Admin approval with some text that needs a little bit of thought to fill out is surprisingly effective and definitely slows down spammers a lot.

I had to do that on dbzer0 and I think beehaw, they were both a fun exercise and took no time at all. Hell, I ended up submitting a wall of text about Sacco and Vanzetti on dbzer0 if I remember correctly, lol. But if nothing else they knew that it was 1) a human, and 2) I really believe what I was saying.

If the point is to get regular users who are thoughtful participants in online communities, requiring an email address and the typing of a few coherent words on their own behalf is NOT a barrier to entry, or even a much of a bar. After all, these people are applying to join a forum in which they are presumably going to spend unlimited time typing statements of their own creation in the future. Instance owners are just requiring a bit of that up front, and it’s not a huge ask.

It is, however, a very frustrating requirement for people who want to open multiple accounts for spamming and trolling purposes, and for that reason alone is a great filter for applicants.

Many thanks!

Your point is well taken, and I thank you for the compliment, but it’s still just people in the C-suite, who started the business before they knew what direction it would take or even be successful at all, and who steer it now whether for good or for bad, whether for provocation or for supporting mental well-being. It’s the same business either way.

But over the last 20-ish years they’ve consistently steered the existing business in a very cruel direction, IMO.

And behind every cruelty for profit there’s a sociopath – or several – absolutely doing it for fun AND profit.

Do you really not think it gave some folks at Facebook a charge to be able to removed with the moods of thousands just by tweaking the algorithm?

There’s a certain point where inner values/morality stops those of us with a conscience from harming others lightly. The lines differ, but where there is a conscience the lines are present. When there is no working conscience, and those lines aren’t there (iow, sociopathy), others are no longer seen as fully human, or even human at all, and they just become fun toys to play with.

Like Facebook achieved with their algorithms, and their propagandistic elevation of provocative, angering, and even trauma-inducing posts, and the way they actively helped subvert the choices of millions of voters by trying, and succeeding, to bait them with radicalizing content.

Profit, yes. But it took a LOT of people to say yes to all that dehumanizing manipulation at Facebook/Meta that begins from a premise of not seeing humans participating on their platforms as worthy of courtesy and respect, much less their own human equals.

I don’t think I can be convinced that among all of them, there’s not a single one who didn’t get off on the sheer POWER of it all.

Zuckerberg is on record as thinking of Facebook users as dumb removeds, and he controls the corporate culture over there. It’s his knob the C-suite and layers of middle management are slobbering. If he doesn’t think users are human, or worthy of courtesy and respect, his well-placed minions won’t either, and in turn they too will hire those that fit in with that corporate philosophy.

Some of them are only pretending to love this . . . but many more aren’t pretending at all, and the ones who would have protested are long gone by now.

Boomer yells at cloud, incoming. Skip it if you want. You have been warned.

I don’t want anything at all to do with Meta or their removedty soylent green, and I intend to block them for myself as a single user. I don’t want to tell anyone else what they need to do.

But anyone who is convinced that a company that thinks it’s cool to manipulate emotion and create depression in its users, whose users (plural) have even taken their own lives because of the deliberately unmoderated but manipulated engagement-boosting emotive filth that Meta panders as a matter of course – and I’m totally not even addressing how far they have gone to help undermine democracies and democratic processes – is a company to safely be involved with even casually, then all I can say is that I don’t think they’ve lived long enough.

We are all literally sitting around here hypothesizing about what Meta will and will not do on the Fediverse because all of us, down to the last Lemizen, already knows that Meta removeding lies and we can’t believe a removeding word out of their mouths, so we have to guess.

And we’re doing that without even blinking: notice how NO ONE, absoremovedinglutely NO ONE here, no matter how pro-Meta-federation they are, has suggested we ask Meta.

It’s because they already know. WE ALL ALREADY KNOW.

Goddamn, with this Meta removed I feel like I’m back in an abusive relationship where I have to stay three steps ahead of my partner just to be able to sleep at night, knowing there’s some removedery going on because there always is, because that’s what they do, but having no idea what it is, and not even bothering with wasting words on the fool because all I’ll get back is removed, and then on top of everything if I ask I’ll have to act like there’s even the tiniest bit of truth to be found in those words.

And on and on it goes.

Lol, no.

Meta isn’t looking at what the Fediverse will be at some future point and betting on margins; Meta is looking at what the Fediverse already IS and how it can be manipulated for fun and profit. It’s what they do.

And even the people here who don’t want to admit it in so many words already know that’s what Meta does, in the same way that the cutest cats are happy to kill birds and enjoy every second of the slaughter without the least remorse. It’s not a moral question. They do it because they’re cats.

Meta is in the business of processing and redistributing brain product, using that processed brain product to get more brain product, and also getting more data on those brains so as to force more brain product from them as well as display targeted advertising at those brains every waking moment, because that’s Meta. That is what Meta does.

We – the Fediverse, its users, our communities, our online relationships, our comments – are product. The only difference between us here and those on Threads is that WE did not choose THEM, they chose us. Why? Well, what is it they make over there? Oh, yeah. That. And we’re just more of it.

The morality of the removed Meta gets up to is only a question for people with morals, like those people and governments who have demanded that Meta answer for its actions and implement change, but morals are NOT what Meta does. Anyone thinking Meta et al will do anything but chew up and spit out whatever they find here, including the federation itself, is deluded.

We all know this too: notice how NO ONE here is demanding that Meta do anything differently. They won’t. The thought itself is laughable. But see how quickly and completely we have internalized it, to the point that no one has yet suggested that META change in order to be allowed to federate, or that pre-conditions be placed on their federation.

This post does at least address some of the false dichotomies involved, and that’s a start. There are always things a collective of users can do to throw wrenches into works; one thing we could do as a collective is restrict our copyrights differently than we do now. Will Meta honor that? No, of course not, but having a provable misdeed like that makes it easier to kick them out whenever their plans do become clear.

If I start putting “© ChunkMcHorkle 2023 - Not For Distribution by Meta Platforms, Inc./Threads.net” at the bottom of every one of my posts, skipping the whole ActivityPub federation protocol and instead specifically naming the for-profit corporate entity, and they distribute it anyway, that’s a tiny headache for them if I want it to be. What if all of us who don’t want Threads to republish our content do that? It’s a slightly bigger headache, but it’s something. Enough somethings and you’re too problematic to removed with. Why aren’t we thinking about these options?

Another thing is that our devs have gotten us this far; if they ever give us the ability to block by instance this almost becomes a non-issue. And so on. There are a lot of really bright folks here; we can come up with some good removed if we stop thinking the way Meta wants us to, in boxes made of false dichotomies and assumptions wherein we have no power.

Let any instance that wants to federate do so, and any user that wants to get that highly processed and curated fecal matter in their feed consume as much of it as they want. For myself, I’ll stay here on lemmy.world – I’m already here and I do not have to sort out the merits of one instance over another, which will be another consideration when Meta finds a way to SEO its place on join-lemmy.org and fill the first several pages with its own instances – and I will simply put threads.net and associated domains in the hosts file, find a way to personally block Meta content from anywhere else, even walk away if I have to, and be done with it.

But anyone who thinks a wolf will suddenly behave differently in the 99th henhouse it sets eyes on hasn’t lived long enough. This is Meta, and this is what Meta does. Meta ALREADY has a plan for the Fediverse as it exists today, we don’t know what it is yet but it will be as morality-free as all the rest of their activities, and anyone who participates does so at their own risk.

He wants a user who literally just said “There is literally no benefit for us allowing Meta to integrate” to provide sources that list those benefits. That the guy just said do not exist.

You asked him the same, and three times he’s come back with a pile of words and no answer.

I’m 100% with you and @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world : There is absolutely NO upside to letting Meta in the door.

Thank you, exactly so.

Also I believe it’s disingenuous to equate explodingheads, which was defederated for being extremely toxic due to its lack of moderation

Okay, right here, stop for a second and think. Picture in your head what happens on Meta platforms daily. Think about the rampant hate, harassment (especially of LGBTQIA people) and open radicalization/right wing propaganda/science denial that goes on completely unchecked on all platforms Meta, and has for years – despite Zuck’s yearly hangdog visits to Congress and the EU denying all problems while simultaneously promising to do better.

And as an extra mental boot, think of all the people – especially the young ones – who get openly and unrestrainedly bullied on Meta platforms, Lord of the Flies style, to the literal point of attempted or completed suicide. And consider how all Meta does, each and every time it happens, is mouth platitudes about thoughts, prayers, and their overwhelming commitment to safe platforms plus zero tolerance for bullying, as though that removed isn’t front and center on their platforms, ALWAYS.

Okay, carry on:

and meta which presumably has more resources to devote to moderation than any fedi instance (of course they are still terrible at it)

It’s not a matter of being terrible, and I’m not saying you’re wrong, but terrible implies that they try and fail.

I posit that they do not try: this is their actual profit structure.

It’s a matter of willfully avoiding even basic moderation duties because higher emotional load equals more engagement, more engagement means more content generation, more content generation means more user data and targeted ad revenue.

Apples and oranges, swings and roundabouts. Whatever you think of federating with Threads, do it or don’t do it, there really is NO possible comparison between Meta platforms and the Fediverse, nor how they are run and moderated (or not), nor the goals that motivate the administrators of both.

That IS very similar to Goodreads, and then I was able to follow a random reviewer link to more content to browse. Thank you.

There are a lot of lists that are public too so don’t worry about that.

Cool, but if I need an account to see them then they’re not really public. Maybe it’s me but I did not see any link to any actual open content. If you could point me to one I’d be happy to look again.

Could you get into BookWyrm if it no longer required an account to view books?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I used to like Goodreads and would linger on the site, but the reviews themselves started to get weird a couple few years ago and now I only go when I need a link. A Federated, open version of it (with effective but non-corporate moderation) would be great, because it would have the honest range of reviews Goodreads used to have, hopefully without corporate attempts at manipulating the content.

I have nothing against AA or Goodreads, and have never heard of BookWyrm before today, but the main thing I use Goodreads for is providing a link for a publication that has accurate info (full correct name, correct name of author, date of publishing, ISBN, etc) that does not involve an Amazon or other sales link.

So BookWyrm could never replace Goodreads for me anyway, and then there’s this:

Write reviews or post casual commentary as you go, and control who gets to see your posts with granular privacy settings.

From https://joinbookwyrm.com/

It’s like Facebook for book reviews. I couldn’t even see a book myself because it’s all locked down. And like Facebook if you have to create a private account to use it I’d never go there anyway without seeing it first, or specific interest in what it offers. (I’m one of those rare never-Facebook people you sometimes see in the wild, lol.) If I had been unable to browse Lemmy before joining, I’d never have joined.

Facebook overcame its initial participation hump by being .edu only, very exclusive, and word of mouth. They have coasted on that word of mouth factor ever since, because now it’s baked into the media and daily online life. But they couldn’t do it from scratch again today. So unless you unlock BookWyrm in some way, or its exclusivity becomes a major draw in itself, I don’t know how it will overcome that initial participation hurdle.

I upvoted your post and absolutely support your goal in theory, but as someone who never joined Facebook, you could never get me to join a Facebook for book reviews, sorry.

I believe a USB WiFi dongle will be a better idea than modifying live images of various distros

Yeah, you and me both. But I’d be willing to do it for one or two, just to be able to prove that THIS laptop can and will run Linux with its current hardware, should he choose install it.

Also, the only thing lost by modifying LiveUSB trials is my time. If I corrupt the image, or it doesn’t work, or I make it crap out somehow – all of which is likely, lol – I still have done no harm at all. It’s just a USB stick. And I will also have learned a few things along the way, like how Linux distros install and use drivers.

you would be installing the firmware on the Linux system, not onto the WiFi module.

Then technically (not that I personally have the chops to do it) this “firmware” could also be something plugged into the distro on the LiveUSB stick along with the wl driver. That distro is getting its current drivers from somewhere on that USB already, so I’m not reinventing the wheel, just adding to what is already there.

I guess I just have to read up more. Thanks for letting me know the difference.

This I can do. Thanks!

Thank you for taking the time to write that, because I still have a few more distros to try and getting used to the various repos and installers is part of what I look at: having broad access to whatever apps I may need in the future is a big deal, so that is very valuable information for me anyway; and Fedora having access to all things Arch was a main selling point when I was trying Fedora spins and also EndeavourOS. This is much appreciated. Thanks!

Kinoite Fedora? This OS?

https://fedoraproject.org/kinoite/

I tried Fedora but it was a couple of the built-in spins, KDE and Budgie, none of the forks. This is the first I’ve heard of Kinoite, looks intriguing. I’ll have to give it a shot. Thanks!

I am absolutely loving Zorin Core as a no-command-line, works out of the box Linux OS.

I don’t mind a bit of command line, but I don’t think I’ve had to open Terminal at all in Zorin, and I’ve had it loaded for about three weeks. Printer installs were painless (HP), and what Windows support there is for Linux is largely built in already. I’m not a gamer, so I couldn’t tell you about that, but so far it’s superb and it has worked for me straight out of the box, everything intuitive and easy to find. There’s also a paid version of Zorin, but I haven’t decided on a distro yet so there’s no point.

Mint (Cinnamon desktop) was fault-free and zippy as hell on minimal hardware, and Pop! OS was also no command line for me, but I didn’t play with it very much and intend to reinstall it when I have more time because I don’t think I gave it a decent shake. (At this point I’m not only looking for distros for myself but also for the BIL, so I am making and testing LiveUSBs for both of us. I didn’t want to give him a LiveUSB for something I’d never installed myself so I wiped Pop! OS to be able to give him another distro I hadn’t already tried.)

I’ve tested over a dozen so far, but those are the most noob-friendly, command-line-free distros I have touched so far, if that helps.

EDITED for clarity

Before Lemmy, the last time I had touched Linux was back in the 90s, when it was Red Hat on a dozen+ floppies, minimal GUI, and almost all command line. It wasn’t bad, I just didn’t feel like working that hard and there weren’t all that many training resources for it, so I just slid back into to Mac and Windows. No loss.

But over time things change, and I’m not much of a Mac user anymore – their hardware is far too overpriced to keep reinvesting in it, IMO – and after aging out of regular updates on the last version of OS X that will run on my 2016 MacBook Pro, and then trying and failing to build a fully operational hackintosh on a newer Intel NUC, I just gave up and went back to Windows.

But now I’m here on Lemmy and it’s all Linux all the time, oh and Microsoft sucks but lets talk about Linux again, which was a bit much at first. But the truth is that I just hate Windows 10 anyway, always have, and am only using it because it’s pretty much the default now. So I guess I started listening.

After a few weeks of this Lemmy non-stop Linux promotion discussion, I decided to load it up on a 13 year old MacBook with minimal hardware and see if it was any better than what I remembered. If that old MacBook can run it, I thought, maybe I’ll just set it up as a spare. It’s free, why not?

Man, it screams. This is nothing like the Linux I remember from the 90s. Holy removed. Even setting up a Linux printer from a Windows share is almost effortless, and I have never been able to do that with only Windows machines. These are full-fledged, well-supported, well-documented operating systems with great video, audio and even peripheral support. And almost all free and open source (I haven’t paid for anything yet myself, though). I was shocked.

So now I’m trying out Linux distros one by one, wiping and then loading another, seeing what there is to see, and when I’ve tried out all the distros I want to try, I’ll install one and bring the rest of my hardware over to Linux. And not only that, but hardware that was just sitting on a shelf collecting dust is now back in full service, and I can think about things I would not have spent money on before, like building a Plex server or a pihole, because now I have a bunch of available hardware. Win/win/win.

TL;DR: People are praising Linux for a reason. Tune out if you want, but don’t be surprised if it ends up working on you anyway, lol.

EndeavorOS

I’ll add that to the list of distros I want to try, I hadn’t seen it before but it does run on minimal hardware. I like that it’s built on Arch because Arch itself is a good OS, but intimidating for a noob, lol. According to Distrowatch.com it’s near the top of their page hits so it must be popular. Thanks for the recommend!

Bungie will ban you for running destiny 2 on Linux.

That is so bizarre to me. According to this article, Destiny 2 was already playable on Linux when it was officially ported to Google Stadia, and no one, not even Bungie, can explain why they won’t support it on Linux or Steam Deck, much less ban a player for trying. That’s crazy.

I tried Budgie (packaged with Solus 4.4 “Harmony”) yesterday and loved it. It seemed fast enough even on this old MacBook with 4GB of RAM, but I was just test driving it on a live USB so I don’t know what it would do in a real world scenario. Even so, it was definitely the most pleasant OS/DE combo of all the distros I’ve tried so far.

Well, now I’m back to one USB at a time for Macs, using Rufus to do the deed and just overwriting the ones I know I won’t like. Same as it ever was. I think the problem has to do with how Ventoy interacts with the boot process that involves assumptions about Mac architecture; everything the author suggested, like enabling Grub2, just laughed and flashed the ol’ cursor. Not all Macs are the same under the hood and there have been some fairly big swings in architecture over the years, so when I read that he had not ever tested it specifically on a Macbook it made me think he tested it on one other Mac somewhere and that was enough for him, lol. I still think it’s genius just not on Macs.

Some of the distros I can try now; others have to wait until I get more memory in the Macbook. So right now I’m just doing preliminary look-sees just to find out if I like a given distro, and if it will find drivers and do hibernate without an issue. Funny thing is that one I can’t really look at yet except via review videos may be the one I go with: OpenSUSE Leap. As far as I can tell, it has no Live USB trial, you have to install it. But it’s incredibly feature rich, can bend to a user’s needs even if those needs aren’t foreseen out of the box, it’s not overly CLI dependent but CLI tools are there if you prefer them, has an extensive selection of software, supports multiple package handlers, and most importantly, the wiki is very complete. I just can’t install it until I get more RAM in the test box, lol.

I expect similar with Debian, to be honest, just because it’s so robust, though Debian does support live USB preview. Same with Pop! OS, there is a live USB preview but I have to wait until I get more RAM into the test box.

But of the ones I’ve tried so far, Linux Lite 6.4 seemed kludgy and repellent (not sure why, but I hated it); Zorin OS 16.3 Core was visually gorgeous but seemed VERY limited in other ways (maybe the paid tier would be different); Solus 4.4 “Harmony” with Budgie was responsive, intuitive, and fabulous to use but I need to look under the hood further, and Linux Mint 21.2 remains the winner so far, but I would rather go with a different desktop than Cinnamon (I do not find Cinnamon intuitive) so it’s on the list to retry with Kfce.

So I’m still looking. And now I have an in-law with an old MacBook Pro who is also paying close attention in case I find something, lol. But it’s all free and it’s been years since I did something like this, so I’m happy. Thanks again for your help!