filter (and/or sort) using the location, date and tags of an event.
All in all, the volume of data is small (not a lot of events happen at the same time and the same area), and the application is not time-critical (if a post takes several of minutes to reach other users it’s not an issue as the event is posted days in advance).
Let’s say a group wants to organize a protest march, they know that the police tends to get violent on such occasions, so they need to monitor the police’s activity and alert the people accordingly.
So, they create a system where some people are responsible for monitoring the area and regularly upload posts with the exact location of the police. This allows the group to create a map that shows the locations of police blocks and adjust their route accordingly.
While the example is terrible, I believe the use-case is clear. A lot of people, need to monitor “something” that is happening “right now”.
Again, probably most of the complexity lies on the UX design, but a few backend requirements are added:
Keep in mind that (2) and (3) do not mean that a decentralized platform would be better suited.
Let’s say, during the spring, a population of ducks passes through the city. Tourists and locals alike want to watch the ducks, so they start recording sightings.
This information not only allows users that are nearby to rush to watch the ducks when there is a sighting, but also can be used to create a heatmap of the most probable locations to find ducks for a given time of day.
Technical requirements:
I had SA incidents in mind when writing the above example, but I choose a more light-hearted example to avoid needlessly triggering people.
The use-case is pretty much the same. The locations are places to avoid for safety reasons, and people rushing to the scene are either searching for the perp or helping/protecting the victim.
Let’s say Bob learns an interesting trivia about the statue on the town square. He creates a post about the trivia and stamps it with the location of the statue.
Here, time is irrelevant to the post, people are going to be interested in Bob’s trivia years down the line. However, people need to be able to discover Bob’s trivia, and a map is probably the best tool for the job.
Technical requirements:
Utilising this, we could create a list of Habitat instances that are relevant to a user’s current location, and then query only those instances.
I don’t think this would work, habbitat.world would still have users around the globe, as a result it would be queried every time someone refreshes their feed. You may make a case that there shouldn’t be such an instance, but keep in mind (a) pretty much every Fediverse platform has a few huge instances, and (b) that would exclude users located in places without a local instance (or local instances with unethical admins/mods).
I believe the existing follow-based federation mechanisms would provide a better solution. Keep in mind that fedizens don’t want to see “everything” within their feeds, but a curated list of posts/events based on their choices and/or the choices of people with similar background (same instance).
I have serious sleep issues so I heavily really on my alarm app, I need features like:
Hi, I am a building a platform with the goal of supporting apps like this, and I would be interested to develop a plugin for your use-case as an experiment (no fee).
I am working alone on this and this is not my first priority, so I cannot make any guarantees about the timeline, or the scope of the plugin. But, if you are interested we can have a chat on matrix.
The project is not open source yet, but I am planning on doing so once (a) I figure out how to properly apply licensing, and (b) remove any potentially critical information (credentials) from the repository.