By god, imagine the labor savings we’re about to experience

Oh yeah, certainly. The US Government isn’t openly censoring the Internet and most of the ‘censorship’ is done by private individuals (who, I would argue, have even more power over the average person’s life).

I’m not making a false equivalence, just pointing out that even if the government isn’t doing it the people in the US shouldn’t be so smug because they are also getting viewpoint-filtered Internet, except their viewpoint dictator is some tech bro billionaire of questionable morality.

I will say, to the passive readers, it’s very possible to live without a site that recommends you content. Avoiding those sites avoids a huge amount of propaganda and emotional priming (which affects you even if you know it is misleading, very important!). Get your news from reputable polls, primary sources (like court documents and case filings) and trusted news organizations (which absolutely exist, despite the drumbeat of ‘don’t trust the media(trust Elon instead!)’ propaganda over the past decade).

Delete Meta, TikTok and X as if your sanity depends on it. Stay away from Reddit, stay away from Lemmy communities that primarily pedal in content that makes you angry, outraged or afraid. If you see a piece of media that makes you outraged, angry, afraid or to think conspiratorially stay far away. Those emotions can be primed into your subconsciousness through content that you rationally know is misleading, knowing that something is misleading does not protect you from being conditioned by it.

Read psychological textbooks about how this works. Look for terms like respondent conditioning, semantic/context/social priming. The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack are excellent documentaries that show the technology involved(The Social Dilemma) and how it can be used to affect political outcomes like Brexit and Trump’s first campaign (The Great Hack, and also any journalism covering Cambridge Analytica).

These are techniques that have been used for advertising purposes for a long time. Now instead of promoting body shame to make you buy makeup, they’re selling conspiratorial thinking so that you doubt the reality that you see with your own eyes or fear of government agents so you avoid the polls and fear of social/career/legal retribution so that you don’t speak your mind on social media.

Get rid of that garbage and protect yourself from this kind of attack, anyone who is paying attention can see the damage being caused in the world… this is how it is being done. Delete it.

I don’t think promoting population growth through cutting off porn, there’s no data to suggest a correlation between those two things.

Population growth is more influenced by providing the population with enough income and secure housing so that they’re not stressed and scared all of the time. This would hurt earnings and that would upset the handful of people who control most of the private/public equity in the country, so obviously this will not stand a chance of happening until they can’t buy politicians.

Banning porn is mostly a ‘I’m going to do this thing for this niche group in order to get votes to get/stay in power’. It’s to give the social conservatives/Sunday preachers an excuse to talk politics and to do campaign rallies for the people voting for the bills.

You’re welcome. It is way easier than you’re expecting I promise.

Not that you won’t run into problems, every OS including Windows has problems that require reading, troubleshooting and jumping through hoops. An example I love is that trying to create a local user account on Windows 11 has more steps than the entire Linux Mint install.

The problems in Linux often come with logs, error messages and debug information which can make it a lot easier to diagnose correctly (instead of just changing random shit as dictated by assorted Googled Reddit posts from 5 years ago). It may look like heiroglyphics at first, but you’ll be able to see the matrix soon enough.

If my account still exists, you can reach out if you have problems and I’ll point you in the right direction at least. Enjoy :)

The goalposts didn’t shift, you started talking to a different person.

This person says that this issue is small, the impact of exploiting this system would be minor (if it ever happened), and the hypothetical attack on this subsystem is also demonstrably not occurring.

Therefore, treating this issue as if it were some sort of red-line issue or, really, even worth discussing outside of the context of the project itself (where changes can actually be implemented) is misrepresenting reality.

As to your direct point, it wasn’t my point but I do agree with it so I’m happy to directly address your argument.

The quote you seem to take issue with was :

Wait, Digg gave the community to a Reddit moderator so Reddit could control the communities with the same name on both platforms? That’s wild.

That’s also how the corporate side of Reddit works. Someone will register a subreddit, and then a bunch of related ones, so anybody who tries to use any of them has to follow the same set of rules — and if you piss off the wrong person in one, they can ban you from all of them. They can also use their “first” or “official” or even “user count” status to bully smaller subs into redirecting to them. Effectively centralising information.

The Fediverse doesn’t work like that.

Or, more plainly:

The Fediverse doesn’t allow a single user to scoop up all of the similarly named/themed communities and use that power to dominate those topics of conversation.

Your reply:

Maybe Mastodon does not, but Lemmy, in particular lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances, which is baked right into the code and there is no way to change it. A third-party listing could have been used instead but… no, this is rather much more on-brand for the Lemmy developers to have chosen.

Your reply references code affecting the Lemmy server instance, that runs once on server instantiation, which uses lemmy.ml as the source to populate the list of communities that users of the new instance will see when they click the ‘Communities’ link at the top. This is true.

Your inference that lemmy.ml has the ability to veto what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances is a bit of hyperbole. Lemmy.ml is the source of the initial list, true.

But new instances acknowledge communities existing regardless of those community’s status with lemmy.ml. The moment that a single user reads a single comment in a community that isn’t on the initially seeded list, then it appears in the new instance’s community list regardless of the status of that community on lemmy.ml.

If we were a security researcher and were analyzing the scope of this problem we would consider that

1. This only affects new instances, so the vast population of Lemmy as it stands now, is not affected by this code at all. Only a hypothetical future population.

2. The list on lemmy.ml is not treated as authoritative. Outside of the initial values, lemmy.ml is not checked for any other functions related to adding or displaying communities

3. Any attempts by lemmy.ml to game this system are both not happening and also easily detectable as the list is public and can be compared to other instances.

So, this veto power isn’t being used. If lemmy.ml were attempting to leverage this power, it would be detectable. In the worst case, if were actively being exploited then it would affect very few people(none of the current Lemmy community), and the people that it did affect are impacted only until a user reads a comment or post from a ‘vetoed’ community.

Also, this is an open source project so saying things like:

and there is no way to change it.

Simply make no sense at all.

You can change it. Any admin who thinks it may be a problem can change it. I linked to the exact section of code where you can just change the URL and compile the .rs file again to use a different instance.

You could change it so that the URL is read from the options file that the administrator sets prior to launching the instance. You could also submit that as a PR so that future administrators could just apply your patch (independent of it being accepted by Lemmy) because that’s how open source development works. That’s what the quote that you provided means:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it

• Nutomic

It sounds dismissive, because it is. This isn’t a product, you’re not a consumer. You’re going to people who donate their time and telling them to do work in a way that you want it done. They may agree, and you may be able to make good arguments to convince them but if they don’t, then brigading social media or spamming their issue tracker with requests isn’t going to get it done.

If you don’t like it fork it and fix it. It is a fundamental concept in open source software that you can always fix problems that you see and other people can use your fixes regardless of what the project thinks. If you think the project is going in the wrong direction then you are perfectly within your rights to take a copy of the code and develop it in your own way and if you can find other people who believe like you do then they can use your changes as they see fit.

But going online and misrepresenting the risk of some code update that you disagree with by exaggerating the scope of the problem isn’t how you get anything done except creating needless drama.

the above humorous example bypasses very many very good safety precautions and conveniences.

I was taught in school that security and convenience are diametrically opposed, so if you can find any way of making this less secure/more convenient I’d be happy to deploy it to the entire credit union.

They’ll probably still get pornhub though, right?

Exactly, China filters their Internet. Just like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead of being at the whims of two rich individuals it’s at the whim of the government.

Not that one is better than the other, but US users experience the same (from a technical standpoint, not ideologically) kind of filtering but they’re not told that it is the great Zuck firewall or the great Elon firewall even though it is used in the same way to filter topics and ideas that the owner doesn’t like.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

I agree with you, but it looks like you intended to respond to Sierk directly :P

Yeah, for sure. Be aware, make your point known and offer alternatives… in the project that you want to change.

Stirring shit on social media isn’t contributing.

Create an issue in the issue tracker is free and takes as much time as writing a post on social media.

This specific issue is something that is 1. Not an issue because the hypothesized ‘attack’ that’s available to lemmy.ml using this system is not being done and, if it was, would be easily detectable. 2. Trivial to change for any instance owner who wants to make another instance the source of their initial community grab. This code is ran once, when the instance first stands up, in order to receive a list of communities to populate the ‘Communities’ tab at the top and after that uses the exact same system as every other instance for adding and removing items from that list based on the local user’s subscriptions. It has no impact on existing servers or communities.

The impact of this issue is currently non-existent and relies on a hypothetical situation that isn’t occurring. If the bar is that low for someone so that they will crash out on social media and swap projects, well that someone is going to be very busy swapping projects… because the FOSS world has an endless source of technical quibbles like this.

I’d be happy to help (and if you run into problems going forward, just message me directly).

Linux Mint is probably the most often recommended for new people coming from Windows. But EndeavourOS will let you tell everyone that you use Arch without having to install your system via the terminal (EOS uses a graphical installer also).

For Mint, Choose the Cinnamon version (this can be changed later but this is a good default choice). KDE Plasma is the most popular DE and you can change to different DEs just by logging out and changing a dropdown menu.

I linked the install guide above. TLDR - copy iso to usb stick, reboot, click through the graphical install process. If you’ve ever installed Windows, this will be very familiar (where do you want to install it, what username, where in the world are you, and login to wifi)

It is much less complicated if you can have a Linux-only machine. But if you want to keep Windows around for a bit, you can dual boot: Mint

All of the software is installed with the package manager from the official repos. Everyone is familiar with this method of installing software because smartphones use them but call them App Stores/Play Store. You don’t download executables from the Internet and just run them 😒

There’s a lot of new terms and concepts so it’ll be overwhelming. Lean on the official Mint communitues, they’re generally helpful (there are assholes, like everywhere else of course), be prepared to read documentation and don’t be afraid to ask an LLM to explain concepts if you can’t get a community answer fast enough but don’t trust the commands that it gives you yet (you’ll learn how to do this safely but not at the start).

If you game, Steam can be installed from the repo, via and Heroic Games Launcher for GoG, Epic Games Store and(???, there are more but you get the idea) make the process as simple as pressing Play.

You’ll probably use different software to do the same tasks so don’t try to find ms-paint or notepad, but Krita and Kate do the same thing and there are many alternatives to those. If you can’t figure it out, dm me.

Good luck. It’s a lot at first but it is 1000% a better experience once you become comfortable with the software.

It’s also a hypothetical, not the actual reality.

If it ever becomes a problem then it requires editing a single line of code (which could easily be setup to read a user-specified location if the complainer wants to change things). It takes 45 seconds to locate the changes: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/8c2303a1e7b784689471a6670a28354b7dff82ad#diff-8a74e1aa82158c28d9695f1f124a49078129391eee455cc691aa330ad11664d5 in build.rs

Complaing about Lemmy while not doing anything to contribute to fixing the problem shows that some people are mentally stuck in Reddit and don’t understand open source processes.

There’s no product manager being paid to scan social media looking for complaints to relay to development.

If someone notices a problem or has a problem with the design then the answer is to create an issue on the issue tracker for the project. It’s even better if you edit the code how you think it should be and include a pull request.

The answer isn’t to misrepresent changes or discussion from the issue tracker in order to stir up anger and outrage.

In the FOSS world, if you want things to change then go change them.

If the President chooses to sanction them, yes. A judge cannot impose that kind of sanction because they have limited jurisdiction.

The court can order you to pay, and it can order US banks to seize your money. But a US court cannot order France to seize your money.

Basically, judgements are a judicial function with a more limited scope and sanctions are akin to foreign policy but can extend as far as we are able to force/negotiate.

OK, so if I set up a lawsuit against OCLC in my country where they don’t reside, and they fail to show up to contest the charges, I get to claim they admitted guilt by default?

Assuming your country’s laws are roughly based on British common law, yes.

Winning a case is easy. How you enforce the judgement is much harder.

This is why the speculation is that they will not comply. If the servers are not in reach of the US, the owners are not in a country that will extradite them, they don’t store money in US banks and the US doesn’t stupidly commit war crimes in order to capture them… then ignoring the court order is about as hard as you ignoring North Korean law.

Oh yeah, 100% agree.

You’re right that their plan won’t literally work as they’ve designed it, but they have the right idea and ideas can be refined.

I can’t fault them, their heart is in the right place even if they don’t actually know what to do.

Give 'em tips as you can and wait a few years, we were all idiots at one point

Don’t judge me

If you want to make Microsoft’s CEO cry then you install Linux and convince all of your friends to do the same.

Using their OS, feeding them telemetry, being opted into their cloud storage but swapping some letters in your browser content is about as useless as mopping a sewer pipe.

Those things are not mutually exclusive

and, hypocrisy is kind of in right now