This looks like a glimpse of how Mastodon (specifically: ActivityPub protocol) can really detrone Twitter. The world is full of governments and agencies and other Very Serious Organizations. They must hate having to depend on a single private company to get their message out. They must be itching for an alternative that gives them the kind of control that they have with phone numbers and email addresses and websites. Surely this is Mastodon's golden opportunity.
Ublock Origin and Vimium C. That's it.
I used Dark Reader until last week, when I discovered a native Firefox setting that does the job better: Settings > Language and appearance > Colors > Manage > set background to Black and override to Always.
No more white flashes, EVER (yes, I tried absolutely everything but on some sites there was nothing to be done, even with every possible CSS hack). And no more add-on speed penalty (to be fair it was small, and Dark Reader is still an amazing tool).
Now the web looks pretty ugly but it is fast and always dark. White flashes banished FOREVER.
Time for a discordant voice in this festival of consensus. Installing Debian is like climbing a mountain for anyone who is not an experienced Linux user. If you don't believe that, go try doing it while attempting very hard to imagine that you are a non-techie Windows user. You will not succeed.
Yes, other distros do manage this better. And yes, that is a problem, because, once up and running with the right defaults, Debian is just fine for non-techie users. Debian could quite easily be the FOSS alternative to Windows for ordinary people who care about privacy and freedom but don't have advanced technical skills. Instead they are stuck, de facto, with slightly-compromised alternatives like Ubuntu and Fedora.
So happy birthday to Debian, and congratulations. But I think we should all be more mindful of the bigger picture here: desktop personal computing is in a steep secular decline among everyone except techies and a few other groups of professionals. We need to think better about how to make all of this sustainable. The lowest-hanging fruit is an easy-peasy installation funnel, and Debian is failing at that.
UPDATE: People are misunderstanding the substance of my criticism, which admittedly was not very obvious. For a normie Windows user, the difficulty of getting Linux installed comes before the installer, it's the problem of making a boot medium. Debian's approach is to say "Here's a list of ISO files, bye!". That will not cut it for anyone but experienced Linux users. Some people here are saying "Tough luck to them". I think that's a shame.
UPDATE 2: What do people here hope to achieve by downvoting sincerely expressed opinions? There is no misinformation in my contributions to this thread, it's just my viewpoint, which I took time to express as best I could. Would you really prefer it if everyone had the same opinion, i.e. yours? Would that not make for a boring "discussion"? I don't get it. Personally I never, ever downvote anyone for expressing their opinion sincerely, no matter how much I disagree. I have not downvoted anyone in this discussion, indeed I have upvoted lots of them. I really hoped Lemmy would be more civilized than that Other Place, that it might have more of the FOSS spirit of exchange and tolerance. Disappointing. Have a nice day anyway.
Completely agree. Training normies to click OK on warnings like this is a no-good terrible idea.
I’m really beginning to see how the Fediverse can be complicated for new users
The fediverse is just the internet as it was designed to be. A network, not a broadcasting medium. A place for connecting people, not just consumers and corporations.
Choice means responsibility. It's a feature, not a bug. But sure, it's also paradoxical.
In answer to your question, I'd say just slow down a bit. Forget about self-hosting. Just pick a mainstream instance like this one and jump in. That's what I did. You can make changes later as appropriate. That was impossible where you were before.
The problem with Google is that it has its fingers in too many pies.
The same company runs:
And so on. This is obviously a big problem in a world where information is power.
Google needs to be broken up at least as much as the oil and railroad companies did a century ago.
Ubuntu-hate is an example of FOSS sh**ing its own bed.
If there's one distro that, after 20 years, most normies might have heard of, it's Ubuntu. Name recognition is like gold dust and, like it or not, Ubuntu is still de-facto the way a ton of ordinary non-techies are getting introduced to FOSS.
But no, we just cannot help but put it down and say what junk it is and how so-and-so random distro is better.
If we really cared about getting normies into FOSS, then instead of slagging off Ubuntu we would be supporting it with both hands.
Addendum. To counter your personal experience, mine is that Ubuntu is mostly just fine and has been for years.
Alternative utopia: do online banking in a desktop web browser while seated comfortably at home, rather than on a street corner in the sun squinting at a tiny screen.
My theory is that The Godfather suffers from pioneer syndrome. It was incredibly modern at the time of its release, with ultra-naturalistic acting and new techniques of cinematography. Which everyone proceeded to copy. So that now it looks like just a decent film, maybe from the 80s. But at the time it was a breakthrough. That's what it's getting the credit for.
Anecdata. I was hooked by RSS right from the outset in the mid-2000s. I used Google Reader for a bit and Netvibes for several years. It was amazing. This was the way the open internet was supposed to be. I had a dashboard to follow a whole bunch of cool sites and blogs, with not a scummy ad in sight. At one point there was even this cool tool whose name I forget which would filter RSS items, by means of multiple dials, based on their social-media buzziness. This was obviously a dangerous slope to be on, but at the time it felt safe enough and it was incredibly powerful at fine-tuning the signal. Again: all without any advertising or spying.
Then websites began to drop their feeds. Stuff began to break. I succumbed to the prevailing wisdom that RSS was on the way out, and tried other things. Lots of things, including Twitter and Pocket and Reddit and Google Alerts and probably even email at one point. Nothing came close to the functionality and freedom of RSS.
So, to cut the story short, I went back to RSS. It hadn't gone away after all. In fact, the rot seems to have stopped. Major blogging software like Wordpress still provides it, obviously. But so does Youtube, if you hunt a bit. Some news sites have even improved their offering. Maybe they finally grasped that RSS is like email: it's an ally against big tech domination. And for the rest there are now lots of tools to generate RSS feeds on the fly. Right now I use a modified Python script that does this for a couple of news sites I can't live without. It works great, although this is obviously not a solution for normies.
RSS is just an acronym but the principle is as relevant as ever. There needs to be an open standard for getting a summary of recently-published content on their web. RSS is the plumbing solution that works best and I hope it can be improved and made better still.
Slightly tangential, but why is "one of the two major Lemmy instances" using a TLD under the authority of the government of frigging MALI, a semi-failed state that has nothing whatsoever to do with Lemmy or its mission?!
Come on internet, grow up and show some respect for internet architecture. TLDs are not just for jokes or decoration, they actually mean something.
In theory, if a good number of public libraries and and the Internet Archive each has a paid-for digital copy of a book, and decent infrastructure to ensure redundancy, plus a paper copy as the ultimate backup, then it seems unlikely the book's content will actually be lost before centuries have passed.
The problem I want solved is this: how do I get my money to the author of a book without needing to use DRM software and without paying tax to gatekeeping corporate monopolists?
Didn't watch, but did try to install Debian fairly recently. And everything in the TLDW is true. The Debian funnel is verbose, confusing, dated-looking, jumping straight into tech babble like "burning ISO" and vague mentions of 3rd-party tools, as if everyone understood what all this means or how to do it. Let's be serious, this is just not going to work for non-techie normies, and the maintainers must be deluded if they think otherwise. There needs to be a 1-2-3 walk-thru with big friendly buttons and all the software included to get a working bootable USB stick. Last I checked, even shady Fedora ticked these boxes. Debian is supposedly the flagship FOSS distro. It is behind the times and needs to catch up.
So, Usenet. Coming full circle.
Indeed, this is the case with Revolut, a bank which literally requires iOS or Android spyware to sign up and use. But it's rare. And a reason to NEVER USE that bank.
where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with
This is the scourge of any forum. Downvoting apologists need to think about what they are doing. Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone's mouth shut because you don't agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?
Personally I never downvote any comment that is made in good faith, no matter how much I disagree with it. Occasionally I even force myself to upvote them if they're thoughtful. It's not that hard.
E: Sad but unsurprised to see that a bunch of people think my personal opinion needs to be hidden. I guess it's less risky than coming up with a counter-argument and seeing if you get more upvotes.
Exactly. I'd argue that some supposedly mainstream distros are hard to install even for the competent. Last time I checked, Debian's funnel for newbies consisted of a 90s-era website with "instructions" in the form of a rambling block of jargon-filled text with mentions of "CD-Roms" and a vague discussion of third-party apps for burning ISOs. I mean, on Linux flashing a USB stick is matter of a single dd command with some obscure switches, but even that was nowhere to be found and I had to search forums for it. Incredible! Hard to imagine how forbidding it must all seem to the average Windows user! No Debian for them!
IIRC Ubuntu's process was much easier but still not as easy-peasy as it could have been.
The only hope for desktop Linux is a crystal-clear, bulletproof, 1-2-3-style onboarding funnel that takes the user from "this is the distro's website" to "I have a bootable USB". From that point on it's plain sailing.
Better solution: don't use Lemmy as your feed, use a feed reader (RSS). There are per-channel feeds that you can sort and filter using parameters.
Doing things this way will also help create the open web we all want to see, where "forum" is not a synonym for "Reddit" or "Lemmy", where you can also follow the goings-on in other places and not miss anything.
Agreed. Phone numbers are now people's de-facto UIDs. And somehow we collectively decided that Big Tech should have free access to this information to construct giant social graphs and analyze as it sees fit. Crazy sh**.
So the decline of SMS definitely has a silver lining. If each siloed messaging app uses its own UIDs, and this data stays out of people's d*** contact lists, then in theory this is a privacy win.
What I worry about is that the OS gatekeepers, i.e. Google and Apple, will contrive to get apps like Signal and Telegram to populate the mobile contact lists with these new IDs. "So you never lose your data", etc. Then they can keep triangulating the information and we're back to square one.
The only failsafe solution is to ban individual users from sharing their friends' IDs without their consent. Just as the GDPR bans websites from doing exactly the same thing. For that the EU is our only hope as usual.
What should they be doing instead? Begging for donations? I do agree in general, tho. Seems they should at least be squirreling away some (or most) of that money into a foundation, because they're obviously going to need it one day.
Good for you, and I'm impressed by your undefensive and unhuffy reply.
Because the amount of entitlement I see about professional journalism really pisses me off, personally. There is a reason that much (not all) journalism is not the quality it used to be. It's because nobody is frigging paying for it any more. Journalists are not the perpetrators in this story, they are the victims. The internet has caused their profession to implode. It's their jobs that have disappeared on a huge scale, their salaries that have shrunk, their career choice that turned out to be a catastrophic bad move. All because of a technical innovation, basically. Well, personally I think we may come to regret the demise of this profession which served society well for at least a century. But the least we can do is stop the victim-blaming.
Rant over. No, I am not a journalist. Very glad of that career choice.
This seems a very decent idea. Disappointed I didn't think of it myself.
The non-profit criterion is so important. Profit means advertising, and advertising means attention-whoring, psychological manipulation, spying, and basically everything that is ruining the internet. Advertising is a moral abyss.
My thoughts are that your question is not so much about belief as about tribe. Since you seem to care about your group identity, why not support a sports team instead? It creates fewer problems than religion.
But nobody will read a charter, just as nobody reads privacy policies. Do you?
OP seems to be suggesting a simplified "label" system, based on easy-to-grasp criteria. To me this looks like a much more sensible solution than yet more opaque blocks of TOS.
For example, there could be colored badges. A green one might mean non-profit, and red might mean "careful, anything goes here", or whatever.
A possible inspiration: the Creative Commons codes (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-BY-NC, etc).
IMO it is crucial to keep all this as simple as possible. It should not be necessary to spend 10 minutes parsing a block of text to understand the essentials about a community.
Yes I'm tempted to too. What bothers me is that Youtube is literally the same company that runs the monopoly spyware OS in half the world's pockets. That is just so unrelated to its mission, so screwed up. If Youtube were a separate media company competing on a level playing field with a bunch of media-company peers, i.e. if it were Netflix, things would be so much healthier and I would be much more inclined to give it money.
The case for forcing Google to divest itself of Youtube is overwhelming.
So easy! Whatsapp!
Dumbest. Name. Ever.
So hopelessly of its time, namely that moment when the word "app" was the coolest thing ever among normies because iPhone.
And, cherry on the top, coined by geeks with language skills so poor that they thought "app" rhymes with "up", which it absolutely does not to anyone who speaks English properly.
What an embarrassingly dumb name.
ITT: lots of the usual paranoid overkill. If you do rsync with the --backup switch to a remote box or a VPS, that will cover all bases in the real world. The probability of losing anything is close to 0.
The more serious risk is discovering that something broke 3 weeks ago and the backups were not happening. So you need to make sure you are getting some kind of notification when the script completes successfully.
Interesting. In this debate I keep going back and forth, mainly because of the XMPP precedent, but I basically agree with your pragmatic priors.
Your last point is so true. Actually I can't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude about all those well-meaning organizations and VIPs and whole governments that went all-in on proprietary platforms and now find themselves on super uncool sinking ships or controversy-laden fiascos. I mean, what was some regional government or university doing on Twitter in the first place?! Same thing for Whatsapp literally replacing phone numbers in many countries. I mean, this is a single private company FFS, you have no control over anything, yet apparently most people and organizations still cannot see the problem - incredible. This is why we always need protocols and standards. It was obvious all along. Anyway, forgive the rant, I agree with your take.
Interesting. Is this serious advice and if so, what's the new canonical command to burn an ISO?
Agreed. I don't get this obsession with marginal speed differences. Stability and privacy and ethics are together 1000 times as important as a 10ms speed boost. I have used Firefox continuously since it was in beta (except for about 6 months of Chrome 15 years ago, when Chrome was still harmless). Today there is literally no choice any more for anyone who understands the internet and cares about their own freedom. It's Firefox or bust. Any speed edge Firefox has is an anecdotal bonus, all but irrelevant.
Impressive. Framasoft seems to be holding up much of this space all by itself.
But why does a fertility-rate decrease "need to be solved"? Obviously if it's in absolute free fall that's going to cause short-term problems, but the underlying reality is that our planet is overstressed with 8 billion humans and counting. Personally I just do not get this anxiety about fertility rates, it seems so disconnected from reality.
How much did you pay for journalism last month? And yet you expect quality and passion.
The ultimate it-just-works CLI tool.
Although I have never understood why it's called rsync, because you need to add --recursive to make it actually sync a file tree, which is what it does best.
That requires putting one's faith in the vapor-currency that is crypto. Not saying that it won't happen one day, but neither is it necessary to solve this problem.
A simple Paypal button, for example, does not require DRM spyware if done from a website on a FOSS stack. The Paypal tax is is mere pennies compared to Amazon. A bank transfer has no tax at all, tho it's not great in privacy terms.
But where do I get the author's Paypal ID or bank number from? I want you pay you directly, dammit, but you insist on allowing to Amazon tax the transaction and to force me to install spyware to read your damn book.
This is a cultural problem as well as a technical one, of course.
IMO we need to get to world where enough authors are happy to allow ordinary folks to "pirate" their work, and enough readers are happy to pay them even though they could get away with not doing so. In that world the technical solutions could so easy, so frictionless, in theory. But it takes a leap of imagination for everyone involved.
Can someone do a quick explainer of what this move to ARM means for free computing? The prospects for hassle-free installation of alternative OSs? Is it good news or bad?
Specifically, the model should be the Wikimedia Foundation. That is, a non-profit organization with lots of stakeholders and slow procedures to guarantee accountability, and lots of resources to guarantee it won't go away. This is the pragmatic least-bad solution to the problem of centralization on the internet.
This user, at least, has not touched a mouse in a decade. Young people do not even know what a mouse is.
But rsync can do this fine with --recursive --delete. The mirror will remain an exact replica.
Seafile is not FOSS, as I understand it. But I tried it anyway, since I also found Nextcloud bloated.
In the end I went back to the purest strategy of all: peer-to-peer. My files are synced between devices over the local network using
ssh,rsyncandunisonand never touch an internet server.