IDK, I’m here on Lemmy basically as a refugee from Reddit, but the federation angle doesn’t seem to help much from what I can tell. Look at how fast Bluesky overtook Mastodon. Anyway, anyone putting up new fanfic servers without understanding the politics and drama behind the existing ones is probably in for some pain. There used to be a saying “you’re looking for a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem”.
Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.
In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.
This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.
It might very well be that the corporate censors are worse human beings than the Lemmy censors. That is completely independent of which platform experiences more censorship. It’s literally against the Lemmy World terms of service to discuss unsanctioned brands of cat food without supplying scientific sources. That nailed Lemmy’s coffin shut for me. There is nothing like that on Reddit. It’s ok, I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.
If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.
I explained that Reddit is better for most people, though there is a fringe minority that chooses Lemmy for various idiosyncratic reasons. I’m part of that minority and so are you, ok? That doesn’t make the rest of the world likely to migrate here.
Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media
It’s also a failure at being like Usenet, which was far less centralized than Lemmy. I’m unfamiliar with Beehaw.
@Teknevra, you’ve posted a number of ideas like this which seem based on the premise that all it would take to make them happen is writing the software and keeping the servers running. In fact those are really the easy parts.
Any above-ground platform involving user to user payments (Patreon, Paypal etc.) has to devote a ton of energy into anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, trade in illegal goods, etc. AO3 isn’t just file hosting for fanfiction, it’s explicitly political in that it aims to give a safe space for works that would be banned on other platforms due to subject matter that draws disapproval. That takes a lot of ideological commitment and some level of moderation, legal backing, etc. Pulling non-fediverse sites into the fediverse when they desire to run their own walled gardens for whatever reasons is another set of battles to fight. So in each case, the obstacles to your idea involve conflicts between humans, not just lack of the right software.
Why do you find the fediverse so great anyway? Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO. Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances. Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users, with just a few of us fringe types staying on Lemmy because of priorities that almost nobody else cares about. Mastodon gained some popularity when Twitter became an intolerable hellhole, but Bluesky ended up recapturing a lot of those departing users.
I appreciate your good intentions and willingness to help out with various annoying situations, but I think it’s important to stay clear-headed about exactly what you are trying to do.
Why would you want that? What is the attraction? “Federate all the things” isn’t really an answer. Why would authors or readers prefer it over AO3?
I don’t bother with a proxy host or with LetsEncrypt, though I guess you could use LetsEncrypt perfectly well. Back when I was doing this, LetsEncrypt didn’t exist and you had to actually pay for public certificates, so using locally generated free ones saved money. It also had a minor(?) security advantage in that if the private server key somehow leaked, it wouldn’t let people impersonate our internet domain.
For the private CA I simply used the crappy CA.pl script that comes with OpenSSL or did at the time. There are much better ways to do it, especially at any kind of scale, but CA.pl sufficed dealing with a few development machines.
Proxy host out on the public internet? Usually I just use a local private CA for this, and install the CA root in my browser.
This is a cute idea but I’ve generally been satisfied with the idea of using Gitit. That’s a wiki backed by a git repo, so you can use normal git commands to propagate updates between servers. https://github.com/jgm/gitit or “apt install gitit”.
If people dont care enough to mess with their browser settings thenselves, then they can either a. join a privacy-focused Mastodon instance
“Joining a privacy focused instance” is exactly an opt-out approach so the answer is exactly the same is before, opt-out is the wrong chocie.
live with the fact that choices are being made for them. People need to take actions for themselves, we cant treat everyone like babies.
It’s not that choices are being made for them, it’s that they are adversarial choices. There’s a difference between “treating everyone like babies” and being on their side. Users who want sites run by predatory jerks already know where Elon’s site is. The fediverse’s main appeal afaict is that it’s run by people who aren’t like Musk and Spez. That is, its operators can be trusted more. They should be looking out for the user. They should make choices for the user that the user would want them to make. Otherwise there is no point to it.
This article looks good: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ :
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible.
I’ve only started reading it though. Anyway, if the fedivese has anything to offer, it’s a respite from that. Stop trying to ruin it.
The referer header tells the site which specific users and which specific clicks came from lemmy world. That’s flat-out invasive. Revealing the number of users (as Mozilla wants to do) is also invasive even if it doesn’t single out the user (of course that’s much less direct and people usually tolerate it until they become attuned to the issue).
The thing to ask yourself when site X wants information Y is “what does X want to do with the information?”. If the answer can possibly be “something bad”, then X should not get the information unless the user opts into sending it. That is even if it’s statistical or aggregated information. Being included in the count is like casting a vote for X, which (as we see with Trump getting elected) can have significant effects even with no identification of the individual voters.
E5 because it supportsECC memory.
Only nerds do stuff like mess with their browser settings through about:config. The bulk of activity is from people who don’t mess with those settings and don’t stay aware of what’s going on. Those are the ones who the info gatherers want to observe, so that’s why the system should be opt-in in every case, and it’s also why they want it to be the opposite.
It’s not entirely clear, but it appears to be up to the instance operator.
Better ask whose benefit the system is being run for in that case. If I want a system run by Elon Musk then I already know where to find one.
Unfortunatly its a cost we must accept since the justification makes it worth it.
That’s for the user to decide. The devs should not presume to make it on the users’ behalf.
It’s less a matter of anonymity as wanting to maintain some basic privacy. If you want to tell someone where you learned about something, that’s great, go ahead and tell them. To have them extract the info from you without your knowledge is dystopian. Referers should have been banned as soon as the web became commercial.
Yeah, browser vendors think the same thing, since they are part of the commercial web. Anyway, at minimum, sending referer should be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Sorry, that makes no sense.