Exactly. To extend the junk food analogy, this is like making donuts from scratch in your own kitchen: customized to your preferences, maybe tastes better, but ultimately you’re still making a mess in your kitchen and eating unhealthy.
My theory is that there is quite a few servers that are chosing to defederate. The number of total servers continues to drop according to fedidb.
Or admins are just finding it not worth bothering with administering their own server and turning them off.
It sounds like you want a way to collect articles, including full text offline, and organize them in a searchable way. Why do you need RSS for this? Just use a blogging platform where you can organize each post, list/sort/filter by date or topic or original source, and use the search functionality in the actual blog platform.
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.
Instances don’t actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.
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.
Our data centers and backbone internet/Tier 1 internet providers are basically the best in the world. The US Department of Energy maintains a network with 46 Tbit/s connections between its labs.
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 think the Supreme Court decided this issue in Bush v. Gore, and it’s been controversial ever since.
Of course i cant just browse porn all day, but clicking a random picture onnreddit with boobs?
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.
I think tech support is inherently bad for the soul.
I volunteered some time answering a few questions on a few Linux forums and chat rooms, at least the ones I could answer, and over time I would get more and more annoyed at the people who wouldn’t help me help them: unable to actually describe their problem or the steps they’ve already tried, and sometimes becoming aggressive towards me when my first suggestion was something they either already tried.
But obviously it’s wrong to take it out on Bob just because you were previously annoyed with Alice in an earlier interaction. Still, over time, it starts to leak into your interactions with new people who don’t deserve it, and the repetitive iterations start to foster a particular toxic attitude that requires you to walk away. At this point my contributions are shielded away from actual people, where I fix things in wikis or documentation, rather than actually helping people troubleshoot real live issues.
I do want to talk about my hobbies and local happenings in my Canadian city.
Shit, there’s not even an active community on lemmy for New York. The Toronto one on lemmy.ca is at least somewhat active, but not very lively. If lemmy can’t even get a critical mass for the biggest metro areas in North America, we’re never going to see communities for even medium sized cities.
It’s turning into digital feudalism, where we peasants try to shop around for a lord to protect us from the other lords.
“Influencer” is just a word to describe a phenomenon that will naturally arise on any platform where following someone doesn’t require a follow back: some people will have a lot of followers, for whatever reason. They’ve existed as authors and columnists, radio personalities, television and film celebrities, podcast hosts, etc.
Some grow followers organically on the specific platform, while others bring their followers on from being independently famous outside the platform. And it doesn’t matter if they don’t start off as famous - all it takes is for a post or comment to go viral and then the attention is there, whether the creator wanted it or not.
Thinking about this some more, I don’t mean to put everything on the user.
The platform itself, through its design and architecture and settings, should also do stuff to make super detailed analysis more difficult:
I don’t think that site would be problematic. After all, we’re just talking about custom interfaces to analyze public data.
A big part of the solution is that users should have an awareness that their activity is public. Every once in a while someone gets burned not knowing that anyone can view what a specific Twitter user or Instagram user liked (like politicians liking risque thirst trap photos).
Another is easy alts and throwaways, with tips to avoid correlations:
This is a public place, so people should be aware that this is a public place. That means they can still find this useful space, as with many other public places, but should be aware that the more they do on this platform, the easier it is to correlate with a real life identity.
Works for me on Sync.