Not under normal circumstances. I had some issues recovering damaged harddisks that had lots of errors and retries and sometimes either the USB adapter or the mainboard SATA would crap out or handle it better. But for normal copying of HDDs, both should copy the exact same data.
My point?
The statement was: “Replace Joe with the evil orange man […]”
My point is, no need for that. The orange man is way ahead of you. I’d credit him for coming up with that meme, years ago.
Didn’t Trump love to talk about that Alzheimers/Dementia-Test he once took and how well he performed and remembered that 5 things they asked him to remember? This sounds like a joke I already heard. Maybe we can look up the dislike ratio from back then.
For what it’s worth… I think there are useful AI tools. For example the offline translation feature that doesn’t send your content to google is something they recently introduced. I’d also like to see someone compete with a decent and open text-to-speech solution that gets wide adoption… And the idea of flagging fake reviews doesn’t sound too bad (I haven’t tried it.) I mean people are complaining about SEO making google unusable and fake news only ever getting more. I can see some benefit there - if done right.
But we definitely don’t need a Clippy 2.0 or another smart assistant. And I don’t think everything has to be embedded in a browser and make it yet more complicated and bigger, or implemented in the operating system. An add-on will probably do.
(Edit: And I sometimes don’t understand Mozilla. Why not focus on their core product and make that exceptionally great? If they’re already struggling… What’s with all these side-projects and dabbling in AI anyways?)
I don’t know where you live, just wanted to say if you’re dabbling in this new hobby, make sure they’re not keeping logs after your contract ends. Your IP of today might still be traceable back to you, if they keep the logs for a fixed time after the contract ended. Or use protection.
That would explain it. I mean if your provider provides you with a proper certificate, you can also use that. But often times it’s just a temporary self-signed placeholder that’s only good for development and not valid.
Where did you get your certificates from and what’s the exact error message? Maybe you’re using self-signed certificates. Those don’t get accepted by anyone else. Your path doesn’t look like the default letsencrypt/acme path…
Is there a client that does that? Sorry I lost track of the different clients. But I’d like to try. I know Eternity (which I use on my Android phone) and the default webui can’t do that. But I haven’t tried all the options.
I don’t quite get your wording. If you mean similar communities should be merged in all cases, I think I’d disagree. People might want to subscribe to a specific community. And it’d be complex to figure out moderation etc, since the root of the platform is a federated architecture and this somewhat goes against that. I think it’d be more a UI / client feature, tied into a cross-posting mechanism.
Thank you very much for explaining, and the whole AMA.
Concerning the “providing the project for free”… I think that’s too simplistic. I mean users have expectations anyways. And you must have some motivation to maintain an open source project. Otherwise you wouldn’t put it out there, engage with your users, fix their issues and incorporate their requests. Or you’d make that clear in the first line of the Readme as some people do.
I think open source is giving and taking. It’s not about legal obligations (we usually waive every responsibility in every open source license.) But perhaps ethically. I as a user feel obligated to honor and respect your work and the time you’ve put in. And I shouldn’t expect anything except for everyone abides by the license. But the devs aren’t the only one putting in time and effort. Downstream are admins who run the actual instances. There might be an ethical obligation to not waste their time either. And there are moderators and users who make the platform become alive. They also offer their time for free and are part of the ecosystem, like the developers are. And ethically it is correct to treat people nice who put in a few hours to prepare a proper pull request and work towards the same goal as core developers.
And there are a few unique circumstances. This is a social network/link aggregator. And as such it relies to some degree on the network effect. It won’t work without a certain amount of users and them being happy here. Lemmy devs seem (to me) invested in the project and not just coding something for money. So you want it to be successful and catering for users is part of the equation. Additionally the users of a social network trust the platform with their private data. You can’t take legal responsibility for that. But if you accept users doing that, it’s at least an ethical obligation to make good choices.
And the situation is: Since you have a few full-time developers… It’s not a hobby project anymore. So it’s a bit more complicated. And money might come with expectations. I personally differentiate between donations that are meant as a bounty, this money comes with obligations. And donations for the great work you’ve done so far. These come without.
I think you’re doing a good job. I especially like that Lemmy development doesn’t seem to be focused on growth above all. You could implement things differently and completely focus on not showing user-facing issues, in order to assure fast growth. Or write a Reddit clone like some people would like, including gamification, awards and stuff. But you don’t seem to be interested in that. And that aligns well with what I like. I want a nice place to engage with people. I don’t need another platform that is commercial and does things in order to be successful at the market.
I’m grateful. There are still bugs and a few more complicated annoyances I’d like to see being addressed. But I really enjoy spending some of my time here.
To me perfect is the enemy of good is: you don’t arrive at good, because you set unrealistic goals for example. But theoretically you all want to go in the same direction.
All or nothing is taking chances, gambling. It’s a different category. It doesn’t have to do anything with one solution being good or bad. It’s saying I want that, no compromises. Like if you say ‘I want to go to Disneyland or I’m not coming with you.’ There’s not necessarily anything good or perfect or bad in it. With political parties it’s often they have to show their voters they’re determined and not taking shit. So they say ‘we’re not compromising’. And that way you have a clear winner and loser. Can be beneficial or detrimental to a goal. The motivation could be entirely different. But both things can also be at play at the same time.
I hope those wants and needs aren’t mutually exclusive. I think most open source projects do a good job in catering for both. I’m not involved in Lemmy development so I don’t really know what’s going on here. But I’ve sent one-off contribution to various projects, sometimes contributed single features or helped to sort something out. It always felt appreciated.
Sure, a drive-by commit every now and then and no responsibility is a completely different level than maintaining a (large) project and putting in that effort and dedication. I think a healthy open source project has both. Maintenance and the responsibility/decisions by a core team. And the community contributions make up by adding diversity, being close to what the user needs and adding manpower by a larger group of people, meaning the individual contributions might be smaller, but by many more people. Good communication between the devs and the community usually helps to get quality contributions.
Since I read a few comments here… What is your oppinion on more democratic platforms? I mean something like electing moderators. (Or dropping them in a democratic process.) Or voting for other things in a community.
(This is more a hypothetical question. I guess with the architecture as is, it can easily be exploited. And there is no way to implement this properly without severe changes and consequences.)
developers are notoriously bad at testing their own code, so I dont see what we can improve in this regard.
Sounds like software development… I mean automated tests help. But you’re developing a distributed/federated platform. Unit tests won’t do it. Maybe infrastructure that spins up a small fleet of instances and checks their ability to federate posts, delete comments and simulates interaction. That’d assure the most important aspects keep working. And I think there are tools for that available. But I get it. It’s complicated, there are real-world instances with special (niche) setups, you’re constrained, it has to be worth the effort and there are other important things to do.
Maybe just do your best not to break too many things and we (users) can complain and have another discussion only if it’s a reoccurring problem. 😉
Sure, that’s not the point at all. But wouldn’t it be great if the knitting community (for example) on beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and feddit.de would be merged for me into one entity for a better browsing experience? And people wouldn’t post the same breaking news 3 times and the cross-posts always showed up 3 times in my timeline? (And sometimes it’s the same 30 people anyways that are subscribed to all of them so the cross-posting doesn’t add anything?)
I currently don’t have a good idea for a UI design for that. But I think a feature like that would add to federated platforms (if done right.) But nobody said you’re not allowed or it’s bad to open a dozen communities with the same name and topic on different servers. That’s perfectly alright. In the real world we also sometimes discuss the same topic with different people at different locations.
Thank you. A follow-up question: You sound like most things have to be done by full-time developers. Is there a healthy open-source community around Lemmy development? Do people submit enough pull-requests to fix bugs? Do people from the community contribute a substancial amount? features?
I’d like that. I think some other platforms/projects have features like this. And on Lemmy some instances duplicate everything. For example beehaw.
I think the instance admins should handle that. Lemmy itself should be a open and agnostic platform. Admins should use defederation and block specific communities.
(My oppinion, I’m not associated with Lemmy development.)
How’s development going? Do you have enough funds to pay your salaries? Did the EU fund run out? What’s your workload? Is the amount of full-time developers enough to work on new features? Or is it barely enough to keep up?
How do you like Lemmy and the people on it? (As of now)
Have you put measures into place to assure the quality of future updates? In the past several updates have caused issues. And recently 0.19.x broke federation for the most of us. And it took weeks to fix it and make Lemmy usable again.
I think out of the 3 kitchen and recipe managers I know, Grocy sounds most like it.