Oh, I thought you meant no email address required to make an account.

Just having to register in order to read the feed is probably just for server load reasons, if I had to guess.

That’s not how it works though.

I actually agree that registration is silly. It’s trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it’s probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.

Hey did anyone say loops yet?

Oh… yeah, you’re right. No idea then.

Even your own posts will be hidden from your own profile, if you have “show read posts” unchecked, I think. Like I say it has some pretty weird behavior sometimes.

• Do you maybe have “show read posts” unchecked? That’s a deceptive setting.
• Are you on a different instance than where the posts were originally created (meaning they might have been blocked or otherwise not federated to where you’re checking from)?

Yeah, probably. The other side of “this is so badly needed why haven’t you done it for us” is “if this is so badly needed why haven’t any of the server admins or mods implemented it yet.”

I feel like this is an example of how the core dev team running on an instance that basically just has 3 of the admins do more or less all the moderation for the entire site is not ideal. This type of feature is probably one of the most-requested pain points for most people who run most servers, but my guess is that it’s basically completely invisible to the .ml team why it would even be needed, because their model works fine for them, so why would they.

Of course they’ve got a right to work or not work on whatever they want, but if their goal is success and good moderation for most servers this type of scalability and teamwork enabling thing is super important.

Yeah this looks super unstable in the long run, and they look vulnerable to heat / heavy rain in a way that will interfere with their life expectancy even if they stay in place on the roof.

Maybe it’s temporary, or maybe I’m wrong and she knows what she is doing. Maybe the cords that are laid along the roof are anchoring the whole thing in place somehow. Maybe that little balcony below is already chocked up full with plants, and she’s putting the surplus up here and staying alive is their problem.

No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

• Librewolf is also quite a good browser
• Piefed seems like it’s shaping up to be better than Lemmy in a few different ways and it’s compatible with all the Lemmy people

But then where will I deploy my AI moderator?

See my other comment. I wasn’t saying at all that Lemmy was a US-only thing, I was just trying to say that that the whole network is probably enough of a niche platform that it’s not worth the substantial effort that would be involved in trying to interfere too much with US users on non-US instances. Big instances in the US, they can fuck with, and so why not (and especially since the Take it Down act is structured to empower individuals to go after them without the government needing to spend resources on it.) Instances outside the US, never mind, we have bigger fish to fry.

Oh, I am sure most of Lemmy is outside the US. I was saying that, in general, Lemmy (and even Mastodon) is probably too small and difficult a problem for them to want to attack through any systematic method. I think, if anything, they’ll just surveil and punish individual US-based users as opposed to trying to shut down or block instances outside the US.

It’s one of the advantages of ActivityPub services. Bluesky will be easy for them to attack at the root and I fully expect them to do so, whereas for truly federated services I think the reaction will be “ah what the hell too much trouble, how much harm can they really do.”

No, they will just make server operators liable for obeying any conservative who has an issue with any content there and can make the right format of complaint.

I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with. Small, scattered opposition that is subject to deliberate trolling and disruption at any scale anyone feels like deploying will simply not be worth bothering with.

This is all assuming if a big internet-censorship operation starts (which it seems likely that it will). I think it will mainly focus on large based-in-the-US companies which host large services. Notably among them will be Bluesky. The only impact it will have on anything ActivityPub-based is that they will shut down or muzzle some big instances inside the US, and then, the point being made, they will probably move on, leaving instances outside the US to do whatever they want. That’s my prediction.

Oh, also, Palantir’s surveillance will incorporate people’s comments into their overall dossier on the person, regardless of where their instance is, which means that anyone who maintains a big presence on an ActivityPub network will be putting themselves at person risk of neo-deportation to somewhere they can never get free from. It will still be legal to do, though. Sure.

Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

on the 50 communities here on lemmy he mods to silence discussion that doesn’t align with his views.

Who is he on Lemmy? I didn’t know he was here too. Do you have some examples of silencing discussion that doesn’t align with his views?

I’m aware of reports of him doing messed-up moderation on Reddit, which is sus. If it sounded like I was in his corner I am not. I’m just saying like you were that more clarity would be better.

Edit: There’s also this and this

Yeah. The instant I read “racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views in a position of power” I strongly suspected that this is some bullshit.

IDK man. I’ve heard bad things about carrotcypher before, I have not looked into them one way or another. It’s sort of dicey both ways: I’m paranoid enough to be wary of a moderator who seems right-wing or pro-corporate who seems to be abusing their position, and also paranoid enough to be wary of a sudden hue and cry that a particular moderator needs to be removed because they are “problematic” in poorly-specified ways.

Just taking a cursory look at it: Mike’s defense of carrotcypher seems pretty credible. He looked at all carrotcypher’s past moderation actions and decided that it all looked fine and explained why with details. The criticism seemed a little unhinged. The one link that I saw at a quick glance was a link to a single one-line reddit comment, saying that it called CNN propaganda when it didn’t, and saying he favored deporting Mahmoud Khalil when he didn’t.

Then there was a bunch of stuff like:

this is a wildly disgusting person that you welcome into your space. i know that as a trans woman i cannot trust any fosstodon user while knowing what kind of person you happily let on your staff, whether theyre acting on those beliefs or not. it’s not safe for our mostly queer userbase to talk to your fascist-harboring userbase.

It would have been much easier to just link to some of the messed-up things, instead of asserting them and getting all upset and using the “I’m queer so don’t you DARE argue with me or you will be a ‘problematic’ person too” card.

IDK, I’m not decided on carrotcypher specifically and he might be a big POS and I just haven’t seen it yet. I have seen arguments that he removed particular reddit posts that there was no legitimate reason to remove. I just wish there was more light and less heat about why exactly he is a problem. Basing it on “this is stuff he removed that he shouldn’t have, look, links” is way better, in my opinion, than just being loudly upset about it.

There’s a whole quantitative science of this in fishery management. It’s called “maximum sustainable yield.” I wish I could find the quote, but someone very accurately summarized the whole philosophy as “preserving the wreckage.”