shrugal

A domain takedown was never able to shut a server down, not even with centralized servers. Most big services are accessible via multiple domains of different countries, and this would just disable one of them. But for the Fediverse that means that they also "disabled" an entire instance with all its users.

This actually shows us that relying on domains can be a problem for the Fediverse! Imo we need to upgrade the federation protocol to be able to handle these things, like propagating a domain change or migrating accounts to other instances.

Just leaving this here: Aurora Store

The Opera of today is not the same as the one from back in the days! The original company sold all their code and rights to a chinese consortium in 2016. Since then it's basically a variant of chromium, with some propriatary features and tracking added. I don't know the new owners, so I don't trust them with my browsing data!

Not really. Most centralized services are accessible via multiple domains, e.g. for different countries. This would just disable one of them, but users could still use another to log into their accounts. For the Fediverse it "disables" an entire instance, cuts it off from federation and locks out users.

Lets not put a positive spin on a situation that exposes a weakness of the current system. The federation protocol needs to be able to handle these things gracefully, like propagating domain changes and migrating accounts between instances!

This is suspicion on the level of "you can't be sure reality didn't just pop into existence 10 seconds ago". You can never be 100% sure of what others are doing on their hardware, or of anything really, especially if other people are involved. Your chat partners could leak all your chats and metadata for all you know!

What we do know is that Signal is operated by a non-profit foundation, their client and protocol are open source and considered the gold standard for privacy by pretty much every expert on the subject, they had multiple independent audits and a very good track record, they were subpoenaed and couldn't comply because they didn't have the requested data. That's about as good as you can get.

The author of this blog post just realized that things posted publicly on the internet are indeed public, and that Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V exist.

This is not some special property of the Fediverse, it's how the internet has always worked. If you post something publicly (say on your personal blog) then others can see it, make copies and redistribute them, even if you later decide to delete the original content. Companies like Google build massive indexes of everything posted by anyone ever, and there is nothing you can do about it if you want your content to be publicly accessible. If you share something with just a group of people, and someone decides to make it public, then it's public. Nothing new about that.

The GDPR works in exactly the same way in the Fediverse as with the existing services right now. If you want something deleted you have to send a notice to every service that has your content. In reality you'll just send it to the X biggest services, because they represent 99% of the users that could potentially see that content, and that's usually enough. You can do the same with the X most popular Fediverse instances. Even better, we might be able to create a standardized and automated process for it, because they all run the same set of Fediverse apps using ActivityPub after all.

Afaik DMs work just like unencrypted (so regular!) emails. If you send your company secrets to john@we-leak-your-mails.com then you're probably screwed, same thing with @john@we-leak-your-dms.lemmy.

Your right to choose is the same as everybody else's right to choose. You can decide to post something, and others can decide they don't want to see it. Decentralized just means there is no one entity to make those decisions for you.

This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.

What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.

Fedora! To me it sits right at the sweet spot of stability and bleeding edge (they call it "leading edge"), and I'm very happy with how they run things (including the most recent controversy!).

An app to manage important config and unit files (fstab, hosts, sysctl, systemd units, ...), and present them as settings menu or editor with auto completion and tooltips. Kinda like how VSCode handles settings, where you can use the GUI or a context-aware text editor.

Also depends how the other clock is broken, if we're this picky about it.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago, because it's just better for personal privacy and the freedom of the web as a whole. Brave would be my second choice, but FF lets you easily self-host a sync server for all your browsing data.

I won't buy Apple hardware as long as they keep being absolute dicks in the tech and app world. It's a shame really, because they build awesome devices, but I would feel bad everytime I use them.

Also they are much more restricted in many aspects (e.g. sideloading!), so it would be a downgrade for me.

That's the capitalistic definition of freedom. Everything is allowed as long as you have the money.

Signal if possible, WhatsApp if not. I'm also trying out Session, but it's still very much work-in-progress.

Starting your own instance doesn't solve the problem of big communities being reliant on the one specific instance they are hosted on to not go down or rogue.

While this is probably still true, I doubt it's a big factor when talking about mass adoption.

RHEL is not Fedora. It's still lead by a community council, even if you don't agree with some of their decisions.

In case of your first link it wasn't even about making a decision. The project has always had the clear stance to not include patented works, so there were no two ways about it.

Also, appart from the obvious restrictions, businesses can structure their prices however they like.

Afaik it is all connected to the domain name, so they could definitely start to impersonate any .ml instance. Other instances could detect that the signing key for federation messages changed, but that's about it. Their admins would probably have to block/defederate them manually.

Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don't see that as a user. Also it's a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.

Yes it's also federated, so you can access their instances and communities pretty much like the Lemmy ones.

If you decide to go down the Synology route, make sure it supports docker. Their cheaper models don't support it, and it's the gateway to self-hosting all the services that are not available directly from the package manager.

The database, storage and network are usually the bottlenecks in these kinds of websites, not the programming language. It might add a few ms of latency, but the big lags come from congestion or bad db queries.

What's wrong with Fedora?

Cryptocurrencies and social platforms are completely different beasts. In crypto I want no moderation/censorship, I want anonymity, and there is a payout system so nodes can compete for something. This is all different when building a social network, so you can't just use the same architecture. Building social structures and trust is desirable in a public forum, not something you want to get rid of.

Of course! Moderation is censorship. There is certain content I don't want to see, and I don't want to have to filter it myself so I join a community of seemingly likeminded people who censor content based on rules I generally agree with. They ban users who break the rules, keep spambots out, block malicious instances and so on, and if they are doing their job right then it builds trust and attracts more people.

what about it makes you think that to be the case?

Because you want to strip all that out and abstract it away. Who do you think would do the moderating and spam blocking? Who aggregates posts from all over the world and presents a sorted list to a user on their smartphone? It would be the wild west with users having to do everything themselves. I know it's tempting to think about building a Fediverse without instances, but afaik you need these social structures for the system to work.

Crypto for example only works because you can define the rules mathematically beforehand, and then hand out money for computers to check them. That's just not possible with a public forum, at least not yet imo.

Same. Having all their custom software available and just one click away is amazing, and with Docker you can install everything else just like a regular server. It's the best of both worlds imo.

Depends on the level of technology we are using. If we're zapping around from one habitable planet or interesting space phenomenon to another star trek style then absolutely yes! But a hard no with our current level of technology. I like to spend my time in an environment that's actually somewhat friendly to life.

Here is a good resource for these kinds of questions: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/

Looks good so far, but two major features I want from a note taking app are still missing: Handwriting and table calculations. If they can add good support for those then I'll definitely switch!

Sure 😁

I think the one thing we could adopt from crypto is having public keys as user IDs, instead of tying it to an instance. But that would require users to handle their own keys, and people are just reeeaaally bad at that!

What comment?

I've literally never seen anyone say this except FediPacters as a strawman.

I've seen that quite a few times already, mostly in the form of "it's stupid to preemptively defederate, we can always defederate later".

Idk if you really can copyright a letter of the alphabet.

There is so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin.

I don't intent to be rude, but this is just not how you build a decentralized/distributed system. The network would grind to a halt if every user app had to search recursively through a portion of the network, and aggregate & rank posts by itself. Aggregate values (communities, votes and so on) would never be right, because you'd never be able to acually gather all events for a particular entity in time. This might work in a local network of 10 nodes, but not on a global scale.

On top, who would pay for those nodes you are querying? There is no relationship between the users and the nodes, so why would anyone just run a node for others or be willing to pay anyone else in this scenario? Servers cost money and stuff. And your spam filtering and moderation solution would be the exact same as with instances, so nothing is gained here.

Maybe have a look at the Session messenger and their Oxen network. They go to great length to make sure the work is equally distributed among nodes and they are compensated fairly. This doesn't just happen magically by itself, and there are many bad actors who will try to exploit any weakness they can find.

So I just think it's impossible to create something like lemmy in an anonymous way, because content moderation is a human decision. There is no one correct mathematical solution, and I also can't send some kind of filter query to a server to do it for me. All I can do is read the general rules that another human being has wrote up, subscribe to their moderation "service", see how they are doing, and decide to stay or switch to another.

Similarly, if I don't want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I'll have to fine someone to do it for me, and somehow pay that someone for their service. This part is actually kind of solvable (again look at Session), but it is not straight forward at all! It would involve crypto currencies, mining/staking, and some kind of client-side monetization. For this part I think trusted instances are just a much better solution, because we are building a social structure here anyway.

I think federating with an instance that would actually want federation to die (have a monopoly) is a very bad idea. Meta would use it's leverage to actively undermine and harm the Fediverse, because it's not in their interest to distribute the userbase to multiple servers they don't own. They only need it to bootstrap their own service.

Ever heard the phrase "democracy without democrats"? That would be Meta in the Fediverse.

I imagine it like friend requests between communities: x@instance.a, all-about-x@instance.b and x-is-great@instance.c could send each other friend requests and merge into one federated meta-community about x. Then if one instance goes down the other two are still there to keep the meta-community alive, and if one goes rogue the others can just unfriend and keep going without it.

The nice thing about manual federation is that the communities don't have to have exactly the same name, and the mods can keep malicious or troll communities out. And ofc you could still have client-side control if you want to, e.g. add or remove a community just for you locally, or create your own local meta-community.

The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.

That's one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you're not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!

That's why picking the right instances is important, to make sure it's not some random person in their basement. Read the about pages of the instances, see what they publish about their operations. The people behind the .world instances regularly blog about what they are doing, spending and earning for example. Some are even run by non-profits. I personally feel much better with those kinds of people running a service I rely on, instead of a company that talks to me only through their marketing department and first and foremost wants to maximize profits.

But that's also exactly my point. You should be able to transfer your account to another instance, so you're not stuck if the one you picked turns out to be bad or has to be shut down.