Maybe i missed some words in the article, but I don't see it say when they figured this out. Because it's been at least a decade since I learned about it in school or from a science magazine at school.
Have people been going around not knowing about this until now?
Or is it that only now can they say with certainty this is true?
"If it bleeds, I can use its proteins to reproduce!"
Just doesn't have the same ring to it.
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The paper was published last month nature.com/articles/s41586-024…
But I suspect this was not a new discovery as much as a new expansion of the information.
For anyone coming along and not trusting the title, it is misleading.
Infrared is one of the things mosquitoes use to find a target.
They still use CO 2 detection as part of their methods, this is in addition to, not instead of.
Edit: the relevant section of text
*Each cue on its own – CO2 , odor, or infrared – failed to pique the mosquitoes' interest. But the insect's apparent thirst for blood increased twofold when a setup with just CO2 and odor had the infrared factor added.
"Any single cue alone doesn't stimulate host-seeking activity. It's only in the context of other cues, such as elevated CO2 and human odor that IR makes a difference," says UCSB neurobiologist Craig Montell.
The team also confirmed the mosquitoes' infrared sensors lie in their antennae, where they have a temperature-sensitive protein, TRPA1. When the team removed the gene for this protein, mosquitos were unable to detect infrared.*
In other words, they still use the previously known ways to find a meal, and this is how they work up close. That's over simplified, but it's the important part because it gives info on how to reduce being "bitten". Loose clothing that covers the extremities diffuses the heat, making us "look" like we aren't the right kind of target wherever the IR is spread out wrong to their antennae.
The article is actually a really good one, but the title is crap
Edit 2: the paper nature.com/articles/s41586-024…
KDE Goals - A New Cycle Begins
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So blown out of proportion. Nobody is saying to stop using them. The report is more of a state of the union on software in secure systems and the talking points hinge on the most common type of vulnerability seen in large scale attacks: memory safety.
The report (which apparently barely anyone is reading) mentions C/C++ aren’t memory safe (truth) and with specific respect to space flight, alternatives such as Rust haven’t been proven yet. Both languages meet other important criteria (again specific to space flight) but it then immediately states afterwards that until other languages can be qualified, other means of ensuring memory safety are recommended such as hardware. The report makes other mentions. It’s a good read but is not a directive like media is making it.
Personally, I have little interest in learning or dealing with C++ solely for the sake of developing KDE applications. I would much rather use Rust.
Imo, Restricting the languages that can be used for app development cuts out large swaths of developers who would otherwise be eager to develop software for the project. I'm sure there are some who wouldn't mind picking up C++ for this cause, but I'd wager that they are a minority. Gnome beats out KDE in that regard, imo, as GTK has bindings and documentation for many languages.
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I thought Rust already had several different methods for interacting with C++?
Oh? Would you mind sharing them? It would be absolutely fantastic if such a thing existed and is mature enough to be practically used.
Very nice.
I'm very excited, because in the past I have bounced off KDE development. Coming from a java and web background, the tooling and dev environment was just mindboggling.
Let me be more concrete then. What I am used to is the following:
- Open the relevant Jetbrains IDE
- Click on new project
- Find the correct template (e.g. Spring Boot Web Starter) and follow the wizard.
(Alternatively the steps before can be replaced with cloning a repo and opening it with my IDE) - I can click "Play" to start the app
- I can click "Debug" to debug the app
- Bonus: when doing Android or Web development, I can create the GUI by drag&dropping building blocks into a preview (contrary to manually typing out textfiles that describe the layout)
Every step is a button click or a entry field in a dialog.
These steps also work on every major distro.
And I wish for a similar experience when developing KDE Plasma.
For completeness, I will try to do the same dev things and list the steps for KDE Plasma development later (in about 8h).
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 83
Bluesky and Brazil continues to be a great match, and lots of other smaller news items.
Programming note: I’m switching the release day for this weekly newsletter to a Wednesday. Over the last year and a half I’ve spend my free Sundays writing this, and this is not sustainable in the long term. So look for the next edition to arrive on Wednesday the 18th.
Bluesky and Brazil
Bluesky remains highly popular among Brazilians as an alternative to X, that got banned in the country last week. Bluesky has added 3 million accounts since the ban went into effect just over a week ago. When I reported on it last week Bluesky had added 1 million accounts. Of these new accounts, around 85% are from Brazil. The popularity of Bluesky in Brazil also shows up in both politics and the media: President Lula, his party PT Brazil, the Supreme Court, and House of Representatives all have their accounts validated by using their domain as their handle. The media is also paying attention, one of the most popular news programs in Brazil, Jornal Nacional, showed their Bluesky handle during the show. Some of the biggest newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo and Correio Braziliense covered Bluesky as well.
What stands out to me about both articles is that they do not mention Threads. Threads have not made any data available regarding the impact of the Brazilian ban on X on the platform. While Threads is likely to still get a large number of signups simply due to its massive size, it is not part of the conversation in the way that Bluesky is for Brazil.
The inflow of new people also shows up for the Trust and Safety team. In an update Bluesky’s head of Trust and Safety, Aaron Rodericks, shares that the team normally receives about 20k reports per week, a number that skyrocketed to 270k reports, predominantly in Portugese.
The News
Firefish has died another death. This February, the original creator of Firefish Kainoa transferred ownership to the maintainer naskya, without naskya being informed beforehand. Naskya has been maintaining Firefish alone for the last 7 months, while noting that this them taking over the project as unwillingly. Naskya says that this is unsustainable, putting the project in maintanance mode. IceShrimp provides migration instructions for server admins who want to transfer from Firefish to IceShrimp. I’ve got fond memories of the time period during which Firefish worked well, which is sadly a while ago now. It enabled me to build a community in a way that I’ve found much more difficult to do on Mastodon, and the community that I’ve build during the Firefish period is still one that feels like my closest community on Mastodon.
Truefans is a podcasting app that is building ActivityPub integration. It gives you the possibility to create a fediverse account as well (truefans.social), and activities that you take in the Truefans app (listen/comment/follow) are broadcasted into the fediverse.
The IFTAS Moderator Survey for 2024 is live. Last year’s survey led to an extensive report on the actual needs that fediverse moderators have.
Forgejo’s monthly update: “Federation is getting useful. There is now more than preliminary background work, and the first exciting things could be tried out by users. The work is not near the goal yet.”
The SocialCG held their monthly meeting, and decided on two new Task Forces: a task force to update the website activitypub.rocks, and a Trust and Safety Task Force. The goal for the website task force is to make sure that the activitypub.rocks website is a better entry point, as it is badly out of date, with the last post from January 2021. The Trust and Safety team from Threads has already expressed interest in participating in the task force.
Trending topics are a feature that is highly sought after by the Brazilian community, and the community has build two versions themselves: as a browser extension and as a separate site.
Peertube continues to make inroads with livestreaming, especially via the livechat plugin, which got a significant upgrade again.
Bluesky continues the tradition of 3rd party clients implementing features before the official clients does: this time the Skeets app already supports displaying videos, even though the feature is not released yet and only the developers can post (otherwise invisible) videos.
The developer’s site atproto.com got a major overhaul, including a Quick Start guide that showcases how to build a complete and different type of application on atproto, an extensive article ‘ATProto for distributed systems engineers‘ and more.
A research paper – An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises – provides a critical analysis of the extend that the fediverse can deliver on the promises of decentralisation. Worth checking out, I also find the framing of ‘techno-romanticism’ as to explain the gap between what is promised and what is actually happening in the fediverse.
The Dutch coalition of public organisations PublicSpaces is starting PeerTube Spaces to promote the usage of Peertube as as suitable alternative for public organisations.
The (unofficial) atprotocol.dev community held a talk with the creator of event planner Smoke Signal, the video recording is available here. The recording from the previous talk, by the creator of frontpage.fyi is available as well. This Thursday is the next event, ‘From Feeds to Labelers with Ændra Rininsland’
The Links
- WeDistribute – A Brief History of the Fediverse Symbol
- Making a Mastodon bot with Google Sheets and Apps Scripts.
- Email platform Buttondown has added the option to automatically cross-post to Bluesky.
- Hachyderm’s Introduction to Mastodon Moderation: The Report Feature and Moderator Actions.
- Thoughts on the 📰 News Feed – by XBlock and News feed developer Ændra Rininsland.
- This week’s ActivityPub software updates.
- Fediverse for government organisations, a follow-up.
- Nostr somehow managed to get a billboard advertising Nostr close to where I live.
- A Bluesky client that makes Bluesky look like the old phpBB forums.
- Brazil, Bluesky & the Fediverse, by Newsmast’s Michael Foster.
- Brazilian Tech YouTuber Gabs Ferreira did a long interview with Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
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Dear @codenamedmitri, @nightpool, @capjamesg@socialhub.activitypub.rocks please make good use of the #SocialHub community to update activitypub.rocks/
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
etc.
If you can convince @cwebber to resume work on the domain and pass on the credentials to make it happen, we'll all be very happy.
Edit: tagged James on the SocialHub instead of bork handle.
The two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance are on Feddit.dk, but you won't see them on your own instance
I recently discovered an interesting (and somewhat disappointing, as we'll find later) fact. It may surprise you to hear that the two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance (that I could find at least) are both on Feddit.dk and are quite significantly higher than the next top comments.
The comments in question are:
1. This one from @bstix@feddit.dk with a whopping 3661 upvotes.
2. This one from @TDCN@feddit.dk with 1481 upvotes.
These upvote counts seems strange when you view them in relation to the post - both of the comments appear in posts that do not even have 300 upvotes.
Furthermore, if you go on any instance other than Feddit.dk and sort for the highest upvoted comments of all time, you will not find these comments (you'll likely instead find this one from @Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone).
Indeed, if you view the comments from another instance (here and here), you will see a much more "normal" upvote count: A modest 132 upvotes and a mere 17 upvotes, respectively.
What's going on?
Well, the answer is Mastodon. Both of these comments somehow did very well in the Mastodon microblogging sphere. I checked my database and indeed, the first one has 3467 upvotes from Mastodon instances and the second one has 1442 upvotes from Mastodon instances.
Notice how both comments, despite being comments on another post, sound quite okay as posts in their own right. A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent "toot" (Mastodon's equivalent of tweet).
Someone from Mastodon must have "boosted" (retweeted) the comments and from there the ball started rolling - more and more people boosted, sharing the comments with their followers and more and more people favorited it. The favorites are Mastodon's upvote equivalent and this is understood by Lemmy, so the upvote count on Lemmy also goes up.
Okay, so these comments got hugely popular on Mastodon (actually I don't know if 3.4k upvotes is unusual on Mastodon with their scale but whatever), but why is there this discrepancy between the Lemmy instances then? Why is it only on Feddit.dk that the extra upvotes appear and they don't appear on other instances?
The reason is the way that Mastodon federates Like objects (upvotes). Like objects are unfortunately only federated to the instance of the user receiving the Like, and that's where the discrepancy comes from. All the Mastodon instances that upvoted the comments only sent those upvotes directly to Feddit.dk, so no other instances are aware of those upvotes.
This feels disappointing, as it highlights how Lemmy and Mastodon still don't really function that well together. The idea of a Lemmy post getting big on Mastodon and therefore bigger on Lemmy and thus spreading all over the Fediverse, is unfortunately mostly a fantasy right now. It simply can't really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I'm not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
I personally find Mastodon's Like sharing mechanism weird - only sharing with the receiving instance means that big instances like mastodon.social have an advantage in "gathering Likes". When sorting toots based on favorites, bigger instances are able to provide a much better feed for users than smaller instances ever could, simply because they see more of the Likes being given. This feels like something that encourages centralization, which is quite unfortunate I think.
TL;DR: The comments got hugely popular on Mastodon. Mastodon only federates upvotes to the receiving instance so only Feddit.dk has seen the Mastodon upvotes, and other instances are completely unaware.
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Discouraged, but still supported. There is also another FEP (forgot the code now) being worked on and implemented by Mitra.
The point is that it is possible for an instance to federate an activity which is not originated by them.
I seriously doubt Lemmy currently does any validation whatsoever. There were communities using this blatant security issue for non-malicious purposes (see endlesstalk.org/c/tails@lemmon… which re-wrote posts from people (which is only possible if the posts weren't validated, or at least re-fetched from their origins)).
There is a way to re-share and validate remote activities, either through LD signatures (ew, JSON-LD processing :vomit:) (which only Mastodon and Misskey implement) or the newfangled FEP-8b32 Object Integrity Proofs (which nobody relevant on the microblogging space implements).
There were communities using this blatant security issue for non-malicious purposes (see endlesstalk.org/c/tails@lemmon… which re-wrote posts from people (which is only possible if the posts weren’t validated, or at least re-fetched from their origins)).
The reason this is possible is because of the way Lemmy federates activities.
When you on instance A post, comment or upvote something in a community on instance B, your instance sends the activity to instance B, regardless of the instance of who you're replying to or upvoting. It is sent to the community, and the community then shares it out to all other instances. AFAIK, lemmy does nothing to verify that received content from a community actually comes from the original instance. See here for one of the main Lemmy devs commenting on this..
Is this secure or reasonable? I'm honestly not sure but it doesn't feel great. Signatures on objects could fix this I think.
Instead of sending the entire object embedded in the activity the secure way would be to only the URI instead. This is permitted by JSON-LD.
In the receiving side, if the object is untrusted (i.e. if it isn't signed or if it's from a separate authority from the parent object containing it) it should be thrown away and the id should be fetched from the remote instance directly (same as it would happen if it was a URI instead of an inline object). This is completely an oversight on Lemmy's implementation and not a protocol problem.
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and given this is AP, that’s gonna be a while. People seem to love bikeshedding in circles instead of doing actual work
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this? Any examples? I've not followed the development of AP very much at all honestly so I don't know the history.
this issue is a blocker for mastodon not supporting filtering remote posts by words (which would've helped with many spam attacks, which the pleroma family supported just fine for a WHILE via MRF, and more recently misskey has added support for)
if you go to socialhub you'll find MANY threads of reasonable ideas that are in json-ld representation bikeshed hell as people unnecessarily debate over which exact json-ld representation of the same exact data is the most correctest. the most infuriating recent ones i have seen is the emoji reaction fep discussion and FEP-fb2a: Actor metadata both of which does this bullshit ON FEATURES ACTIVELY FEDERATING RIGHT NOW, where changing it would BREAK BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY
I recently started looking at socialhub actually. I have even participated in that emoji reaction thread you linked, but I only joined the site recently.
Honestly, I'm a bit confused by the site. There's kind of a lack of direction in a sense? Everyone is trying to extend the protocol in various different ways and it seems difficult to achieve alignment and agreement. I guess that is to be expected in a decentralized system but still.
you’ll find MANY threads of reasonable ideas that are in json-ld representation bikeshed hell as people unnecessarily debate over which exact json-ld representation of the same exact data is the most correctest
What's the alternative though? I mean nobody has the authority to put their foot down and decide. I agree that the debates go on for way too long, but how else do we find alignment? Then again, the long discussions definitely exhibits a kind of selection bias - only the people who are pedantic enough to keep discussing will do so. Everyone else naturally just get tired of the whole thing and leave.
It's weird but it almost feels like the fediverse needs a benevolent dictator to kind of get an overview and set a clearer direction, when it comes to the standards.
this bullshit ON FEATURES ACTIVELY FEDERATING RIGHT NOW, where changing it would BREAK BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY
But these features were totally non-standard extensions right? You can't expect such things to continue being compatible as the actual standard evolves. It would also be a neat way to strong-arm the standard - just implement an extension in the way that you want it to work and now the standard has to keep your version compatible. That wouldn't be good. Just because there exists a non-standard implementation does not mean it should be able to dictate how stuff should be done.
But these features were totally non-standard extensions right?
that's the thing, everything in activitypub is a non-standard extension. hashtags are an extension. post visibility the way it's commonly done is an extension (more like a convention in that it doesn't introduce anything new, but still not written down anywhere official), the concept of an un-locked account is a convention (and the marker that marks an account as locked is an extension). pinned posts, marking images as sensitive, they're all extensions
(surprisingly, this is the second time i'm writing this exact thing today)
It’s weird but it almost feels like the fediverse needs a benevolent dictator to kind of get an overview and set a clearer direction, when it comes to the standards.
this has historically been mastodon. and they have put themselves in such a place that anything they do not approve of gets seen as a "nonstandard extension" and anything they approve of gets seen as a part of the standard. see the above reply.
edit: additionally, emoji reactions are federated by the SECOND MOST POPULAR free/open AP software and has implementations in at least 5 other software families (not just forks of one software, entire software families). if they cannot determine a de-facto standard but mastodon can, is AP really an open standard?
Yea I see what you mean. How do we solve this though? I mean let's say you were to redesign the protocol from scratch. Do you just need to include all these things into the protocol from the start? That's a lot of features and considerations to make. An extensible protocol might be for the best? But it does bring a lot of complexity... I'm really not sure.
this has historically been mastodon. and they have put themselves in such a place that anything they do not approve of gets seen as a “nonstandard extension” and anything they see gets seen as a part of the standard. see the above reply.
Yea this is problematic, especially because this pulls AP into a more microblogging-oriented direction, at the expense or at least disregard of all other use cases. I would not call this a benevolent dictator - that's just a regular dictator.
(surprisingly, this is the second time i’m writing this exact thing today)
Where? I'd love to read more about this stuff.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon's ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?
still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ?
It's a good question and really we just don't know yet I think. It's very hard to predict performance of complex systems. The only way to know, is basically by measuring, and the only way to do that is if we actually had that amount of users.
Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?
Unfortunately ActivityPub has no way to "batch" activities like this.
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Then why, if I view the post on feddit.dk, does it not show me those likes/votes? What is dependent on my instance?
I don't understand what you mean, how does it now show you the likes? If you see the two comments here and here as I linked above, you can see the high upvote count. Almost all the upvotes are from Mastodon instances.
The upvotes do not appear if you view the comments from another instance, like here and here, because those instances did not receive the Like.
Your instance doesn't pull the upvotes from other instances. That would not be scalable. How would it know when to pull again, to see new upvotes? When would it stop pulling periodically? Never? And you'd have to do this for every single post and comment everywhere.
No, instead ActivityPub uses a push mechanism here. So any new activity is pushed out to the ones that are deemed relevant to know about the activity. Any other instances are unaware.
Pulling the data when a user requests a post/comment (with a cooldown/cache for popular posts) isn't any more or less scalable than feddit.de pushing the same data whether it's been requested or not. If anything, I'd think pushing data when it's not necessarily needed would be less scalable.
But if it has to be a push model, why doesn't feddit.dk push the votes it knows about along with the rest of the data?
Pulling the data when a user requests a post/comment (with a cooldown/cache for popular posts) isn’t any more or less scalable
That would definitely be less scalable. That would entail pulling every single time a user views a post or comment. That's simply not feasible. There are far, far more views of content than there are posts, comments and votes.
Also what about stuff that isn't seen? What if nobody is logged in or nobody looks at the New sort? You need the votes before you even show the user anything, otherwise you can't sort the votes.
But if it has to be a push model, why doesn’t feddit.dk push the votes it knows about along with the rest of the data?
This has been explained elsewhere in the thread, see feddit.dk/post/7628338/1025556…
True, but that's why I mentioned a cache or cooldown. Once every two minutes is plenty, unless Lemmy really blows up and we have hundreds of instances trying to fetch a very popular post.
You have a point about new sort, but you could approximate it by sorting what's known to an instance. It's not ideal, but it's at least something. Maybe it would make sense to push just that feed, or to fetch a subset periodically.
I read that comment tree, but it doesn't answer my question. If someone on Mastodon likes a post on feddit.dk, I don't see any reason feddit.dk can't communicate that to lemm.ee when I go look at it.
Once every two minutes is plenty,
That won't work, because it would have to be once every two minute for every single comment and post forever.
You have a point about new sort, but you could approximate it by sorting what’s known to an instance. It’s not ideal, but it’s at least something. Maybe it would make sense to push just that feed, or to fetch a subset periodically.
I have no idea what you mean by this - you can't fetch a feed, that's not at all how the data is organised.
If someone on Mastodon likes a post on feddit.dk, I don’t see any reason feddit.dk can’t communicate that to lemm.ee when I go look at it.
The problem is this: How does lemm.ee know that the like that feddit.dk claims is from mastodon.social actually is from mastodon.social? What prevents feddit.dk from just fabricating a like from mastodon.social? Currently there is no nice mechanism for authenticating such a forwarded like. A malicious instance could send loads of likes claiming they come from other instances.
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at the minimum the followers of that user should be notified about that like…
I agree - the problem is that the instance that sends the Like (on instance A) doesn't know the followers of the user receiving the Like (on instance B), because followers are not (necessarily) public. So it doesn't know which instances to send the Like to. And instance B can't forward the Like to the followers itself, because the signatures in ActivityPub are not made for that, as I explained elsewhere in the thread.
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however they than just forward this reply to the follower collection
How do the receivers of this indirect activity verify that the activity was indeed produced from the original instance?
It simply can’t really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I’m not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
Mastodon needs to implement group support, you can follow the issue here (don't get your hopes up though).
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A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent “toot” (Mastodon’s equivalent of tweet).
Wait, back up... Mastodon calls these "toots"? So, everybody is posting farts?
Can't even see these posts, I clicked and got:
400
{"error":"couldnt_find_post"}
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PS: I just tried it without Photon and got another error.
feddit.nl/post/feddit.nl/20706…
Anyway, all good and not something I can influence so I let it go 
Mastodon doesn't support groups so it's maybe not a "bug" per se, but it is at least a missing feature.
Consider also that if Lemmy shared upvotes the same way, you would only see the upvotes on posts from your own instance, i.e. upvotes would only appear on the local feed. The all feed would be pointless and in general it would be pointless to try to sort posts across the whole fediverse, as you only receive upvotes for your local posts.
Lemmy simply would not function if it shared votes like that. So in that sense, it's a bug kind of. And as mentioned above, I think it's a bad way of doing it, as it encourages centralization.
(mentioning people mentioned in post because post mentions apparently do not work)
What happened to elementary OS?
elementary OS may not be as much as popular as it used to be.That being said, elementary OS 8 release is still on the horizon with some useful changes based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
...
However, amidst disagreement between co-founders during the pandemic in 2022, co-founder Cassidy quit the elementary OS team.Right after that, the development pace took a big hit, and we saw elementary OS 7 being released almost a year after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS came up.
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A good indicator about its development activity is its upcoming major release, elementary OS 8, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.I took a sneak peek at it using the daily build, and elementary OS 8 is almost ready to have an RC release.
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You can expect things like:
- The settings app handles system updates (instead of AppCenter)
- AppCenter is now Flatpak only
- New toggle menu icon giving you easy access to the screen reader, onscreen keyboard, font size, and other system settings
- WireGuard VPN support
What happened to elementary OS?
What should you expect from elementary OS? Is it still around? I answer some of those questions here.Ankush Das (It's FOSS News)
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Dead like any other Linux distro that is mainly a desktop.
The thoughtful, capable, and ethical replacement for Windows and macOS
comes with a carefully considered set of apps that cater to everyday needs
Here's the issue, elementary OS is made for regular people who want a computer that works, an attempt at replicating macOS, and that same group of people need proprietary software like MS Office that isn't available under Linux. The alternatives won't cut it for people once they've to collaborate with other who use the proprietary stuff.
elementary OS is essentially a misguided marketing exercise where the founders / company failed to study and understand their target market.
Then how do you explain the continued success of Mint?
Because Mint's philosophy is to make a friendly, simple and usable system for everyone.
That may be for people who came from Windows before, or those who like their OS to be a bit more conservative, meaning no flashy stuff, boring, and just working. Just like Windows was "in the good ol' days".
This makes it accessible and usable by everyone, including Linux sysadmins who come home after work and don't want to deal with annoying computers and fixing things.
Everything on Mint feels high quality, functional and cohesive.
ElementaryOS on the other hand feels like a cheap MacOS clone, but nothing works.
Those who want Mac, buy a Mac.
Mint/ Cinnamon on the other hand is similar to Windows (XP, 7, etc.), but not a copycat. It's familiar enough to be intuitive for Windows users, but much enough it's own thing.
Mint's main focus is to get a uncomplicated, and usable system, while Elementary's focus is to just do what Apple does.
... Well, did. 15 years ago.
They totally forgot how much work maintaining a distro and a desktop with a whole app suite is, and just stopped working on it.
While Gnome and KDE (and other WMs/ DEs) got magnitudes better in just one year (e.g. Plasma 6), Pantheon (and Elementary) just stagnated the last 5 years or so.
They don't even offer/ work on Wayland yet, or other new things.
Either they'll stop working on Elementary, and focus only on Pantheon, so it can live on on other distros, or it will just continue dying like it does currently.
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TBH, they should put all their effort into making Pantheon better. NixOS's installer has Pantheon, and it feels pretty much the same; that's clearly 90% of what makes elementaryOS unique.
Trying to make a walled garden in Linux with their software choices was what turned me off to the project, and you'll never attract Linux-minded people by forcing them into a box.
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Totally agree.
I think they had or have commercial aspirations. That along with the strong desire to curate the experience are likely what lead to the walled garden effect.
The problem with walled gardens ( well, I hate them always ) is that they only work if you have the resources to pull off the full experience by yourself. Elementary really never had that and, before they could get there, they stumbled internally and killed their execution. It is going to be really hard to get it back.
Whatever their original aspirations, salvaging what they have into a distro agnostic DE is probably their best hope for relevance and survival. With a curated Flatpak store, they may even be able to someday pull off their walled garden in a cross-distro way. If it ever became big enough, they could take another run at being a full distro.
As it is, Elementary is on borrowed time. That would be the case even if the Wayland clock was not ticking but ticking it is.
Yup. Same issue will plague all Windows-alternative distros. Unless serious work is done to fix Microsoft 365 and Adobe creative cloud, there's genuinely little benefit trying to claim Linux is an alternative for all but a minority of people.
That, or we can work on improving the alternatives to those apps. GIMP, Inkscape, and OnlyOffice are on a spectrum of laughably bad to just-about-comparable to their proprietary counterparts.
I don't think it's an insurmountable issue: I think there's more we could do to bring Apple software to Linux (using a BSD-based kernel means a lot less complexity!) and with it the few applications that currently don't play well with WINE.
MacOS still ships x86 builds, and most software either provides binaries for both platforms or some kind of universal/hybrid binary. Still a few years before that becomes an issue.
At some point an ARM->x86 translation layer is going to be needed too, regardless. It's not long until ARM becomes popular enough to make it necessary to translate both ways.
Ubuntu was the “original” easy-to-use Linux desktop. It expanded into that demand and still enjoys the market share it got when nobody else was really filling that niche.
Mint exists explicitly as a fork of Ubuntu and enjoys less success as a result. Many, including me, think Mint does a better job at being a solid desktop option than Ubuntu and is kind of the goto distro for that now ( not still not as popular as Ubuntu still is ).
Elementary is a curated desktop for people that really like coherence and design. That is, first of all, a more demanding target. It is perhaps too ambitious for their scale. And they have stumbled in execution. The task might be easier if they focussed on just being a DE ( desktop environment ) that other distros could use.
An “official” Ubuntu or Mint spin would have a real shot.
Pop is the only one that really ever makes any reference to windows in its marketing. I'm more talking about distros like Zorin which are targeting public sector orgs and windows users by bundling windows compatibility apps and features into the ISO.
The other examples definitely do also target "new users" which of course means Windows users too, but they aren't explicitly tying their distros to Windows software compatibility the same way some are.
Pop is the only one that really ever makes any reference to windows in its marketing
First line of the the description of Zorin on zorin.com/os
“Zorin OS is the alternative to Windows”
They are probably saying the shared POSIX underpinnings means greater commonality between macOS and Linux and therefore easier porting. That is likely true to some extent but real apps are written to Apple proprietary APIs and therefore that advantage is largely nullified.
In terms of effort to bring apps over, there has been far, far more effort put into porting Windows apps and so that task ( at this point ) is generally easier. It may have been less effort to port macOS at the start ( eg. GNUstep ) but that work has still largely never been done.
It is easy to move POSIX world apps to macOS. It is not as easy to go the other way.
I think (aka speculate) that the fact that Windows is the largest OS plays into the fact that Linux-Mac compatibility isn't more developed.
I bet some 90% of desktop software is available on Windows (even many core KDE are on Windows!) so targeting them brings most Apple apps onto Linux "for free". Especially since Apple's insistence on trying to make Metal a thing hurts gaming support, which is a big driver behind Linux compatibility development.
The few applications that MacOS has over both Linux and Windows are usually so embedded into the Apple ecosystem that you're not getting much by porting them anyway. iTunes? The App Store? Garage Band? Probably doesn't help that many of those apps also use Apple's own UI framework which isn't really portable.
However, stuff not designed to live in Apple land like Teams for Mac or Adobe CC might be more possible. But still far too few applications to necessitate the effort to bring them over.
Absolutely.
A lot of it is just the organization and leadership within the projects themselves. The GNUstep guys struggled for a long time. Just agreeing to implement the Mac APIs instead of just the NeXTstep ones is a thing.
Regardless of how attractive projects are, they can be run well or badly. Without trying to disparage anybody, look at the progress of WINE vs ReactOS for example. And if you think it is just because kernels are hard, look at Linux or Haiku or SerenityOS vs ReactOS instead.
But the popularity of Windows made the Win32 APIs more commercially viable as well and so you get companies like CodeWeavers and Valve that really accelerate the WINE effort. That wind at your back really helps.
You can’t just go it alone with free software when all your colleagues expect you to use proprietary tools
Yeah that's my point.
I don't really think that's fair. I agree with your suggestion that it should be a multiplatform DE rather than just its own distro but I think having polished and design opinionated distros is important. I know a few Mac guys who have become interested in Linux when they heard about ElementaryOS.
I get that a lot of people hate on GNOME too for being annoying to customise and being highly opinionated but I think that's the key to getting the average person interested in Linux. The average person just wants their desktop to look nice out of the box and maybe offer a dark mode. Anything more than that gets too complicated.
Edit: and yeah having access to programs like the MS apps is important but it's not like that has to come before having an appealing desktop
I get that a lot of people hate on GNOME too for being annoying to customise and being highly opinionated but I think that’s the key to getting the average person interested in Linux.
I agree with this ideia, however GNOME lacks desktop icons and forces people into an activities view - all stuff that said average people don't want to deal with. GNOME isn't already dominating the DE space, and we still have other DEs, because of their poor decisions based on a "vision" that revolves around reinventing the wheel ever 2 years or so.
and yeah having access to programs like the MS apps is important but it’s not like that has to come before having an appealing desktop
This is one of the major hurdles with Linux desktop and the Steam Deck just confirmed it. People like the ones you're talking about require software, be it Adobe, MS Office, Autodesk or some other and without it there's no way they're going to move. Alternatives may work for some isolated people but if you're collaborating with people that expect those proprietary formats it won't just work out.
Fucking hell you could cut the Reddit-tier snark with a knife.
BSD is more binary compatible than Windows. The fact there's less MacOS ports on Linux seems to me like a lack of resources, but if you have a reason beyond 🤓☝️ then I'm genuinely interested.
In what way?
The binary formats are not compatible, not even the format of the files themselves. Linux uses ELF. MacOS uses MachO.
True, macOS is more or less POSIX at the base but the API Mac applications are written to is not that at all ( Cocoa ). GNUstep exists for a reason. Sadly, it is not very mature. It is certainly not a trivial undertaking though as there have been a number of attempts over decades and nobody has really pulled it off.
The Win32 API on the other hand has largely been implanted on Linux. A few Win32 APIs are even being added to the kernel.
Going the other way is easier. You can port POSIX stuff to macOS fairly easily.
NTSYNC is one example, I don't know what the current progress is lore.kernel.org/lkml/202401240…
It was supposed to be in 6.10, I don't know if that actually happened
They released their desktop environment publicly, which imo was the main reason to use it
I never found elementary really worked that well for me, though pantheon is lovely
It was a PITA on Arch because the Debian roots didn't play well.
I canned all usage many years ago.
What's a PITA sorry? Never heard of that
I've used pantheon on nix before and it worked perfectly, can't say for other distros
I'n using Elementary OS right now. It's been my daily driver for several years on a low powered laptop as a Chromebook replacement. I run browser, messaging, and occasionally some light photo or audio editing.
No complaints. Works great. Solid. Looks great. If you have a similar use case, I recommend it. All of the people ITT talking about what's wrong with it have not changed my mind that it's just what I need.
Vardin P/f är ett stort pelagiskt fiskeriföretag på Färöarna. Bolaget äger en lång rad stora pelagiska fiskebåtar genom flera olika dotterbolag som de helägda fiskeriföretagen P/f Krossbrekka, P/f Gulenni, P/f Hvamm och P/f Driftin.
La “magia” della tartrazina, il colorante alimentare che può rendere trasparente la pelle
Pelle, la “magia” della tartrazina, il colorante alimentare che può renderla trasparente
Sembra un controsenso ma non lo è. Su Science alcuni ricercatori spiegano come sono arrivati a scoprire questo metodo, non distruttivo e reversibileAnna Lisa Bonfranceschi (Wired Italia)
Let's clarify something: does Bluesky allow federated servers on their network? Is there a list of those independent servers?
Trying to figure this out as in the recent threads a few people said that Bluesky was federated, but it didn't seem to actually be the case.
bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2… in February announced that Bluesky would allow federated servers
The Bluesky documentation on the topic isn't very clear. They mention Bluesky.social a lot, as if it's supposed to be the one central server other PDS need to federate with:
Bluesky runs many PDSs. Each PDS runs as a completely separate service in the network with its own identity. They federate with the rest of the network in the exact same manner that a non-Bluesky PDS would. These PDSs have hostnames such as morel.us-east.host.bsky.network.However, the user-facing concept for Bluesky's "PDS Service" is simply bsky.social. This is reflected in the provided subdomain that users on a Bluesky PDS have access to (i.e. their default handle suffix), as well as the hostname that they may provide at login in order to route their login request to the correct service. A user should not be expected to understand or remember the specific host that their account is on.
To enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface for interacting with bsky.social accounts.
docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-gu…
Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.
github.com/bluesky-social/pds?…
The custom domain name is still something else, and does not seem to require a PDS: bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-20…
So, to come back to the title question, do people know of an example of PDS that can be used to access Bluesky without being on the main server?
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Indeed, but I'm a bit surprised there isn't any list of alternatives servers.
I would have to look more into the protocol specification, but it seems like this isn't really federation, alternative servers are still relying on the central server, and that's why nobody bothers with setting one up
That sounds like a really dumb design idea. Why make a federating protocol if you still rely on the server? I don't even get why they did it at all then.
That's indeed very interesting and peculiar.
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They could pretend to be federated while they're not.
Might show them in a more positive light to the general public
@fediverse I think the main reason is that this solves a lot of UX problems that Fedi has because of its architecture, things like:
- thread comments, like counts, follower lists not being consistent between instances
- not being able to easily interact with content that's not already cached on your instance
- user/post search not working globally, for the same reason
On Bluesky, the AppView indexes all that, and you load threads, feeds and do search through there.
There are some people hosting their own identity server, but yes the centralisation of the main aggregator server seems to be by design as they even scare people away from trying by talking about the high resource requirements of doing so.
IMHO Bluesky is only federated in the sense that responsibility for content and moderation can be outsourced, but the user endpoint stays mostly in control of Bluesky. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a company perspective... outsource the legally and personnel critical parts and keep the ones that are lucrarive for advertisement and can be easily scaled by throwing hardware at it.
But you must be a real sucker to take them up on that very one sided offer...
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Why would someone host a server and pay for it out of their own pocket, when the protocol just turns in to an invisible piece of infrastructure that people don't even know exists?
AP instances allow for communities and identity to build around them, so there is a non monetary incentive to running them, but what's the incentive to run an equivalent on bluesky and make it public?
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I have setup bskysocial.world to test that (there's no web interface, just select this domain when logging in or signing up via the app or bsky.app)
Note: This is for testing only, I can't promise it will remain running.
(I am @ruud.bskysocial.world)
Bluesky
Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.Bluesky Social
Thank you Ruud!
If I understand correctly, using a custom domain name still makes you use the central Bluesky server, right?
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No, it doesn't have to. Custom domain does not tied to any instances (PDS) you reside in. The way custom domain handle works is for the verification itself.
The first time you've created your account to that instance, you've been given to a specific instance name to your handle. For example "user.bskysocial.world". With the "user" acts as a subdomain and "bskysocial.world" as a PDS name.
You can learn more of how the handles work in ATProto here:
atproto.com/specs/handle
You can still change your handle to however you'd like without having to migrate it to another PDS using your own domain name.
Every component in the ATProto (Handles, PDS, AppView, Relays, etc) are separated from each other and can be run individually, without having to cause massive interference to one another. I kind of think of it as a "Microservices" in ATProto, whilst ActivityPub is more like a "Monolithic" one.
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So, from up close it seems like people can have their own servers (i checked wurzelmann.at which is currently on the frontpage) but they do not seem to have their own frontend.
This indeed makes it so that for people to actually SEE your content you must federate with one entity and are controlled by them.
Imo this is very bad because it takes the freedom out of federation. Yes, you dont need to login to an app but if they ban you or defederate or delete your post, nobody will see it, right?
Please someone who has tried and gets the technical details shed light on this.
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From what I can tell, it’s perfectly possible to set up an independent Bluesky network. The only issue is that Bluesky users don’t give a shit about federation and won’t move to any alternative server, so if you want to reach them, you need to play nice with the main instance.
Makes sense
As for banning, they haven't written an explicit documentation on this yet, but generally it can be done on a few layers depending on the offence:
- labelling you via Bluesky official moderation service, in a way that can be ignored
- giving you a "force hide" label that can't be ignored
- suspending your account on a Bsky-hosted PDS
- preventing their AppView from indexing you
- preventing their Relay from indexing your account or whole PDS
Their app is open source, but it doesn't give any instructions on how to self-host it, in fact it seems to not have been designed with self-hosting in mind given the forking section of the ReadMe:
You have our blessing 🪄✨ to fork this application! However, it's very important to be clear to users when you're giving them a fork.Please be sure to:
- Change all branding in the repository and UI to clearly differentiate from Bluesky.
- Change any support links (feedback, email, terms of service, etc) to your own systems.
- Replace any analytics or error-collection systems with your own so we don't get super confused.
The impression I get from Bluesky is that it doesn't view federation as a core feature of its platform, just a nice technical oddity. I'm no expert on the AT protocol, but from a quick skim of the quickstart, their view of federation seems to be having disparate data repositories (Personal Data Servers) app developers can put their app data into. It doesn't really seems to be about different software communicating with each other.
In contrast, ActivityPub is about passing JSON between servers in a somewhat standard format so different software can reasonably understand what that JSON represents and act on it in a way that makes sense for that software.
(But again, I'm don't know anything about the AT protocol, I could be completely wrong here)
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AT (Bluesky's protocol) is a little bit different then activity pub. There's two types of servers, a PDS and a relay. A PDS is basically a git repository of all your posts/interactions, it's super lightweight and doesn't do anything but host them and provide it to any server that asks for it. The PDS basically does the profile hosting portion of a Mastodon server, and is very similar to a Nostr relay if you're familiar with that.
A relay accesses data across a bunch of PDSs and provides it as one big network to the relay's users. It's basically the equivalent of the federated portion of what a Mastodon server does. It's also doing what a Nostr client does (although Nostr does that on the user's device) if you're familiar with that.
Any relay can pull data from any PDS, so theoretically it's very decentralized since anybody could host either a PDS and/or Relay. Bluesky was opened up very recently though, so there's not many non-Bluesky-hosted PDSs on the network yet and most are small and experimental. There's also no relays other than Bluesky that I'm aware of, although it's only been open for ~6 months so I expect that'd change soon.
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There’s also no relays other than Bluesky that I’m aware of, although it’s only been open for ~6 months so I expect that’d change soon.
Thanks for clarifying!
Long winded, nuanced answer, ready your eyeballs:
It's a bit complicated, but since we're on Fediverse and at least somewhat familiar with how things work here, I'll try to explain with that comparison in mind.
On Fediverse, instances are in control of the user data directly. To "migrate" your account, you'd be switching instances and admins entirely.
BlueSky splits things up quite a bit more.
There, you can host your own "PDS" or Personal Data Server. That hosts your account and post info only.
Then, there's the "AppView". In comparison to Fediverse, these are like Lemmy, Mastodon, Mbin, etc. Right now, there's VERY few Appviews to choose from.
Then, there's the "relay". Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there's a choice on *what* is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they're not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.
Now, that we have those definitions out of the way, this is where things get a bit muddy and a bit of purposeful corporate created confusion for purpose of selfishness is quite apparent.
Right now, there's very few AppViews. The ones I'm aware of are, BlueSky itself, Whitewind, and Frontpage.xyz.
The confusion happens because BlueSky, the company, doesn't separate the fact that accounts hosted on self-hosted PDS, aren't technically Bluesky accounts, they're ATproto accounts. Everywhere you look to login, it says "login using your BlueSky account". I can only assume they're doing this on purpose so that anyone who tries to make an Appview, host a PDS, AND a relay, can't have their own "identity" like different instances and platforms have here on Fedi.
That will confuse people and make them think *everything* is just hosted by BlueSky the company. However, as we've now established, there's definitely a separation of "Bluesky" the company, "BlueSky" the AppView that you can login to using your "BlueSky" account, which doesnt technically have to be hosted by anything related to BlueSky.
I hope this all makes sense and you can tell that *technically* things are decentralized for the most part. It's just that BlueSky is purposefully muddying their own definitions of things so that anyone that tries to build on ATproto, has a hard time making themselves known as *not* bluesky due to the way they conflate all these definitions.
Sorry for the huge post and hope it makes sense in some way.
Thanks for reading.😁👍
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well, it's not difficult to federate, it's difficult to seperate your identity from BlueSky itself, if you're trying to create something on ATproto.
I doubt you'll see big news about a service using ATproto, the way Fedi platforms do, besides BlueSky because they really don't want you to differentiate that way.🤦♂️
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Or maybe they do it because it would be very confusing for 99% of users to read “sign in with your atproto account” when no one knows what that is. Its a good thing theyre keeping things simple for now instead of getting the mastodon “its too complicated” issue and having non tech users not use it.
Mastodon and the activitypub culture is very much either “its too complicated” or “how do you not understand its so simple maybe you’re just dumb and shouldnt be here” energy and its why 99% of topics here are just tech and politics. Almost no artists use it and the few that use it are on mastodon.art which defederates from so many instances.
well, it doesn't really matter their reasoning when the end result is the same.
It won't become truly decentralized with these things in the way.
It does matter their reasoning and they can change the word when atproto is more understood. No fedi software uses “sign in with your activitypub account” either because confusing users is a bad thing.
I personally like that theyre doing things to appeal to non tech users because i dont want to use a service no one uses. Its why i dont use any activitypub service for my art because theres no artists using activitypub but bluesky has a huge art community even though they still dont have video
to each their own.
The anarchist in me doesn't feel right having a corporate overlord who can 
me from existence whenever they choose.🤷♂️
That's not important to everyone and that's fine. We are all different.
I certainly cannot. I'm on my own instance and there's like 20,000 instances. Someone can *attempt* to yeet me. They'll have a hell of a time getting admin privileges to all instances though.
I believe they're planning to change that into something like "Sign in with your ATmosphere account." (hopefully)
I could be wrong, but the term "ATmosphere" has been used widely by non-technical users.
Bro just use twitter at this point.
That's like choosing gangrene on your foot because you can't decide which shoe to wear and tying the laces seems like a pain in the ass.
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That's a wild interpretation of what they said.
Dude described a branding problem, not a technical problem.
no problem, friend.
I always worry if my long winded answers make sense to neurotypical people as I'm ADHD and slightly autistic.😅
So I hope it does make sense, at least even partially.
Overall, they're mostly centralized because there's *very* few relays and they're required infrastructure, but decentralized in other ways, which may or may not matter in the bigger picture because of this previous information.
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you're welcome, and thank you for the reassurance, friend.🫡
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thank you for the compliment and assurance friend.
I am always self conscious about my long winded replies because sometimes even I wouldn't wanna read a post that long.
Though, with topics like this that I'm very passionate about, I feel it's very important to lay out all the information and knowledge I have so that others can make informed decisions themselves based on the most important details.
I discuss Fediverse and networks like it, literally constantly and there's LOTS of nuances with these systems that need lots of explanations.
I am always self conscious about my long winded replies because sometimes even I wouldn’t wanna read a post that long.
No need to be self-conscious - that's a concise account of a complicated issue, which is going to go long. Long posts become an issue when they are rambling and unfocused.
Thanks for the explanation. Didn't realize Bluesky/AT is more like a fedi-washed version of ActivityPub rather than a real alternative ...
I'm not sure; on the one hand, I think the fact that federation has become a unique selling point in micro-blogging is indicating a positive trend; so even if people join Bluesky its good for the Fediverse. On the other hand, if federated just becomes another buzz word that means nothing at all, while places where the real innovation is happening are drowned out, the window of opportunity could just close.
TBH I think our biggest strength here is decentralization, but every day we're inching closer and closer to centralization here in many ways and most don't care.
Mastodon controls how 73% of users interact with Fediverse. Threads, if it fully federates will completely take that over, but then we have 2 corporate entities in charge here and there's nothing any of us are doing about it.
They will be able to enact change in AP that most other softwares can't and effectively completely change Fedi as we know it.
To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.
A number I've seen quoted multiple times now is ~$150 per month to host a relay (Source). Which explains why Whitewind, Smokesignal and Frontpage don't host one, they are mostly still small projects by individual talented devs, but imo if that number is true, it really doesn't seem too outlandish that someone might go for it.
Lemmy.world used to cost that much, but I think they downscaled a bit recently, or are at least planning to as the current growth of the userbase has slowed down.
I was actually surprised by that 150 figure when I first read it, as it is much cheaper than what the BlueSky documentation makes it sound.
It is certainly possible to collect that much in monthly donations, but then again... how do you build a loyal base of supporters for running a mostly hidden piece of infrastructure? People always complain about the instance focussed nature of the fediverse, but the ability to build communities around them and get people actually emotionally invested in their home instance is IMHO rather a strength of it. That is also why I am slightly sceptic of easy account migration tools, as it devalues the instance as yourhome base to a certain extend.
Yeah, the instance-focus aspect of the Fediverse is a good thing. You are a good example with slrpnk.net, but dbzer0, all the language/country-based instances (feddit.org, jlai.lu, aussie.zone, lemmy.ca, feddit.uk) also have their own culture and feeling. That's cool to see.
as it devalues the instance as yourhome base to a certain extend.
That's definitely a thing for generalist instances. I don't really think there is much of a lemm.ee culture for instance. Which is also okay, some people just want access to Lemmy without a strong instance identity.
Yeah, so it's not a bad explanation, maybe a bit biased ;)
The key is that the architecture is very different, and there isn't a direct equivalent of instances. There are PDSes, but they do much less than Fedi instances, and they also don't directly talk to (federate with) each other. The data flows from PDSes to relay(s) to AppView(s) and to clients.
that's what I said, no? just in more words.🤷♂️
And yeah, my opinion is mixed in, but I figured that should be obvious. Maybe I should put *opinion* somewhere in there?🤔
Most of it is true, with my opinion in 2 or 3 sentences.
There's a small number of self-hosted personal PDSes (blue.mackuba.eu/directory/pdse…), but the system isn't really open yet to running larger ones with open signup. The Bluesky Relay doesn't currently accept more than 10 users on one PDS (with exceptions like Bridgy).
Technically anyone can run a parallel Relay and/or AppView, and hopefully that will happen, but nobody has done it yet so far (Whitewind/Frontpage are kind of different services on the same protocol).
Thank you for all the info! Been wondering about various things.
Zooming back, it feels like both the fedi and bluesky aren't fully resolved yet and might influence each other and a possible further replacement.
For example, I like the PDS/repository idea and think it would help make migrating easier in the fedi. But I would like more granular control over what is shared to relays as opposed to everything.
$150-$300 per month is what a relay costs for the entire 10M account network. That is extremely efficient.
It’s also not necessary. Smoke Signal the events on ATProtoo connects to user PDS directly.
So what would happen if a billionaire buys out Bluesky and starts spreading right wing propaganda all over it?
Completely hypothetical scenario
You saying people could “easily” move to another instance isn’t reality. People already find the Fediverse too difficult, as you and I discussed under a different thread people actually care about their data which also includes their posting history. Humans by nature do not like change. People complain about Mastodon.social being too big to block. So, if people that want to block mastodon.social due to what they believe is poor content moderation but feel they can’t because of its size how likely that people would find it “easy” to move to another instance ?
Indeed, I hadn't looked at the full context as it's a month old thread.
They built it with decentralised identities so that users owned their identities and can move about freely.
From the top comment here: t
Then, there’s the “relay”. Which to Fediverse, the only thing similar is also relays, but they work differently. On BlueSky, they relay every post and interactions of all the PDS data that connect to AppViews. I do not think there’s a choice on what is relayed, just a huge firehose. That being said, they’re not optional like Fediverse. To complete the network, relays are required on ATProto and apparently could be expensive to host, so right now, it appears the only relay is hosted by BlueSky the company. Which makes things slightly centralized.
Could you provide an example of a relay that is not managed by Bluesky?
You saying people could “easily” move to another instance isn’t reality. People already find the Fediverse too difficult, as you and I discussed under a different thread people actually care about their data which also includes their posting history.
If we already discussed this, then is it worth it to go over this again?
Kristofer Lundberg anser att stöd till palestinska PFLP är vettigt och att palestinier har rätt till att försvara sig själva med våld. Det är som jag ser det en självklar inställning hos en vänstermänniska precis som att stöd till kurdernas motståndskamp och YPG är en rimligt ståndpunkt.
blog.zaramis.se/2024/09/08/van…
Polisen har fått massor med mer pengar. De har dessutom fått en massa ny personal. Brottsligheten har minskat stadigt under lång tid. Polisen hinner inte utreda brott ändå. Det är i alla falla vad polisen själva hävdar.
FEP-7888 and the Add activity
@thisismissem@hachyderm.io in a post yesterday brought back the idea that better post controls could be achieved if the reply were sent to the target only, and the target then forwards it if applicable.
It reminded me of @trwnh@mastodon.social's w3id.org/fep/7888, which attempts to govern a similar flow where a reply is sent to the context owner (instead of inReplyTo, which I think was Em's intent), and the context owner (and/or originating server) federates out an Add if approved.
Which got me thinking about whether that federated server could actually send out a Remove too!
Let's say a reply is made but later on, a mod decides that it is to be deleted. A Remove would be a way to signal to other instances that the content actually be removed/deleted!
We could even take it one step further; servers will always exist who don't adhere to the philosophy of the context owner approving replies. If they federate their own replies out, the context owner could actually proactively send a Reject and limit the spread of those replies...
Last year, I moved conversations into Collections identified by the context element, and we only accepted Add/Remove activities for collections from Collection->attributedTo. All submissions were made to them and only to them.
We previously sent replies only to the thread originator - a concept for restricted access conversations I came up with about the same time the Diaspora folks did. We kept it for a number of years even though Mastodon didn't support it, but moving conversation threads into a simple collection management operation not only makes sense, it bloody works brilliantly and co-exists with microblogging. It also co-exists with FEP-7888.
>In a constrained conversation, the target->id and the context are identical.
So target.attributedTo and context.attributedTo would be identical too
I would be happy to consolidate, but I think the chances of some large percentage of the fediverse choking badly on an array for the context element are pretty high. Same reason I don't use an array in an actor 'url' field. It's a few years since I tried this, but 2/3 of the fediverse projects at the time couldn't deal with it and nobody bothered to fix it for years because "Mastodon doesn't do this, so you must be doing something wrong."
Anyway, I'm retired from the fediverse shit-show now. Y'all can do what you want. But please implement comment control. It isn't a "feature" - it's basic online security (except for some freespeech folks who still think everybody with an opinion or a dick has some God-given right to shove it in your face).
The fediverse you save might be your own.
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Magical equation unites quantum physics, general relativity in a first
Edit: The paper is total nonsense. Sorry for wasting people's time.
youtu.be/Yk_NjIPaZk4?si=dasxM2…
Magical equation unites quantum physics, general relativity in a first
Scientists have finally figured out a way to connect the dots between the macroscopic and the microscopic worlds. Their magical equation might provide us answers to questions like why black holes don't collapse and how quantum gravity works.Rupendra Brahambhatt (Interesting Engineering)
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The math here is beyond me, but this statement from the paper seems contradictory:
The obtained equation is covariant in space–time and invariant with respect to any Planck scale. Therefore, the constants of the universe can be reduced to only two quantities: Planck length and Planck time.
Planck time is derived from the speed of light and the gravitational constant. So wouldn't there be at least four universal constants?
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Yeah , on top of how ad-infested and vague the article is and on top of the discussion I’ve seen about this paper elsewhere, it looks like at least one of the authors, Adrian David Cheok, doesn’t have any physics training according to his ORCID bio or his his wikipedia page, but has dabbled in AI according to the latter.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just some AI schlock.
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Yeah , on top of how ad-infested and vague the article is and on top of the discussion I’ve seen about this paper elsewhere, it looks like at least one of the authors, Adrian David Cheok, doesn’t have any physics training according to his ORCID bio or his his wikipedia page, but has dabbled in AI according to the latter.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just some AI schlock.
Pop sci
The direct article: sciencedirect.com/science/arti… (Jan 2025)
Reddit chatter about it: reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/…
Might be LLM bunk. If you're consuming science news, then first: I recommend PBS Spacetime and second: if a quantum gravity was actually formulated, you'd hear about it there first. It might actually be exciting enough to make CNN.
More to the point though: this sorta thing is too good to be true. Plenty of things are, and are still real. But even still they bear a second glance. This one doesn't pass the sniff test.
No shade to OP. Something like this isn't likey to trip BS alarms unless youre already aware of how big this should be. and it's the kinda thing that isn't sexy enough to grab public attention, which lends some credence.
like, I read a headline like, "FUSION MAKES POWER NOW, FUSION POWER PLANTS EXPECTED NEXT YEAR" and I know it's BS. But part of that is the way it promises to affect your life, and it does do in terms of Fusion, which enough people would recognize so as to make their eyeballs valuable.
This article has neither of those really. So yeah. No shade.
(Edit: guess the words "magical equation" is a pretty quick tip off too lol)
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I had my suspicions but I wanted to see what others made of it. The headline was obviously dodgy, but that might just have been the reporting rather than the paper. And I glanced at the paper but didn't dig through. Since then I had a slightly more careful poke through it, and sentences like this ring some pretty loud alarms:
The masses of electrons, muons, and tau can be explained by the different curvatures of universe, galaxy, and solar system, respectively.
Anyway, I appreciate your comments and the comments of the person you replied to. I should have recognized this for what it was.
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The masses of electrons, muons, and tau can be explained by the different curvatures of universe, galaxy, and solar system, respectively.
What the actual fuck? I mean I get that it's a bullshit paper but at least try for god's sake.
Nah, you're doing the right thing: getting input when not sure. That's the way of learning!
Only one request: add the thoughts from this answer to the OP the next time please! Would make reading it a bit easier and better framed, at least for me.
(I.e. "I'm an authority in this field, look at this exciting news!" VS "my bullshit sensors tingle but I don't know enough. What are your thoughts?"
It's utter bullshit from the very start. First, it isn't true that the Ricci curvature can be written as they do in eqn (1). Second, in eqn (2) the Einstein tensor (middle term) cannot be replaced by the Ricci tensor (right-hand term), unless the Ricci scalar ("R") is zero, which only happens when there's no energy. They nonchalantly do that replacement without even a hint of explanation.
Elsevier and ScienceDirect should feel ashamed. They can go f**k themselves.
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‘Sustainable’ logging operations are clear-cutting Canada’s climate-fighting forests
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/19517395
With its vast expanses of forest, Canada has the most “certified” sustainable timber operations of any nation, according to the nonprofit organizations that attest to the environmental soundness of logging practices.Such forestry-standards groups were born in the 1990s out of rage over tropical rainforest destruction. Today, they put their leafy seals of approval on toilet paper, two-by-fours and other wood and paper goods to assure eco-conscious consumers and investors they were responsibly produced.
Yet research shows Canadian forests have seen some of the world’s largest declines in ecologically critical primary and old-growth woodlands over the last two decades, even as sustainability-certification programs grew to include nearly all of Canada’s logging.
To track destruction of older woodlands in these certified zones, Reuters analyzed forestry data in Ontario, a major logging province. The analysis found that about 30% of the certified boreal forests harvested from 2016 to 2020 were at least 100 years old. That resulted in the loss of 377 square miles of these older forests, an area the size of New York City and Washington D.C. combined, the analysis found.
...
GitHub - Rolv-Apneseth/rofi-games: A rofi plugin which adds a mode that will list available games for launch along with their box art
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/19516210
Hey! Figured I haven't posted this on Lemmy before so should be OK to share here in case anyone else finds this cool/interesting.This is a rofi plugin for launching your games, simple as that. I built it both because I think it looks cool and to make launching the game I know I want to play faster (no need to navigate the dreaded Steam UI). It parses games from several sources, such as Steam, Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris and Bottles, as well as some modded Minecraft instances (check out the readme for instructions).
The repo can be found here, and there's an AUR package available for Arch users.
Let me know what you think! I haven't built all that much but this my favourite tool that I've created (I am addicted to games).
Looks good. Now I can view all the games I won't ever play in a beautiful menu! /s
For real though, looks good. 🙂
That looks awesome I'll have to give it a go
I guess it just launches the games via the shortcut the same way rofi normally works?
Thanks hope you like it.
It parses files from different launchers like Steam or Bottles preaent on your system, and when the game is selected, it will spawn the command for launching the game directly via e.g. a steam command to launch that specific game ID. It doesn't interact with desktop shortcuts in any way if that's what you mean, though that is how it started
Ahh perfect the desktop shortcut thing was what I was worried about, doesn't seem like an ideal solution
Props to you for making it work with the launchers directly
NEW BLOG POST:
Two things scare me the most….
Read it on my website (recommended):
tiotrom.com/2024/09/two-things…
Or read it here:
Two things scare me the most, personally. First is death or health related issues. It is normal, if I die I’m fucked for eternity :). I think this is easy to understand for many people.
Second thing that scares me so much is to slip back into the fantasy world that humans created and forget about the amazing reality discovered for the past hundreds of years. To become too normal, even if that can mean to laugh, have fun, enjoy. I am scared of this. I battled this for all of my life trying to inject myself with reality bits and info (atoms, galaxies, evolution, stars and everything real) in the hope that my brain can understand the value of reality. It is hard. It is so hard and it is something I feel not many, if any, understand. It is also something that you can lose very fast, when you “get it”.
I wanted to put a printed Hubble image of the Andromeda galaxy on the ceiling in my room when I was in college so that when I wake up it will remind me of how reality is mind blowing and the human invented one is a simplistic, myopic and colorless at best.
Most humans are today as they were 400, 1.000 , or more years ago. Let’s have a beer, a chat, get married, fuck, have kids, gossip, have fun or war. Not saying some of these are not good or reasonable, but isn’t it mindblowing that not much has changed in the core of our global society and the day to day life of humans for the past 400 years considering in this time we discovered cells, atoms, galaxies, evolution, and everything in between?
To me, this is so odd it creates a turmoil in my head. I think I have an explanation why this is the case tho: an aggressive trade-based society where everyone is a working ant. No time to even know about reality, let alone absorb it.
Reality is shocking, mind-blowing, fabulous, scary, infinitely complex and amazing.
Day to day life in this society is simplistic and almost parallel to reality.
If you don’t fee like losing your mind when you think about this contrast, I don’t think you understand.
#society #trade #capitalism #andromeda #science #TradeRuinsEverything
Just ran through that list of bugs and don't see my issue that happens all the time. I guess I'll have to add a ticket.
My bug is when minimizing and restoring windows (fedora plasma 6 latest version), the first time or two it is smooth, but a few more times and it gets really jerky. It acts like a memory leak somewhere.
It's a great addition. It's a surprisingly powerful aspect of gnome that nobody, not even Gnome, ever seem to talk about.
They really should place a text file in that folder to explain how it works (and of course exempt it as being used as a template)
Sharing a file to your device via KDE Connect no longer breaks after the first time you do it until the app you shared the file from is restarted
Yeeeees!
Yeah sorta. First you gotta know what the problem is, good luck getting the average user to figure out the UI looks off because of the padding. Then you gotta know where and how you need to change it to make it better.
Customizing is cool for power users that like to fiddle with their settings, however it can't replace good defaults; not that I have anything against the defaults in this case...
Yes, I can't begin to express how much I love 5 cm of whitespace between every setting on Windows Settings pages.
Thanks, Microsoft.
0% fixing the multitude of crippling crashes and bugs that plague the software making it unusable for daily computing.
You say this in the comments of a blogpost where they are precisely doing that
Lots of people seem to be using it fine daily
Maybe you need to switch distro and check your hardware
Or if you're getting lots of crashes, contribute code or money to get them addressed. Otherwise it's clear your priorities aren't straight
By definition an email server is not under your control, so the question of whether or not it runs FOSS is a bit moot and in any case impossible to verify.
In terms of privacy-respecting email hosting, Proton, Posteo, and Mailbox all spring to mind.
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Here is the problem with crop quality:
- Most of the purchase decision is what is observable at the store.
- Does it look good.
- What is the price.
- How is the smell, texture, weight...
- Some happens at home, and you might remember for next time.
- How does it taste.
- How long does it last.
- Does it make you feel satisfied.
- It is basically impossible to know how good food was for you.
- You eat a lot of food and the response is delayed.
- Even if you have a response you probably don't properly understand your body.
- In the end most of the "health" of food is just your believes and marketing.
So there is basically no business pressure to have crops be nutritious.
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But it does boil down to business pressures. The business prefers more and bigger produce to more nutritional produce.
Is that a bad thing? Maybe not. Maybe you can just eat more to get your nutrition since higher yield should reduce cost.
But the point still stands that there is very little business pressure to make a nutritious product.
Even then how you you know? I don't think anyone can reliably look at a vegetable and tell you how nutritious it is. I don't think it is reasonable to have the general population being experts in evaluating vegetables.
I think what could work here is mandated labeling. This is required for most foods but generally not produce. I think there are some reasonable reasons for this, but for farms producing huge volumes it seems that occasional testing that gets reported at the store would make sense.
USSR was founded in 1917 and based on my rough count it looks like majority of the famines in time period were conducted by communists regimes.
This seems like a what aboutism. I am not going to disagree that capitalist regimes didn't cause famines for funsies like like commies did but recent time frame comparisons show communist did do it more frequently.
Especially once you account for the fact that have been very few comminist regimes, and they all of that that came to lower via a "revolution" ie brute force used famine as tactic to pacify the peasants.
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And, playing the devil's advocate, if you die in your early 60s due to long-term sustained malnutrition that is better for the economy than if you live until you are 80.
They got to do everything they can to prevent them from having to pay back those social security loans they took out and never paid back.
Didn't those SS trust fudn loans were already converted into national debt?
Cure of you to assume boomers ain't gonna go get that money lol
Many vegetables today are either sweeter than their predecessors or less flavorful or both.
Corn, for instance, grows so fast under modern fertilizers that the internal cells split during the growth process.
Their stalks are weaker but their yield has more than doubled since the 80s.
If you want to learn more about that, I can highly recommend the book The omnivore's dilemma. It's fascinating how modern agriculture is so completely divorced from what most people think it is.
Maeve
in reply to just_another_person • • •KingOfSleep
in reply to Maeve • • •like this
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Maeve
in reply to KingOfSleep • • •leisesprecher
in reply to KingOfSleep • • •casmael
in reply to just_another_person • • •Zachariah
in reply to casmael • • •Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees
finley
in reply to Zachariah • • •casmael
in reply to finley • • •invertedspear
in reply to Zachariah • • •grue
in reply to invertedspear • • •davidgro
in reply to Zachariah • • •Evil_Shrubbery
in reply to Zachariah • • •ByteOnBikes
in reply to casmael • • •Wait is the Milky Way Galaxy a dude?
All this time I've been inside a man?! 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
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DragonTypeWyvern
in reply to ByteOnBikes • • •Evil_Shrubbery
in reply to DragonTypeWyvern • • •lurch (he/him)
in reply to ByteOnBikes • • •Finally this makes sense:
::: spoiler NSFW
:::
Evil_Shrubbery
in reply to ByteOnBikes • • •It's Milfy Way, sometimes affectionately called Milfky Way.
She has hot flaming balls & a supermassive black hole, imho can't really ask for more.
CleoTheWizard
in reply to casmael • • •Andromeda and the Milky Way shall merge in the most beautiful sex display you’ve ever seen, they will become one in the flesh and yet over millions of years bangin it’s unlikely a single ball will touch. Therefore my thesis of galactic homosexuality is false and our merging is not gay and the socks can be removed.
Thank you for coming to my defense, boring questions will not be allowed.
DeanFogg
in reply to just_another_person • • •Kek
gravitas_deficiency
in reply to just_another_person • • •reaching out
touching me
touching you
SWEET ~~CAROLINE~~ ANDROMEDA
~~Edit: no Bostonians here, I see :/~~
E2: wicked fahkin’ pissah
gzerod200
in reply to gravitas_deficiency • • •gravitas_deficiency
in reply to gzerod200 • • •NineMileTower
in reply to just_another_person • • •nexguy
in reply to just_another_person • • •When we collide the chances of anything hitting anything else is quite small.
If we scaled down the universe so that our sun was 1mm in diameter then our next closest star would be about ~~17km~~ 18 mi away (earth would be about 4.25 inches away) . Galaxies are so empty they would just sling stars around when they merge/collide.
RizzRustbolt
in reply to just_another_person • • •