• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • OpenShot went terribly for me. Cool idea but did not work. Ate hours and hours of editing by failing to export. I tried everything, even opening Github issues to figure out where the problem was. Systematically re-cut and edited and moved every clip. Still couldn’t get it to export even though everything worked flawlessly in editing and previewing. Tried switching to latest, alpha, whatever, none of them could export. Absolute nightmare. Do not recommend. Eventually had to re-do everything in kdenlive.







  • There is an apt variant that can do this, but nobody uses it. BitTorrent isn’t great for lots of small files overhead wise.

    IPFS is better for this than torrents. The question is always “how much should the client seed before they stop seeding and how longs should they attempt to seed before they give up”. I agree something like this should exist, I have no problem quickly re-donating any bandwidth I use.




  • I think you can still have users decide which projects get funding and have the system/organization/smart contract/etc automatically distribute funds to the libraries those projects depend on. 80% to the project, 20% to the libraries, etc.

    If we let devs decide which projects get funding, they’re just going to always pick their own project. Since that doesn’t align with what users want, users won’t want to donate. If you want users to donate, you need to let them have some say in what their projects their donations go to.


  • The discussion portion wouldn’t happen over BTC, that’s just for funds management and voting. Discussion could happen on a forum, lemmy community, matrix chat, discord hangout, or other space. I suggest BTC because with smart contracts you can automate the voting process among stakeholders and make it so you don’t need to trust any single party to hold onto the money. It solves this exact problem of coordinating financial transactions with multiple people who can’t trust each other. It also solves the “how do we accept donations internationally easily” problem. Bitcoin has a market cap which places it in the top 25 countries by GDP, higher than Sweden. 850 billion dollars. On average, adoption and market cap grows year on on year. It may not be the USD, but it’s already more widely accepted than most national currencies.

    Re: kivach, it’s not more widely used because many people don’t know about it, it’s using a lesser known cryptocurrency as a base, and people reflexively go “eew crypto” even though it’s perfect for solving these kinds of problems. Anytime you have a distributed decision-making process that needs to be international and you don’t want to trust a single party or parties to manage that system, crypto is good at solving that problem. Most people know it for solving that problem in the realm of currency production and decentralizing finance, but it has much broader implications in terms of anywhere you have distributed decision making. Note that kivach doesn’t have any kind of distributed decision making or voting, it’s basically just a smart contract bot that distributes coins based on github dependencies.

    Bringing the state into this just brings us a bunch of problems and no solutions. For one, every state or block of states has different currency, and for every state whose population you want to participate, you have to some how bridge access to that state’s banking system and incorporate it into the system. And you can’t do it in a decentralized way, so you need some legal entity to be formed to handle all this and the staff to do all this. So that’s a nightmare. State-backed currencies can’t easily or cheaply be transmitted electronically across borders, and often, even within the same country. Or you have to use some third-party service like PayPal or Venmo to do this, which is its own set of complications. More nightmare. Plus, hello fees and making microtransactions prohibitively expensive. And that’s just moving funds from A to B, that’s not even getting into managing the voting system and navigating the laws every single country whose currency you use, each of which are going to have their own interpretation of whether or not your voting system is compliant with their legal system and whether or not they agree that funding a project like the Tor project is allowed. You may say you don’t care what Turkeys laws say, but if you want to maintain a bridge to their banking system, you have to. So that’s what incorporating the state and fiat system brings you. Or, you could write a smart contract once and have the administration of this system run automatically forever and be available to anyone in any country automatically. Running an international organization which receives funds, holds funds, votes on how to distribute those funds, distributes those funds is exactly the kind of thing blockchain excels at.


  • I would be interested in this as a user and as a dev for OSS projects. I currently donate to a few projects via OpenCollective, Github sponsors, etc. A few options:

    • Users vote on how the money is spent, perhaps in proportion to how much they have donated over time. I think this is the simplest model that prevents self-dealing and accurately transmits user interest. You could use a quadratic funding model to better represent user interest instead of just giving the most vote weight to the users with the most money. On the other hand, assigning vote weight based on donations over time incentivizes users to donate more and keep donating (stopping a recurring donation could result in loss of vote weight and help redistribute vote weight as users become less active). You could also do a hybrid model: 50% is assigned according to vote weight based on total donations, 50% is assigned based on quadratic funding.
    • Developers vote on how the money is spent. I don’t know how to allocate vote weight here. Devs should also submit a list of downstream libraries which would receive donations. (or is it upstream?).
    • User and developers both vote on how it is spent. Vote weight could be distributed however, for example, 50% to users 50% to devs.

    This kind of a system would be very possible to implement as a DAO, there are templates out there for making an organization like this. You could use BTC or ETH, both support DAOs. The benefit there is that since no single entity holds the money, no single entity has to file taxes and claim that money as income. It also automates the voting process and solves the issue of users having to trust a single person or organization to hold and distribute the funds. Making a DAO on Bitcoin lightning could reduce tx fees to less than a penny per donation.

    You could also incorporate it as a non-profit depending on your jurisdiction. Many organizations like the Linux foundation have pursued this route, look at what things they have tried and what has worked. Also just a link to leave here for your research, I’m not suggesting you use this, I’m just saying it’s relevant interesting thinking in this area: https://blog.obyte.org/kivach-cascading-donations-for-github-repositories-2b175bdbff77

    Other relevant links/research for you: https://github.com/Resolvr-io and https://nostrocket.org/About

    Also research Gitcoin, they have used quadratic funding to fund a number of OSS web3 projects in a similar manner to what you’re proposing. I have participated in a few of their funding rounds as a donor and a recipient. Their interface is a mess but the concept is cool.


  • If you are going to “be your own bank” you need some very basic computer security skills like:

    • Research the reputation of the wallet you are going to use.
    • Don’t download wallets which aren’t open source
    • Download wallets from their official dev site, not some third party repo.
    • Don’t use Facebook search to find a wallet.
    • If you are storing significant funds, use a multi-sig wallet.
    • If you are not 100% confident in the security of a given wallet or system, send a smaller test transaction first before sending larger amounts

    If you can’t be trusted to do that, you need to pick a trusted custodian to manage access to your funds (you know, like banks), preferably somebody who can get an insurance company to under-write your no-opsec-having-ass. Unfortunately, in the crypto world, these trusted custodians few and far between and have a terrible track record with exchange collapses etc. It’s getting better, but it’s still a mess. Hopefully as time goes on and the industry gets better regulated and more mature, this will be an easier thing to do.


  • The fact that Linux lacks a decent system-level backup tool with a GUI is kind of a mind boggler for me. The best one I’ve found which gets close to this is timeshift. File-level backups can’t restore your whole system state and users shouldn’t be expected to remember or manually export their package lists and god knows what else. I have subsisted on file-only backups but it’s really not great as a solution. Disks fail, and when they do, you inevitably have to reinstall the entire OS. It’s a mess. RAID1 could theoretically prevent this, but no distro makes it easy to boot from a RAID1 setup.

    Backing up the entire filesystem is not a technically complex thing, there are plenty of command-line tools to do this and some filesystems even support this concept via snapshots etc. But this has yet to be put into a useful practice for end users.


  • Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

    • Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
    • On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
    • On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
    • On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
    • Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

    Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081



  • Because you can choose which relays to connect to and you typically connect to multiple relays. This is all seamless. On Mastodon/fedi, an instance controls your entire view of the fediverse unless you make a separate account elsewhere and check it separately. You can’t follow or be followed by users or instances they block even if you want to. They also control your identity, since it’s tied to a relay/instance. If your relay shuts down or your account gets banned, you have to make a new account elsewhere, re-follow everybody, get everybody to re-follow you, etc. It’s a mess.

    On nostr, instance/relay admins only control that goes through their specific relay. Relay admins can, of course, share common blocklists if they want for anti-spam or anti-abuse purposes. If you want to follow somebody blocked by a relay, you are connected to other relays and the signal can flow through there. You don’t need to check multiple relays separately. If your relay closes, you don’t lose your account/identity.




  • Nostr vs Mastodon on Privacy & Autonomy:

    • Relay/instance admins can choose which content goes through their relay on either platform
    • On nostr, your DMs are encrypted. In Mastodon, the admin of the sender and receiver can read them, as can anybody else who breaks into their server
    • On nostr, a relay admin can control what goes through their relay, but they can’t stop you from following/DMing/being followed by whoever you want since you are typically connected to multiple relays at once. As long as one relay allows it, signal flows. Nostr provides the best of both worlds: moderated “public squares” according to your moderation preferences, autonomy to follow/dm/be followed by anybody you want (assuming that individual user hasn’t blocked you).
    • On mastodon, your identity is tied to your instance. If your instance goes down, you lose your follow/followee list, DMs, etc. On Nostr, it’s not, so this doesn’t happen. Mastodon provides some functionality to migrate identity between instances but it’s clunky and generally requires to have some form of advanced notice.
    • Both have all the same functions as twitter: tweet, reply, re-tweet, DM, like, etc.

    Why I think nostr will win https://lemmy.ml/post/11570081