Hi! This isn't really a question, but I was a former admin on Lemmy.ml and I just want to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to be on your team and it was a really valuable experience for me! I'm no longer an admin due to inactivity and personal life events causing me to no longer have the time to serve such a role, but I enjoyed the time I was and I really hope I was able to make a positive contribution to the instance!

Thank you for your continued work developing this project and running your instance comrades! This is still by far my favourite fediverse platform, actually, favourite social media in general. I intend to continue using both Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad and I hope I can continue to contribute by using Lemmy when I have the chance!

It was my pleasure! Thank you for the opportunity!

On one hand I'm interested in seeing how well it works and what they do with it, on the other hand...

I'm going to seriously consider completely discontinuing watching YouTube if NewPipe stops working. I still like plenty of non-FLOSS oriented channels that will never even consider a FLOSS or open web solution, but I think I owe it to myself to not accept Google's bullshit, not even use it from the browser, with or without the adblock ban. Not to protest Google's actions because I don't care, but to uphold my own values and interests. I need to heed my own advice and extended rants about big tech.

"Don't want your kids seeing ads that are absolutely not for kids? Easy! Just pay us!"

Seriously it's so hypocritical that they demonetize swearing yet show gambling, alcohol, and even the occasional barely-not-porn sexualized ad without a second thought.

Canada, mostly learned by listening to the CBC (our government media outlet) Laugh Out Loud podcast:

1. Vancouver is the weed capital

2. Newfoundland's "Newfie" accent/dialect

3. Hockey fights (when players go insane and beat the crap out of each other)

4. Quebec hates everyone

5. Our airline is terrible

6. We use a confusing combination of Metric and imperial units

The vast majority of their userbase already puts up with it, so I doubt they will see any significant backlash. Even if all the FLOSS creators leave, they're still a tiny minority because it's """influencer""" channels like the Pauls and content farms like Bright Side that are the real cash cows on the platform.

Also, a huge part of their userbase is children. Probably more than any other mainstream social media platform. They won't even understand the concept of DRM or corporate bullshittery and will only use the YouTube app or browser anyway. Kids are also less likely to be bothered by ads, might not even understand what the purpose of an ad is, in fact they will just see them as more content which is why advertising to kids is so unreasonably effective.

imagine people would start defeding email

There are literally globally maintained blacklists of spam email sources. When people lease a static IP address the first thing to do is to check it against the major email blacklists.

90% sure it's tomatoes. They are not native to Europe and were only introduced in the colonial era.

Chinese person in Canada: I just drink cold tap water, but my parents and grandparents drink boiled water. Not really for safety concerns over here, but they, my grandparents especially, subscribe to that traditional Chinese medicine thing of don't put anything cold into your body ever.

Convenience and platform inertia. Same with most shitty cloud services.

I wish Ol' Debian would get the love it deserves, especially for enterprise where their "stability over the latest flashiest software" philosophy should really shine. People on the desktop side criticizing how slowly Debian packages update is generally responded with "well it's a server OS first and foremost, the Debian derivatives are more suited for desktop," so why does no one use Debian for servers? And as far as I know Debian has always prioritized stability and reliability above anything else, and have never pulled any sort of corporate antics even close to what Canonical and Red Hat have pulled.

Yep... Bummer, but completely in character and expected.

I've never pegged Google as particularly giving a shit about legacy support though. They kill things out of the blue without warning or explanation.

I wish you the best of luck! I'm on a similar journey to replace YouTube.

Except Robinhood absolutely deserves a one-star rating. Sure, go ahead and remove the reviews if they're untrue, offensive or obscene, but negative reviews about an incident that actually happened shouldn't be removed.

pay for attention

Isn't that basically what their "superchat" feature in YouTube live is? Pay money to force the host to read your comment? IDK I've never used it and don't intend to.

Frankly, I've had it with band-aid solutions like alt clients. Gonna say it now: if you claim to be a FLOSS/open web supporting creator and you're still exclusively using YouTube, you obviously value revenue over FLOSS or open web. Yes I'm gatekeeping FLOSS/open web with that statement, but corporate tech is actively trying to destroy both, and if you side with them, why shouldn't you be called out for it? Don't have to quit YouTube IMO, but at least mirror on Peertube if you care.

How exactly is "being against the concept of fascism" too much politics? Because that's what the term "antifa" abbreviates for, nothing more.

When someone says that Microsoft is NOT an ally to free software on /r/opensource, they're almost ALWAYS downvoted. Then their prized company pulls this shit.

I don't think there are any that don't require jailbreak/sideloading, but you can always use the browser versions like Invidious or Piped!

Fun fact: if you use Proton to run a Windows game in Linux, Steam reports it as a Linux player, so developers of many "Windows only" games will actually see a number of Linux users in their analytics.

They don't.

While we're on the subject, neither does Google.

It's insane how the greater concept of "antifa" is automatically associated with violence when it literally stands for "anti fascism".

I don't condone violence on either side, but I say be against the concept of fascism or GTFO of this forum.

Probably not. There's no netflix-dl for a reason.

Thank you so much comrade! I loved working with you and the other admins and am very grateful for the experience!

As far as I know Fedora is fully detached from RHEL and is its own independent distro, most others still rely on RHEL as their upstream.

Because in order to federate, user data needs to be shared, including the username. It prevents double votes from the same account and also allows votes to be rescinded at the user's discretion, at which point the instance will send effectively an undo signal for the activity.

The first rule of the Fediverse is to make sure you're perfectly okay with the entire internet seeing your account activity, including votes and favourites. If you're unsure or are worried you might regret it, best not to post it at all. This is equally true on all social media but the way the Fediverse works just makes it more obvious.

bit concerned about what the potential “bot army” on some of these instances will be used for going forward though.

There is an option to hide bot accounts in your account settings. This is also why all bots must be tagged as such so people can choose if they want to see them or not, that's the agreement with allowing bots on Lemmy for most instances.

I should clarify that the bot account option is only for legitimate bots that serve a community-oriented purpose. Bots that do things like auto-archive websites or suggest alternative links that might improve your experience when viewing YouTube videos for example. The bot tagging system is intended solely for developers of legitimate bots, and to make the user experience with legitimate bots as smooth and user-controllable as possible, it is not intended to prevent undesirable bots because as you pointed out, they can easily just not click that checkbox and claim that they're normal accounts. Bots have to operate with a reasonable standard to be allowed, so even if a spam or troll bot labels themselves as such, they intrinsically break the rules so they won't be allowed. It's up to mods and admins to find and remove undesirable bots and it is not an easy task, especially for sites that are pseudoanonymous and intentionally collect minimal information. We could probably stick a reCaptcha on the signup form and solve almost all the bot problems, but that is extremely abusive to the privacy of legitimate users so most instances probably don't want to go that route. Maybe an open source picture captcha that is self hosted, but I'm also not sure how effective those are.

I'm not aware of any instance that permits automated signups, the expectation for a legitimate bot is that a human will create the account and then connect the bot up to it. As Lemmy grows we may eventually need to add more rules to legitimate bots, like they must have an automatic way for users to opt out, provide a way to contact the developer or maintainer should problems with the bot arise, etc, but most instances right now only require that you use the bot tag and have your bot act in a reasonable and actually helpful way. This isn't an explicit rule that I've seen on any instances, but I think there is also an unspoken rule that bots should not vote on any content, not even things they have interacted with and replied to, since the voting system is intended for people, a future update to the API should probably disable voting for bot accounts entirely.

TBH this reeks of manager god complex. "I need the peasents in the office so I can feel better about my sad life by making the people under my management worse!"

That's mainstream tech journalism for you.

Charging one cent is one cent of price gouging.

But at the same time, not enough people use 3rd party YouTube apps to cause any significant backlash if they deny api access

Wonder if that will finally change with web integrity.

pOpCoRn tAsTeS gOoD

The number of trolls and spammers who will actually spend the time and effort to write a script to pull the registration questions, feed it into ChatGPT, and then feed its output back (which costs money to do at any significant scale, you're only allowed like 10 responses a day for free, and 7 of them will likely be either "something went wrong, please try again" or generally not make enough sense to fool the admins based on my admittedly limited experience with trying it) is probably less than 1%. At which point it's probably easier to just do it the old fashioned way and make stuff up on the screening questions yourself. If they aren't even willing to do that most of the time I doubt ChatGPT will change anything, trolls tend not to put tons of effort into their trolling. This is less like a castle wall and more like a picket fence, adding just enough resistance and requiring just enough extra effort to evade is enough to keep out the majority of the riffraff, we can deal with the rest much easier.

In fact, having screening makes it much easier for us to more effectively deal with the more determined trolls, by not giving them a place to hide among the casual trolls.

With all due respect, if it was pointless theatre we wouldn't be doing it. Reviewing registration applications is also a lot of work, and we only do it because it's less work overall than dealing with floods of abuse posts (also more pleasant to review applications vs having to look at the various unpleasant things trolls cook up in order to remove them). I don't need to theorize these things, the evidence is there: We see a significant reduction of abuse accounts with registration screening enabled, down to almost none in fact, even if the admins don't pay super close attention to the actual responses (just needing to write something in the first place discourages most casual trolls), and again, the only reason open instances are being blocked is not because we're offended that it's an open instance with no screening (we don't even preemptively check if an instance has screening or not), but because we've actually noticed large amounts of abuse posts from an instance. I think the fact that the open instances currently have the most issues with abuse speaks for itself, something one can independently verify by looking at the new posts and comments for various instances.

Gonna be even more expensive to run a company that no one uses!

To be fair, the downvotes might also be part of the joke. That comment was the most downvoted in Reddit history before EA came along.

And it's not like there's karma on Lemmy so I don't care lol

IBM wants to userp Canonical as the Windows of Linux.