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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Honestly, this is an easy way to share files with non-technical people in the outside world, too. Just open up a port for that very specific purpose, send the link to your friend, watch the one file get downloaded, and then close the port and turn off the http server.

    It’s technically not very secure, so it’s a bad idea to leave that unattended, but you can always encrypt a zip file to send it and let that file level encryption kinda make up for lack of network level encryption. And as a one-off thing, you should close up your firewall/port forwarding when you’re done.





  • That’s why I think the history of the U.S. phone system is so important. AT&T had to be dragged into interoperability by government regulation nearly every step of the way, but ended up needing to invent and publish the technical standards that made federation/interoperability possible, after government agencies started mandating them. The technical infeasibility of opening up a proprietary network has been overcome before, with much more complexity at the lower OSI layers, including defining new open standards regarding the physical layer of actual copper lines and switches.


  • I’d argue that telephones are the original federated service. There were fits and starts to getting the proprietary Bell/AT&T network to play nice with devices or lines not operated by them, but the initial system for long distance calling over the North American Numbering Plan made it possible for an AT&T customer to dial non-AT&T customers by the early 1950’s, and set the groundwork for the technical feasibility of the breakup of the AT&T/Bell monopoly.

    We didn’t call it spam then, but unsolicited phone calls have always been a problem.


  • Loops really isn’t ready for primetime. It’s too new and unpolished, and will need a bit more time.

    I wonder if peertube can scale. YouTube has a whole sophisticated system for ingesting and transcoding videos into dozens of formats, with tradeoffs being made on computational complexity versus file size/bandwidth, which requires some projection on which videos will be downloaded the most times in the future (and by which types of clients, with support for which codecs, etc.). Doing this can require a lot of networking/computing/memory/storage resources, and I wonder if the software can scale.






  • No forum, email or word processor (even WordPerfect for the c64) or Notepad uses this

    I think the convention of 2 newlines for each paragraph is a longstanding norm in plaintext. The old Usenet, list servs, plain text email, etc., was basically always like that, because you could never control how someone else wraps their text. 2 new lines would be a new paragraph no matter what, while single new lines could create ambiguity between an author’s intentional line break versus the rendering software’s decision to wrap an existing line.

    For lists and the like, you’d want to be able to have newlines without new paragraphs, but you’d generally want ordered lists or unordered lists at that point.

    For an obvious example of markup languages where newlines and carriage returns don’t have syntactic meaning, look at literally the most popular one: HTML.

    So markdown was essentially enforcing the then existing best practices for pure plain text communication, to never use single line breaks except in lists.

    Most UIs don’t even have a preview option, let alone need one, because they don’t require you to have a stick up your ass to ‘get’ using them.

    It was pretty common before Markdown took over that forums and other user-input rich text fields used raw html (or a subset of html tags), or something syntactically similar to html’s opening and closing tags (BBcode, vBulletin markup, etc.).

    Markdown was basically the first implementation that was designed to be human readable in plaintext but easily rendered into rich text (with an eye towards HTML). It’s not a coincidence that it took off in the early days of the “web 2.0” embrace of user-submitted content in asynchronous forms.

    I get the complaint. But I think markdown makes a lot of sense as a way to store and render text, and that one compromise is worth it overall.


  • Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.

    Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.

    These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.

    Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.



  • I think that it’s foolish to concentrate people and activity there even further, it defeats the point of a federation.

    It defeats some of the points of federation, but there are still a lot of reasons why federation is still worth doing even if there’s essentially one dominant provider. Not least of which is that sometimes the dominant provider does get displaced over time. We’ve seen it happen with email a few times, where the dominant provider loses market share to upstarts, one of whom becomes the new dominant provider in some specific use case (enterprise vs consumer, mobile vs desktop vs automation/scripting, differences by nation or language), and where the federation between those still allows the systems to communicate with each other.

    Applied to Lemmy/kbin/mbin and other forum-like social link aggregators, I could see LW being dominant in the English-speaking, American side of things, but with robust options outside of English language or communities physically located outside of North America. And we’ll all still be able to interact.



  • I don’t think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can’t discriminate by viewpoint (and you’re limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.

    The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.




  • I’ll take a look at the nostr protocol, but I still think that people will naturally organize themselves into outsourcing “sort/rank/filter/block” functionality to someone else, whether that’s the provider of the service or a third-party plugin that leverages lots of users’ observations and behavior to train the model. In the end, plenty of us want the ability to block content we don’t want to see, rank content (including comments) by interestingness or usefulness or whatever criteria we prefer, whether that’s provided by the actual service or not.

    After all, look at how we’ve created an ecosystem of ad blocking: we’ve whitelisted and blacklisted certain sites and domains, certain types of scripts, to where the user can control whether a website shows them ads. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and the software needs to be continually updated to be effective, so most of us just rely on a third-party-maintained browser extension or pihole config to do the ad blocking for us.

    In other words, we still want to be able to censor things before they reach ourselves, but certain methods of doing that are more user-friendly, or more user-centered, or more user-configurable than others.