Earlier this week my company bought a LIDAR from Ouster. The LIDAR is a network device: it has an ethernet interface, it gets its IP from a DHCP server and then it talks to whichever machine runs the Ouster application.
The engineers and the marketing guy in charge of evaluating it installed the software on a Windows 11 laptop and tried to make it work for 2 days, to no avail. The software simply wouldn’t connect.
So they came to me, the unofficial company “hacker”, to figure it out. And I did: the culprit, as always, was the Windows firewall. Because of course…
But here’s the twist: because it’s Windows, you need some sort of additional antivirus on top of it. Our company uses WithSecure, which is phenomenally annoying and intrusive, and constantly gets in your way when you try to do any work in Windows that isn't Word or Excel. And of course, Wi
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Earlier this week my company bought a LIDAR from Ouster. The LIDAR is a network device: it has an ethernet interface, it gets its IP from a DHCP server and then it talks to whichever machine runs the Ouster application.
The engineers and the marketing guy in charge of evaluating it installed the software on a Windows 11 laptop and tried to make it work for 2 days, to no avail. The software simply wouldn’t connect.
So they came to me, the unofficial company “hacker”, to figure it out. And I did: the culprit, as always, was the Windows firewall. Because of course…
But here’s the twist: because it’s Windows, you need some sort of additional antivirus on top of it. Our company uses WithSecure, which is phenomenally annoying and intrusive, and constantly gets in your way when you try to do any work in Windows that isn't Word or Excel. And of course, WithSecure wouldn’t let me punch a hole in the Windows firewall, because of course…
Anyhow, after trying to work around Windows and the hateful compulsory antivirus, I called IT and told them I needed WithSecure disabled, at least temporarily. They told me to fuck off because they’re not letting an unsecured Windows machine on the intranet.
Fine. I pulled another, older Windows laptop without any antivirus, connected it to an air-gapped router, configured DHCP in the router, connected the LIDAR to the router, launched the Ouster app and… it didn't work.
After 3 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally found the problem: the stupid app is an Electron app built with an older version of Electron that had a bug in node.js that prevented it from working if it couldn’t resolve some internet address.
Sigh… Electron… Because of course…
This was getting too painful and annoying with Windows. So I blew away the Windows partition, installed Linux Mint on the laptop, configured the ethernet interface as a private interface, installed the DHCP server so I could do away with the router, connected the laptop to the guest wifi so the stupid Electron app could resolve whatever it needed to resolve to work, installed the Linux version of the Ouster app, and hey-presto, it worked rightaway.
So I made an account for the guys in Mint and handed them the laptop. They played with the LIDAR for a few hours without any problem, pulled records and files out of the machine on USB sticks without any problem, viewed some Excel files in Libreoffice without any problem.
Eventually the marketing guy asked me:
“So what was the problem then?” “Windows of course” I said. “What else?” “Wow. That Linux stuff is really good. We tried so hard to make this work but we never could. But it worked rightaway in Linux. That’s slick!” “Well yeah, I keep telling you guys Windows is crap. There are reasons and this is one of them.” “Yeah I can see why you don’t like it. And that Linux desktop is really nice actually. I might give it a spin at home.”
So hey, I managed to impress a marketing guy with Linux 🙂
It shows how polished Linux has become, if ordinary computer users can be convinced this easily now. It wasn’t like that for a long long time and it feels kind of rewarding to know you bet on the right horse all along and you're vindicated at last.
Great story. I have found that pretty much everyone I have shown Linux is pleasantly surprised with how nice it is. I think people have an idea of it being a hacker person OS with code running on the screen.
Windows Defender is actually quite good these days. The main reason an enterprise would use a 3rd party AV/Firewall would be centralized management of said av and firewall. If IT needs to install apps and make them work, they also need the ability to manage the AV/Firewall.
Well I'm sure they have very good reason and I'm not questioning them. I'm just talking from a user's standpoint (and I'm a very poor Windows users): whenever I try to port any of our tools to Windows, wham the damn antivirus kicks in and puts my stuff in quarantine. If I use an engineering application that talks to some device on an unusual port - and I'm talking outgoing traffic, not incoming, wham it's blocked. And unblocking it requires making a formal request to IT, that whitelists the application, until WithSecure updates itself and forgets about it, and here we go again.
It's just a complete PITA. You constantly feel like you're fighting an algorithm with stupidity built in just to get normal, honest-to-goodness work done.
How do you sell what you did as "it just worked"? Rightaway? You lied to them. You have your coworkers on an unmanaged machine with a foreign OS on the guest WiFi with custom networking. Don't oversell a workaround as a solution.
Simplifying the problem to "Windows" seems unfair, given how many problems you found. All of them still require a long-term solution for regular operation.
Not everyone has a career where dedicating time to learn this stuff is helpful or worthwhile. There's a ton of "useful" skills that all of us don't bother to learn because our time is better spent elsewhere.
Maybe the point is that you cannot demand that the whole world knows the same set of concepts as you do. Otherwise just learn to remove cancer by yourself instead of forcing a person that studied decades to get down their trone and do their job
That's my point. They learned to remove cancer, and yet, can't remove them all. I learned to use GnuLinux, to make it work, regardless of distro, yet some things just fail. So, again, what's your point?
What's keeping anyone from learning anything other than the desire and effort?
You chose to bring up that ridiculous comparison only to confirm what I said. Ran out of hentai to watch or something? 🤣🤣
Ok, you're right. I have to agree that it being worthwhile for me doesn't make it so for others. Can't disagree with you on that. I'll down vote myself for not reading your comment with the intent to understand before I replied. And, honestly, thanks for pointing out that I did not really get it, for real.
Your IT department sounds awful. I have never heard of "withsecure" but it sounds like a pain in the ass.
Anyway its better not to do ghost IT as that never ends well. Next time you should get the explicit approval of the IT department and document everything.
Sodomizing IT is always mandatory unless you want to waive the white flag. They will never help you. IT is an invincible enemy, you just have to seal them up in a infinite bureaucratic loop and try to do your work while they are tangled in that web of logic.
This story has nothing to do with why Linux would be any better than Windows. Sure, if you lie to people, then anything can be convincing. What if I had a firewall installed in Linux, wouldn't you have had the same issues?
This is sort of the problem I have with a lot of Linux enthusiasts, when you have a hammer, everything is a nail.
Compared to Windows and MacOS as a client desktop, Linux still severely falls behind, but it is getting better. For a server, Linux is just far superior.
You think linux doesn't have a firewall? I'm fairly certain every distribution has one installed and enabled by default.
The real reason linux worked so well in this situation was the local admin rights that came from being a rogue, unmanaged device on the network. I'm sure they could have made windows work if all the group policies weren't being enforced.
Yes, you have iptables and nftables, but it's not always enabled. So, when I said installed, I really meant enabled. I 100% agree with what you are saying though.
Unfortunately a lot of places just have shitty IT and people go rogue because of it. Some people are just impatient though as it sounds like in this case.
You also have things like apparmor and selinux. If those are enabled, you might be chasing your tail trying to figure out why something is not working. You would need to know where to look and how to fix it.
A previous company of mine, required an "AntiVirus" installed on the Linux computers too. The one the IT guy installed, ran in the background all the time, doing nobody-knows-what and and slowing down every thing and having multiple segfaults in a minute, shown in the journal.
Long after I left, I also saw an RCE vulnerability related to it. So essentially, my system would have been more secure without the app.
As much as I disagree with your last statement (I think Linux for client is on par with Windows for the vast majority of users), I strongly agree with everything else. This wasn't a Windows problem, but a "your IT is cockblocking you" problem, it could have happened in Linux too if it wasn't because he used a rogue device, he could have fixed it on Windows too doing the same.
Personally I would have gone straight to Linux because I'm out of the loop on how to do these sort of stuff on Windows. If it had to be Windows, let IT figure that out, their firewall, their anti-virus, their problem.
I read through the update but I'm not quite sure what this means for Valve or Arch Linux. Can users expect better compatibility with hardware and software for gaming? Will this affect other distros or only Arch?
That was my reading of it as well. Maybe a bit of technical information tutoring to get them up and running. I would also imagine that Valve is contributing upstream from SteamOS back to Arch.
By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
Seems pretty explicit to me. Valve is allowing some arch linux contributors to work freelance for valve and get paid money to work on the things they would otherwise be working on for free. This allows these contributors to spend much more time working on these things because they can treat this work as the-thing-I-do-to-put-food-in-my-mouth rather than something extra they would do on the scraps of time they have on the side.
Admit to not reading the whole article but does this mean they're finally going to officially release SteamOS 3 for desktops? Or am I stuck with hacky ports from the Steam Deck?
Right. We all know Steam Deck is running on Arch. And also that Steam previously did publicly release SteamOS for awhile (Debian based). So hopefully one day soon they get ballsy enough to push a new/modern official linux build and profit. They haven't even taken the old links to the SteamOS builds down. I mean c'mon!
Interestingly, the developer is already bringing up the possibility of using Wayland by default.
Btw, after this I feel like the driver is much more usable, would it be acceptable to enable it by default? Is there any other major feature missing (given that virtual display settings is being worked on)?
It's a Mastodon client. It has many neat features. I like it on desktop because it's easy to navigate with my keyboard. It's also great on phone. Overall pleasant, Mastodon users should try it out. But I feel like describing it at length is not really productive - it's a user interface.
It's a nice user interface, made by @cheeaun@mastodon.social, and loved by a lot of people.
If you don't want to trust people with your account details that's fine - then using a third party app is probably not for you, unless you're willing to either trust people or dig into the source code.
it really is. I love the catch up feature too for times where I feel behind on everything in my feed. I usually start the morning with catch up from the past few hours and it's really helpful. I've also tried probably every Mastodon app and after each time I always come back to Phanpy. It's too good. I do wish there was a setting to display likes and repost counts below posts in the feed however. Would make it even better.
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I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:
fostering genuine connection protecting privacy and enforcing consent championing accessibility
I think she's obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it's best, this is a "people before economy" value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vis
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I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:
fostering genuine connection protecting privacy and enforcing consent championing accessibility
I think she's obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it's best, this is a "people before economy" value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.
The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?
If you have any objection at all to your posts and profile information being potentially sucked up by Meta, Google, or literally any other bad actor you can think of, do not use the fediverse. Period.
It's on the internet. Public. Got it. It's almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It's almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
Sorry, but this always make me rage. It's like these people are discovering in 2024 that public access means anyone can read it, not just 2000 individual tech bloggers. It's like in 2024 they're discovering that, but aren't technicallly skilled enough to open a forum to have their closed-of discussions in.
Sigh.
No wonder the tech sphere is going to shits if this is the modern discourse around it. :(
It’s because of how people people on mastodon freak out over privacy and consent. That’s why he wrote that article as the expectations and views of a large number of users are fundamentally against what actually happens
It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
This is true for Mastodon and Lemmy and I generally agree with this sentiment.
That said, ActivityPub is more than just Lemmy and Mastodon. ActivityPub is more general than that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed in a way where public discourse is the default and everything you write is expected to be public. But ActivityPub on its own has no such assumptions. There's nothing about ActivityPub that says that you cannot build a more private social media with it. But actually you can't really, because of the problems that the blog post points out. But the vision I think for some people is that this should be possible.
I'm personally not 100% convinced that that vision i
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It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
This is true for Mastodon and Lemmy and I generally agree with this sentiment.
That said, ActivityPub is more than just Lemmy and Mastodon. ActivityPub is more general than that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed in a way where public discourse is the default and everything you write is expected to be public. But ActivityPub on its own has no such assumptions. There's nothing about ActivityPub that says that you cannot build a more private social media with it. But actually you can't really, because of the problems that the blog post points out. But the vision I think for some people is that this should be possible.
I'm personally not 100% convinced that that vision is even possible though tbh.
I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic.
Agreed, me too. Also, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts regarding this - they're very insightful.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
I agree. I don't think it's realistic to expect all of the fediverse to adopt a set of core values, not any more than we can expect all of the internet to adopt a core set of values. Certainly, there's no one in a position to enforce them from the down top, at the very least.
most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
I want to start off by saying that I respect you and your opinion very much. I think this is a serious point of concern, especially considering that a major reason given for the exodus that happened from a major website back in July 2023 occurred in part due to fear of loss of accessibility (which was an unintended consequence of API restrictions). r/blind
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I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic.
Agreed, me too. Also, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts regarding this - they're very insightful.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
I agree. I don't think it's realistic to expect all of the fediverse to adopt a set of core values, not any more than we can expect all of the internet to adopt a core set of values. Certainly, there's no one in a position to enforce them from the down top, at the very least.
most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
I want to start off by saying that I respect you and your opinion very much. I think this is a serious point of concern, especially considering that a major reason given for the exodus that happened from a major website back in July 2023 occurred in part due to fear of loss of accessibility (which was an unintended consequence of API restrictions). r/blind moved to the fediverse primarily because of this point.
So basically, a failure here really feels like it would have serious ramifications for the fediverse.
There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values.
Agreed - but that just means there's room for something new. Hopefully from the diversity of groups that you alluded to above, a privacy minded group with dev skills will arise with a new entrant to the fediverse here.
ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare
I've been doing some thinking about this. One (not yet fully fleshed out) thought I had was if content was retained on the original server (the one the community/magazine is based in) and others receive a new "CONTENT_LINK" type of ActivityPub message that points back to the original server. A good app/web UI can then fetch from the link to display the content - but this would happen client side and be meant to be analogous to a web browser fetching a page from a web server. I wrote more about what I had in mind in lemmy.world/comment/12109601
No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.
This is a positive IMHO.
There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot.
That's true. Time will tell if things like sub.club are able to move forward
The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin
I'd call this, the power of community
without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network.
And this, going global.
Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?
I think this is usually termed "having the best of both worlds".
I should point out though that this isn't entirely true. I don't think that we can really say that this applies to folks who made their home on exploding-heads or lemmygrad, for example.
11 minutes to 55 seconds in their example is interesting. I'd wager this won't do much for the consumer side, but enterprise...could save tons of time.
What I'm thinking. If it took that long for my server to shut down, I would just sync and force reset. Although tbh, most things are VMs now, and those reboot pretty fast and would likely not be affected much by these improvements.
I don't know how, but i kinda imagined it even though i don't speak a word of German (nor i am an English native speaker). It just... uh, sounds like it.
The newfound galaxy appears to be in the midst of a star-birth sprint, and its reservoirs of gas and dust are being pummeled with countless photons of light. It is this light the JWST has managed to see.
The kind where science communicators have to account for the lowest common denominator of reader that may not have payed attention in high school when the teacher was talking about photons being the reason for light.
Any headline pumping site, I always go find the original cited article. I trust the researchers who did the thing over someone who has a minor understanding and a good domain name.
Tho, I do like the articles on phys.org. They often seem to have direct quotes from the authors of the research, like they actually spoke to someone. But they are less space focused and more general science news from across the spectrum.
If you'd like a real answer, because of particle-wave duality, all electro magnetic emmission can be quantized as photons, including radio waves. Now is it redunant to say photons of light instead of just light? Yes
I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.
I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.
And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it'll take way too many communities with it.
If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.
I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to !football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?
And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like !main@soccer.forum is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like !nba@nba.space - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.
Yeah, I realized the issue with "main" as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I'll suck it up and just create a new community.
I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to !football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?
I'm not the main mod of !football@lemmy.world so it's really not my decision to make, but moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there's a lot of people that don't like having football referred to as soccer.
Moving away from lemmy.world and their annoying VPN restrictions would be nice though.
moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.
As I'm sure my home instance reveals, I do like the idea of focused instances. I think a general sports focused instance would be better than sport specific instances though, at least with lemmy's current size. It's not sustainable to pop up an instance for every sport out there, like strongman or arm wrestling.
And people would also have to be able to sign up to the instance. Which if I remember correctly you had a very different opinion on when you spoke to Snowe on !meta@programming.dev about programming.dev. Just from a technical standpoint, the federation latency and general wonkiness is real and is why my football bots are running on Lemmy.world despite programming.dev being my preferred instance. Near real-time communication is important during live games where minutes may drastically change the topic.
And while I'm sympathetic to your cause, inertia is a real thing and lemmy.world is competently run, even if I strongly disagree with their VPN restriction.
If you somehow
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As I'm sure my home instance reveals, I do like the idea of focused instances. I think a general sports focused instance would be better than sport specific instances though, at least with lemmy's current size. It's not sustainable to pop up an instance for every sport out there, like strongman or arm wrestling.
And people would also have to be able to sign up to the instance. Which if I remember correctly you had a very different opinion on when you spoke to Snowe on !meta@programming.dev about programming.dev. Just from a technical standpoint, the federation latency and general wonkiness is real and is why my football bots are running on Lemmy.world despite programming.dev being my preferred instance. Near real-time communication is important during live games where minutes may drastically change the topic.
And while I'm sympathetic to your cause, inertia is a real thing and lemmy.world is competently run, even if I strongly disagree with their VPN restriction.
If you somehow managed to convince the other sports communities to migrate to a common instance I'd happily follow along though, but I find it very unlikely happen. ReadyUser31@lemmy.world is the one primarily in charge of !football@lemmy.world
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn't it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?
I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it's not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
I would assume the "rendezvous" instance would collect all posts from all communities it is subscribed to, and show them to the users as if it came from a single instance. So moderation would be limited to the moderators of the actual instance behind it.
The explorer makes it easier to discover them, but would be even better if that's automated.
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven't had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating "community instances" from "people instances":
Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a "too big to fail" scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn't want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, i
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If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven't had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating "community instances" from "people instances":
Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a "too big to fail" scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn't want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, it also makes it easier for both sides of the table to be able to join one single community and make the overall fediverse stronger.
I don't like this kind of community/user instance because 2 instances have to deal with the same problem. E.g. a rogue user can troll on most community instances until they are banned by their user instance.
The instance fragmentatios is not as big issue as it's quite easy to create new accounts. There was a thread about this some days ago here, I also use different accounts on different instances for different topics.
but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
Now when a user reports a troll, the report goes to the moderators of the community. But in special cases the admins of the user instances should deal with banning. So the admins of the community instances have to deal with reports, but the solution is at the hand of the user instance admins. It's the same as dealing with users from other instances, but an edge case.
My recommendations would be something like this: (I'm just a random user, so it's just my point of view) - Shut down the fully inactive instances. Noone will even even notice it - Merge the semi active communities to a handful of instances, like sports and technology... . I've seen active communities move instances, it would be possible, take a look how !europe@feddit.de migrated to !europe@feddit.org. G
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but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
Now when a user reports a troll, the report goes to the moderators of the community. But in special cases the admins of the user instances should deal with banning. So the admins of the community instances have to deal with reports, but the solution is at the hand of the user instance admins. It's the same as dealing with users from other instances, but an edge case.
My recommendations would be something like this: (I'm just a random user, so it's just my point of view) - Shut down the fully inactive instances. Noone will even even notice it - Merge the semi active communities to a handful of instances, like sports and technology... . I've seen active communities move instances, it would be possible, take a look how !europe@feddit.de migrated to !europe@feddit.org. Give enough time for subscribers to notice and subscribe to the new one. - Allow registration of moderators on these instances, so they can work around the current limitations of moderation tools. Maybe an invite only solution or something like this. - You could find help more easily if you look for admins for 3-4 instances instead of for 18 instances.
This would be useful for you and other admins, because you would have to admin much less number of instances. They would be still considered small instances, compared to big one, so you still not at the "too big to fail" level. For users it would help community discovery, there are overlap between followers of similar topics, e.g. I have friends who follow both European football and NBA at the same time, I read both selfhosting related topics and about general tech support, etc...
I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.
When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.
I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.
But hey that's just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.
You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the "group-focused" and "people-focused" instances.
The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn't mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, !apple@hardware.watch would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.
for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal
When is this ever true? The idea of a "universal culture" is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any "universal culture" (it's likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).
I don't mean universal in the sense of "totalitarian", I mean it in the sense of "large common denominator".
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries
This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.
Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
I don't see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don't think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.
At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics
I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.
I don't run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.
I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?
I assumed, by "They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.", that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn't realize their instances were already closed-registration.
Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.
I am not sure what "instance members" you are referring to, here.
The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.
If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.
I think this idea is good. I remember seeing those domain names last year. At the time it seemed muddy and uncomfortable to me, since there was a whole scheme of Reddit ghost accounts posting, while I understood there were good intentions behind it, mirrored posts were flooding users' All feed to the point I started blocking a bunch of subs, and many admins defederated.
If we can promote the community first approach where the domain is the space for discussion to be held and stored, with users connecting from across the Fediverse, this would be excellent, a good alternative to massive centralized Lemmy servers. Collective ownership would ensure preservation of content if one or more go offline.
I think there may be a challenge or challenges that you haven't pinned down yet. First is: what problem does this solve?
Second is, how will people know that they are housed under the same roof, so to speak? A small instance dedicated to NBA basketball may be interesting, but if it seems disconnected then people would be wary. Small specialty instances can be shut down without warning for all sort if reasons.A consortium of instances may help with this issue, as long as it is immediately clear through common branding that they are part if the same group.
Third is that different communities have different needs.
Also, if we assume that the entire idea is to have more than one admin, then what change does that actually include?
You now have 3-4 people that can go and randomly delete the whole server instead of 1? Do you know that right now, only 1 person has the credentials to the admin account of whatever server you're talking about?
If you don't want the communities, stop squatting them. Having no users seems like just a way to keep costs down so you can hold onto more urls and is bad for the general ecosystem anyways.
It's amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.
I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing "you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?", even though I'm running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of "community-based instances" .
Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
I'm skeptical about this since you are squatting on at least 18 urls while trying to get volunteers to create value out of them. Nothing leads me to assume you are being altruistic.
Edit: misattributed something, woops
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize and trying to hold the most potential instances without putting any work or money into it. It's just my impression.
I also think instances without users are a terrible idea and I'd rather real instances come about organically instead created by people that actually care about the subject.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
First, we'd have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is sta
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Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I'd hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
Thank you for providing the numbers, these domains are quite pricey if you have to pay 1700 € per year on domains alone.
You are asking a consortium of different admins to collectively own those instances with you.
If the idea is that those other admins can take over should something happen to you, then it makes sense for them to assess whether the whole project is viable from a financial perspective, otherwise it would just lead to them closing most of the instances, which is just the same as them not owning those instances with you.
There are plenty of ways where people can enter into an equity agreement without having to pay directly with money.
can take over should something happen to you
Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I'm failing some type of BS purity test.
Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
I wish you the very best (as I generally do to all admins), but at the same time I'm doing some due diligence. As you mentioned earlier in this thread, other instances have disappeared overnight, and one way to prevent this is to have multiple people in charge.
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I’m failing some type of BS purity test.
No matter what people tell you (you've got plenty of comments in this thread which are not from me), you do not take them into account.
This thread is 2 days old, it was the week-end, maybe people will jump in tomorrow or later, but at this very moment, it does not seem like you were able to convince anyone to want to join you in managing a pool of instances for 6500€ per year.
I feel like I have been disc
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Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
I wish you the very best (as I generally do to all admins), but at the same time I'm doing some due diligence. As you mentioned earlier in this thread, other instances have disappeared overnight, and one way to prevent this is to have multiple people in charge.
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I’m failing some type of BS purity test.
No matter what people tell you (you've got plenty of comments in this thread which are not from me), you do not take them into account.
This thread is 2 days old, it was the week-end, maybe people will jump in tomorrow or later, but at this very moment, it does not seem like you were able to convince anyone to want to join you in managing a pool of instances for 6500€ per year.
I feel like I have been discussing this with you several times. You have a certain vision on how to manage those instances, but until you find other people sharing it with you and wanting to work on this together with you, you won't convince people to move communities to your instances.
Sorry, I can not let go of this. I don't know if you realized that the whole reason that I am doing this is because you kept pushing this idea that you'd be more than willing to contribute to different instances and that the only thing that is stopping you is that you'd be worried about me being the only person.
Even with me telling you that I have other people to take over my operations, you were doubting me.
Now that I am actually going forward and offering to get more people onboard, while asking for NOTHING in return, you are putting this bullshit, pretending to be worried about price of domains.
What you are doing is just Concern Trolling, and I am frankly tired of this. You have put no Skin in the Game, yet you continue to find ways to rationalize your senseless idea that this is going to grow magically without getting people to put significant resources at stake.
I've been for over an year offering alternatives, attempting to bring actionable proposals to the table, putting resources on the line (go take a look at the matrix room and you may find me telling people that I registered selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it for free to the /r/selfhosted mods) and every time there is any type of push for concrete effort, I am met with apathy at best and suspicion at worst.
Everyone keeps crying about Zuckerberg/Threads/Venture Capitalists/Spez, but when push comes to shove no one wants to mobilize and put up a proper fight.
Community collections should be a thing. Something like /cc/Technology could pull in lemmy.world/ other instances and collections of communities. It makes it easier if one instance dies, an instance de-federates itself, or just wanting to consolidate all the different /c/Technology communities across instances.
It would also be nice if communities had the option to vote on their admins once in a while. Having individuals lord over different communities is a problem in reddit.
New users to lemmy usually aren't going to join communities if they can't register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You're cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.
I don't mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you're going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren't that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
Also the idea that communities can be 'neutral ground' doesn't make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it's caused by how you're running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.
aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experienc
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aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experience. A few examples:
No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topic
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Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
For people who've used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don't know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they're not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.
people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
I'd prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.
I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.
Not my experience. A few examples:
No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
I'm not sure how that goes against what I said. That's mostly people disliking the admins.
Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.
Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn't an active community elsewhere.
I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.
Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don't want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.
That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That's also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don't like that very much.
From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don't allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There's still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don't see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
But still, what's the point? It doesn't improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you'd need a way to... federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there's no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn't solve the problem because now you got people able to either mo
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Now it makes even less sense.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don't allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There's still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don't see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
But still, what's the point? It doesn't improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you'd need a way to... federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there's no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn't solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy (good luck with that power trip bonanza) and no central admin to remove the mods, or they cannot moderate each other, in which case good luck figured out how to block on a per-post basis depending on laws in your particular country getting the content federated over.
Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.
I am not trying to be mean, it's just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple
Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.
Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
You don't need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.
It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down
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Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.
I am not trying to be mean, it's just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple
Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.
Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
You don't need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.
It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.
But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?
I can't even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.
If you want communities to be resistant to server removal
Another non-sequitur.
So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy
How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?
In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy
Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?
Ah, sorry if that wasn't clear, the entire second half was theoretical about a better way of doing this.
A type of federation where there is no "home" for a community any more. It exists equally on all servers, so any being removed would have ~0 effect.
I mentioned that basically because I feel that's a much better solution to the problem than shared ownership + locked registrations. Sorry if that wasn't clear, not my primary language.
Your key is your identity. If it's lost or stolen, you can not revoke it. That alone will make it virtually impossible to be used as an official application protocol for any organization.
Usability is even worse than anything on ActivityPub
Moderation is entirely punted to the end user.
(not technical, but relevant) it is completely dominated by Bitcoin maxis
That’s not true it’s not entirely punted to the end user. It starts with the relay operators just like it does instances. All of the same moderation tools that users have on instances and with clients Nostr users have too, so I’m not really sure about that comment. Also, maybe it’s because I’m a US citizen but I don’t get what so problematic about individualism and allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences. You mention the keys that’s still under user control as if instances have not gone down with users identities, content and social graphs Usability worse than anything on AP that’s very broad. Go point for point with comparisons You can filter out any content related to Bitcoin.
If you have examples of relays differentiating themselves based on moderation policies, it would be appreciated. Not just "we are extreme free speech holders" vs "we pay attention to some laws here". What nostr relay is actually running a strict filter, or do any type of analysis on the message content beyond "payment only"?
as if instances have not gone down with users identities.
If instances go down, there are still lots of possible backups: someone can recover the domain name and regenerate keys (or even recover a database copy). If someone loses a private key, there is no turning back. The fact that (some) poorly managed system are not recoverable does not mean that it is as fragile as something as nostr that gives up completely on making it.
allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences.
The same can be achieved on ActivityPub, no new protocol is needed for that.
Also, this is not matter of individualism, but of UX. It's "nice" when users have the ability to make decisions on their
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If you have examples of relays differentiating themselves based on moderation policies, it would be appreciated. Not just "we are extreme free speech holders" vs "we pay attention to some laws here". What nostr relay is actually running a strict filter, or do any type of analysis on the message content beyond "payment only"?
as if instances have not gone down with users identities.
If instances go down, there are still lots of possible backups: someone can recover the domain name and regenerate keys (or even recover a database copy). If someone loses a private key, there is no turning back. The fact that (some) poorly managed system are not recoverable does not mean that it is as fragile as something as nostr that gives up completely on making it.
allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences.
The same can be achieved on ActivityPub, no new protocol is needed for that.
Also, this is not matter of individualism, but of UX. It's "nice" when users have the ability to make decisions on their own, but it is terrible when they have to make all decisions on their own to get started.
You said that like that’s been reality, I’m not going based on simply what’s possible but what’s happened when instances suddenly shutdown
If the same came be achieved why hasn’t it been? It is a matter of individualism. People often see instances as communities, I don’t agree with this assessment with the exception of coop and special interest instances.
Looks more like you are interested in more influence power, and control for yourself.
What qualifies you to be in a leadership position that directly affects content control?
Your instances are not being used the way you wanted, so you propose structural and organizational changes that, suprise, benefit your administrative influence from your instances.
You're so focused on the details of your solution, you don't seem to be holding or acknowledging any objective perspectives.
benefit your administrative influence from your instances
They are not going to be "my" instances.
acknowledging any objective perspectives.
Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.
ITT: People who don't understand IAM or how to build a healthy federated structure. There should be identity services and instances just to host content separately. This way a spammer from a service won't de-federate content from everyone else and there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.
lol I think you are right about this. You'll never get these lemmitors to see it i guess.
Even though the community is contained the cloud resources should still be split in two between identity and operations to be in alignment with all the industry best practices and potential for scalability. Remember the unix philosophy is do one thing well.
Beehaw should operate their own Beehaw fediverse IDP (Identity provider) for the users to sign in with, that would manage their tos agreements, privacy policies and user based security. Separately they should operate their Lemmy server which hosts pictures and links organized by communities. They could just use a single IDP for their instance and have the same experience as now only better with better architecture.
I'm familiar with IAM concepts, and indeed having a separate IdP and content instances would be a better architecture.
However the reality is that the platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed) are being developed by very small teams (Piefed is a 2 or 3 people team, and Lemmy might be around 5).
Lemmy is focusing on features delivery (join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11…), which could help the platform grow more than a new IAM architecture.
There will probably be a point in time where performance will require a rework, but at the moment, it does not seem to be a priority
But nothing needs to be done to meet this OPs desires for community only instances that are well federated with other instances (IE at least one user is subscribed to each community on each instance). This way those admins just manage those communities and Beehaw and Lemmy.ml can run their combined servers.
The users and the subscribed to communities cause nearly all the load on the servers too, it is a way to keep costs down.
Who would manage all of those community instances?
The current setup works well with the limited number of admins and mods we have overall. I'm regularly looking for mods on communities I mod, there isn't so many of them (e.g. !showsandmovies@lemm.ee )
Also, with the federation currently being broken, mods would need to have an account on each community to be able to get the reports: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issu…
Regarding costs, the cost of these community instances suggested by OP is around 6500€ per year, so 540€ per month (lemmy.world/comment/12595221)
It currently costs 80€ per month to host lemmy.ml, which is the 4th most active instance with 2300 monthly active users
I mean that is what is is asking, he is looking for a team of people to manage the instances in this post. That is what this post is about, he is looking for a team of people to run them as admins while maintaining his (imo correct) vision for how it should be structured.
I forgot to mention the biggest fact- the users are where all the risk are. If people are just posting pictures to your instance of communities you have minimized risk as you can just gatekeep what is posted. Once you allow users in who can then post on other federated communities you take on a lot more risk.
Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.
I think this makes a lot of sense. We don't want the instance hosting, say, football communities to be defederated anywhere on account of its users behaving poorly. In general there's just no reasons to have the users in the same place as the community.
I was the only one who could create communities on them.
Typically the only one who can create magazines/communities are local users of the instance. With registration closed, that means only you (or the new instance owner) would be able to do this.
Though one can get around this with some bot magic ( lemmit.online had a magazine that was dedicated to new sub/magazine requests - once someone made the request, the bot would create and own the magazine but add the requestor as the moderator )
Do you intend to have open magazine creation on these instances or would that still be restricted to the owners of the consortium?
My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).
Objection! Hehe... No, wait. Really, I see a problem...
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don't think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)
There's also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don't know you, and perhaps you're well intended.. So, it's fine for the most part, let's just assume that's okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There's centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.
I can't see this happening even if the domain names are cool.
And, leaving disadvantages aside. What's the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that.
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Objection! Hehe... No, wait. Really, I see a problem...
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don't think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)
There's also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don't know you, and perhaps you're well intended.. So, it's fine for the most part, let's just assume that's okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There's centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.
I can't see this happening even if the domain names are cool.
And, leaving disadvantages aside. What's the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that. But it's quite subjective, and hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they're now...
Thanks for the intentions. Let's focus on some new ideas, they'll come...
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.
It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.
centralization of domain names under you.
The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.
Can you name any advantage??
Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
Less load o
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If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.
It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.
centralization of domain names under you.
The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.
Can you name any advantage??
Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.
hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…
As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.
Riksdagspartiernas inställning till Chat Control. Kamratdataföreningen Konstellationen har skickat ut en enkät med frågor till samtliga riksdagspartier om deras inställning till Chat Control, övervakning och personlig integritet.
Jag är ordförande i Vänsterpartiet Guldheden-Johanneberg-Krokslätt. En av Göteborgs större lokala partiföreningar. Men långt ifrån den största. Men större än Angered där Kristofer Lundberg är ordförande. Jag delar Kristofer Lundbergs åsikt om att PFLP precis som PKK bör tas bort från terrorlistan. Båda två finns med på EU: sådana listor idag.
Speed demos made at FediForum September 2024, the online unconference that brings together the people who move the open social web and the Fediverse forward.
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
It’s been an eventful week in the fediverse, with the Swiss government ending their Mastodon pilot, the launch of the Social Web Foundation, Interaction Policies with GoToSocial and more!
Swiss Government’s Mastodon instance will shut down
The Swiss Government will shut down their Mastodon server at the end of the month. The Mastodon server was launched in September 2023, as a pilot that lasted one year. During the original announcement last year, the Swiss government focused on Mastodon’s benefits regarding data protection and autonomy. Now that the pilot has run for the year, the government has decided not to continue. The main reason they give is the low engagement, stating that the 6 government accounts had around 3500 followers combined, and that the contributions also had low engagement rates. The government also notes that the falling number of active Mastodon users worldwide as a contributing factor. When the Mastodon pilot launched in September 2023, Mastodon had around 1.7M monthly active users, a number that has dropped a year later to around 1.1M.
The Social Web Foundation has launched
The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new foundation managed by Evan Prodromou, with the goal of growing the fediverse into a healthy, financially viable and multi-polar place. The foundation launches with the support of quite a few organisations. Some are fediverse-native organisations such as Mastodon, but Meta, Automattic and Medium are also part of the organisations that support the SWF. The Ford Foundation also supports the SWF with a large grant, and in total the organisation has close to 1 million USD in funding.
The SWF lists four projects that they’ll be working on for now:
adding end-to-end encryption to ActivityPub, a project that Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates (another member of the SWF) recently got a grant for.
Creating and maintaining a fediverse starter page. There are quite a variety of fediverse starter pages around already, but not all well maintained.
A Technical analysis and report on compatibility between ActivityPub and GDPR.
Working on long-form text in the fediverse.
The SWF is explicit in how they define two terms that have had a long and varied history: they state that the ‘fediverse’ is equivalent with the ‘Social Web’, and that the fediverse only consists of platforms that use ActivityPub. Both of these statements are controversial, to put it mildly, and I recommend this article for an extensive overview of the variety of ways that the term ‘fediverse’ is used by different groups of people, all with different ideas of what this network actually is, and what is a part of it. The explicit exclusion and rejection of Bluesky and the AT Protocol as not the correct protocol is especially noteworthy.
Another part of the SWF’s announcement that stands out is the inclusion of Meta as one of the supporting organisations. Meta’s arrival in the fediverse with Threads has been highly controversial since it was announced over a year ago, and one of the continuing worries that many people express is that of an ‘Extend-Embrace-Extinguish’ strategy by Meta. As the SWF will become a W3C member, and will likely continue to be active in the W3C groups, Meta being a supporter of the SWF will likely not diminish these worries.
As the SWF is an organisation with a goal of evangelising and growing the fediverse, it is worth pointing out that the reaction from a significant group within the fediverse developer community is decidedly mixed, with the presence of Meta, and arguments about the exclusive claim on the terms Social Web and fediverse being the main reasons. And as the goal of the SWF is to evangelise and grow the fediverse, can it afford to lose potential growth that comes from the support and outreach of the current fediverse developers?
Software updates
There are quite some interesting fediverse software updates this week that are worth pointing out:
GoToSocial’s v0.17 release brings the software to a beta state, with a large number of new features added. The main standout feature is Interaction Policies, with GoToSocial explaining: “Interaction policies let you determine who can reply to, like, or boost your statuses. You can accept or reject interactions as you wish; accepted replies will be added to your replies collection, and unwanted replies will be dropped.”
Interaction Policies are a highly important safety feature, especially the ability to turn off replies, as game engine Godot found out this week. It is a part where Mastodon lags behind other projects, on the basis that it is very difficult in ActivityPub to fully prevent the ability for other people to reply to a post. GoToSocial takes a more practical route by telling other software what their interaction policy is for that specific post, and if a reply does not meet the policy, it is simply dropped.
Peertube 6.3 release brings the ability to separate video streams from audio streams. This allows people now to use PeerTube as an audio streaming platform as well as a video streaming platform.
The latest update for NodeBB signals that the ActivityPub integration for the forum software is now ready for beta testing.
Ghost’s latest update now has fully working bi-directional federation, and they state that a private beta is now weeks away.
In Other News
IFTAS has started with a staged rollout of their Content Classification Service. With the opt-in service, a server can let IFTAS check all incoming image hashes for CSAM, with IFTAS handling the required (for US-based servers) reporting to NCMEC. IFTAS reports that over 50 servers already have signed up to participate with the service. CSAM remains a significant problem on decentralised social networks, something that is difficult to deal with for (volunteer) admins. IFTAS’ service makes this significantly easier while helping admins to execute their legal responsibilities. Emelia Smith also demoed the CCS during last week’s FediForum.
The Links
All the speed demo videos of last week’s FediForum are now available on PeerTube.
DesolateMood
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •like this
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variants
in reply to DesolateMood • • •like this
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Possibly linux
in reply to variants • • •You need our brilliant product. It will save your business millions!***
*** licensing fees not included in calculation
sic_semper_tyrannis
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •Zeoic
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •like this
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ExtremeDullard
in reply to Zeoic • • •Well I'm sure they have very good reason and I'm not questioning them. I'm just talking from a user's standpoint (and I'm a very poor Windows users): whenever I try to port any of our tools to Windows, wham the damn antivirus kicks in and puts my stuff in quarantine. If I use an engineering application that talks to some device on an unusual port - and I'm talking outgoing traffic, not incoming, wham it's blocked. And unblocking it requires making a formal request to IT, that whitelists the application, until WithSecure updates itself and forgets about it, and here we go again.
It's just a complete PITA. You constantly feel like you're fighting an algorithm with stupidity built in just to get normal, honest-to-goodness work done.
like this
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Possibly linux
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •nkat2112
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •node_user
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •ExtremeDullard
in reply to node_user • • •Not cheers, no. But it increased my problem-solving reputation within the company and it made Linux more appealing to key people in the company.
What's wrong with that? What's your butthurt? Are you bitter about something?
node_user
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •It just reeks of bullshit.
Also, I can almost guarantee your company IT department thinks you're a twat lol.
ExtremeDullard
in reply to node_user • • •gencha
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •How do you sell what you did as "it just worked"? Rightaway? You lied to them. You have your coworkers on an unmanaged machine with a foreign OS on the guest WiFi with custom networking. Don't oversell a workaround as a solution.
Simplifying the problem to "Windows" seems unfair, given how many problems you found. All of them still require a long-term solution for regular operation.
some_guy
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •Did you read what you wrote?
Yeah, you and I can do this. Most people can't. Yes, Linux has become more accessible. Most people still can't do this.
youmaynotknow
in reply to some_guy • • •WldFyre
in reply to youmaynotknow • • •youmaynotknow
in reply to WldFyre • • •fishinthecalculator
in reply to youmaynotknow • • •youmaynotknow
in reply to fishinthecalculator • • •That's my point. They learned to remove cancer, and yet, can't remove them all. I learned to use GnuLinux, to make it work, regardless of distro, yet some things just fail. So, again, what's your point?
What's keeping anyone from learning anything other than the desire and effort?
You chose to bring up that ridiculous comparison only to confirm what I said. Ran out of hentai to watch or something? 🤣🤣
WldFyre
in reply to youmaynotknow • • •youmaynotknow
in reply to WldFyre • • •WldFyre
in reply to youmaynotknow • • •Tlaloc_Temporal
in reply to some_guy • • •interdimensionalmeme
in reply to some_guy • • •Sure the front desk secretary can't but the engineering team can if they use chatgpt and their brain.
The alternative is yielding to the techno priesthood and giving up on your dreams.
Possibly linux
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •Your IT department sounds awful. I have never heard of "withsecure" but it sounds like a pain in the ass.
Anyway its better not to do ghost IT as that never ends well. Next time you should get the explicit approval of the IT department and document everything.
interdimensionalmeme
in reply to Possibly linux • • •killabeezio
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •This story has nothing to do with why Linux would be any better than Windows. Sure, if you lie to people, then anything can be convincing. What if I had a firewall installed in Linux, wouldn't you have had the same issues?
This is sort of the problem I have with a lot of Linux enthusiasts, when you have a hammer, everything is a nail.
Compared to Windows and MacOS as a client desktop, Linux still severely falls behind, but it is getting better. For a server, Linux is just far superior.
GSV_Sleeper_Service
in reply to killabeezio • • •You think linux doesn't have a firewall? I'm fairly certain every distribution has one installed and enabled by default.
The real reason linux worked so well in this situation was the local admin rights that came from being a rogue, unmanaged device on the network. I'm sure they could have made windows work if all the group policies weren't being enforced.
killabeezio
in reply to GSV_Sleeper_Service • • •Yes, you have iptables and nftables, but it's not always enabled. So, when I said installed, I really meant enabled. I 100% agree with what you are saying though.
Unfortunately a lot of places just have shitty IT and people go rogue because of it. Some people are just impatient though as it sounds like in this case.
You also have things like apparmor and selinux. If those are enabled, you might be chasing your tail trying to figure out why something is not working. You would need to know where to look and how to fix it.
ulterno
in reply to killabeezio • • •A previous company of mine, required an "AntiVirus" installed on the Linux computers too.
The one the IT guy installed, ran in the background all the time, doing nobody-knows-what and and slowing down every thing and having multiple segfaults in a minute, shown in the journal.
Long after I left, I also saw an RCE vulnerability related to it. So essentially, my system would have been more secure without the app.
Nibodhika
in reply to killabeezio • • •As much as I disagree with your last statement (I think Linux for client is on par with Windows for the vast majority of users), I strongly agree with everything else. This wasn't a Windows problem, but a "your IT is cockblocking you" problem, it could have happened in Linux too if it wasn't because he used a rogue device, he could have fixed it on Windows too doing the same.
Personally I would have gone straight to Linux because I'm out of the loop on how to do these sort of stuff on Windows. If it had to be Windows, let IT figure that out, their firewall, their anti-virus, their problem.
corsicanguppy
in reply to ExtremeDullard • • •Not a word. Spell-check should have told you.
Twice.