It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model

Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.

There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.

People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.

Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You’re just sending something to an address, not CC’ing literally everyone all the time.

Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.

The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.

Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.

We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it’s simple, but it’s really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.

When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you’re seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.

That’s not the case with the fediverse. There’s no simple default. You have to build it yourself.

Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn’t call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.

Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.

There’s no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.

Can we be honest about this, please?

Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.

What they’ve done in the past has earned them trust, but it is irrelevant to what they intend to do in the future. Bitwarden is growing company, not the scrappy little open source app they once were.

In 2022, a private equity firm injected 100m into Bitwarden. From that point forward, users are rightfully going to scrutinize any action they take because it’s 2024 and the tech space is a hellscape of enshitification and acquisitions, thanks in part to VC money. We’ve seen this story play out too many times to assume there’s nothing to worry about.

So yes, people are going to be suspicious. That’s not irrational.

Right but you could at least be reasonably sure it wouldn’t be outright spied on from the person you’re sending it to. Now it’s almost a guarantee.

Like if I sent something to a friend of mine, I could be fairly certain it wouldn’t end up in the wrong hands unless they got compromised or did something stupid. I could trust their competence.

Now everyone that isn’t actively managing their own windows installation is absolutely compromised, as a rule. Like I can’t just send an email to my mom anymore, from now on its always my Mom and Copilot.

Yes, and that’s a valid concern, but there’s no good answer here. That’s why it’s such a problem. From now on, one of the most widely used operating systems in the world is going to be harvesting data from any and everything that appears on it. Meaning any software you use to send any form of electronic communication, if a Windows computer opens it, and the user either hasn’t bothered or doesn’t know how to disable recall, your information has been harvested by Microsoft.

There’s just no way to limit or avoid this. We need regulation.

I feel like I’ve been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.

We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site’s growth.

And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don’t have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.

Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn’t help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.

Secure from what exactly? You need to have a threat model here.

Which is funny, because developers use “secure” like this all the time as a way of scaring users into compliance for any changes they implement. If they voiced aloud what the actual threat was, they’d have to admit that often its the user’s freedom they’re afraid of. The user may do something stupid, therefore their ability to do it is dangerous for everyone.

They’d remove the front door on your home and call it more secure, all because some people don’t lock it.

Yeah, I was gonna say, holding Chrome OS above Windows because its Linux based is bizarre. That’s getting more true about Android, too. For all its faults, I can still say I’m the admin of my Windows OS (for now), and not Google.

That’s generally what you hear from people who have basic use cases and simply can’t fathom other people may want or need different things from their devices.

Which is fine, they don’t have to understand. If stock is good enough for them nowadays, more power to them.

What I’m sick of is the condescension. This bizarre thing where they somehow think a person wanting control over a device they paid for is worthy of derision or shame.

It’s like if someone who only checks their email on their laptop laughing at someone using a desktop for heavier work, for no real reason other than thinking using technology differently than themselves is silly.

That other comment is a perfect example, and indictive of this weird subculture in Android spaces that hates Google but seems to be drinking from the same user-hostile Kool aid.

Personally, I’m an odd case, in that I didn’t used to root or use custom ROMs at all until recent years. Basically since Android 10, simply to get around the needless roadblocks and restore the functions I want. I was fine with stock for a long time, until Google started becoming Apple.

Shit like this is why I can’t abide GrapheneOS or their cheerleaders.

It’s legitimately the same attitude as Google itself. This parental, condescending tone, acting as if wanting freedom to control their own devices is somehow irrational. Continuing to push this toxic idea that handcuffs are the only way to protect users. Like a sysadmin at a workplace, but without the justifiable reasons.

Not only does it still exist, newgrounds is unique in that it is a long-running website from the early days that is still being run by the same person (never bought out or sold), still has no ads (despite funding issues), still has the same basic focus, still hosting the same content, and is still more or less exactly the same despite some UI changes.

Granted part of that is there hasn’t been any real pressure on it, but still.

Genuinely, it is the kind of thing that I would want to put behind glass, because it is an abnormality in this wasteland we call the internet. It’s this beautiful little corner that has been allowed to remain as it is, unmolested by the terrible bullshit around it.

There aren’t any good search engines anymore, because there isn’t a good internet anymore. SOE has buried the internet’s wealth of information and centralization starved out all the spaces where information used to be. Hell half the forums that used to appear in search results aren’t even online anymore, and live only in the way back machine (which doesn’t come up in results).

There’s so little to find anymore compared to the halcyon days of search engines we remember.

It’s mostly that it’s just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you’re gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren’t curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.

Having third party clients is not good for security.

If the first party provider told you this, you should always second guess them.

Moreover, providing an option that informed users can choose doesn’t hurt security. This idea the user can’t be trusted to use the appropriate type of messaging if provided options needs to die.

You have absolutely zero guarantees, with or without their policy on third party apps. You can not send sensitive information to someone else’s phone and tell yourself it couldn’t possibly have been intercepted, or that someone couldn’t get ahold of that phone, or that the person you’re sending it to won’t take a screenshot and save it to their cloud.

A lot of software nowadays is doing a real disservice to their users by continuing to lie to them like this by selling them the notion that they can control their information after it has been sent. It’s really making people forget basic information hygiene. No app can guarantee that message won’t be intercepted or mishandled. They can only give you tools to hopefully prevent that, but there are no guarantees.

Moreover, this policy does not exclude them from including third-party functionality and warning the user when they are communicating with somebody that isn’t using encryption.

Too many of these apps and services are getting away with the “security” excuse for what is effectively just creating a walled garden to lock users in. Ask yourself how you can get your own data out of these services when you decide to quit them, and it becomes more apparent what they’re doing.

Downvotes are part of the whole curation aspect of the site, and it’s a valid part of the democratic system. For all the whining about being “censored” because you got downvoted, there’s countless cases where downvotes influence the sorting algorithm positively.

Garbage shouldn’t sit on the same level as fluff comments no one bothered to vote on.

I’d 100% donate to them if they accepted donations.

If they accepted donations, you wouldn’t want to.

The reason uBlock Origins surpasses all the others is because of who the lead dev is, what they believe, and why they do it. They are absolute hardline and believe in what they made. It’s not a job.

You don’t need to be that kind of person to be a good developer, but when it comes to something like an adblocker and privacy protection, you want people like him who won’t falter or sell out. You want those true believers.

If he accepted donations, then he wouldn’t be the kind of person that made uBlock Origins what it is.