Satouru

Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.

The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.

But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.

We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.

Aww, that’s a bit sad, but it’s completely understandable and probably the right decision as things stand. :(

Admins, to clarify, which “federation logic/tools” would you need to re-federate with those public/general-purpose instances? Maybe something like:

• Beehaw users may read and write content on restricted instances,
• Users from restricted instances cannot read or write content on Beehaw,
• Unless the user from another instance is manually verified on Beehaw… maybe? But that would be much more complex in terms of development.

Would that be an acceptable solution? If so, I can try to get a look at Lemmy’s code and see if I can implement something like that - although no promises, as I’m currently completely unfamiliar with what lies under the hood of both Lemmy and the Fediverse.

(Not sure who to ping… @alyaza, maybe?)

Well, just a heads up, I might have wrote total bullshit (sorry about that!).

I tried to find a reference to the “one calendar month” rule in the EU’s legalese, but I didn’t find anything.

What I found is that depending on your country, the data regulator might require services to give you your data in 30 days or less, but this might not be the case everywhere in the EU. The relevant legal article for this can be found here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/

I am not a lawyer anyway, so your best bet would be to message an organization that fights for personal data protection to ask them about your rights in your home country.

Sorry about the confusion once again, as I might have been wrong!

No, no. They say it can take up to 30 days, yes.

But that’s not the correct wording. It legally needs to be done under 30 days (well, one calendar month), if you’re a EU citizen.

If they do not, I highly encourage you to contact your country’s data regulator and complain about it.

That’s a very sensible approach IMHO and resonates in unison with my own opinions on the matter, so I couldn’t be happier about this post!

I have to say that I was a bit worried after the creation of /c/socialism, not because of the ideology itself (which, to be fair, is probably one of the political groups I feel the closest to, but that’s not the issue), but because I was worried that it was an “official endorsement” and political affiliation of Beehaw, and would create drama, discourse or echo chambers.

This post proves that it was not the case or even the intention, and that’s really reassuring. It might still cause issues as people from other political sides (rightly) ask for other communities to be created, which is not a problem in itself, but might still create conflict and discontent in either side.

The explanation in this post makes me quite confident that you’ll be able to handle these challenges in a smart and sensible way, though. Thank you for that, admins! I’m glad that I picked the instance I did.

Why would we need to fork the software? It’s AGPL-licensed. Code changes and related discussions are public. And for now there’s no signs of the maintainers pushing their political opinions in the software itself, they just do that on their own instances (and it’s not like they’re hiding that, I mean their choice of TLD is a political statement in itself, do people think “ml” stands for “markup language” or something?).

Until they start messing with the code (which is something that is not going to go unnoticed), there’s absolutely no reason to fragment development efforts, that would just be counterproductive.

Doesn’t prevent me from doing it.

I send a mail to you and your shitty mail provider blocks it as spam, even though I setup my SPF and DKIM entries correctly? Well that’s your problem, complain to your provider then lmao.

Of course that cannot be applicable to every use case. Sometimes you need a mail to go through in which case I still use GMail or iCloud Mail, unfortunately.

But it became like that because we let it become like that. We should use email as it was intended to be used, and if it doesn’t work, well fuck it. It’s the recipient’s fault for choosing a shitty or “non-compliant” provider.

Building a resilient, safe, longterm-viable communities is the metric to measure fedi by.

100% agree, especially on the resiliency part.

A community with 100 users but will never die is much better than one with a million users but might kick the bucket anytime.

The way the Fediverse works, and assuming that not everyone goes to the same instance, then it will be pretty much guaranteed to exist as long as there are users. And this is huge in terms of community building.

GPU passthrough works amazingly well… when you have the required hardware and spend a lot of time to make it work.

It’s an elegant solution but it’s also difficult to setup and maintain. To be fair, I don’t think it’s worth it when you can just have a dual boot going. And you’re going to be running Microsoft’s software either way, soooo…

If you have a very particular workflow that makes it very painful to reboot, then yeah it’s worth it, and yeah it works perfectly well. Otherwise, dual booting when you need to is more efficient and less time consuming, I think.

I feel like most games get it wrong and just make you stay in one place waiting for the enemy dude to slowly make his route as you map it in your head. It’s just boring, I don’t know.

A nice way to change that would be to give a button that gives you a “top view” map of the enemies’s movement maybe, to make it a little bit puzzle-y. Or, if you want to make it more “action-y”, give the player a way to hide or disengage by scrambling to find something in the environment that allows them to do that, when they get detected.

Stealth is just implemented in a terrible way in most modern games I feel like. Makes it not fun.

That’s okay. Take your time, Bethesda, and give us an amazing TES6 whenever it’s ready.

Until then, to be fair, the modding community is still doing amazing things to TES5, so I’m okay to wait.

I don’t think that there’s any conspiracy or ill intent there.

It’s just that the tech bubble is exploding and investors are running out of money - or rather are running out of willing to spend money for these social media platforms.

So they go public or get bought by some ultra rich people.

There’s also the issue that as communities grow to insanely bit proportions, the operating costs also grow exponentially. Server costs of course, but then you also need to start investing in teams of lawyers, support, community managers, dedicated DevOps and developers… all of that while the community loses its sense of being part of a “little village” and get less inclined to financially help foot the bill.

These social media services have pretty much committed suicide - or egocide rather because I don’t believe that they will go anywhere. They’ll stay afloat without issues, but they’ve lost their souls a long time ago. They’re working for money now, and not for their community or users anymore.

And they cannot go back either, because the operating costs don’t just go down by themselves, so they need to act greedy in order to survive. There’s nothing the Reddit or Twitter leadership could do to stop that now. It’s a one-way byproduct of uncontrolled growth.

The right “moral choice” for these leaders would probably be to just let their platform slowly die while alternatives emerge - but that’s a very painful thing to do when you invested 20+ years of your life into it. Dorsey managed to do it for example, which is impressive and quite commendable.

I’ll add that it’s unlikely that the Fediverse will suffer from the same fate, because… there’s no management. There’s an “agreed upon” structure but everyone can do their own thing and that’s what’s beautiful about it. It cannot “lose its soul” because as a contract/protocol, the “soul” of the Fediverse is the only thing that makes it exist. It might splinter, it might evolve into different “universes”, but it will never die.

It’s pretty much a re-creation of how the 2000’s internet worked. Which had its problems, yeah, but which was also a very resilient and independent place.

But here’s the thing: are you going to miss Reddit or the communities that they allowed you to partake in?

Because there’s no reason to miss the former - and you’ll miss the latter either way because a lot of people are going to just stop using Reddit after the changes come into effect anyway, so the community will certainly change.

I think that this move made most of us lose something. Which is certainly sad, but we’ll lose it either way, so might as well get rid of the platform they hurt us, right?

Or a certain four-letter word starting with F followed by a famous Reddit administrator’s handle…

But yeah. My Reddit account is pretty much worthless now, so might as well express my discontent, right?

I agree!

I want Reddit to fail because they overestimate their value and think that their software is why Reddit is popular (even though, let’s face it, the software was absolute garbage during the time where Reddit became popular, and is still is, albeit for different reasons).

I want the Fediverse (and not specifically Lemmy or Beehaw, although I’m in love with both at the moment) to succeed because I think that the idea behind it gives the communities that it hosts total control about what they want to do, regardless on the people that hosts them.

So it’s not really that different, as it all boils down to the same point: the importance of communities is paramount, and the tools that are given for that are important but also mere accessories. Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but I think that it gets the general idea.

Can I subscribe to kbin from lemmy as well? It’s kind of crazy to think about. 😂

That’s the point of the Fediverse. Think of it like a contract. There’s rules on how data should be formatted, on what you can or cannot do, but what you actually do is up to you.

You can choose to participate through a Lemmy instance, you can use Kbin, some obscure tool connected to the Fediverse or you can even build your own thing that connects to it!

And nobody really “owns” it. It’s all about agreed conventions and community contracts. Anyone can adhere to the contract and build their own thing. The way it works is amazingly beautiful, to be fair.

I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen too.

They’ll kick dissident mods out, install their own, and just reopen the subs like nothing happened. There’s precedent of that happening I believe (although for much more reasonable reasons, like mods going rogue for stupid or anti-free speech stuff).

And it’s going to be an absolute shitshow. I feel sad, but I also kind of love it. You reap what you sow, I guess.

So, Lemmy (and by extension Beehaw) can be federated. (Although the instance admins can make a non-federated instance, but it’s not really relevant in this case.)

This means that there’s actually multiple Lemmy “worlds” living next to each other, and they can interact between each other. You can post in your world, and people from other worlds can come, read what you wrote and leave a comment.

Think of it like email, as it’s a great example to explain federated and decentralized software:

• You have a GMail account,
• You receive mails from other people on GMail: no problem there, it’s something internal to the service, you can read and reply to the mail,
• You receive a mail from someone using a Microsoft Mail account (live.com, or whatever)… no problems there either, you will receive the mail, be able to read it and reply to it,
• But, if you want to reply to it… you’re not going to sign in to live.com, right? You’re going to use your mail.google.com account to do so.

Lemmy works the same. You received a comment from someone on lemmy.ca, which is pretty cool, right? If you want to reply, you’ll have to do it through your beehaw.org account - because that’s where your “identity” lives. Beehaw certifies your identity, and your device can use this certification to reply to that person on Lemmy Canada - but this means that you still need to go through Beehaw to reply to the Lemmy Canada person.

And if you follow the link to your thread on beehaw.org, you’ll also be able to see that person’s comment… and be able to reply to it! To summarize it: you don’t need to have an account on other instances to interact with people on other instances. Just like you don’t need to have an account on Hotmail to interact with people there if you have a Gmail. You just login to your Gmail and do it from there. That’s federation/decentralization.

Hope that helped - the web has worked with centralized services for almost two decades now, which can make things confusing. But decentralization is really not that bad once you get the gist of it. And it’s a much more elegant technical solution as well.

Holy shit that’s almost a 90deg angle lmao!

Maybe admins should set up one of these donations pages with current donations for the month/monthly operational costs, so we can help when the maintenance budget gets a bit tight? I can help build that, if need be.

Not much that wouldn’t also kill them, I think.

Reddit has become too massive for its own good, and it lost its sense of community from the early years. There was a few nice subs, but they usually ended up being popular for exactly this reason, and they ended up being connected to the “big centralized Reddit bubble” (if that makes sense), which killed the community in the process.

My best memories of fun or interesting conversations on Reddit were actually not made on particular subreddits, but more on recurrent stickied threads on some subreddits that only a few regulars opened and read. Those had a real sense of community.

So yeah, Reddit lost me as a user these past few days, but not 100% because of the actual changes that they made - I think I was already dissatisfied with it and that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s more like a combination of the massive user base and the way the website works that kind of suffocated communities. They cannot really change that, as they would probably not survive changes that are too big or a drastic reduction in the user base.

The Fediverse could suffer from the same issues if it becomes wildly successful of course, but the fact that it is federated adds another layer of separation between community circles, and I think that’s enough for mitigating that problem a little bit.