Andreas

Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

No, it’s 100% economics. Why do you think that having “careers, lives and travel” (as if having a family is not having a life?) is more appealing to modern first worlders? Because it doesn’t impact their finances severely. Having more children in impoverished countries is a financial gain because children are free labor and lottery tickets to get the entire family out of poverty. In wealthy countries, children are only a financial loss.

I have two phones as daily drivers, one Android and one iPhone. Compared to Android, the iPhone is very restrictive and locked down. Adblockers don’t work and you’re forced to use whatever iOS interface it throws at you. Buttons and gestures move around with every update. There’s no way to view and manage internal files, no sideloading, lots of options that are just not accessible to normal users.

The positive side is that iPhones are very optimized and I can get similar performance to my Android phone despite the iPhone being older and having worse specs. The closed ecosystem also has its benefits, because it makes data very hard to get out, so I use the iPhone as a device to sandbox all the Meta crap that I’m forced to use.

Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it’s inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

It’s Estonian (.ee is the country code for Estonia) but it’s also a cool domain hack and the owner opened it to everyone.

Older than 30 nope, tech enthusiast yes, Linux user sort of, because my self-hosting servers run Linux but my personal daily driver is Windows. Windows native art programs have a lot of responsiveness problems and other random issues when running on Linux, and it’s annoying to have to boot up a separate OS to use specific programs.

Taking the extremely tech-unsavvy fanartist community as a reference, it’s not that federation and choosing a server is that difficult, that’s just a lame excuse. Their usual social media platforms do UI redesigns, A/B testing and introduce weird limitations all the time. They just learn to cope with it.

People who don’t care about tech don’t think about the websites they use at all. In their minds, websites are just omnipresent things that exist naturally, like the sun. They only care about whether the website is able to connect them to their friends and showcase their posts to other people. They will only pay attention to the website if it introduces a change that affects their daily usage of it negatively, just like how people don’t consciously think about the sun unless it inconveniences them.

That’s why I suggested Revanced with “disable recommendations” patches. It’s still Youtube and there is no new platform to learn.

I think it’s sad how so many of the comments are sharing strategies about how to game the Youtube algorithm, instead of suggesting ways to avoid interacting with the algorithm at all, and learning to curate content on your own.

The algorithm doesn’t actually care that it’s promoting right-wing or crazy conspiracy content, it promotes whatever that keeps people’s eyeballs on Youtube. The fact is that this will always be the most enraging content. Using “not interested” and “block this channel” buttons doesn’t make the algorithm stop trying to advertise this content, you’re teaching it to improve its strategy to manipulate you!

The long-term strategy is to get people away from engagement algorithms. Introduce OP’s mother to a patched Youtube client that blocks ads and algorithmic feeds (Revanced has this). “Youtube with no ads!” is an easy way to convince non-technical people. Help her subscribe to safe channels and monitor what she watches.

Using Piped/Invidious/NewPipe/insert your preferred alternative frontend or patched client here (Youtube legal threats are empty, these are still operational) helps even more to show you only the content you have opted in to.

Yes, it started from this terminology change at Twitter in 2020. They’re the reason that version control systems call the primary branch ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ by default, because ‘master’ comes from the master/slave terminology that is used in electronics hardware design.

There’s a comment here saying that master/slave in hardware design is being replaced by primary/secondary because of the software trend, which I think is stupid. Master/slave works much better in that context because the master device controls the slave device. Primary/secondary implies that the slave device is a fallback of the master device.

It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

This instance is hosted in Germany, one of the countries with the strictest anti-piracy laws? Seems like a very risky decision (I’m aware that a lot of the good and affordable hosting providers are German).

This made me realize that I relied on Reddit a lot to decide on making tech-related purchases. I assumed that the contributors to Reddit’s tech subs are enthusiasts who genuinely want to help others improve their systems and avoid scams. Thank you Reddit for being so open about sneaking sponsored content into discussions so that I can stop trusting your site!

Given the number of bots on the internet trying to crack captchas, this is already happening. I don’t think captchas are being used for AI training that much, since hCaptcha uses AI-generated images with prompts like “Select the images with a hamster eating a watermelon” for its tests. All of the reCaptcha road captchas I receive also have answer validation and won’t let me pass if I answer incorrectly because of a misclick.

Surely that already happened in the Code of Conduct drama a few years back? Or the “Linus is rude and difficult to work with” callout even before that?

Gloating? Complaining? I thought the FOSS community has matured past “creator’s views = views of everyone who uses their creation”, honestly. And isn’t Linus supporting the Democratic party already well known?

The history is that Lemmy was originally created as an independent forum for communists. Later, the devs experimented with ActivityPub federation and created the first federated Reddit alternative. The software itself is neutral and can be used by anyone, but the original communist users of Lemmy before federation was implemented are still around. The politics of Lemmy’s original community scared off a lot of potential users from exploring federated Reddit, but bringing more users and awareness to Lemmy will also attract politically neutral developers who can maintain a good alternative.

An alternative is not even necessary if the devs are able to leave their ideologies out of the software’s design, which I believe they are doing well.