This is not a missing feature in Jerboa, it's a design choice in the Markdown syntax. It's done so that one can break up long lines in the .md file without affecting the rendered page. Markdown is a standard, and Jerboa uses an existing tool to format posts. In order to make this work for Jerboa the devs would have to break compatibility with Markdown and create their own rendering tool. They're most likely not going to do it, and I don't think they should.

That's not a problem, though, because you can already create single line breaks in Jerboa, using standard Markdown. All you have to do is add two spaces at the end of your first line, where you want your line break to be. So, if I write down:

This is a line<space><space>
This is another line

this gets rendered to:

This is a line
This is another line

There are other ways to create line breaks in Markdown:

• Using an HTML <br/> tag
• Using a backslash \

but they're not supported by all renderers. For example: the <br/> tag works in Jerboa, but not in the web UI. Double space works for me in both.

Legacy COBOL code is largely used in critical systems like those of banks and airlines. What could go wrong with having that code rewritten by stochastic parrots who get programming answers wrong half of the time?

They're insufferable commies who keep attacking other parts of the Fediverse by... uh... commenting on posts and... ehm... responding aggressively to bigoted content. They've got all these sick ass stickers that we don't and they keep flexing them in our replies which drives me crazy.

Their instance is an authoritarian distopia where queer people feel safe and they don't waste time debating the same wrong liberal talking points every time. Also you can just call someone a dumbass if you disagree with them: a totalitarian nightmare.

Worst of all they go around straight up bullying other Fediverse users: right now I'm locked in a bathroom stall that a Hexbear user shoved me into. I've been here for an hour missing my maths class, and I've had to drink the toilet water. My tummy is starting to hurt. Stay away from Hexbear users...

Or just https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

He has a mirror of his blog on his own website without paywall. Not sure why he still publishes on Medium too, visibility I guess...

Which other web services support Markdown formatting and also single line breaks? Reddit, for example, didn't...

Since AFAIK the main reason for this choice in standard Markdown was to make the raw .md files more readable, I can see how this isn't necessary in Lemmy. I still see two reasons not to change this though:

• Effort: forking and maintaining a markdown rendering library just for lemmy would take a ton of effort for a pretty small usability improvement. The dev team is already small and overloaded with work, this doesn't seem like a good use of their time.
• Consistency: each website having its own flavor of Markdown syntax would be pretty chaotic for users. Right now you can learn basic Markdown once and use it on Reddit, Lemmy, Github, etc. If every website did it their own way you'd have to remember all the little differences, it would get messy.

Thanks for the tip about the archived Reddit link, I've updated it!

For the seed to leech ratio you're right, but I feel like it might be a bit much to throw at somebody who's just figuring all this stuff out. It's not a guide on how to seed safely, I don't want to encourage people to put themselves at risk who don't yet have the skills to protect themselves.

Backed by who?

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a recent history of questionable investments...

It's there... Step 4 of the section "Download A Torrent Client". I didn't call it "binding an interface" because the intended target of this post would have no idea what that means.

ActivityPub doesn't just push everything on a server to every federated instance like a fire hose. In the first place, as Masimatutu@mander.xyz said, it only feeds your content to an instance if somebody on that instance follows you, which you can set to require your manual approval. Your posts could also get pushed if somebody else boosts your post and they have followers on the other instance.

However, if you set an instance block, none of your posts get sent to the instance, period. They would have to resort to scraping. In other words, if you don't want to give meta your data, just set an instance/domain block.

Other people in the thread have already made this point: even with a full mesh network, the number of remote calls made for a single activity is equal to the number of instances subscribing to that activity (plus one if the activity originates from an instance that's not the host of the activity).

A hub/spoke model doesn't change this, it just moves the load from the host instance to the hub. The number of connections is still the same: if N instances need to receive the activity, N calls will have to be made. If anything this adds 1 more call from the host instance to the hub.

Even peer-to-peer distribution of activities, mentioned by @hazelnoot@beehaw.org, wouldn't actually change the amount of calls being made. You still have N servers that have to receive the activity, so you need at least N calls overall. What this would do is redistribute the load better over instances, so the host doesn't have to make all N calls. It would definitely be an improvement, but it would not be easy to implement successfully, and it would almost surely break ActivityPub compatibility.

The only thing I can think of that would actually reduce the overall network load, though, is batching: sending multiple activities/updates together in a single message. AFAIK this is not supported by ActivityPub, though, so implementing it would mean breaking compatibility, and also implementing an entirely updated version of the protocol (which is a massive undertaking).

a long form nuanced take

interesting, however have you considered pee pee poo poo

Truly a worthy contribution to the discourse, thank you...

Can countermeasures be implemented in the clients to mitigate privacy risks, while not having to proxy images?

You're right of course, but it's hard to communicate this level of nuance in a post targeted at newbies. If you don't disable your antivirus, 9/10 times it will quarantine the KeyGen automatically, and you don't get anywhere.

I've added a warning about the risk of infection. Do you have any recommendations on how to tackle this in a way that's appropriate for non-nerds?

In the EU companies can't scrape personally identifiable information without consent, even if it's already publicly available. IANAL, and there's probably ways they can sneak around the GDPR, but at least it's not a free for all. It's unclear though how it works for federation. It's definitely not the same legally though.

Support for this in core Lemmy has been discussed many times. There's an open issue for it that's been gathering dust for a while. Some apps already implement this on the client side I think, not jerboa though.

The reason for not directly federating content to Threads isn't so nobody there can ever see my amazing posts, it's so Meta can't easily profile me. Scraping public posts on a different platform would probably be illegal, at least in the EU, and reposts don't give them a lot of data about me. Federating content, however, would give them most of the same data that Mastodon has on me without even having to ask.

Mastodon instance blocks are already bidirectional AFAIK: if you block an instance your content does not get federated with them. I was actually surprised that this does not seem to be the case for Lemmy. I don't think this break any core abstraction of AP...

Awesome work folks, thanks!

Agreed, standards are what make the Fediverse possible. Rendering posts from other platforms is already messy: we've all seen the posts coming from Mastodon where the title is the whole body of the post, cut at the character limit. If Lemmy starts doing its own Markdown flavor it would further degrade the integration with other Fediverse platforms.

I'm seeing the same bug, and I don't see a github issue for it. Wanna create one?

I believe you need root to access those, plus a file manager that supports it (I use Mixplorer which does). Otherwise, as someone else suggested, you can access them from a computer over ADB or MTP.

Thanks for the report about ProtonVPN, I haven't used it in a bit so I didn't know. Do you know a better free VPN which does allow torrenting? I know a paid one would always be better, but this is for people who are just not willing to spend money. A shady free VPN is better than none.

For VirusTotal I know about the false positives, that's also why I included the reddit post on how to interpret the results. I still find a scan to be good practice to weed out the more obvious malware.

Yeah I was also thinking that using "OS" might not be obvious, but I also don't want to explain too much. Like, I don't want the reader to feel treated like a child. I expect someone who's trying to pirate software to at least know that they're running Windows.

I added (Mac / Windows / Linux) as examples there, hopefully it's enough...

Oh that's nothing... In hard techno it's not uncommon to find tracks with an almost completely flat waveform

I'm aware they're not using a generic model, but that's not much better. Current custom-made models still fuck up significantly more than humans, and in less predictable ways.

Even if their custom model is slightly incorrect 1% of the time, that's still a major problem in critical systems like those.

I had high hopes when I tried it out but frankly it's been almost unusable for me. Terrible performance, laggy UI, plenty of bugs, long loading times for songs...

I don't know if something in my mobile environment was messing with it but I use quite a few indie FOSS apps still in beta and none of them worked as badly as Spotube did. I'd love to go back to it if it improves, but for now it's just not worth the UX pain.

Edit: forgot to mention. The idea of sourcing tracks from YouTube is cool but causes loads od trouble in practice. I've found remixed versions streamed as the original, tracks with the intro from the music video, tracks with sound effects from the music video, and tracks that just cannot be streamed cause they aren't on YouTube. I know there's a feature to pick which version to stream, but it's quite a bit of UX friction and it didn't work often enough to be a showstopper.

These look awesome! This might be asking too much, but I'll try anyway: I use the Whicons icon pack for the minimalist, monochrome white theme. Would you be able to make a version of these with just the plain white outline and transparent background?

Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use.

Which is why Chinese users don't use standard VPNs, they use obfuscated proxies with protocols like Shadowsocks and V2Ray, which mask the tunneled traffic as innocuous HTTPS traffic.

This post from Eugen Rochko mentions that blocking Threads at the user level "stops your posts from being delivered to or fetched by Threads". Basically, the user-level instance block is bidirectional.

Limited federation mode is a different feature, at the admin level. It doesn't really affect the delivery of posts in either direction, it just hides the blocked instance's content from the global feed. Defederation on the other hand is indeed bidirectional, but again it's on the admin level rather than users'.

I don't think Lemmy does either...? It pushes updates to subs that at least someone on the receiving instance subscribes to (at least that's how it worked last time I checked). That's why there are scripts going around for new instances to automatically follow a bunch of popular subs to populate the All feed.

I think Mastodon works in the same way with users, where it sends updates for accounts that someone on the receiving end follows. So if nobody follows you from Threads it wouldn't send any of your posts there.

Are these from a video game or Terry Pratchett's Night Watch books?

I thought I heard they were rolling out some material you theming in beta a while ago. Did they revert it?

Eh, it's a bit naive IMO. It's nice to focus on your small, close-knit community, but it does not live in a vacuum. At some point the world (read: capital) will come knocking at it's door, and if you've been sticking your head in the sand until now you will not be prepared for what happens.

Also, what if I don't want my community to be small and close-knit? Lemmy is way more interesting now that it was a month ago, after growing by an order of magnitude. Ask anyone who's grown up in a rural town and they'll confirm this: tiny communities are fucking boring.

This is such an amazing article, The Verge's staff is still capable of some excellent journalism.

Yeah I've updated the post to have Windscribe as the recommended free one, with a warning about free VPNs

Yup, exactly. We can't gatekeep this too much, even if it's warranted, otherwise people will just give up and never actually spend time to learn about this.

That's not bad actually, impressive how many FOSS apps that icon pack covers. It's a bit of a different style to whicons still.

I think something like the top right icon in the image, just without the background circle, would be perfect.

Awesome! This looks great, thank you so much! Perhaps Jerboa should include these various community icons natively...

Got it, thank you!

Me when I start seeing sickoposting in my default Lemmy comms