This sounds like such a cool idea. Makes it super easy for anyone to participate. I hope it takes off

The main issue with AI scrapers is that there isn’t just one, there are dozens or hundreds of them, all doing the same thing. Most websites would handle being hammered by one or two bots just fine, but crash under the load of dozens of bots constantly sending requests.

On top of that, many of them are very badly (vibe)coded and get stuck in endless loops, requesting the same pages over and over again. At my job we IP-blocked an aggressive data-harvesting bot from our service, and the thing got stuck requesting the same page over and over again every 8 seconds, despite receiving the same error code every time. This continued for weeks.

I might be guilty of using an argument like that sometimes. What I really mean is that I currently value the convenience more than my privacy. “I’m using service X because that seems the most convenient choice for me and I don’t really care whether someone I won’t ever meet is reading my data. But I could also use service Y if it’s just as good and convenient as service X.”

Point being, I’m always willing to start using a different thing as long as it works for my use case as well as (or preferably better than) the thing I’m currently using.

So, instead of trying to scare me about someone spying on me, try convincing me how the other service works better than the one I’m currently using.

There will also be a “normal” Direct the next day.

I don’t have any real advice for you but I just wanted to say I have huge respect for firefighters. You are literally risking your life to save others. So, from the outside it looks like you’re doing the exact opposite of wasting your life.

EDIT: Reading the other responses, I thought might as well add my own experience. I used to write. Both fiction and nonfiction, opinion pieces, short stories, fanfic, and sometimes even some spicier NSFW stuff. I’m not good at expressing myself verbally and writing is/was my way of expressing myself.

It was huge for me when I got a couple of my articles published in a printed tech/PC magazine (albeit a very small one) that I had been an avid reader of, and they even paid me a little something for them. Then I had some guy online commission a short story from me. I was so excited about it and the amount I charged for it didn’t even come close to covering the time I spent obsessing over the story to make it perfect, but I still really enjoyed doing it.

Then, during covid I lost my day job and was seriously considering whether I should try freelance writing. But then AI and LLMs came along. At first, I thought it was a positive thing. Publishing online requires English, and English is not my native language, and even the very first public AI models were great for fixing grammar, typos and improving the flow of a text you give to it. But very soon I found that it also destroyed my motivation to write anything at all. Why should I spend time writing something myself when I can just describe the idea to an AI and it will write something almost as good in seconds that I would have spent the whole evening on? I got okay-ish results by taking the AI output and refactoring it to fit my style but I don’t feel comfortable ever publishing anything where a major portion of the work was done by a machine rather than me.

Venting over haha. And really, I enjoy my current job in software development and it pays the bills, so it’s not all bad for me. But I can definitely sympathize with you.

I think the main problem is that far too few people are contributing to these projects and major decisions aren’t made collectively instead of by a single person. Isn’t Rimu effectively the sole dev for PieFed, in much the same way that Nutomic and dessalines have been the main people running the Lemmy project?

I think all of these people are reasonable per se, but there’s an old quote that I feel fits nicely here: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If there’s no one to challenge your decisions, you’re inevitably going to make some bad ones eventually.

Compare that with any healthy FOSS project where major decisions are a group effort. Things move more slowly but a single extremist view is much less likely to pass. Projects like that also tend to attract more contributors in the long run, because people can trust that their contributions (the time they spend coding, not snowboarding) will be evaluated objectively by a group rather than suddenly being discarded because they don’t fit one person’s worldview.

An update post from the admin: https://sopuli.xyz/post/50113243

If anyone who’s already played it is looking for an interesting second (or third) playthrough, try ignoring Delilah altogether. Never respond to her, and only radio her when the game won’t progress otherwise. The devs went to great lengths to avoid forcing the player to talk to her, and there’s a good amount of dialogue (well, monologue, actually xD) that you won’t hear when playing “normally”.

And I think this playstyle actually fits Henry’s character better. After all, he took the job to get away from everyone and everything, only to end up being constantly harassed by an overly social supervisor. Oh, and when the helicopter comes to pick you up at the end, you can just ignore that too and run back into the forest. It’s a bit of a secret ending.

I have had this blog post about SDRs (Software Defined Radio) bookmarked for a couple of years now:

https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/

Apparently the basic models only cost around 30-50 dollars. I’ve been thinking about getting one, but I haven’t had the time to dive into it yet.

I was going to agree to disagree, but I couldn’t resist biting one more time because the link you posted turned out to be really interesting, but probably not for the reasons you were expecting… It’s past midnight where I live and I have work tomorrow so I’ll keep this one short.

Two things. First, just a reminder that like I wrote in my last message, I’m not arguing for any instance to re-federate Hexbear or Lemmygrad. It’s clear even just from reading this thread that most users don’t want to see them, and that’s actually a perfectly valid reason to maintain the status quo. But at this point it’s also pretty clear that ideological reasons and personal opinions are part of why those instances are so widely defederated and we are lying to ourselves if we insist otherwise.

Second, let me prove it by using your alt’s post you linked. I’ll be really frank here as you seem like someone who won’t take it personally. It’s obvious you feel very strongly about this matter, you’re good with words, and you’re not scared to influence others to adapt your ideals. Your post on discuss.online is honestly very well written if that was your goal. It’s manipulative, but not in instantly obvious way. It’s a textbook case actually: (All quotes below are directly from the post)

• Starts with an appeal to fear (“…we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us…”)
• Overgeneralization from anecdote (“…Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here…”)
• Poisoning the well (“…at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith…”)
• Appeal to social proof (“…Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated…”)
• Loaded language (“…troll instance…”, “…flooding over here…”)
• False consensus (“…most of us…”)
• Shifting the burden of proof (“…the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?..”)
• Flattery (“…Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices…”, “…you are doing a fantastic job of being admins…”)
• Strategic concessions (“…That one I understand may be more problematic…”)

I could go on, but it’s late and I’m tired…

Then add what looks like a mountain of evidence, but is mostly a handful of trolls and douchebags, something you can find from almost any larger instance. Most people aren’t going to dig through the “evidence”, and just like that, discuss.online defederated Hexbear. It’s not my place to comment on the decision itself, especially since it doesn’t affect me. I’m just pointing what happened there.

blahaj is in the black box (has defederated fedinsfw.app), in the blue box (has defederated Lemmygrad) and in the red box (has defederated Hexbear). No one on this graph has defederated pawb. The graph is a bit confusing on the first look.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your point of view in such detail. It’s not every day that a Lemmy comment makes me really think or maybe even change my opinion a bit :)

I actually agree with almost everything you wrote. If I were unlucky enough to be friends with both Russia and Ukraine, then sure, that game night would be very unlikely to happen. For science tho, I decided to check what the hell people on Hexbear and Lemmygrad are actually discussing to make everyone and their dog want to block them. Judging by the first two pages of recent threads on both, they seem like generally nice people who I disagree with politically very much, but could still imagine spending a fun evening with without anyone getting murdered. And at most game nights I’ve attended, politics is one of the banned discussion topics anyway xD

Lemme be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing for suddenly reversing the defederation of those two instances. That’s not an argument I’m qualified to make, first of all because I don’t know the full history we have with them. What I’m trying to ask is whether we’re absolutely sure all these defederation decisions are solely based on provable facts and past behavior, rather than some instance admins simply disliking how certain people think and deciding they know better than their users what they should or shouldn’t see. Just like the Tesseract dev recently were exposed trying to do. Because if it’s the latter, then it’s a very dangerous road we are on.

My own experience is that in 3+ years on Lemmy, I don’t remember having a single bad interaction with someone from Hexbear, for example. That’s why I’m so surprised to find so many instances defederating them. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s bad experiences, but I think everyone should ask themselves whether they actually had those experiences themselves or have only heard about them from others?

Also worth adding, I fully understand I’m using a free service (although I do make a small monthly donation to my instance) and no instance is obligated to provide a platform for any content they don’t want to. As you said, anyone can host an instance and freely choose who to federate with. But if we cannot trust the admins of these large, well-known, and promoted (e.g. join-lemmy.org) instances to make decisions based on the common good of their users rather than their own personal opinions, then the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers. And that’s something to be plenty sad about.

Btw, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own instance just for myself. But wouldn’t it be really hard to discover new communities that way? To my understanding, an instance only receives posts and comments from communities that someone on that instance is already subscribed to?

Yeah, I get your argument, and obviously it’s good to have instances with different federation policies. It’s just that when big instances like the ones in this chart start swinging the defederation hammer around, I worry that some (or many) users end up disconnected from users and communities without ever realizing it or agreeing with the decision.

Have you ever tried to organize a fun game night with friends but two of them just can’t get along, ruining the whole thing? That’s kinda the feeling I get from this.

I think the main issue is that this isn’t communicated clearly. Most people joining a random instance listed on join-lemmy.org won’t know what defederation means and they have no way of knowing that by choosing that particular instance they’ll be cut off from a certain number of other users.

Kinda eye-opening, thx for making the chart. I hadn’t realized it had gotten this bad. In my opinion, defederation should only ever be used to combat spam, not because of ideological differences or disputes between individuals.

One of the most common tips for people looking to switch over from Reddit has been that the instance you choose doesn’t really matter. But it clearly does. Choose the “wrong” instance and you may suddenly find yourself cut off from a sizable portion of other users because someone else decided they know better than you what you should and shouldn’t see.

I’m lucky to be on an instance that has “only” defederated one instance in this chart (lemmygrad.ml). I don’t really follow the drama around here, so I have no idea why that instance is banned. All I see is that there are 558 active users I’ll never be able to interact with just because someone I don’t personally know (my instance admin) made that decision at some point.

Wasn’t there just a big drama because some app developer built-in their own opinionated blocklist into their app or something? How is this any different?

My point being, why not leave these kinds of drastic decisions to individual users, who can and should block whoever they want, instead of dividing threadiverse into silos at the instance level?

I’m in favor. I don’t really care whether we do things the same way as in Reddit but sometimes I start typing a reply to a thread without noticing which community it’s in. Having ELI5 in the title makes it immediately clear what kind of responses are wanted.

That said, if the rule is implemented, I don’t think it’s necessary to start enforcing it strictly right away. It’s not that big of a deal if someone forgets the rule. That way it wouldn’t create any extra work for the mods.

I run Debian on my homelab and manage Ubuntu Servers at work. I haven’t seen any practical differences between the two. Sometimes you might get a bit newer version of something from the Ubuntu repositories than from the Debian ones but not even once has that been an issue and most of stuff I use come from 3rd party repositories anyway.

Old screenshot. They used to have basic security features like 2FA behind a paywall. That’s just stupid. But at least they recently changed it, allowing free users to secure their accounts.

Instance admins can appoint new moderators to any community if/when someone wants to take over one of the currently dead ones. That’s why many instances have a community_requests community, where anyone can request mod rights for a community that no longer has an active moderator.

Probably the fact how I just freaking teleported and somehow I’m still alive