Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I have both. I find that YouTube Music has a much better algorithm, but the app really does sucks, although at least it doesn’t crash for me. Spotify’s app is a lot more polished (although lately it too has started to enshittify), but the music discovery is a bit lacking. Audio quality is better on Spotify, YTM just sounds compressed to be as loud as possible.


  • Because it’s too flexible, and assumes everyone has source code to glue it all together. There’s endless choices you can make to have a functional system.

    • Before you even compile the kernel, you have to provide a C compiler. That can be GCC or LLVM/clang.
    • Before you even build the kernel, you have to pick a CPU architecture and subsystems to enable.
    • Before you can even boot the kernel in any useful manner, you need to select a partition table format, one or more filesystems to put on the drive, all with varying amounts of features, but are at least mostly all POSIX compliant. Or a ramdisk.
    • Even just starting at the very core of userspace, the C standard library, you have glibc, musl, uClibc. That can only be dealt with at compile time.
    • Then on top of that, for the core utilities, you have the GNU coreutils, uutils, busybox, toybox, the BSD coreutils.
    • Great, we can start booting now. Wait, now there’s the choice of init system: systemd, sysvinit, OpenRC, runit, upstart, dinit, and a lot more. Good, we’re booted.
    • Now we need a login prompt, which can be agetty, greetd, mingetty, GDM, SDDM, LightDM. You’ve entered your password: that may or may not trigger a PAM session, which can verify your password from just about anywhere (locally, Kerberos, LDAP), start a D-Bus session, register a session with logind, that can trigger decryption and mounting of a drive, which itself could be local or remote or removable.
    • We’re logged in! Now we need a shell. There’s bash, dash, zsh, ash with their own small differences, and that’s just the POSIX compatible ones. There’s also fish, nu, ksh, csh and more.
    • We have a prompt! Now we should probably install some software. Is it gonna be apt, yum/dnf, zipper, pacman, apk, xbps, emerge, port? What’s the package names? Depends on the distro!
    • We have a way to install software, now we need network to get it. How’s the network configured? ifupdown, systemd-networkd, NetworkManager, Connman, dhclient, dhcpcd, netplan, netctl. If you have WiFi, there’s iwd and wpa_supplicant.
    • Lets get a graphical session. Xorg or Wayland based? ALSA, PulseAudio or PipeWire? Window manager or desktop environment?
    • You want to mount a drive. systemd can do that, udev can do that, fstab can do that.

    That’s just the basics to make it to a desktop. Now there’s some stuff to help that a lot, like Flatpak which aims to provide a known base system for apps to target. The portals help get access to resources with varying backends. PipeWire supports pretty much every audio protocol in existence so that’s alright. Flatpak is a pretty good standard/ABI to target. For server software we have similar things in the form of Docker and Podman. But all of these solutions are basically “lets just ship the distro with the software”.

    The only really standard interface is the Linux kernel’s public interface. If you’re writing a driver, you better be ready to maintain it because stuff moves around a lot internally, the kernel doesn’t care not to break out of tree modules. Go makes use of the stable kernel API and skips the libc entirely, so Go binaries are usually fairly portable as long as the kernel is somewhat sane.

    The only real standard you can target is POSIX, which is fine if you’re writing CLI or server software, but if you want to write GUIs, you just have to make choices. Most Linux stuff runs fine on FreeBSD too, they have Wayland, PipeWire and Mesa there too, so technically at this point you’re not even targetting Linux per-se, more like generally POSIX-y systems with software that’s just very commonly used and target that.

    On Windows and Mac, you have what Microsoft/Apple provides and if you want anything else you bring it yourself. However, technically you can install PulseAudio on those, install an X server (Xming, Xquartz), run most DEs in there, run browsers and quite a bit of Linux-y stuff, natively on Windows and Mac in their respective binary formats.

    The thing with FOSS is there isn’t a single standard it targets, we just port everything to everything as needed. The closest thing we have to a standard is targeting specific versions of specific distros, usually Debian/Ubuntu or RHEL and derivatives because that’s what the enterprise customers that pays for the development tends to run. That’s why Davinci Resolve is a pain to run on anything other than Rocky Linux. Thankfully, it’s also just software and dependencies, so if you just give it everything it uses from Rocky, it’ll work just fine on other distros. And that’s why source code is important: you can make everything work with everything with enough time and patience. That’s what powers the ecosystem.



  • Lemmy’s format just kind of sucks for discussions and visibility. If you comment on a post from a year ago, you can expect that to not been seen by anyone ever.

    Lemmy is primarily a link aggregator, just like Reddit. It also happens to somewhat work for Q&A and help forums, but fundamentally Lemmy is more oriented towards new content.

    The more classic forum format is better for discussions because replies bump the thread up to bring new attention to it.

    Also a lot of people just don’t give a shit about random people’s random thoughts, that’s why I’m not on Mastodon and never really used Twitter either. I don’t know why people feel the need to dump all their thoughts on the Internet, like I care that a celebrity is on a plane or enjoying a nice meal.

    Lemmy is about topics, not people, that’s what I like about it. I don’t care about people.



  • You can’t, because normies don’t care about tech other than it benefits them directly in some way. They care about the experience they get and doing the same thing everyone does because normies are like sheeps.

    Normies barely even get how emails work and it’s been like over 40 years. They know if they sign up for Gmail it’s free, they get a ton of space and an @gmail.com address. That’s it.

    And even then, people looked at me weird back in 2007 when I made my Gmail account because “everyone uses Hotmail, why wouldn’t you use Hotmail, everyone uses it so it must be the best”. Heck just yesterday, the teller at the mechanic shop looked at me weird because I used $storename@max-p.me to place the online order, they were utterly confused. They thought I made a Gmail or Outlook for all of those aliases. People don’t think about using emails, they think about using Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.

    Same with Reddit, it didn’t become popular until normies felt like they were missing out by not being on Reddit, and arguably that was Reddit’s downfall flooding the site with the same repeated arguments and opinions over and over. And for that too, I’ve been told my “Reddit looks weird” because I use a third-party app. People want to use Reddit so they download Reddit.

    Normies don’t use Twitter because they want to microblog, they use Twitter because their idols are on Twitter and they want to mimic them. If Taylor Swift opened a Mastodon account and posted exclusively there, we’d get a massive spike of users. And they all would want to register on the same instance as her and it would be the only viable instance to them.

    They just want to fit in and do the same as the others, using the same services and same apps and everything. “Influencers” are everything these days.

    The best way to get normies on the Fediverse is IMO, endorsing Threads and BlueSky, which will effectively force them to integrate because those platforms integrate.





  • From a user’s perspective, yes, but as an instance admin that’s also a DMCA nightmare.

    That’s a great example of the eternal fight between mods and users that ultimately drives admins away: users feel entitled to post that stuff, and mods have to take it down. The user is anonymous and possibly from a country with very lax laws, so they’re protected. The admins have to pay for the servers with real money and their real identity, and thus also an easy target for lawyers.


  • Porn is often really high traffic, which is expensive to run. But a lot of people are weirdos too and tend to push it to the border of legality, which can be challenging for admins if your users keep posting lolis even if it’s not allowed. And they’ll scream at you “it’s not technically illegal”.

    The other thing people do a lot with porn is post stuff from sketchy sources or repost paid content for free stealing from OnlyFans pages and the big porn studios. And lately, AI generated porn of non-consenting celebrities. And of course now the increasing pressure to make sure to keep minors out or heaven forbid they’re shown trans porn.

    It’s expensive to store all that porn, it’s insanely expensive to distribute it, you need lawyers on standby for the firehose of DMCA reports, you need a solid team of moderators scrubbing the site as fast as possible for CSAM, or run AI tools that needs a lot of fast hardware to run at any decent speed (you need to analyze every frame of a video, for example).

    It’s just expensive as fuck overall and that’s why a lot of the porn sites have the sketchiest ads ever, and that’s because you can’t run regular ads as most advertisers don’t want to be shown next to questionable content.

    On the fediverse you have the added challenge that ideally, you scrub things before they get federated due to federation bugs. Or you risk being defederated which you probably will anyway as most admins just don’t want to deal with it.




  • Profiles, yes that’d be nice as that’d bridge the gap with Mastodon and enable users to do standalone posts but see it threaded instead of the horrible microblogging UX for that.

    Chat, I don’t think belong to ActivityPub, it works alright for direct messages but that’s it. It wouldn’t scale well for this amount of traffic for a chat. But you can however put your Discord/Matrix/IRC on your profile, and communities can put their own Discord/Matrix/IRC rooms link in the description to form a chat community around the Lemmy community. Maybe an option would be adding dedicated fields for those so that it can be added to the UI to direct you to those transparently. UIs could implement some support for those and embed the chat rooms in the page.



  • For me it’s not even that I hate the concept of AI. It’s that we’re shoving half baked AI literally everywhere we can without any fuck given to reliability, accuracy and safety, or even sustainability.

    • GitHub Copilot: code so bad I won’t even bother reviewing the PR. It doesn’t save time at all unless you suck at coding already.
    • Google Gemini/Bing Copilot: completely off the mark more often than not, it’s still faster to do a standard, well written web search.
    • AI assistants: they’ve always sucked and still sucks but hey at least the voice is realistic right. It still doesn’t understand what you say to it half the time.
    • Recall: nobody ever asked for that
    • AI summaries: I’d rather skim through articles, at least I know what I skipped.
    • AI translations: better than Google Translate I guess, but more of the same: it gets you by when reading foreign sites but the quality is still too bad to use it to translate my apps with it in a professional setting.

    They’re all impressive products on a technical level, but they’re basically really expensive alpha quality software that sucks a stupid amount of power for dubious gains.

    My other gripe is most of the time those feed your personal data to Microsoft/OpenAI for processing, because most people don’t have a quad RTX 4090 Ti setup to run any decent model locally at reasonable speeds. It’s using a jackhammer to nail a nail.


  • Firstly, remember than each piefed account only has one alt account and it’s always the same alt account doing the votes with the same gibberish user name. It’s an open source project so the mechanics of it cannot be kept secret and they can be verified by anyone with intermediate Python knowledge.

    That implies trust in the person that operates the instance. It’s not a problem for piefed.social, because we can trust you. It will work for your instance. But can you trust other people’s PieFed instances? It’s open-source, I could just install it on my server, change the code to make me 2-3 alt accounts instead. Pick a random instance from lemmy.world’s instance list, would you blindly trust them to not fudge votes?

    The availability of the source code doesn’t help much because you can’t prove that it’s the exact code that’s running with no modifications, and marking people running modified code as suspicious out of the box would be unfair and against open-source culture.

    I also see some deanonymization exploits too: people commonly vote+comment, so with some time, you can do correlation attacks and narrow down the accounts. So to prevent that, you’d have to remove the users mapping 1:1 to a gibberish alt by at least letting the user rotate them on demand, or rotate them on a schedule, and now we can’t correlate votes to patterns anymore. And everyone’s database endlessly fills up with generated alt accounts (that you can’t delete).

    If the person is always downvoting or always voting the same as another person you’ll see those patterns in their alt and the alt can be banned.

    Sure, but you lose some visibility into who the user is. Seeing the comments is useful to get a better grasp of who they are. Maybe they’re just a serial fact checker and downvoting misinformation and posting links to reputable sources. It can also help identify if there’s other activity beside just votes, large amounts of votes are less suspicious if you see the person’s also been engaging with comments all day.

    And then you circle back to, do you trust the instance admin to investigate or even respond to your messages? How is it gonna go when a big, politically aligned instance is accused of botting and the admin denies the claims but the evidence suggests it’s likely? What do we do with Threads or even an hypothetical Twitter going fediverse, with Elon still as the boss? Or Truth Social?

    The bigger the instance, the easier it is to sneak a few votes in. With millions of user accounts, you can borrow a couple hundred of your long inactive user’s alts easily and it’s essentially undetectable.


    I’m sorry for the pessimism but I’ve come to expect the worst from people. Anything that can be exploited, will be exploited. I do wish this problem to be solved, and it’s great that some people like you go ahead and at least try to make it work. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from experimenting with that, but I do think those what-ifs are important to discuss before everyone implements it and then oops we have a big problem.

    The way things are, we don’t have to put any trust in an instance admin. It might as well not be there, it’s just a gateway and file host. But we can independently investigate accounts and ban them individually, without having to resort to banning whole instances, even if the admins are a bit sketchy. Because of the inherent transparency of the protocol.


  • The problem with this approach is trust. It works for the users, but not admins. If I run a PieFed instance with this on, how can lemmy.world for example can trust my tiny instance to be playing by the rules? I went over more details in this other comment.

    Sure, right now admins can contact you, for your instance. But you can’t really do that with dozens of instances and hundreds of instances. There’s a ton of instances we tolerate the users, but would you trust the admin with anonymous votes? Be in constant contact with a dozen instance admins on a daily basis?

    It’s a good attempt though. Maybe we’re all pessimistic and it will work just fine!