I just mount a tablet in front of my radio and ignore all of the infotainment ‘features’. It’s just a bluetooth audio device.

Same thing with smartTVs, just ignore all of the ‘features’ trying to lure you into the data harvesting ecosystem and treat it as a dumb monitor.

Tabs are just bookmarks for people who can afford RAM.

That’s a B

He’s missing the sigh() function call at the start of the main body of the loop.

That is exactly what happens. Encryption on the protocol doesn’t do anything but hide what you’re downloading from your ISP. It doesn’t prevent someone from downloading the same torrent and matching your IP to it. That’s why people recommend that you use VPNs if you’re going to do this from your house.

Most of the time I just copy/paste the terminal output and say ‘it didn’t work’ and it’ll come back with ‘I’m sorry, I meant [new command]’.

It isn’t something that I’d trust to run unattended terminal commands (yet) but it is very good when you’re just like ‘Hey, I want to try to install pihole today, how do I install and configure it’, or ‘Here’s my IP Tables entry, why can’t I connect to this service’ … ‘Ok give me the commands to update the entry to do whatever it was you just said’.

pihole, wireguard, qbittorrent, sonarr/radarr, Jellyfin, syncthing, NFS.

I’ve considered Airsonic but I haven’t found a good client that looks good and doesn’t behave weirdly. I had one launch about 500 threads trying to transcode the same song which ate up my CPU time on my server resulting in a stern e-mailing from my host.

Chatgpt is a camp for just YOLOing off into some new software. Unless it is after the knowledge cutoff it’s pretty accurate about configurations and such. It makes mistakes but it’ll get you started a lost faster.

I have a question: Do you think we should be trying to compete for these users? In order to do that, wouldn’t this instance have to try to grow very large?

I don’t mean this instance or any single instance specifically. The idea of the ‘defederate Meta’ pact is to create a separate network of instances that have all blocked Meta services. That network of instances would have a tiny userbase compared to the network of instances that federated with Meta’s services. If a generic user is looking to create an account on an instance then they’d likely just default to the network that has 8 billion users rather than the one with 10 million.

I agree with the idea of smaller communities being more attractive but I think that a social network, like the Internet, works best when it is fully connected with as little friction as possible. Communities and instances can grow or limit themselves as much as they’d like but the entire network itself shouldn’t become fragmented.

I think Meta’s goal here isn’t to take over the Fediverse and own it like they own Facebook. They likely want to be like Google where they control none of the content (and all of the associated costs and legal issues) but provide the core services and ad networks that are so profitable. Google’s “content” is the entire web, they simply provide a useful service (search) and, because of that service, they have the ability to mine incredibly valuable data which they use to generate revenue through ad targeting. I think Meta is aiming for this kind of business model so that they can dump the headaches that come from hosting massive amounts of user data/content.

I’m imagining 10 years into the future where you would, instead of using Google’s Ad Sense, use Meta’s ad platform since it would provide more money from advertisements as the ad targeting is using information gathered from the ActivityPub extensions that Meta develops. Meta devotes tons developer hours to extending the social media protocols so that people use them and Meta profits from the data collection and other services (hosting instances, storing data, etc) that don’t require them to actually run a social media website directly. This makes Meta more like an aspiring symbiote rather than a hostile instance that wants to ‘take over’ the fediverse.

I think that, to combat this, people who are motiviated should be looking at ways to create a software ecosystem that counters Meta dominance. Instead people are looking at this like it’s just another instance that they don’t like. I think that’s a very short-sighted way of addressing the issue.

I’ve had old oximeters get readings without even being on a patient before.

It was just picking up the environment’s oxygen concentration! 🤓

Let me know if I’ve misunderstood.

You did not misunderstand.

I don’t think this is the purpose of federation. Threads exists and has a huge amount of users.

Meta will ensure that it grows rapidly and defederating them ensures that users looking to join the largest ActivityPub-based social media network will likely go in the direction of Meta’s services.

The way that instances win this battle is to offer better services and a better experience than Threads. We simply don’t have the userbase to kill Threads by defederating with them. When given a choice the average user will default to using Meta’s services… it will take time and interaction with them to convince them to leave.

I would like to suggest that we consider open sourcing the script, since it is a practical encoding of the instance’s voting bylaws. I’m interested from a purely technical perspective, but I am also of the opinion that open source software is a tool of democratization.

This is imminent. TheDude just wants to track down a few issues and then polish it up before it’s subject to public scrutiny.

Don’t you see how that would make e-mail worse for everyone that uses e-mail?

Imagine having an e-mail address but you couldn’t send an e-mail to your friend because for whatever reason your e-mail server decided to not block Gmail. That makes e-mail worse for everyone.

It’s the same here, we’re trying to get away from social media silos and move towards a protocol that lets everyone participate. The kneejerk reaction here is to just create a new silo that has different owners instead of just being part of a network that shares a protocol.

If we could ensure 100% compliance with a meta-blockade then I’d be for it.

However, that isn’t going to happen and any instances that do federate with Meta will be the part of the Fediverse that exists to billions of people. Those instances will become the dominate instances on the Fediverse for people who want to get away from Meta but still access the Fediverse services. Lemmy, as it stands now, is only a few million people at most. We simply do not have the weight to throw around on this issue.

It is inevitable that commercial interests join the Fediverse and the conversation should be around how we deal with that inevitability rather than attempting to use de-federation as a tool to ‘fix’ every issue.

What are you even talking about?

Also, having people come in and vote who didn’t take part in the discussion can be problematic as they’ll have a pretty shallow understanding of the topic and the arguments for and against.

Great post, one of my few saved posts

I referred to them as a Beehaw user because their posts and profile both indicate that they’ve moved to Beehaw as their primary instance.

Be nicer. Come on. The way you moderate this community will influence the way this entire instance operates. Your rudeness and dismissiveness sets the tone for the entire instance and how people will perceive users with @sh.itjust.works as part of their identity

That’s fair.

However, I don’t believe I was being rude or dismissive.

• The user’s question, asked in the title, was answered in the stickied announcement post.
• They changed their display name to ‘Leave This Instance’
• They announced in their profile that they were leaving the instance and accused the admin team of not acting in good faith.
• The body of the post is simply discussing the voting system. We already have a post announcing and discussing changes to the new vote system… creating multiple posts about the same topic only fracture the discussion.

The fact that the user was leaving the instance, encouraging others to leave and also accusing the admins of acting in bad faith doesn’t really mesh with the idea that they’re just a user attempting to have a good faith discussion about the voting system. Instead it reads like a concern troll by a user who wanted to get one last jab in before they left.

The thread is up and available for anyone to read, it’s just locked so that conversation about voting changes will be placed into the correct discussion thread.

Define an executive process for defederation, just as you already have an executive process for moderation. Defederation is part of moderation and 1 month is not a fast turn around for this sort of situation

I think a discussion about defining a policy for de-federation is a great idea and is probably more sustainable than having to have votes on every individual instance. In this case, the issue was fairly contested and had already been submitted for a vote so we used it as the topic of our first week’s voting. That doesn’t mean that all de-federations require a vote. There was another instance that was allowing content that, under Canadian law, is consider child pornography and it was de-federated immediately.

Increase the transparency of the audit scripts you’re using to tally votes by linking a link to a git repo containing the script. I think it’s fair to say that your automated script for what the vote talley is and what someone reading through the vote sees as being the vote results are quite different

It isn’t my script to share and the final count will be done by hand with the script acting as a check. If it is accurate to the hand count then we may depend on it going forward but currently it’s just a way to check the progress.

We didn’t want to have the thread full of comments that only say ‘Remove by moderators’ as that could be construed as vote manipulation since nobody can see the content of the removed messages so we decided to leave the comments and instead wrote a script to check to see if a user is flagged as ‘local’ or not.

Does your tally exclude any votes that have already been removed by a moderator?

Why have some non-local votes been removed, while others remain?

We were removing posts of people that were not instance members. However, since users cannot see what the post said, having a [Vote] post full of ‘removed by moderator’ can look like unfair vote manipulation on the moderator’s part and, in addition, it was a lot of work to manually remove each post (the mod tools are… primitive). Instead of removing them we’re just excluding them from the count. Each user’s account has a ‘local’ flag that is checked by a script and if they’re not a local user it doesn’t add their vote to the tally.

Does non-local solely indicate accounts not on this instance, or does it include sock puppets of the same? What is the full list of criteria used to determine this?

Are there any other criteria you are using to exclude votes?

We’re having to check for sock puppet accounts manually at the moment. We have not excluded any local votes. There are not a HUGE amount of suspicious accounts (maybe 3-4 accounts who were created two weeks ago and have no comment or post history except for one vote) so we don’t expect it to affect the final result.

We’ll probably need to have a discussion in the future as to what objective criteria we should use to determine if a person is an active community member in order to prevent any perception of bias.

I’m specifically asking because I’ve been trying to follow along and audit the current vote, but my tally isn’t copacetic with yours. I assume I’m working with imperfect information, so I think it would be worth adding this level of clarity on voting qualifications to the Agora sidebar as well. A true democracy should be well codified; It would be a shame for the disparity to be down to me missing one buried comment somewhere.

The final vote count will likely be done by hand with the script acting as an audit. If the script and the hand count match then we’ll have a bit more confidence in it going forward. It’s a very manual process currently.