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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldZeroTrust Your Home
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    24 days ago

    When done correctly, the banner is actually a consent banner. It’s a legal thing, not necessarily trying to discourage criminals. It’s informing users that all use will be monitored and it implies their consent to the technology policies of the organization. It’s more for regular users than criminals.

    When it’s just “unauthorized access is prohibited”, though, especially on a single-user server? Not really any point. But since this article was based on compliance guidelines that aren’t all relevant to the homelab, I can see how it got warped into the empty “you no hack” banner.


  • But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

    You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

    Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.


  • The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

    But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to removed off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

    Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.





  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlHow do you say SUSE?
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    6 months ago

    Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.

    LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.


  • That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

    What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

    Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.



  • This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It’s also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called “eggs” by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

    But I don’t think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you’re not trans, correct me if I’m wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn’t account for that at all. I don’t think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There’s clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what’s socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as “liking having breasts or a vagina” or “liking having a penis”, and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one’s body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

    Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren’t necessarily related to just what we’re “allowed” to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don’t see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

    Your theory also doesn’t account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

    All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don’t think that being trans is merely a result of one’s likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can’t be reduced to such a simple cause.




  • The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?

    It seems to me that anything that’s being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don’t want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don’t post publicly.

    I guess I just assume that everything I’m posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there’s no way to ensure it’s not. It’s ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there’s a conflict between the protocol and the culture.


  • Harry Potter spaces are not unique in creating structure. There are tons of fandoms, with millions of members. It’s not the first modern fandom by any means either. It’s not like if HP suddenly disappeared there wouldn’t be any fandoms of equivalent or larger size to provide “structure” to vulnerable people. Lots of them have more queer people in them too, and less transphobia.

    I’m not sure what makes Harry Potter uniquely digital in your mind either. I’m sure you can interpret it as being about that, but I don’t think that’s the interpretation most people walk away with. Even if it really is a lens some people use to understand the Internet or whatnot, I certainly don’t think it’s the first story to be used in that way… There are a lot of stories that can claim that title that far predate Harry Potter, many of which have fandoms of their own.

    I just don’t think HP is an essential backbone of culture. It’s important to a lot of people, for sure. And I can’t imagine what it’s like to realize that the creator of a work that’s so important to you is a terrible person. That has got to be a really removedty situation to be in. But there are other fandoms out there. There’s other great fiction, written by authors who won’t weaponize your consumption against minorities. It’s not a dichotomy of either you embrace Harry Potter or you must write your own.


  • I love to be able to reclaim works from their hateful authors, especially cultural ones. I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, and that dude was hateful. He makes JK Rowling look sweet and kindly. But it’s a lot easier to reclaim the narrative and make it a part of our culture when the author is literally dead.

    Lovecraft is a cornerstone of modern fiction, despite being a bigot. We can acknowledge how he was a terrible person, even analyze it, but we know that our enjoyment of Lovecraftian fiction isn’t benefiting Lovecraft’s hateful causes, especially because the work is public domain.

    In contrast, JK Rowling is not only still alive, she is active and vocal about her hatred, how she spends her money towards hate, and how she considers support of Harry Potter in light of her hate to be support of her vile views.

    Consumption of media is not a passive action. Even if you do not actively give any money to the franchise, promoting the franchise encourages other people to do so, and then their money goes to fund hate.

    I understand that HP is important to a lot of people. It was a cultural phenomenon. But we aren’t leaving it behind just because JK Rowling said something offensive. We’re leaving it behind because the author is actively using our consumption to fund hate and campaigning to deny rights to trans people.

    There are plenty of other forms of media, new and old, that aren’t being piloted by known bigots. If you want a cultural backbone, using one that is currently controlled by a bigot will probably make a lot of trans people feel unwelcome at best and at worst, if HP continues to be a cultural phenomenon on a large scale JK Rowling will use the platform and the money to further the oppression of transgender rights.



  • There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very slow to defederate, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating when the instance itself is the problem.

    Defederation splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.

    That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.

    I agree though that the freedom of FOSS moreso lies with admins, as they’re the ones deploying the software so they can choose how to run their instance, whether that means federating with everyone or just running a completely defederated Lemmy instance with no peer instances.


  • What Google/Facebook did, while a little silly, at least makes some sense because they’re segregating the product from the megacorp that owns the product. They maintain the benefits of having consistent branding while also separating out their corporate interests under a new name. In Google’s case, Google still exists as a subsidiary of Alphabet, while in Facebook’s case Facebook is not a separate company anymore but it still exists as just one of the platforms that Meta operates.

    With X, the product itself was renamed, and in so doing the branding was destroyed. There’s no good reason to do this as far as I can tell.