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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there’s no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

    The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren’t preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

    The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.


  • That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.

    A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.




  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    24 days ago

    I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.

    Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.

    To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.


  • Happy Debian daily driver here. I would never ever recommend raw Debian to a garden variety would-be Linux convert.

    If you think something like Debian is something a Linux illiterate can just pick up and start using proficiently, you’re severely out of touch with how most computer users actually think about their machines. If you even so much as know the name of your file explorer program, you’re in a completely different league.

    Debian prides itself on being a lean, no bloat, and stable environment made only of truly free software (with the ability to opt-in to nonfree software). To people like us, that’s a clean, blank canvas on a rock-solid, reliable foundation that won’t enshittify. But to most people, it’s an austere, outdated, and unfashionable wasteland full of flaky, ugly tooling.

    Debian can be polished to any standard one likes, but you’re expected to do it yourself. Most people just aren’t in the game to play it like that. Debian saddles questions of choice almost no one is asking, or frankly, even knew was a question that was ask*-able*. Mandatory customizeability is a flaw, not a feature.

    I am absolutely team “just steer them to Mint”. All the goodness of Debian snuck into their OS like medicine in a kid’s dessert, wrapped up in something they might actually find palatable. Debian itself can be saved for when, or shall I say if, the user eventually goes poking under the hood to discover how the machine actually ticks.


  • Everything works the same, times of website incompatibility are long gone.

    Not completely true. It’s mostly true. I’ve daily driven Firefox for years, and the number of websites I’ve crossed that wouldn’t function in it correctly but would work just fine in Chrome was very slim… but not zero. Definitely not comparable to the complete shitshow of the 90’s and 00’s. That’s true. But it’s not a completely solved problem.

    And with Mozilla’s leadership practically looking for footguns to play with combined with the threat of Google’s sugar daddy checks drying up soon due to the antitrust suit (how utterly ironic that busting up the monopoly would actually harm the only competition…), that gap can get much worse in very little time if resources to keep full time devs paid disappear.


  • I recently had a rather baffling experience trying to preemptively avoid this by downloading the stupid app right away, only to discover I needed the website version anyway.

    I was attempting to add my Known Traveler Number to an already booked trip with Southwest Airlines, booked by someone else. I was able to link the trip to my account right away in the app, no issue. And I could see the KTN field for my ticket sitting there, empty, greyed-out, and not interactible. I opened up the moble version of their website, completely unsurprised to find it was identical to the app, except for the detail that the KTN field there was functional. Put in the information, changes reflected in the app instantly, and I was in the TAS-pre line that afternoon.

    Why did the two versions obviously built from the same codebase have two different sets of capabilities? Why was the website the more capable of the two this time? I have no clue. All I know is I never want to be a developer at a corporation where I’d have to be responsible for this flavor of trash.


  • The more egalitarian principle would be to not assume. I won’t deny that. People from more minority locales have every right to be upset at being marginalized.

    But at the same time, whenever I read passive aggressive comments on socials from residents of crown countries or from EAASL people around the world bitching about US defaultism as if people are doing it just to be ignorant dicks, I can only think to myself, “Uhh, hello? What do you think the demographics of this space were? What did you expect?”

    Americans are hardly the majority of the world’s English speakers, but for all the reasons you listed, they tend to remain a massive plurality, if not an outright overwhelming majority, of any mainstream online English language platform. No, that’s not a license to perpetuate US defaultism. But like… read the room, people. Your good fight is far more uphill than you seem to think it is.



  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoComic Strips@lemmy.worldAds
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    2 months ago

    If adblockers would allow ads that adhere to the acceptable ads criteria, the world would be a better place. Less paywals, less ads and maybe some companies would pay their employees a little bit more.

    I disagree. The system may have began in earnest goodwill, but financial incentive inevitably erodes goodwill. ABP becomes incentivized to adapt its definition of “acceptable” based on potential revenues they stand to gain from increasingly persuasive advertisers. Your vision of a better world under this system is at best temporary.

    The alternative model, simply paying for goods and services directly, is a far more robust solution.


  • Easily my vote for the most unweildy named concept in software development.

    It always reads like a typo of memorization. Not exactly an accident, of course. Memorize is memory + -ize, while memoize is memo + -ize, and memo is short for memorandum, which comes from memory. Both terms refer to some kind of storage and retreival of information. The similarities are deliberate.

    My gripe with it is that memo in my head exclusively refers to a one-paragraph email sent to my company to notify me about something. Not remembering something. Definitely not the very specific case of linking input parameters to results of pure functions.

    So we have this made-up word that looks suspiciously like an existing word that is related and means something related but is not the same thing, and the words it is actually adapted from don’t mean the thing it’s supposed to mean. Thanks, I hate it.

    Really ought to call memoization what it what it really is. Lazy-loaded lookup tables.





  • pixelscript@lemm.eetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldEmpires fall
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    2 months ago

    I still won’t forgive Shopko for consuming Pamida and ultimately taking the remnants of Pamida down with it.

    I’m surprised to see on Wikipedia that Shopko actually owned Pamida basically the entire time I was growing up, they just ran it independently. They even broke up breifly before re-merging later. The second merger sent it all to shit, though. “Shopko Hometown” my ass.


  • As a fanart hoarder, the number of great artists I know of who seem to exclusively post their work on Twitter, a completely unsearchable platform that lossy compresses anything you upload to it and makes it a pain in the dick to get highest quality downloads, as opposed to a browsable upload platform like deviantArt, Pixiv, or Tumblr, infuriates me.

    I think I know why a lot of them do it, too. To them, their work is intentionally ephemeral. They want to draw a thing, release it to the world, be admired for a day, and let it fade away into the aether. They don’t want a browseable archive of their past work. Art they draw is disposable. Twitter is the best platform for this, as everything on Twitter is naturally consumed this way. That, and its audience is way larger than any of the other platforms I mentioned, so they get more eyes on their work.

    Yeah, an archive exists on Twitter, but unless you want to scroll scroll scroll through every single tweet they’ve ever made in reverse chronological order, you’re never going to find what you’re looking for without some kind of external indexing tool. All of this before Elon bought it and further enshittified it within an inch of its life. You can’t even browse posts without being logged in anymore.