It’s not even enshittification. If it were that at least would be understandable through a capitalistic lens, a natural part of an investor-owned process. It’s the actions and thinking of a man-child with all the brilliance of a 40 watt bulb. No logic is to be had here.

It still looks pretty bad (in a good way): https://reddark.untone.uk/

Almost 7,000 subs private, including many of the biggest ones. This is by no means letting up.

This is fucking gross. There’s no one who thinks people will read the mass shit they pump out.

This is a particularly low effort comment, provides no value, and is therefore unwelcome here. It’s also demonstrably nonsense, as others have shown you.

Please consider engaging intelligently, and in good faith.

If he committed a crime, then hold him accountable.

What a nightmare scenario. Can you imagine being trapped inside, sitting on the ocean floor several miles beneath the surface, maybe having lost power? It’s dark as pitch. Control panels dead. Maybe you have some light from a cell phone. You try to control your breathing to conserve oxygen, but you’re all but certain this is where you’ll die, a fact that you have several days worth of air to contemplate. All the mistakes you’ll never get to right, the things you didn’t do, the family you’ll never see, the pets who’ll never understand why you abandoned them. Through the cold, narrow hull, you hear the gentle susurrations of the current, and that’s it. Could be you have a ring back home you were going to surprise your girlfriend with, and all you can think about is how long it’ll be after the air runs out before she finds it. Maybe someone weeps softly beside you.

Enough oxygen until maybe Thursday. Think about that. What must it smell like inside that cramped little sub? Sweat and body odor, obviously, but what do you do when four or five people need to piss and shit for almost a week? You can’t just contain that. Maybe someone has brought bags they can go in or something, but surely not enough for everyone for that long.

And how will everyone react? You know how you’re going to die, and make no mistake, every single person on that boat knows how horrible it is to suffocate to death, clawing at your throat for hours on end until their fingernails have broken from their nail beds. What if someone breaks? Decides they want to go out on different terms, starts fidgeting with a pocket knife or something? Do you let them? Just sit there and let it happen?

So there you are. It’s Wednesday. Power is out. Even cell phones with their little lights are dead. It’s cold, it reeks of human waste and the filth of unwashed bodies. The air, long since gone stale, is getting thin. No one noticed in the back there that Roy quietly bled out after secretly slitting his wrists, but now he’s starting to stink. Oh god, the absolute horror of a stench a rotting corpse must be in a tight space like that. A putrescence you can taste, thick like oil—which is exactly what the fat in his skin and body is turning into. Grease.

You’re essentially alone, in the dark, with a corpse, and the thinning oxygen is playing tricks on you. So much so in fact that you start to wonder if you hadn’t maybe heard Roy back there starting to move. What does his face look like there in the dark, blackening from bloat and rot? Are his eyes open, staring numbly into nothing, milky and dead?

That’s where my mind goes, at least. I don’t mean to make fun. It’s a horrible situation and I hope they’re rescued.

The personalized, colorful web pages became streamlined, conforming to modern design standards and sacrificing individuality for uniformity.

There are some pretty big advantages to 'modern design standards.' For one, they make the Internet a less hostile place to users with accessibility needs. I don't have problems viewing clashing colors, flying gifs, jumbled pages with no sanity, etc, but a hell of a lot of people with various disabilities sure do. I don't want to even think about how screen readers try to deal with pages like that. Web1.0 offered absolutely nothing for those users who needed accessibility.

Except NOTHING is being accomplished by targeting individuals like this. You're not winning people over, you're not changing minds, you're not effecting change. You're protesting the wrong people. I, as an example, am a huge supporter of education and change regarding climate change. But I still have to live and work within the very system I am protesting. You're not doing anything by attacking allies like me. Instead, you need to go after corporations, and politicians. Those are the entities that are responsible for and have the ability to influence real action.

I drive a large truck because I truly need and use the bed on a weekly basis. I wouldn't be able to get by without it, being more than a convenience thing, as I have tried (and failed) for years to use my wife's minivan. There are a lot of things that you straight up cannot do without a truck. I live on 7 acres of mostly heavily wooded land. That kind of property has a lot of maintenance needs that you really need a truck for.

But when I go to the city, I almost never go with anything in the bed. First, I think it can be unsightly to have my bed loaded up with rotting construction material or large bulky items that need to be taken to the transfer station.

Second, it can be dangerous, depending on what I'm hauling. The load needs to be secured. I'm more likely to get into an accident in the city, so if that happens, now in addition to whatever comes off from either vehicle, now whatever else that I was hauling is going to be all over the place, impeding traffic even further.

If my load is heavy, as it often is (think: maybe 1,000 lbs of cord wood), that has a pretty big impact on my gas mileage.

And if it rains? Whatever is in my bed is going to get wet and soggy and nasty.

And then there's the winter. I live in New England. You may have heard about the snow we get here. My driveway is 1/4 mile long, and REALLY steep. I use my truck to keep it plowed. There's no other way we're leaving our property when the snow falls. But obviously I don't have my plow attached in the off-season, so it wouldn't be obvious to you that I also use it for that.

So for many reasons, I need a truck. It is almost never loaded when I have to go into the city. It's not lifted, I don't have obnoxious wheels, but it's a big truck (they don't seem to make them any other way these days). Now I have to also worry about people with attitudes like yours taking their misguided vigilante justice out on my vehicle because you're not thinking beyond your nose? Do you really think that's fair?

I think your idea of what federation should look like is not quite right, which is okay, it’s not an insult, it’s new to many of us.

The idea isn’t that everything is open, with a unified platform that shares everything, everywhere. The Lemmy software is open source, but the way instances are moderated is highly customizable, and that is an intentional design decision.

You’re probably used to common moderation styles on Reddit, where users have more control over content via up/downvotes, and some Lemmy instances may run just like that, taking a more hands-off approach to moderation. But Beehaw is not like that. The goals and moderation style here are different. Beehaw is looking to create a different kind of space, with more control over what’s posted. There are pros and cons to this, which are beyond the scope of this comment to explore. The point is this: different Lemmy instances are run by different people, with different visions and styles. If you don’t like how Beehaw is run, it’s probably going to be a better experience for you, as well as the people here who do like how it’s run, if you find an instance that more closely aligns with what you’re looking for.

But coming onto someone else’s instance and aggressively demanding things conform to your desires or trying to inform the owners of what you will or won’t “stand for” is rude, though. There’s a better way to communicate with people, and in the future I hope you choose grace.

This perspective lacks nuance.

a service like iCloud is a bad idea if you care about your privacy

Like all security and privacy measures, you have to consider your threat profile. From whom are you trying to maintain privacy from? If it’s other people or companies, then using a service like this is perfectly okay. If you’re worried about state actors or governmental agencies coming after you, then you have a very different set of requirements and considerations than most people, and you should plan accordingly.

But saying that services like this aren’t for people who care about their privacy is a little disingenuous. As with all things, it’s a matter of degrees.

I LOVE this approach though. I want tech news, or politics, or whatever, but I want to be able to decide what my experience engaging with those posts is like. If an instance isn’t seriously discussing something in the comments, or moderation isn’t what I want, then I can go to another instance where it is. Beehaw is already a fantastic example of this, and why I strongly prefer this instance over others—I really don’t like the type of comments that seem to gain popularity elsewhere, like on lemmy.ml.

Reddit burning itself to the ground is the best thing to happen to the Internet in a long time. Just look at how decentralized communities are flourishing.

Public transport in a LOT of US cities is poor, or non-existent. Even where it's good, getting to the city, when you live outside of it, is often not an option without your own transportation.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, really, and in fact I share much of it. But you are oversimplifying and dismissing the reality for many people in the US.

If they want their subs back so badly, let them take them. They can deal with moderation (or finding any decent mods at all) on their own.

Good luck with that, Reddit admins. lol.

Remember when they released their roadmap…for their roadmap? Lol

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/star-citizen-dev-offers-roadmap-for-development-of-new-development-roadmap/

Right. That’s why searching for anything on the internet SUCKS these days. The results are all just filler bullshit.

but I would hope the activists can decide between a polished up city-only SUV and an actual working-vehicle and act accordingly.

People like the guy I replied to don't, though. See the other reply to my comment as evidence.

I have to image that their fleet of attorneys would have thought of this before hand.

What is it lately with companies and shooting themselves in the foot? Have all the CEOs gotten together and mutually decided that this was the year they were going to piss off their communities?

Red Hat are burning through a lot of the good will they’ve made over the years with this.

Here’s the statement the Rocky Linux folks put out:

https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/

Good luck, brothers. I wish you well.

First, I respect you doing what you feel you need to.

That said, I think we need to be careful about how we decide what products to use or support based off the politics or history of their development. That seems like a risky game to me. How much slave labor was used in creating the very products we’re using right now, for instance?

I don’t have anything to add to your questions, but these comments made me LOL:

the NASA-esque startup sequence … I probably have six hackers fighting for dominance over my dedicated network for smart garbage

Lol, I got a good chuckle out of this. Fantastic sense of humor

This has quickly become my favorite instance and this is yet another example of exactly why.

I applaud what you’re doing here, and the community you’re working to build. Thank you!

Another huge +1 'thank you' to the admins of Beehaw

I did as well, but this time, I'm leaning into it. I joined and became a literal card-carrying member of The Satanic Temple, and you should too. They don't really have anything to do with Satan at all, but instead, work for equal rights and to fight Christo-fascists.

For email, Thunderbird has done a complete re-write, and it’s excellent: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/beta/

If you go back to [the] early days of Cloudflare, we've wrestled with: 'What is our role in term of controlling what content flows through our network?' And we believed that the right principle was to remain content neutral.

I think he’s exactly correct. This is what Net Neutrality is about. Service providers on the Internet should be treated like a utility. It’s easy to conflate this issue with that of ‘tolerating the intolerant,’ but I don’t think that’s correct at all. It’s also an argument that many parts of the Internet infrastructure have had. Cloudflare is a big part of the infrastructure underpinning the Internet at large, but it’s only a part. There are many others that need to come together to support a simple website. What about RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) like ARIN, who are responsible for allocating IP addresses? If you’re going to be upset with Cloudflare for struggling about whether or not to be neutral, why should they get off the hook? I think it’s probably because most people don’t understand how the Internet works, and so they remain ignorant of what goes into simply ‘hooking up’ a website to the Internet, allowing these other critically necessary components to fly under the radar of the public attention.

The debate about various Internet infrastructure entities remaining neutral has long raged. By and large, the communities that build and maintain these kinds of underpinnings have come down on the side of remaining neutral. It’s a vastly complex situation, with no easy answers, and a LOT of ‘hidden’ variables and concerns.

Not a podcast, but I’m an author and editor with a small audience that may well be interested in a text interview, would you be interested in that?

Absolutely. It’s disappointing that this person read a post made by the Beehaw admins that was written with nuance and grace, and then decided to respond with vitriol. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that is so prolific on Reddit, and I am happy to leave it behind. Thank you for your reasoned reply.

OP, I encourage you in the future to choose grace.

Never even heard of this before, but I've been a console gamer for a long time until my Steam Deck. I'll check this out, thank you so much for linking!

No idea who this person is but I poked around their website a bit and found them to be kind of charming, in an odd sort of way.

i believe that the free software movement is over, and that it has been over for years.

Strong disagreement. The free software movement is so, so much larger than RMS and TFSF.

Love and use them for Photo, Publisher, and Designer, but there's no alternative for Lightroom. And honestly, I like Lightroom. It truly is the best at what it does. Simple, easy to use, great features, thoughtful design.

There’s no harm in going to the meeting to just listen to what they have to say. Why should he deprive himself of that knowledge? That would be dumb. Information is power. Just because he can’t run out and say “here’s all the things they talked about” doesn’t mean he can’t use what he heard to his and the FOSS community’s advantage. Maybe they disclose that they’re working on some $thing, and now he can start development of a feature that might somehow protect against that $thing.

I love FOSS and the community, but far too often their zealous nature cause them to make poor decisions. The world isn’t black and white. Stop treating it like it is. NDAs happen in business all the time for anything and everything. A lot of companies won’t even have a meeting with you/another company AT ALL unless an NDA is in place. It’s standard.

Not going to at least hear what they had to say was stupid.

There's no need to be so nasty, friend. I'm removing your comment because this isn't the in line with our community value of 'be(e) nice'

It makes me sad that people are losing their jobs. Somewhere out there are real people with real families wondering what they’re going to do if they’re out of a job. It just sucks.

Well, give young people some credit, though. Mostly they're the ones that have been closing their subs and migrating here and working to develop FOSS software like Lemmy. I say this as someone in my late 30s.

I was highly skeptical before reading the article, but the author made great points and I’m actually fully on board with that, now. I was even wondering if my state had plans to do something like this, then I read this at the end of the article:

Meanwhile, many states aren’t waiting for federal action. Hawaii, Connecticut, Colorado and Massachusetts either already offer subsidies or intend to.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing. This really changed my perspective.

I really love Bear, and I’m immensely relieved they’re not trying to bake AI garbage into it.

Get into short horror stories. GOOD stories published by professional magazines like Nightmare, The Dark, Black Static, Weird Horror, Pseudopod. Those are all places that pay professional rates and who have won tons of awards. Anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow are also good, who does the Year’s Best. Crystal Lake Publishing is good as well, both their short stories, novels, and their podcasts. Weird Little Worlds is another indie publisher that has put out good stuff. (Disclosure: I’ve had stories published by both CLP and WLW—the Mother: Tales of Love and Terror antho I was in was a finalist for the Bram Stoker award this year.)

If you want good horror, you need to go to the places that publish it professionally. Issues are pretty cheap, and there’s plenty of free stuff on their sites as well.

I know fuck all about physics but that was interesting! She was great