• 0 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2023


  • Before Arch that role belonged to Gentoo.

    To add, before the change the Gentoo wiki was a top resource when it came to Linux questions. Even if you didn’t use Gentoo you could find detailed information on how various parts of Linux worked.

    One day the Gentoo wiki died. It got temporary mirrors quickly, but it took a long time to get up and working again. This left a huge opening for another wiki, the Arch wiki, to become the new top resource.

    I suspect, for a number of reasons, Arch was always going to replace Gentoo as the “True Linux Explorer”, but the wiki outage accelerated it.


  • But here’s a bonus feature: many platforms allow you to easily migrate your account to a new instance.

    But Lemmy isn’t one of those platforms. Right?

    Generally I agree with the article that the shutdown of lemm.ee isn’t a big deal. It sucks for sure, but the Fediverse survives.

    Personally I don’t care about account migration. Export/import works fine, but I get that it’s a little clunky for some.

    Community migration is something that I think is more important and as I understand PieFed handles this. Hopefully Lemmy will someday and even better between Lemmy & PieFed.


  • You also have to keep track the site and how you spell it. For example is it “Microsoft” or “microsoft”?

    And keep track of the current name of the site vs the old name. For example am I signing into Microsoft or Live.com or Xbox?

    And keep track of my username. Is it my email? Which email? Which username?

    I understand the concept but I think if falls apart fast.


  • then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities

    As a thought, do you really lose them?

    For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.

    It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?

    Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.

    Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.


  • I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.

    I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.

    Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.

    Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.




  • Search also sucks because people suck.

    If I post a picture of a flower with the caption “Look what grew in my garden!”, that’s a terrible post from a search point of view.

    Later on someone will search for “flower” but I didn’t use the word “flower” so now search sucks.

    Of course a much more common post is someone posting a picture of text, from Twitter, Tumblr, etc. with, once again, a vague caption. You remember the picture, but not what the poster actually said.

    Searching comments will sometimes help, but that depends on the comments being related.



  • You’re not affected if (and only if)

    You always used the Brave browser or the DuckDuckGo search engine on mobile

    I found that odd, but reading the more technical write up (linked in the article) it seems Brave blocks localhost communication.

    The Chrome proposal references a single use case. I’ve never seen a website that sets up my local devices, but is this a new thing?

    Why did localhost not get blocked earlier? This seems like a huge hole browsers have ignored for years.


    Also the DuckDuckGo exception doesn’t make sense to me. Does DuckDuckGo have Facebook trackers on it to begin with? Whatever site DuckDuckGo sends you to, if they have the trackers, you’ll get tracked.


  • Linux has two ways of drawing pictures, the old way (Xorg) and the new way (Wayland).

    The old way is like a giant box of crayons with the crayon sharpener built in. The box is all marked up, the sharpener is full of gunk, and a few crayons are melted together. Nobody really wants to touch the old box of crayons, although it does work for the most part, it’s a familiar box.

    The new way is like a smaller box of crayons. The clean sharpener isn’t built in but it is available nearby, although some people say it doesn’t work as good. A few crayons are missing, but are available in most cases, they’re just not in the box. Most people are working to improve the new box.

    If you’re using Linux, the new box of crayons is generally the better choice. It’s ok to stop using the old box.



  • Knoppix. I didn’t see it listed yet so I had to chime in.

    I saw it and was confused that computers could run something that wasn’t Windows and wasn’t Mac. Then I was handed a Knoppix LiveCD and suddenly MY computer was Linux. Absolutely blew my mind.

    I then explored Mandrake (now Mandrivia?) for a while but it never really stuck.

    A few years later Ubuntu was handing out LivdCDs to everyone running Warty Warthog and soon after window managers started to use Beryl (?) which let you have a fancy cube desktop. Absolutely pointless but that’s how it all started.


  • I love pineapple and really strongly dislike it on pizza. The only time I’ve had “acceptable” pineapple on pizza is when it was chopped up really tiny and I could barely taste it.

    My problem with pineapple on pizza is,

    • Hot/warm pineapple is gross.
    • Pineapple makes the pizza watery.
    • Pineapple adds a sweetness that a pizza just doesn’t need. It detracts from other flavors.
    • Again hot/warm pineapple tastes gross.

  • As you mentioned elsewhere it’s encrypted.

    Take a look at /etc/crypttab and creating and adding a key file that can unlock the drive.

    Essentially your additional SSD will have both a password and a file containing a password that can unlock the drive. When you unlock your root filesystem (I’m guessing at boot) it will then have the key file that can unlock the SSD.

    Something like cryptsetup luksAddKey /dev/pathtossd --new-keyfile /etc/newpassword

    Systemd might make this easier to setup nowadays.

    Edit: Also, yes, the password to unlock your SSD is just sitting in a file in your root drive. Be sure to restrict it to only be readable by root.


  • Oh I completely agree. There is a reason it took me a while and careful observation before I figured it out.

    I assume it’s part of, or started as, a little password dance. Something like, “abc123DEF”.

    Or maybe it just comes from the idea that only a single key can be pressed at a time?

    Either way I completely agree, insane.


  • I agree, but it’s more common than you’d think.

    I used to work at an organization that used Chromebooks, which replaces the caps lock key with a search key (same shape, different behaviour). I was surprised at the number of people who struggled with their passwords because they would hit the “search” key, enter a single letter, and then hit “search” again. It took me a little while to figure it out because… Who does that?


  • I’m willing to discuss UI/UX issues but that top comment is just stupid.

    The first complaint is that “lemmy.world” shouldn’t exist, because websites should be dot com. That’s not a UI/UX issue, that’s just ignorance. As we all know Bluesky has also failed to pickup any users due to its URL bsky.app, you obviously can’t have a dot app website!

    The second argument is worth looking at, but it’s unclear based on their comment what went wrong. If you go to Reddit and search for Brazil/Brasil do you just magically find every community you’re looking for? I doubt it. Discovery can and should be improved but this person found an instance before a community?