Sad news about a pioneer of internet freedom. He has earned his fair share of criticism and detractors, but he has also given a lot to the Linux and free software ecosystem. I personally run !boinc@sopuli.xyz on all my rigs to support open-source cancer research, I hope one day we can finally cross cancer off the list of humankind's foes.

Unfortunately this is just ONE of MANY bad internet bills currently up for consideration and with bipartisan support. Help fight all of them at https://badinternetbills.com

The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were "too big to fail (true)". Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.

We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don't get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.

OBS is an absolute powerhouse, an amazing example of what OSS can do

Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can't subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.

Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that's the whole idea of federation.

De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.

Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That's why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.

Lemmy's strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.

De-federation is bad.

I mean obviously we can do both right? We can both fight stupid laws so they never get passed in the first place and then refuse to comply with them if they do.

I would give it all to BOINC !boinc@sopuli.xyz. I donate time and money to this project on a regular basis, but I wish more people knew about BOINC because projects like this give me faith in humanity. BOINC is a open source tool scientists can use to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers. Any scientist can use it without institutional backing or approval, it's an open network operating on the petaflop scale. Users can choose which projects they compute for.

BOINC has been used for medical research, finding new asteroids, and identifying new particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Anybody remember seti@home? Ran on BOINC. BOINC was also used to make the first accurate 3D model of the sars-cov-2 spike protein and even helped lead to the design of a shelf-stable vaccine which was distributed to millions. Plus, the project Minecraft@home used it to find the tallest cactus. BOINC has resulted in hundreds of scientific papers that without BOINC would never have gotten funded due to the cost and complexity of the computation involved.

But there is some serious technical debt and usability issues and BOINC has a long-term trend of declining userbase.

Banning porn nationwide is part of Project 2025's plan. defeatproject2025.org

How to contact your MEP. We beat this bill last time, we can beat it again https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Firefox user and evangelist of over a decade. Fuck Firefox for this.

I see a lot of people here frustrated with our two party system. I too am frustrated. Donate to FairVote to get ranked choice on the ballot in more states. Ranked choice voting allows voters to express actual preferences between more than two parties and it is a win no matter who you normally vote for. Many states have a ballot measure system that can be used to pass legislation without requiring the agreement of the state legislature. Several US states have implemented ranked choice voting already. http://fairvote.org

Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can’t subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.

Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that’s the whole idea of federation.

De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.

Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That’s why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.

Lemmy’s strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.

Defederation is bad.

For those who don't know, if you shop on Amazon, you can have a portion of your purchase price go to EFF every time you do. You pay the same price, EFF gets a slice of the pie, and Daddy Bezos loses a few bucks. Edit: Use the affiliate link not the smile link, Amazon stopped the smile program.

Now this is a suggestion I haven't heard before, thank you I will look into this!

It's embarrassing that nobody in mainstream liberal circles seems able to answer this very basic question: why do people vote for trump? It's not that they are racist womanizing nazis (though some of them certainly are). That is some of it, that's the convenient story, but it really misses the mark.

I'm a through and through liberal, I vote D in every race, I vote in primaries, etc. Some other comments here have gotten some good points in so I won't re-iterate them. Before all you tankies jump in and tell me that the entire point of the two party system is to capture dissent and manufacture consent and how the only point of the democratic party is to move the needle as little as possible while staying in power as often as possible, yes, obviously, we're all impressed that you went to college, now let's move on.

I'll tell you what Trump's appeal is:

• He, and his party, are the only ones who openly acknowledge that the entire system is broken and corrupt. This is a talking point among all major republican candidates. Most democrats don't even give lip service to this problem, they just blame republicans and promise things only if we somehow get them a supermajority. Bernie, AOC, and Warren may touch on this topic from time to time, but as a party, the DNC does not. Their position is largely that "the system works, and the reason it's not working well right now is because there aren't enough democrats". Trump says things are "the deep state" or "the swamp" or whatever, but he openly acknowledges that the entire system is corrupt to the core. That is very powerful and speaks to every disaffected voter regardless of why they are disaffected. He did so well and beat poll expectations in the year he won because he got people out the polls who had given up all hope in the electoral system, he got so many non-voters to vote. And they won't vote for anybody else. Hell, some trumpers are former bernie supporters who were so disgusted by the DNCs primary that they thought "well, at least this guy says it like it is, how much worse could be possibly be?". I don't know about you, but are there less disaffected people out there now than there was in 2016? Is the average person's economic position better? Are people feeling less socially isolated? Does the world feel more stable and safe? If not, that's how people like Trump get powerful. Trump is the symptom, not the cause.
• He speaks to people that, rightly or wrongly, feel ignored by those in power. Rural voters, for example, may actually get a bigger vote than those in cities, but it doesn't change that on most issues they get outvoted. They may have all of their social services funded by blue areas, but that doesn't change that their towns are constantly subject to brain drain and under-investment and have no real job opportunities, and that they are looked down upon by people in cities. Whenever politicians do pay attention to them, it's only a quick scam to get their vote and they never come through on their promises. Frankly, democrats could absolutely rake in the vote from rural counties if they wanted to, but for some reason it's like they don't even try. Their policies would be popular, much of the democrat platform is about serving the under-served, yet for some reason it's like democrats don't even try to capture rural voters. Protecting the environment is good for people who enjoy hunting and living in rural areas. Funding education and making job opportunities are easy wins in this area. Funding infrastructure is good for these areas. Remember how Trump delayed COVID checks to put his name on them? How come every build back better project doesn't have a similar requirement? Democrats are embarrassingly bad at taking credit for their wins.
• Republicans may not ever actually accomplish anything legislatively, but boy are they good at making noise and pretending to be fighting for something. And remember, if you believe the entire system is broken and corrupt, you don't care that congress isn't accomplishing anything. Hell, it might even be a good thing to you! Most democrats are absolutely milquetoast. Nobody cares about policy, they care that their politician is speaking their language and fighting for them. Republicans do this well. This grandstanding about the border? What a great show. Passing laws that have no chance of surviving a court appeal but make their base happy? Every month. Their refusal to vote for things because of the "national debt"? Great strategy. Look, I know some or all of these issues are baseless, but that doesn't mean they aren't effective.
• For all ills people are facing in life whether social or economic, the right has a clear boogeyman or two to point at and blame. Is that blame appropriate assigned? No. But at least they have somebody or something to blame. Liberals blame... republicans? That's a particularly dangerous strategy when dems are crushing it in elections and when the republicans can't even vote as a block in the house of reps. Dems are too afraid to ever point the finger at "the rich" or other easy targets, instead they're always like "it's complicated" and "nuanced" and nobody gives af about that, it's not how people vote.
• Republicans are 100% better at social media and running their own media. Fox News is a genius concept that liberals still have yet to copy effectively despite being around for.. two decades? Play the fucking game liberals, it's how you win. Democrat messaging is milquetoast through and through. Their social media game has gotten better the past few years, but I'm not convinced they have surpassed republicans in this yet.

Domains aren’t free and I don’t think it’s worth it for them to buy a new domain to just be able to spam for a short time again.

Literally what e-mail spammers do.

Agreed defederating can help solve obviously malicious instances, it doesn't solve spammers abusing good instances. E-mail and AP are very similar at a protocol structure level.

Never liked Kamala. Choosing a former cop/prosecutor as your VP right after the BLM protests felt like a real slap in the face. Voting for Biden anyways but don't love his VP.

• Publish useful content on lemmy. Link to that content on other social media sites
• Anytime you see a negative article about reddit particularly on reddit, remind users this will continue to get worse, link them to lemmy and explain what it is/how to join.
• Donate to lemmy development to improve UX.

All of them. Make "banning advertising" an election platform, I'll vote for you. Ban billboards and other forms of commercial advertising everywhere. Advertising works, nobody denies that. If you see enough ads, on average, your mind will be changed. By allowing advertising to exist, we are sanctioning widespread mind control. It sounds crazy when you say it that way, but it's true. Advertising does not benefit the average person, it makes them buy stuff they have no native desire for. Advertising only benefits advertising agencies and their clients.

Let word-of-mouth and genuine desire for a good or service drive purchases of that good or service, not advertising, and you'll end up with a more efficient economy where our consumer choices better invest in our shared prosperity and future.

No that's not how it works. It stores learned information like "word x is more likely to follow word y than word a" or "people from country x are more likely to consume food a than b". That is what is distributed when the AI model is shared. To learn that, it just reads books zillions of times and updates its table of likelihoods. Just like an artist might listen to a Lil Wayne album hundreds of times and each time they learn a little bit more about his rhyme style or how beats work or whatever. It's more complicated than that, but that's a layperson's explanation of how it works. The book isn't stored in there somewhere. The book's contents aren't transferred to other parties.

They use some OSS modeling/docking software which tests for efficacy. After good candidates are identified by the computers, they are sent to 'wet lab' for further testing and candidate selection. Then it's tested on some cells, then on some live animals, etc you keep going down that road and eventually you get to human trials.

The short answer is that while torrents show great possibility for content distribution (as an alternative to CDNs for example), they inherently rely on some centralized resources and don't make sense for a lot of use cases. Most websites are a bunch of small files, torrenting is really much more useful for offloading large bandwidth loads. On small files, the overhead for torrents is a waste. That's why your favorite linux ISO has a torrent but your favourite website doesn't.

One major issue is difficulty in accurately tracking the contribution of each member of the swarm. I download a file and I seed it to the next person, sounds great right? But what if the next person doesn't come along for a long time? Do I keep that slot open for them just in case? How long? How I prove I actually "paid my dues" whether that was waiting for peers or actually delivering to them? How do we track users across different swarms? Do we want a single user ID to be tracked across all content they've ever downloaded? When you get into the weeds with these kinds of questions you can see how quickly torrenting is not a great technology for a number of use cases.

Being somewhat centralized, by the way, is how BitTorrent solved the spam issue which plagued P2P networks prior to it. Instead of searching the entire network and everything it contains (and everything every spammer added it to it), you instead rely on a trusted messenger like a torrent index to find your content. The torrent file or magnet link points to a link in a DHT and there you go, no need to worry about trusting peers since you are downloading a file by hash not by name. And you know the hash is right because some trusted messenger gave it to you. Without some form of centralization (as in previous P2P networks), your view of the network was whatever your closest peers wanted it to be, which you essentially got assigned at random and had no reason to trust or not trust. You couldn't verify they were accurately letting you participate in the wider network. Even a 100% trustworthy peer was only as good as the other peers they were connected to. For every one peer passing you bad data, you needed at least two peers to prove them wrong.

Blockchain gets us close to solving some of these problems as we now have technology for establishing distributed ledgers which could track things like network behavior over time, upload/download ratio, etc. This solves the "who do I trust to say this other peer is a good one?" problem: you trust the ledger. But an underlying problem to applying Blockchain to solve this problem is that ultimately people are just going to be self-reporting their bandwidth. Get another peer to validate it, you say? Of course! But how do we know that peer is not the same person (how do we avoid sybil attacks)? Until we have a solid way to do "proof of bandwidth" or "proof of network availability", that problem will remain. There are many people working on this problem (they've already solved proof of storage so perhaps this could be solved in a similar way) but as of right now I know of no good working implementation that protects against sybil attacks. Then again, if you can use blockchain or some other technology to establish some kind of decentralized datastore for humanity, you don't need torrents at all as you would instead be using that other base layer protocol for storage and retrieval.

IPFS was intended as a decentralized replacement for much of the way the the current internet works. It was supposed to be this "other protocol", but the system is byzantinely complex and seems to have suffered from a lack of usability, good leadership, and promotion. When you have an awesome technology and nobody uses it, there are always good reasons for lack of adoption. I don't know enough about those reasons to really cover them here, but suffice to say they actually do exist. Then again, IPFS has been around for a while now (15 years?) and people use it for stuff so clearly it has some utility.

That said, if you want to code on this problem and contribute to helping solve data storage/transmission problems, there are certainly many OSS projects which could use your help.

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have anti-SLAPP laws which render a baseless defamation lawsuit against you into a blessing which you can turn around, counter sue for, and end up with a nice payday.

Syncthing

OnionShare

Sad news about a pioneer of internet freedom. He has earned his fair share of criticism and detractors, but he has also given a lot to the Linux and free software ecosystem. I personally run !boinc@sopuli.xyz on all my rigs to support open-source cancer research, I hope one day we can finally cross cancer off the list of humankind's foes.

Worth noting that BOINC (the distributed computing platform behind SETI@Home) is alive and well with over a dozen projects. You can help scientists cure diseases, map the galaxy, and more. The Large Hadron Collider even has a BOINC project you can crunch for. See the Lemmy for BOINC https://sopuli.xyz/c/boinc

These things are great for !boinc@sopuli.xyz often time leagues more efficient per watt in terms of computation than regular PCs. I have a couple of 'em working on cancer research and computing to develop an open-source patent-free covid antiviral. You don't need a PhD to make a difference, all you need is a processor :)

Honestly this applies to a lot of people in civic service. Not rich politicians, but the people trying to run your local or state government. Often the races are uncontested, because they literally can't find even one other person who wants the job. Some of them are incompetent or pursue these jobs for power-seeking reasons, but many of them have their hearts in the right place and want to give back to their community, often while fighting ridiculous red tape at one end while contending with threats and harassment from citizens at the other. And the pay is often terrible. My local city council positions would qualify you for food stamps/EBT.

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

Any joe shmoe can spin up an instance, post your personal details (or personal details they made up), and bada bing bada boom, your identity is compromised forever.

Replace "instance" with "website" and that's how the internet works. There are avenues in the legal system to combat this, but generally people can post speech (illegal or not) very easily with the internet, having rapid, free, open communication is a net positive for society even if occasionally there are downsides.

Lemmy can't solve doxxing or other forms of abuse any better than a centralized service can, which they don't do particularly well as it is. What Lemmy does do it put control over what content is promoted into the hands of users and instance admins, as opposed to a few execs at Meta. If an instance has poor moderation, it will be 'de-federated' by other lemmy instances, which means content from their instance won't travel across the fediverse. So in general, I think you can expect good moderation. Unlike centralized services, instance admins are not incentivized to shove polarizing content and misinformation into your feed. That pipeline of increasingly polarizing content is the root cause of many situations which involve doxxing in the first place.

Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

• Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
• On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
• On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can't stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated "public squares" according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn't blocked you).
• On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it's not, so this doesn't happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it's clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
• Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081

They handed over their own BTC over to the government. If you have the private keys, you control the coin. If you don't, no amount of money or guns can make that coin move thanks to math and physics. However, a $5 wrench rammed repeatedly into your head may make you divulge those private keys. Strength of encryption is rarely the weakest link in any modern cryptographic system. But that wrench used on anybody who doesn't know the keys? Useless. It's pretty powerful stuff in that regard.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but it is clear that he supports and is supported[1] by Project 2025’s many authors[2] including his own press secretary and many members of his cabinet. He has, for example, called Project 2025 “our agenda”[4] and is personally mentioned hundreds of times in the document. By the Heritage Foundation’s own count, Trump already implemented a majority of their recommendations during his last term [3] and 81% of Project 2025’s authors held official appointments in his administration[5].

1. https://democrats.org/news/project-2025-is-undeniably-a-trump-driven-operation/

2 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-project-2025-truth-social-rcna160774

3. https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations

4. https://www.heritage.org/impact/heritage-analysis-trump-administrations-first-year-draws-high-profile-attention

5. https://popular.info/p/what-trump-doesnt-want-you-to-know

If you are going to "be your own bank" you need some very basic computer security skills like:

• Research the reputation of the wallet you are going to use.
• Don't download wallets which aren't open source
• Download wallets from their official dev site, not some third party repo.
• Don't use Facebook search to find a wallet.
• If you are storing significant funds, use a multi-sig wallet.
• If you are not 100% confident in the security of a given wallet or system, send a smaller test transaction first before sending larger amounts

If you can't be trusted to do that, you need to pick a trusted custodian to manage access to your funds (you know, like banks), preferably somebody who can get an insurance company to under-write your no-opsec-having-ass. Unfortunately, in the crypto world, these trusted custodians few and far between and have a terrible track record with exchange collapses etc. It's getting better, but it's still a mess. Hopefully as time goes on and the industry gets better regulated and more mature, this will be an easier thing to do.

In addition to being overweight, there is the problem of your posture getting stuck in a position if you are always in that position. You know how in other countries people take public transit and walk or bike places? This allows the posture to reset after sitting at an office. Americans never get that chance because they go from sitting at the office to sitting in their car to sitting on their couch. So their neck and shoulders never really gets much of an opportunity to not be pushing kind of forward. Add to this that they are often looking down at their phones and you can imagine how the combination of these two postures can result in a thicker appearing neck.

Edit to also add to this: Americans are also on the higher end of the average height globally. This means if you take a picture of one, there is a better chance the American will be looking somewhat downwards at the camera, which also increases the size of the neck. If you interact with Americans in real life and you are shorter than their average height, this perception trick will also happen. It's one of the many insidious ways we maintain our dominance over other countries. 🦅🦅🦅🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲

Put money and effort towards the cause https://defeatproject2025.org/

I don’t care so much if my personal info is posted to a website like kiwifarms or someone’s private blog, because those websites are harder to find in search results

So is most of Lemmy

Big companies have a desire to protect themselves from prosecution for hosting illegal activity.

So do Lemmy instance hosters, the hosting companies they use, and the other instances which federate with them.

They specifically hire people to moderate content and reduce their liability.

Once can expect lemmy instances to do this once they reach a certain size. If you don't moderate sufficiently, you get de-federated, and your users won't want to use your instance, so lemmy instances which want to grow will keep a handle on good moderation,

But she can run a Lemmy instance that will federate with the entire rest of the fediverse and expose her content to potentially thousands of people.

If she posts it to a lemmy community the mod that community or instance will remove it. If she hosts her own instance for the purposes of doxxing people nobody will even see the post (since it's not getting upvoted across fedi) and other instances will de-federate.

Ultimately, if you are at high risk of doxxing, the best measures to protect yourself are mostly based not around which platforms you trust or not, but around engaging with those platforms in a way which protects your privacy. Might want to check out the surveillance self-defense guide. https://ssd.eff.org/

Copyright is a classic case of "The few benefit at the expense of the many". Ideas, medicine, innovation, culture, these should all be shared as widely as possible as quickly as possible to all of humanity. Especially when we can copy those things for no production cost unlike the times of the printing press. But somebody realized they could paywall it and get rich instead.

Copyright is an antiquated idea whose time has come to arrive on the chopping block. Any politician who aims to curtail or abolish copyright gets my vote.

Very excited to see this, and to be able to follow BlueSky and Mastodon users from my nostr app