Has anyone else noticed this, across the fediverse, Lemmy specifically. A lot of new users, but also a lot of first posts that are very inflammatory/rage baity.
Do we have another legit influx of new users? Or do we just have some bad actors trying to stir the pot? Or maybe I'm imagining it.
Yeah in my small areas of the fedi, im not seeing any inflammatory posts. Of course there's like dozens of us compared to you all, but its a happy balance.
Or do we just have some bad actors trying to stir the pot?
Yes.
People are hostile idiots sometimes, also, so that doesn't help. But yes, people are definitely trying to stir up deliberate ballache for whatever weird reasons of their own.
I don't think it's an uptick, it's been around for as long as I've used the Fediverse.
I've never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It's not. There's very nice people here and there's very mean people here. Often, the very nice are quiet so you won't always notice them but the meanest are usually very outspoken and everyone comes across something left by them. Hatred, ignorance and toxicity is not something that's left at the door of the fediverse.
Those countries want to divide us and it’s working
We have a saying "People who think too highly of themselves and can't fix their problems will always make up a bogeyman to blame"
Did the tankies lead you to support the genocide? Did the tankies keep you from keeping Israel/US accountable for their crimes?
No buddy, your "countries" did those all on their own and were proud of it. The countries are only changing their tone as the hypocrisy is failing to keep up with the lies.
But you do you. You're such good guys and have never done bad to anyone else and also "never" fought among yourselves.
If it takes some Chinese and Russian trolls to divide you, you're never really "together" bud. But again whatever makes you sleep at night.
Im new but ive noticed a ton of slop news is spammed by the same handful of accounts only. None of the articles add anything new or provide a unique perspective. Then its spammed over all the news subs. Its annoying but im not a mod what can i do.
I think that slop news posts are intentionally inflammatory because they add no new information and only seek to evoke an emotional reaction.
Not inflammatory, but I've noticed some new users who come only to do self promotion, without engaging in anyting else in the platform. Mostly in art related comms but also a couple trying to promote a shady website or the like. Even though my account is new I've been browsing for a good while and dislike people that are only looking for an audience not a community.
I do some self promotion, although I try to; 1: only post in relevant forums. 2: also engage outside of my own posts an then not talk about said posts.(this time is an exception but its kind of a meta discussion.)
Due to the nature of the fedivers what I post on mastodon and pixelfed might get federated on to Lemmy, which unfortunately might give the appearance of spamming, I'm aware of this but I don't see a way around that. And lastly. I don't think my videos on Peertube would get any views unless I post them outside of peertube since there is no real algorithm or good discovery functions across the instances. But I'm open to being in the wrong here.
And to clarify, self promo is ok! My complaint is about the ones who wouldn't even see this post (or any other post for the matter), much less reply to it. They just take up space and do not give anything of value back. Imo. As the fediverse grows it's bound to happen, it just pisses me off.
I'm not saying it will be the solution but, positive reinforcement for those who behave, mixed with not interacting with those that only spam would probably get some to loose interest. And perhaps some mod rules.
Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully. It’s a lot nicer than the pathetic chess match on reddit where everyone seems to take the rage bait like a carrot on a string
Any influx of new users that appear to be valid human meat popsicles should be the new normal. Would you like to create a downloadable zip file of a codebase that demonstrates this?
Intentionally inflammatory posts? I haven't noticed an uptick, honestly. Doesn't mean there isn't one and doesn't mean I won't notice now that you posted it.
But I will say that I've basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I've got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn't used to be that way.
Mostly I assume we must've recently gotten an influx of new users from Reddit or someplace similarly toxic. Things usually get a bit unfortunate for a time when that happens.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Vanlife videos, cooking shows, and politics should make YouTube believe you're an adult. But hell I subscribe to gaming channels, with watching gamers play games. Will that get me labeled a child.
It's interesting that you mention the gaming thing, I've realised recently that I'm still watching the same folks I was 10 years ago, so it's really content by millennials for millennials - not a child thing like I'm used to assuming. It does come in part because if I mention YouTube to a younger person I get a blank look when I say who I watch.
Yeah I mean look how long Markplier been on YouTube it's crazy. I been on YouTube since early part of 2006. And it what only 20 years old? That mean we have kids who used YouTube who are now grown ups. So this is crap. I remember following Lisa Nova, and watching crazy vine videos. 5secondfilms. Along with gaming videos. I even have posted videos myself. Plan on doing it again soon too.
I think you got it backwards. What are some categories an adult would never watch? Fucking Dora the Explorer and Blues Clues and the like. Although it's very likely they just play it from their account for their kids.
You do realize that there are a ton of adult fans for kids shows and games right? How quickly the bronies are forgotten with everything happening in the world.
There are many reasons why mentally mature people also find an interest in content designed for immature minds. The first of which that I can list, in regards to bronies and pegasisters being fans of My Little Pony, especially Generation 4, is: 1. That kids shows are chock full of moral lessons that everyone can benefit from. 2. MLP may have more compelling drama plots per episode compared to 'adult' soap operas. 3. The desire for a fantastical escape from a world that's becoming increasingly negative. 4. Psychologically I suspect the characters or settings were very relatable, perhaps in terms of innate desire to: - Fit in (Twilight) - Be happier and less depressed (Pinkie) - Be useful to society/have a loving family (Applejack) - Be peaceful/coexist with animals (Fluttershy) - Be popular/cool/more confident (Rainbow) - Have self-pride/be helpful to friends (Rarity) 5. The fantastical idea that conflicts can be solved with love, not war. 6. Many animations are often designed with references or jokes that only adults would know, and keep them entertained. For example, how many children would recognise Dashie's morning wing-boner as anything of note, or that one episode was a parody of Murder on the Orient Express?
Either way, something relatively unique and wonderful happened with MLP:FiM.
Maybe not, but I'm gonna bet most aren't taking the time or effort just to make a separate account for their child. Or even if they did, that the child is checking to make sure they use that account and not their parents. There's going to be a lot of overlap.
Makes sense, as all services I've encountered that mention age in regards to data collecting imply that it's illegal to harvest those under 13. Mobile games and other services would not harvest data if you state your age as well below 13, but the increasingly vast majority just say "we will be harvesting you; by clicking this button or making an account you confirm that you are over 13 years of age.." Because, you know, real child protection laws are in effect.
Honestly if they can verify that i'm an adult based on what i watch and stop blocking videos because they might not be appropriate for a kid like mf i ain't no kid.
And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity... Sir/Ma'am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.
There are problems with this. Firstly, people might let their kids watch videos on their "adult" accounts. YouTube's detection would have to be incredibly fine-grained and be able to flip-flop depending on what's being watched.
The second one is a "damned either way" kind of deal: Consider the deletion of watch history; Should it forget you're an adult if you do that? If yes, then you have to go through a different process or watch a load of videos that are not blocked but still sufficiently adult to get your account reidentified. If not, they're storing metadata that you implicitly requested the deletion of.
I have reason to believe that they do keep such metadata and that they may have been taking steps to hide that fact. A permanent "user is an adult" flag would blow that wide open. As such, I reckon this will be the first, "forget" option. And users will have to suck it until the algorithm works out the user is an adult again (or else never delete their watch history; something that would suit YouTube's advertising algorithm just fine).
I know for a fact that the algorithm retains data about your viewing preferences even after deleting watch history. After deleting mine it would still occasionally recommend something I've seen before and can pretty easily corral me back into whatever direction I had previously gone in. After having done this many times the videos became more random, so I think it keeps a few data points to "jump start" your viewing experience but they gradually change. If you reset your history and view as many random new videos as you can, rinse and repeat, they eventually use those those as starting points.
interestingly, when i delete the my history, after watching one video yt repopulates the recommendations almost exactly as it were a few minutes ago. it isn't even trying
Heh. That's also my "reason to believe", but I was trying to get an unruly comment under control and trimmed that part.
Namely, I once took an account right back to no watch history and no likes - either that was a feature at some point or I did it manually - and still got suspiciously familiar suggestions.
Yea and they will know a lot more soon since i will buy the samsung project moohan VR headset that runs android XR. Google will become my eyes with the passthrough and they advertise the headset for AI use that can see everything i see... i'm not sure if i will turn that off right away or try to use it for some stuff. Right now i'm using a meta quest pro to work and do a lot of daily stuff so it's a question of meta or google for me and i decided to get out of meta's not so great VR hardware.
Was gonna say.. my kids keep accidentally using my profile to watch their videos. YouTube is going to think I'm a teen/child with peak gen alpha brain rot.
I watched a video today on my work computer for the first time, where I don’t have the ability to block the ads. Dear god. The litany of overhyped, lie-based AI dreck was traumatizing.
I watched a single motorcycle video on computer logged out of YouTube. All the related videos were rage bait right wing content. None related to motorcycles.
Google's data-mining software knew pretty well who 1D10 was. It had simply concluded, based on its extensive database spanning vast numbers of users around the world, that he would look magnificent in a flamenco dress.
Probably possible to have something like a Selenium or whatever the kids use to automate Web browsers these days Python script that automatically builds a credible viewing history that looks like an adult's.
Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you.
Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.
I still find it hard to believe just how few people even ask themselves the obvious : Provides services 'for free', but is one of the world's biggest companies. Where is the money coming from ?
So I just have to gain a brain rot addiction to regain my youth? When asked how this twelve year old managed to create a YouTube account 20 years ago, YouTube replied, "he's very clever."
There's a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there's a much bigger part that doesn't want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)
I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.
My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.
I had one of those "I've become my dad" moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who's ever existed.
But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.
Maybe I'm giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.
So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.
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The U.K. has said it would recognize a Palestinian state unless the Israeli government ends "the appalling situation in Gaza,” as global anger mounts over Gaza.
Firstly, Palestine has always been a state, and should have been recognized before Israel was created. Secondly, this shouldn't be "unless a ceasefire." Thirdly, Israel and the global West are liars. Finally, some of us knew all these states claiming they are going to recognize Palestine was pacification until, as POTUS so eloquently put it, "at some point you have to just finish the job."
Empty words. Most people in Gaza will die of starvation in a few weeks. The UK and French government know this and are gaslighting with this recognising a state bullshit.
With the Fediverse, Linux, privacy-preserving browsers and alternative protocols, people are creating a cornucopia of alternatives to Big Tech for a variety of reasons, but it seems like we don't have a collective term for technologies that gives users back their power and digital freedom, in opposition to Big Tech's machinations.
So maybe it's time we devise a catchy phrase for it. I thought of a couple, but they didn't quite scratch the itch:
Small Tech - just sounds like smaller versions of Big Tech
DIY Tech - implies you have to create everything yourself and be technically skilled
So, instead, I turn to the people of the Fediverse. What are your ideas for a catchy phrase for anti-Big-Tech Tech?
A large-scale police operation at the Peršmanhof memorial in southern Austria, one of the country’s most significant memorial sites dedicated to resistance and civilian victims of the Nazi regime, has...
An overview of the fediverse clients I'm paying the most attention to.
For the Threadiverse readers, I'd love to hear more about what I've missed for threadiverse clients. Ill admit that I've paid less attention to those, so tell me what I've missed!
The summer months I’m experimenting with some different content for the weekly report articles. For more information on that, see this accompanying post. Today I’m taking a look at all the different client apps for the fediverse that I’m paying attention to. This is not meant as a recommendation on which client you should use; my experience is that people’s preferences for clients are highly individualistic. The best client for you is simply the client that you enjoy using the most. This is an overview of some the clients for the fediverse that do something differently, and stand out because of that. Part of the reason for making this list is that I do not have the time to keep a close eye on literally every client in the fediverse, and I’m curious to hear from readers if they feel like I missed some.
Microblogging
Phanpy (Web, Progressive Web App) Phanpy is one of the most innovative clients for any social media platform. The Catch-up feature takes all the posts from your home timeline and gives you the ability to sort and filter them in any way you want. You can filter posts by replies, reposts, followed hashtags, sort them by date or engagement numbers, or group them by author. Another unique feature is the ‘boost carousel’, where boost are delegated in the timeline to a separate horizontal-scrolling ‘carousel’.
One thing that stands out to me about Phanpy is how these standout features have not really seen adoption by other clients, neither for the fediverse nor for Bluesky. Phanpy does have a crowd of hardcore fans (I’m one of them), but it seems to mainly resonate with power-users.
Ivory (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, paid) Ivory is made by the small company Tapbots, who also created popular Twitter client Tweetbot. Ivory focuses on design, and has some additional features such as account statistics as well. Ivory is a popular client for Mastodon, even though it has a monthly subscription. That makes it also a client worth watching: is the Mastodon ecosystem large enough to support a small team of three developers? Tapbots recently announced that they are building a Bluesky client, and they were frank about needing another revenue stream besides Ivory.
Fedilab (Android, F-Droid) Fedilab is one of the older clients for the fediverse, that supports multiple accounts on a variety of fediverse platforms. It can be used in combination with Mastodon, Pleroma, PixelFed, PeerTube, Misskey, Friendica and even GNU Social. There are few other clients that I know of that focus on supporting a large variety of fediverse platforms, which indicates both the technical challenge of doing so with none of the platforms supporting the client-to-server part of ActivityPub, as well as it being unclear if there is a real demand for it.
Mastodon (Android, iOS) The apps developed by the Mastodon organisation itself. Mastodon now has a full-time iOS developer as well as an Android developer, and the app is always up to date with Mastodon’s latest features, such as Mastodon’s recent work on quote post implementations. An ecosystem of third-party clients for Mastodon could proliferate partially because Mastodon was strapped for developer resources and the apps did not always get the highest priority. Third-party clients for Mastodon are often created by hobby developers, who now have to compete with Mastodon having full-time paid developers on their app, making it more important for other clients to show a clear value-add above the Mastodon client developed by the organisation itself.
Some other microblogging clients worth pointing out: Whalebird, (desktop client for Windows, Linux and macOS, supporting multiple platforms), IceCubes (free, open-source iOS app), Tusky (the most popular third-party Android app for Mastodon with half a million downloads), Trunks (web, Android and iOS, that has some cool additional timeline filtering features) and Elk (a popular web client for Mastodon)
Another thing that stands out to me is how there do not seem to be clients targeted specifically for Misskey that are popular. Clients like Kimis, Kaiteki and Milktea seem to have little use or no recent updates. The MissCat app might be more popular, but it is not available in the EU so it is hard for me to judge.
Multi-network clients
Openvibe (Android, iOS) Openvibe is a multi-network client for Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and Threads. It combines posts from these networks (provided you have an account on that network) into a single timeline, and you can post directly to all the different networks at once. Openvibe is the most popular of these multi-network clients, and is also the best funded of the clients on the new social networks: early in 2025 Openvibe announced an $800k funding round. The company expects to introduce a subscription plan at a later point to generate revenue.
SoraSNS (iOS) SoraSNS is another multi-network client, that supports Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, Pleroma and Nostr. It also has a algorithmic timeline with the algorithm running locally on your phone. SoraSNS has more of such experimental features, such as analytics per-post and AI summaries.
Reader clients
Surf (Android, iOS, in beta) Surf describes itself as a ‘browser for the open social web’. The app, made by Flipboard, integrates various platforms: Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and RSS are supported. It centers around creating feeds for topics, and users can share these feeds with each other (either via Surf or as a custom feed on Bluesky). Surf stands out for pushing the boundaries on what a social media client can look like, and for the large amount of control that users get over which content they want to see.
Tapestry (iOS, iPadOS, in beta) Tapestry is made by Iconfactory, the company behind popular Twitter client Twitterfic, and raised funds via a Kickstarter, raising $177k. It is a reader client that combines a large variety of sources: RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Tumblr, podcasts, YouTube and more. Tapestry places all these sources into a single chronological timeline. The funding model for Tapestry is what stands out: making high-quality apps is not cheap, but getting a large enough paying user base to sustain development is hard. Iconfactory could lean upon their previous work to get a solid Kickstarter to fund development.
Rest of the fediverse
PeerTube is developing their own mobile apps, and have just completed a fundraiser of €75k for further features. I’ve covered the app in other places in more detail, and for here I think it’s noteworthy that no other major PeerTube app has gotten traction over the years.
For the Threadiverse, there are a variety of clients for Lemmy, with some of the most popular ones being Voyager, Thunder, Mlem, Jerboa and Photon. My sense is that the Threadiverse clients do not differ much in features, and mainly differ in platforms and terms of design. The main standout feature at this point seems to be support for PieFed, but a variety of clients (including Voyager, Mlem and multiple more now support PieFed). It points to an ecosystem where clients are aware of each other, and new innovations get rapidly copied by other clients, bringing them effectively to the entire ecosystem. If there are unique features in Threadiverse clients that you think I should pay attention to, let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.
Fediverse News and Links
Move Slowly and Build Bridges is the new book by Robert W. Gehl, in which Gehl documents the story of the fediverse and how everyday people have build a ‘noncentralized alternative social media system’ over the years. The book is now available for sale online, with physical copies shipping soon. I’ll definitely write more about the book once I’ve read it, so stay tuned!
Mastodon is adding an in-app donation request for the funding of Mastodon. Mastodon is rolling out this feature very carefully (only their own mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers for now), but they are already thinking about how to expand the feature and make it available for other server admins as well.
Some polishing updates for WordPress ActivityPub as their blog post explains how they are working towards more social integrations with the rest of the fediverse, with more coverage by WeDistribute.
How To Improve Your Privacy and Security on Mastodon is a highly extensive guide on Privacy Guides that goes into in-depth detail on all the possibilities people have on Mastodon for better security and privacy.
For the Threadiverse, there are a variety of clients for Lemmy, with some of the most popular ones being Voyager, Thunder, Mlem, Jerboa and Photon. My sense is that the Threadiverse clients do not differ much in features, and mainly differ in platforms and terms of design. The main standout feature at this point seems to be support for PieFed, but a variety of clients (including Voyager, Mlem and multiple more now support PieFed). It points to an ecosystem where clients are aware of each other, and new innovations get rapidly copied by other clients, bringing them effectively to the entire ecosystem. If there are unique features in Threadiverse clients that you think I should pay attention to, let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.
The Threadiverse app with the most standout feature is probably Quiblr and its recommendation system. I can't speak to if it's actually any good, as I don't use it, but it's interesting nontheless.
Also, I wish more apps has lemmy-ui 'chat' sort for comments. It's surprisingly nice for seeing new comments in a thread you've read before.
I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future!
The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not just on a protocol level, but on an organisational level as well.
I joined Matrix at FOSDEM - the largest gathering of open source nerds in Europe. We were all encouraged to use it - every talk had its own channel, all the official comms came from there, I was even invited to a top-secret private channel for speaker. This was going to be epic! Viva la rèvölūçïón, right? Wrong.
It was dead. Even among the most seasoned geeks on the planet, most people preferred to use other services like Signal, Telegram, and Slack. Why? Because those other tools actually work.
Matrix has two official Android apps - one of which is old and unsupported, the other is new and doesn't work with many of the basic chat features.
I want to be absolutely clear about this - the company behind Matrix have put out an app which doesn't work with their own product! Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's a typical view of the official FOSDEM speaker room, using the official Matrix app:
It was embarrassing. People would pipe up in channels and say "this doesn't work" only to be told they were using the wrong app and should go back to the one marked unsupported. So they left, never to return. Even in the large talks, where people were encouraged to use the official Matrix chat, most of the conversation happened on other platforms. It was just too hard to use Matrix.
A few thousands geeks, all used to recompiling their own kernels and participating in the Fediverse, and most thought that Matrix was too much of a faff.
After FOSDEM, I kept the Matrix app on my phone. Occasionally receiving a ping from some long-forgotten channel.
And then, one day, I got hit with the most vile spam. A dozen notifications suddenly appeared on my phone with abuse, torture, and transphobic slurs in them.
This shouldn't be possible. It doesn't take an expensive team of moderators to add some keyword monitoring. It doesn't take a massive AI model to work out that a stranger shouldn't be able to bombard users with multiple notifications. You don't have to sacrifice your dream of a decentralised future - you just need to care about your users.
This stuff is basic.
I moaned about it on Mastdon and was surprised to receive a private reply from the official Matrix account.
Please do not encourage the spammer by giving them a platform and propagating their spam; you may want to consider deleting your post.
This is classic victim blaming. It is my fault for giving the spammer attention. I am the one who needs to take responsibility and delete the evidence. I shouldn't warn people that Matrix is actively dangerous to use.
Bullshit.
Here's what I expected them to say:
"We're sorry you had such a bad experience on Matrix. Rest assured we're working hard to block these spammers - here's a link to show what we're doing. You can protect your account further by doing x, y and z. Once again, sorry and we hope we can win back your trust."
I'm not saying scrappy open source projects have to hire anodyne corporate communications specialists; they just need to have a little empathy.
But, no, just constant whining about how it isn't their fault and how I am the one who needs to change my behaviour.
This is pretty typical behaviour from the team. Find any post complaining about some aspect of Matrix and you'll see their instant woe-is-me replies.
Between the slow performance, the increasing amount of spam, the miserable web client, and the unfinished state of Element X, the Matrix.org network is not something I am willing to continue to recommend, especially to non-technical users. Normal people are simply tolerating it to communicate with idealistic nerds like myself who insist(ed) on using it.
Matrix just isn't focussed on users. I'm not talking about user-experience tweaks like which shade of cornflower blue to use - I mean basic user needs like apps that work and a way to combat spam.
While the protocol may be conceptually interesting and their intentions noble, I'm not prepared to suffer abuse in the name of technical purity.
Open Source and Open Standards nerds like me ought to know by now that the protocol is the least compelling thing about a service. Who cares if your home is built using only Stallman-blessed tools, when the walls are full of rats?
I've looked over the matrix spec and unfortunately /account/deactivate only requires for any future login to become impossible. Synapse fulfils the spec, but does not actually delete the account, w...
This one is probably one of the most disappointing one; Matrix had everything I wanted in terms of chat features. Programmability-wise, all it was an encrypted JSON sender/receiver, but in a good way. It basically could be extended however you want since it provided a useful primitive. But the encryption just randomly fails, and it's hard to figure out why, causing you to miss messages. I eventually gave up on building a side project for it.
Same here - the encryption issues killed my project too, the problem is that Matrix's OLM/Megolm protocol implementation doesn't handle device verification and key distribution robustly enugh across multiple clients.
I have moved my communications to SimpleX for very similar reasons.
I always found Matrix to be extremely clunky because of key management for rooms and stuff like that.
I'm used to using cryptocurrencies. I know how to manage keys, and yet I was constantly getting hit with the same issues with decryption of old messages, even when I properly saved my keys and imported them.
I figure if I'm not even able to use this thing properly, knowing and understanding technology, how do I expect people I talk to to understand how to do it properly?
Then, on top of that, I found out about all the metadata leaking to your home server. Sure, your communications might be encrypted, but if the sender, receiver, reactions, timestamp, etc. is not encrypted, that's not good.
I still have it on my device, but it very rarely gets opened anymore.
Edit: I use a combination of signal for those I know, IRL, and simplex for groups of FOSS enthusiasts, etc.
How are you using Simplex as a replacement for Matrix? That's not a leading question - I'm curious about the use case.
I stopped using Matrix for 1:1 and family chat years ago because of how broken encryption has always been, but I've kept using it for public chats since
privacy isn't solvable in public chats, so the fact Matrix's encryption is terminally screwed up isn't relevant
there are many public rooms; not IRC-level, but it's still a large domain with large numbers of users
Matrix is a better public chat than IRC (fight me!) with replies, comment editing, reactions, emojis (that's mostly a client thing, but it's first-class and not a sporadically supported feature), and offline history syncing (as in, see what happened while you were offline).
I haven't yet found anything that's as good at public rooms as Matrix, that's still federated and OSS. Discord is very good, but it's SPA crap and centralized to boot.
SimpleX seems to be focused primarily on messaging, not public, large group chat... but am I missing something?
You can use SimpleX for large chats. However, at least the current architecture is not the most efficient way of doing so. Especially not once rooms hit a thousand users or more. Does it work? Yes. Does it work well? Only somewhat. I think the developers were caught off guard when people wanted to start using it for large rooms instead of one-on-one communications and had not planned for that when they made the program.
They are addressing the issue by having devices connect to super peers instead of directly peer to peer in order to make large rooms work better. That way, instead of trying to maintain a thousand individual connections, your device might maintain two or three connections to Superpiers and get messages through them. I make it even harder on myself because I demand that my SimpleX do everything over tor.
A thousand users seems like a lot; I'm not sure I've ever been in an IRC room with that many.
Is there a directory? IIRC the human naming part was still missing last time I tried it, and connecting through hashes was not very fun. The biggest blocker for me, though, was the lack of multiple device sync support. A single identity used across multiple devices concurrently is bare minimum feature, and is the reason I've always bounced off SimpleX. Has that been addressed?
There is a directory and you can find it by asking your favorite search engine for the SimpleX directory bot. As far as multiple devices goes, I'm not totally sure. I know that it's supposedly able to be used on multiple devices, but I only run it on my phone, so I haven't actually tried that functionality myself.
I haven't seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
Editing and reactions are nice, but they're not that important.
IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
The one feature I like better on Matrix vs IRC clients is it is way easier to actually connect to the server. Just type in matrix.org or whatever it autofills for you, and you're in. No dealing with port numbers and proper syntax. This is an improvement.
I wanted to like matrix but it was too clunky for me. I wish more people used libera chat though, it is less active than it was 10 years ago or whatever.
I haven't seen replies be useful at all, in fact they actively clutter the UI.
Editing and reactions are nice, but they're not that important.
Yeah, well, that's a massive opinion gulf we're never going to meet over.
IRC already has emoji support 😀 and offline history sync, and is way smaller and faster.
You can enter emojis into anything that supports UTF-8, and so can claim everything supports emojis. I haven't seen an IRC client with either an easy, integrated way to enter them, and I've also never seen an IRC client that will pull history from before I joined the room. Weechat certainly doesn't.
Matrix is super clunky, and the fact that the reference platform is a shitty Electron application sucks. Even if you use something sane like gomuks, your client is perpetually lagging in Matrix features, often by more than just months.
Matrix angers me. It's been such a mismanaged project. But I don't see IRC having changed much over the past 20 years that I've been using it.
Discord, on the other hand, is an active pestilence. I only open that stupid web page on the direst of need.
That makes sense -- different features are important to different folks.
For emojis on IRC I just use the system keyboard. So it's easy on my phone, but hard on a computer. I didn't know that matrix had an emoji button -- I guess I haven't missed it 😛
It's true that IRC doesn't pull scrollback the first time you join a room in any implementation I'm aware of. I'm ok with this limitation though because I tend to stay joined to the rooms I want to read. I like hexchat, although I'm aware that it's a dead project 😢
The awful spam was the reason I left, I got mass invited to rooms with really nasty names, and there's no way in the client to mass ignore invites, you have to go to each one and click ignore.
That wouldn't be the end of the world, except their client seems to rely on waiting for the server to respond to an action in the foreground, so every time I click ignore it sits there processing for like 10-20 seconds before I can click the next one. There's no select all, there's no way to just rapidly tap ignore and have it process in the background like it should be doing.
Also they said even after banning the accounts, there's no way on their end to remove the invites the banned account sent out.
Overall it's just painful to use, the clients are bad, the moderation system doesn't work (what kind of system lets 1 account send out thousands of invites?? It should have auto-banned them within the first 10 or something), their cleanup system doesn't work, and everything just feels slow as molasses.
I became adept in IRC in early 90s when I was under 10 years old, before my BB provider was even a full ISP (so I couldn't even look up help on what existed of the early web). Every time I hear an adult claim its too complicated/obscure/esoteric I realize how close to the medical exam scene in Idiocracy we've gotten in a few short decades.
Yep, I didn’t join as I am only there for the general shit talking and not participating in any constructive or useful conversations (it’s a way of life) but Camus, Snoopy, Anansi, THE meerkat and probably others are participating with you on the piefed zulip and codeberg.
The jlailu matrix is still open but inactive and left to slowly wither and die, every sidebars are now linked to the zulip server instead of matrix.
Looked this up out of curiosity and the fact that it will only somehow allow mobile notifications for "up to 10 users" even if self hosting for free, is putting me off. I get if you were using their cloud, but restricting self-hosting almost feels malicious.
Dunno I am not administrating it so I didn’t checked. We got the sponsorship tiers as a lemmy/piefed instance is an open source project zulip.com/help/self-hosted-bil…
I believe Rimu (piefed dev) also got the sponsorship.
I plan on using it for personal business projects (self hosted or not, it is not defined yet) to organize comms and plans in topics. But it’s a small team of way less than 10 and if it grows bigger than that it will means we have du money to upgrade (it won’t be eligible for sponsorship tho).
This page describes how to manage your self-hosted plan, and answers some common questions about plans and billing for self-hosted organizations. Please refer to Self-hosted Zulip plans and pricing for plan details.
it's crazy, we'we had no issue with matrix even though i was sceptical at first and there was some teething issues, but we've onboarded non-technical users no problem.
I assessed Matrix a few years ago and came to the same conclusion. I went with IRC3 which is a new standard that overcomes most of IRC's issues. I think IRC is still quite good, and actually has working clients for everything, web etc
Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.
But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.
XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)
Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)
Whoa now, author sees a censoring filter as a most basic feature of a free and open chat infrastructure? It's not a social media client, you know? It was made for closed groups like governments and companies.
I use Fluffychat to talk with family and friends and for that it's good.
While announcing no breakthroughs, China's top trade negotiator Li Chenggang said the two sides agreed to push for an extension of a 90-day tariff truce struck in mid-May, without specifying when and for how long such an extension could come into force.
All kinds of governments are rushing to implement something similar. The Fediverse solves some problems, but not the problem of a site being hosted in a single geographical location (and thus a single government's jurisdiction). To help with this there are tools like i2p that can obscure a site's hosting location, and there's also work on distributed web hosting, but the latter still seems to be in its early stages. One day maybe we'll have distributed websites that can be resilient against censorship.
Whaddaya mean? A non-UK instance doesn't have to comply with UK law if it doesn't operate as an entity in the UK and so it won't require the face ID for UK visitors. So long as the instance is okay with hosting this content, it would let UK visitors view it. For example, I don't think the UK has authority or mechanism to ask a Brazil-based instance to do this.
Right, if blocking is part of the framework, yes. But that means they have to have a mechanism, legal and material to execute this. There must be an gov't institution that looks for and designates sites to be blocked. Then they have to have legal power to compel UK ISPs to block those lists. Are these things part of this law? I haven't read enough.
Reddit blocks you plain and simple if you use a vpn, and has done so for a while. Also I don't see how VPN relates to them gatekeeping 2 subs behind a mandatory doxxing of yourself.
If you use a vpn you appear as a non-uk user, you don't have to show the ID. If you don't have an existing account, the only reliable source of geolocation for websites is your ip address, so a vpn can effectively circumvent that.
Oh, right. I didn't thought of that at all, I never went beyond "well, they don't let you use VPNs anyway. Man I need to sleep. And thanks for explaining.
Just visited with my personal VPN, which I'd advocate anyone with technical chops to spin up. Digital Ocean droplet, been in use for years with zero maintenance, $6/mo., and no one gets my logs.
Huh, just went and managed to get the frontpage after 5 tries with mullvad. To be fair haven't really tried too hard to go back on Reddit the last two years, and just assumed the blocking of IPs was stricker. Still, thanks for correcting me
One of them that is hard is waving your hand in front of your face. It trips up almost every deepfake system I’ve seen. That’s a common test we’ve had to start using with interviewees because they’d try to game the system.
Infuriating and horrifying in a way that triggers my claustrophobia. Even more infuriating are the people in America who are begging for censorship. You point out what a trash heap Europe's censorship is and they shrug, as long as the censorship is by them against the "other side" whichever side that is they have no concept of what happens when that "other side" gets a hold of the reins. I would rather have to sift through 10 feet of nazi posts than have the government have a way to legitimately hold a verified list of everything everybody does.
social-rise.com/blog/list-of-n… says there are 10476 NSFW subreddits so is this the first of a 5238 long list of articles that all say "UK Users need to post selfie or photo id to view ... and ..."?
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It's crazy that we have website that are just outlets for war gore to begin with. The "solution" to the social rot that is monetization of war pornography appears to be adding a bunch of faces to a big database marked "Adult", I guess?
Who does this even benefit, other than data warehousing and aggregation companies?
I wouldn't call it outlets for war gore. It is also about providing information that mainstream media refuses to give or intentionally distort to fit its narrative.
The joke of the China comparison was that we had a bunch of libertarians screaming "We can't have social services! The government will weaponize them against us and track everything we say and do!!! Public healthcare, public transit, public education, public utilities - they're all a slippery slope to the Police State, just like in China!"
And now we get all the same mass surveillance via privatized channels, while libertarians seem to have fully clammed up (when they aren't quietly cheering on psychopaths like RFK Jr). But we get none of the public amenities. Yay... love my Freedom(TM)
Hey, we wouldn't want young people to know that they're being propagandized by the state of Israel to ignore a genocide, would we? Let's block them from informing themselves under the guise of "protecting" them from porn, which they'll still be able to get to from shadier websites that bombard them with malware. Yeah, that's the solution.
Politicians are so out of touch. Also, all zionists can rot in hell.
For years, politicians from across the political spectrum insisted the Online Safety Act would focus solely on illegal content without threatening free expression.
I'm usually of the opinion that I don't want kids in spaces like this, simply because I want adult comments. Then I look at shit I wrote as a teen, "This is going to be flat out stupid. Wait. This guy was fucking sharp!" Have never not been surprised reading stuff I wrote in high school. Turns out I wrote dumber shit in my 30s.
Then there's the occasional user bold enough to state they're like 14, and again, I'm amazed at how knowledgeable they are and how well they write. I think, "Damn! I wasn't on the ball like that at that age!" See first paragraph.
Neighborhood teens and their friends used to hang out on a Saturday night. Had deeper conversations that I'm able to have with most adults! They could argue effectively, had no problem changing their view with good cause, no one beat anyone up for being "wrong". You would think an old guy like me could manipulate them to dance to whatever tune. Hell no! They'd often fight me and tear down my arguments, never treated me as an infallible source of truth and changed my mind quite often. Clever bastards, very proud of them. One just got back from the Air Force and we're meeting up with him and his wife!
Often have to remind myself, teenagers are not nearly so dumb as they're made out to be. Wish more people weren't afraid of stating their age around here. I find the additional context interesting. I'm 54 if anyone cares.
The concerns really have nothing to do with intellect. It's more about how manipulative social media and the internet at large is. Many adults who watched it come about are still vulnerable to it. The developing mind is an important thing and change or damage during that period changes a person drastically
If you're worried about how the Internet affects children, be a parent and restrict your own child. What you think kids should be able to access has nothing to do with my rights to engage in free speech online, including my right to engage anonymously without putting doxxing material in a database just waiting to be compromised. Parent your own children, don't try to make government parent other people's children.
The founding manager of rock band Evanescence claims he was fired after reporting that Tait assaulted him. An Evanescence co-founder denies he was fired for that reason
Agreed. This is more a combination of naive people being exploited by a sexual predator, and the tragic ripple effects of that.
But that said, I just looked up a history of Evanescence, and there appeared to be a lot of problems in their first incarnation. Some of that might be the effects of the abuse their male band members and management suffered. But there was also a lot of bad blood between Lee and Moody that seemed to predate Tait's abuse.
Yeah this seems like one member was put in an awkward position at a young age and didn't have the understanding he now does. He did harm but seemingly unwillingly
When I was young, I went to several concerts for DC Talk (his band at the time) and the Newsboys (the band he became the frontman for).
While I'm still religious, I've since become an outspoken critic of corporate Christianity. Having a bunch of rich people singing pop songs to arenas full of people paying hundreds of dollars each with million-dollar lighting systems spotlighting the singers doesn't feel very humble and spiritual.
So it's fair to say I already had issues with this dude for profiteering of people's faith. With the newest revelations, I'm shaking with rage. This assholes and those who hid his actions pretended to be faithful servants while destroying lives and raking in profits and praise. They pretended to be exemplars of goodness so they could establish implicit trust, then used that trust to violate others.
Limp-wristed bitch babies. In 2024, the EU was the biggest trading partner of the US and China was the 4th. China got Trump to back down, the EU could have done the same. But the EU is headed by do-nothing-status-quo conservatives, so of course they backed down, they can't do anything but to capitulate when it comes to the economy or their ratings.
E.U. officials offered a simple response. The situation could have become a disaster, setting off an all-out trade war
A bad thing for the 1% on both sides and a the best long-term outcome for the 99%. "Global trade" exists to keep a few thousand people around the world happy and rich and you worse off for it.
A deal with America isn't worth the paper it's written on. A large part of American society consists of criminals, degenerates and corrupt nihilists.
While there are many sane Americans, my experience living in the US suggests they unfortunately don't have what it takes to implement real anti-corruption reforms, judicial reform and rehabilitation/internment programs for degenerates.
They are too well off to do anything (until it's too late) and are generally unwilling to think outside the box of local provincial orthodoxy. They will always come up with excuses to do nothing.
I wouldn't say a large part. I mean we have what, the worlds largest % of the population in prison or something. Most of them are only criminals by the local definition, and wouldn't be criminals elsewhere. So we got that going for us.
I meant criminals in the ethical sense, not necessarily in the judicial sense. Compare how the American judiciary treated the Sackler Cartel verses "Chapo" Guzman of CDS.
Mind you, this is of course not unique to the US. What is unique is that many Americans openly defend such corruption (while also parroting some copytext provided by Sackler Cartel lawyers). That's what I meant by degeneracy.
I don’t know many rral people who defend corruption. It's just the people who are trying to get media attention mostly. So poloticians, influencers, newsertainment people, that sort. On lemmy of course you have liberals who will defend corrupt democrats as the better of two evils. But lemmy doesn't really represent the country.
I would strongly disagree. Polemicists and public demagoguery is of course present in the US, but that's not really what I am discussing. I will give you another example.
Mandatory arbitration in B2C contexts. Objectively speaking this an American-style corruption scheme to limit the ability of individuals to use the legal system and force them to use a corporate run kangaroo court system that's not too different from the USSR or CCP China.
Many Americans will reflexively defend any criticism of corruption in the judicial system often employing rote copytext that is widely promoted by regular people (not just influencers). In this particular context one example of common copytext would be "we are a nation of contracts" (which is of course false) but there are other variations as well.
These aren't small exceptions. This sort of support for crime and corruption is very prevalent among the US public.
Mind you, this is not meant as an anti-American statement. From my perspective, one isn't doing anyone a favour by sweeping key problems under the rug and pretending they don't exist. I also say similar thing to my American friends about my own country.
I would prefer if the US was in the democratic camp of nations. But personally I think it's already too late for that. I hope I am wrong.
I don’t know who you are talking to, but I have never heard a real person face to face say "we are a nation of contracts". Only tv newsertainment. The only defense I have heard for arbitration was a half-hearted mention that the courts are already jammed.
As for corruption of the judicial system, that was one of the major points of the black lives matter protests. The judicial system give cops preference, allowing them to continue to brutalize minorities.
I've been in the jury room, before 2020 even when faith in the system really took a nose dive. One guy wouldn't vote to convict no matter what because he didn't believe any part of the system was fair. Others openly expressed how thier lack of faith in the system was impacting thier deliberations. Keep in mind, judges will tell people that both of those actions are illegal and can get you put in jail. No one turned them in or even objected to those opinions.
Most people have come to the realization that the government, especially the judicial system, doesn't work for the people. They work for the corporations.
The only defenders a person is likely to meet are the ones who profit from the system. People with stock portfolios and such. And even among those many agree the system isn't fair to people.
Between 2020 and 2024, Americans' confidence in the U.S. judicial system and courts declined by 24 percentage points, one of the largest country-level drops for the courts measured globally since 2006.
I will admit the "nation of contracts" piece is not from a IRL convo, it was a forum convo. That being said I've definitely encountered very similar polemics in face to face conversations in the US.
The level of skepticism of oligarchs and government corruption in the US is far less than in any country I've lived in (I've lived in 5 countries across North America, Europe and Asia, I've also visited another ~25 countries, some multiple times).
I am not saying there is no skepticism of either the judiciary or the oligarchic system, but a lot of people (note I never said a plurality or majority, I used the word "large") actively and aggressively promote oligarchic polemics, corruption and criminality.
In other countries, you almost never have situations (IRL) where someone talks about the constitution or freedom of speech or any such concepts in a random manner. You can have conversation about such topics, but these are defined and focused discussions. In the US, as foreigner, you get the impression and that everyone and their mother claims to be constitutional expert. And the "free speech supporter" polemics (the ones I've heard IRL, not internet or media stuff) are extremely shallow, bordering on childish.
And the polemical outbursts almost always leverage standardized copytext. This is very noticeable if you are foreigner and you travel across the US and talk to different people in different environments.
It is not my intention to "shit on the US", not at all. But it also not reasonable for me to deny my real experience in the US (not one location, I've been to maybe ~20 states or so).
So they went with what in the short term appeared to be the better of two evils. Ignoring the long term always works out. But I don’t blame them I guess. They didn't creat this mess, and they just want to stall to see where it goes.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. and Chinese officials may be able to settle many of their differences to reach a trade deal and avert punishing tariffs, but they remain far apart on one issue: the U.S.
Shaolin, and buddhist tradition could be something for the Chinese to really be proud of. It's a shame they haven't managed to protect their heritage from greed and abuse in the modern times.
Awdah Hathleen, a Palestinian activist who was part of the crew on the Academy Award-winning documentary No Other Land, was shot dead by an Israeli settler on Monday, the film's co-directors say.
"Israeli Settler" who is plainly on the video shooting at a crowd, named, internationally sanctioned and fully identified. But let's just call him "Israeli settler" for the headline...
A statement released by the Mount Hebron Regional Council reads: "We will be there to support him and to call on the IDF and the government to demonstrate sovereignty—arrest the attackers, not the victims. Yinon stands on the front lines for us; we will stand there for him."
Yinon Levi, previously sanctioned by the US, arrested after defending himself from Arab rioters—one of whom was a producer of the anti-Israel film No Other Land—during violent incident near Carmel.
Donald Trump on Thursday announced a 35% tariff on Canadian imports, starting Aug. 1, citing that Ottawa had retaliated with tariffs against Washington.
“Instead of working with the United States, Canada retaliated with its own Tariffs,” Trump said in his letter to Mark Carney, prime minister of Canada, posted on Truth Social.
Japan’s embassy in Laos and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued a rare and unusually direct advisory, warning Japanese men against “buying sex from children” in Laos.
The move was sparked by Ayako Iwatake, a restaurant owner in Vientiane, who allegedly saw social media posts of Japanese men bragging about child prostitution. In response, she launched a petition calling for government action.
The Japanese-language bulletin makes clear such conduct is prosecutable under both Laotian law and Japan’s child prostitution and pornography law, which applies extraterritorially.
This diplomatic statement was not only a legal warning. It was a rare public acknowledgement of Japanese men’s alleged entanglement in transnational child sex tourism, particularly in Southeast Asia.
It’s also a moment that demands we look beyond individual criminal acts or any one nation and consider the historical, racial and structural inequalities that make such mobility and exploitation possible.
Japan’s official warning wasn’t triggered by a government audit or diplomatic scandal. It came because Ayako Iwatake saw social media posts of Japanese men boasting about buying sex from children and refused to look away.
I'm sure I'd be preaching to the choir if I told you that it's time for us to immigrate from übercorp owned social media and services. All of you have done so, so that's not the point of this post. Even though we are on these new platforms, the fediverse is still sensitive to requests from governmental bodies and organizations. Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users and Lemmy.world will almost certainly do the same. Due to the size of Matrix's biggest homeserver matrix.org, the admins of said homeserver are beginning to follow the OSA and have already raised their minimum age to 18+. And instances who don't follow the Act could be subjected to insurmountable paperwork and even blocked from the UK, Australia and other countries enacting these outrageous laws soon.
Blocking UK users to avoid this is almost a necessity, and as Labour is attempting to get lawmakers to outlaw VPNs, we could be seeing the equivalent of the UK Great Firewall soon. However, it will take significant amounts of time, money and paperwork to outlaw VPNs and to get ISPs to block sites and protocols. This is where federated and open source platforms have an advantage, without being shackled by bureaucracy they are able to quickly adapt. But this is not sustainable, and eventually the UK will become even more overreaching in order to gain more control over people's Internet usage.
Darknets such as Tor, I2P and Yggdrasil are a potential solution, however they have multiple issues. Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load. ~~Yggdrasil is alpha software and requires IPv6, which in many countries is simply not possible to use~~. Whilst these darknets are extremely resistant to censorship from other countries, with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet, they still are not capable of handling modern Internet usage.
We might need new completely independent mediums seperate from the Internet to avoid this. Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up. All I know is that governments will not stop here. I might seem like I'm overreacting here, but we need to be prepared for what is coming.
CORRECTION: I was told by a peer that Yggdrasil peers must have IPv6, however one does not need an IPv6 enabled network to use it, they just need an IPv6 operating system/device, which virtually every modern operating system including Windows and Linux does. Yggdrasil is actually Beta software.
TOR was invented by the US Navy, roughly 1/3 of major entry/exit nodes are estimated to be comprimised / run as honeypots by various LE / Intel agencies, and said LE and Intel agencies also know how to, and have deanonimyed various people and groups on TOR that they really wanted to go after.
TOR ain't it.
I2P is a lot closer to 'it'.
The other part of the answer is:
Well, now it turns out data hoarders were not just paranoid weirdos, they actually had foresight.
If you can host your own at least several terabyte mini/curated backup of the Internet Archive, and plug that into I2P, then congrats, you now are the backup plan for when, not if, they get massively purged of even more of their content than has already been taken out in the last ~2 years.
The old cyberpunk line holds true in another sense of meaning:
The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed.
Wi-Fi mesh might be possible with neighbors, but mitm is extremely likely. Also, a non-Internet-routing protocol will need to be invented as I do not want possibly liable traffic to run over the clear web without some kind of tunnel.
SSL is safe when the initial key exchange happens ahead of time. If the the threat actor can capture the key exchange and substitute their own, then the security is broken.
Hear me out, what if we take that LAN idea, but make it wider than just a Local thing? It could be of Metropolitan size, even the whole World. And machines there would be interconnected in a very big network. We could distribute our porn there without uploading our ids. We could even make the fediverse work there.
Besides being slow I think the issues with darkweb can be overcome simply through general interest growing. Currently I personally have no real motivation to use such technologies beyond the decentralized fediverse on clearnet. But if things keep going the way they are, then I'll have motivation. I'm into digital media archiving so if that gets pushed further underground then I will have reason to bother.
I am paying attention of course, Canada is likely to copy cat EU/UK/AUS. Just as a general rule of thumb, but this stuff is in the works here too specifically.
Meshtastic is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!
Only one node can be transmitting at once, or signals can be lost, so nodes automatic hold back until the channel is clear. Meshtastic seems reliant on having as little traffic as possible, with the way ot works right now, it can easily be overwhelmed.
Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers.
It sucks that literally using something that should be the default, truly protecting privacy, has such a bad reputation because… well it protects privacy.
Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you're using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that's even more streamlined, and then come and find you.
Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than "the dark web" is. That's just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it's a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because "terrorism!" or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.
Yeah. As far as I know, there are some theoretical state-actor attacks, but nothing that anyone's ever been able to make work in practice. Compromising something else is just always easier.
It was literally designed by professional spies to be resistant against state intelligence agencies. It was originally made by US intelligence for secret communication with their assets, and only released to the public when they realized they needed a bunch of additional traffic on the network that the US intelligence traffic can blend in with. At least as of the Snowden leaks (which showed NSA compromise of huge amounts of the internet including most HTTPS traffic), they hadn't figured out a way to undo it for their own spying purposes, either.
I've literally never in my life heard of "this person was doing (whatever), but they were behind a VPN, so we had to do (whatever elaborate sting operation) instead of compromising the VPN." I've heard that many times about Tor.
It's possible that no one's ever done something significant enough to make the feds interested from behind a VPN, just always used Tor, but I feel like it is unlikely. I feel like it's more likely that they either have the ability to force the VPN companies to comply with some legal structures that give them the info they need, or else just wiretap the pipes going in and out of the VPN servers and can sort things out pretty straightforwardly if they really start to care about it.
VPNs are certainly useful; they make it a lot more difficult for non-law-enforcement people to know what you're up to, which is a significant gain, and they are faster and generally more convenient than using Tor. But if you're actually concerned about the government, I would use Tor 100% of the time over a VPN.
I dont think most people need a security model that is fed proof. Thats a pretty extreme level of privacy and most people would break it by yappign about their life to much.
Well, but we're talking about how to prepare for the future where it does need to be fed proof. At some point, I think pretty soon from now in some places, it's going to become necessary to either break the rules of the internet in ways that can actually get you in trouble, or accept that you have to do things like upload your ID to all these places, agree not to access certain types of content the government doesn't want you looking at, not say certain political things on social media or else you're going on a list, things like that.
I think option A is probably better and it probably makes sense to start to think about, how are we going to do that and not have the expanded-and-mission-creeped version of ICE showing up at your door for it to give you a citation or worse, a year from now.
Right now, yes, a VPN is fine. But that's only true for as long as the government doesn't strongly dislike anything that you are doing.
That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.
Oh they're all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that's the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.
Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that's not really a coincidence.
Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely. Let them have their own little North Korean style micronet. Maybe when the people of the UK can't visit anything but a bunch of miserable English websites, they will get off their asses and elect competent leaders. If not, well maybe they're just not the sort of people we should allow access to the global communications network. Let the barbarians stew in their own barbarism.
Frankly, the answer should be for every site to just cut the UK off entirely.
Tech corporations own most popular and visited websites/services, they are not going to do it. That said you have countries with major websites blocked like russia or china, while it upset many people censored internet is also a strong tool to brainwash people so don't assume a blockage would lead to a positive outcome.
Maybe things will go back too when the internet was a less decentralized and more for a select few who were interested? Personally that's when I enjoyed the internet the most. Were message boards reigned supreme and chatrooms were filled with 30 year men pretending to be women. Actually that last part hasn't changed
Two days from now there's a seminar happening in the capital city of my country on a technology called mesh/meshtastic(?). They claim to have found a way to send messages in blackout conditions.
I just ordered a couple of meshtastic transceivers. Here's what it is:
LoRa is a patented radio technique that uses some kind of fancy spread spectrum technique to give very low power sub-GHz UHF radio somewhat impressive range. We're used to a single Wi-Fi access point being able to cover about the size of a large-ish house with wireless data. I can't pick up my house Wi-Fi in my workshop at the back of my suburban property. LoRa manages to reach out several miles on the same amount of power as a Wi-Fi signal. The tradeoff is bandwidth. A typical Wi-Fi connection can stream video, LoRa isn't really practical for much more than text messaging. It is my understanding that it's designed to do things like industrial telemetry.
On top of this is built Meshtastic, an open source mesh networking protocol. You buy a little circuit board that's got a microcontroller, a LoRa transceiver and a bluetooth transceiver. You flash the Meshtastic firmware to it, and now it is a "node." "Nodes" can be configured in several ways, but in general they'll sit there and scream into the void looking for other nodes. Messages sent are like "Tell John I say hello. Pass this on Three times." If your node hears that message, it will automatically transmit "Tell John I say hello. pass this on Two times." So in that way, nodes can automatically act as repeaters.
So they have astonishing range for their band and power, and the automatic relaying of messages means a message can propagate pretty far. Mind you, it has limitations similar to old school SMS; a message is pretty strictly limited to something like 288 characters, including emoji.
Many "nodes" don't have much of an onboard UI; some do but the main intended way for the user to access a node is over bluetooth from the Meshtastic app running on an Android or iOS device. Some units do have onboard UIs or can host a web interface accessed via wi-fi or ethernet.
Meshtastic essentially forms an ad-hoc off-grid SMS-like service. The bandwidth is simply too low to allow anything like web hosting, audio or video. At a ham convention, several hundred nodes saturated the available bandwidth just with procedural pings leaving no room for actual traffic.
Encryption is permitted on this network, I wouldn't exactly plan a coup over Meshtastic but I think I could coordinate meeting friends at a restaurant without being stalked.
If your project is to abandon the internet, this may be one of many tools necessary.
Yeah I hold a general class amateur radio license, and that's helped me wrap my head around how it works. And I've still got a lot of "somehow"s in my understanding.
Enough folks drank the coolaid, and now we're stuck with surveillance laws masquerading as child protection laws.
Those laws can, and will, get worse over time. However, new mediums will arise, or old ones will rise to the occasion (IRC goes brr). The main thing to do is remain calm, make it a key voter issue, and watch the bastards fold right before the next election.
Lemmy.zip has already blocked UK users and Lemmy.world will almost certainly do the same.
For clarity, lemmy.zip had blocked them months ago because the owner of lemmy.zip is based in the UK and theoretically could actually be fined. This is not the same situation as lemmy.world.
Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.
Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.
These are incompatible statements lol
Tor is fine, I'm looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what's going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. The majority (but not all) news sites and things work fine. Some things do not and I have to bounce over to some normal browser. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it's bearable.
I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (near-bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there's a lot more that goes into "the internet" than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.
The main point is: Hey! Don't badmouth Tor, it's good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)
I strongly encourage everyone to protect the things they love, download all of Wikipedia, screenshot & download all the things. It's a little paranoid, sure, but between all of us downloading & saving all our little pieces of the web & all its information, we effectively safeguard most of it from digital terrorism, tyranny, erasure. It costs very little, relatively speaking. Do your part & I'll do mine.
I have Kiwix (offline versions of Wikipedia and other online resources) and Linkwarden (preserve specific websites in multiple formats) running on my home server.
Yes! It saves it as HTML, readable HTML, PDF and image. Results can vary a lot depending on how the page is implemented. Sometimes most of the formats are empty or broken, but I always got at least one that's usable.
You have two things, the application and the libraries. The libraries are files with the data you want to host (wikipedia, stack overflow, etc). There's a lot of applications for different platforms. Some allow to download the libraries directly, otherwise you can download them manually into a folder and tell the app where to find them.
Discover Kiwix applications that enable offline access to knowledge on different platforms. Explore the convenience of accessing information without an internet connection
It's kind of like a PDF of a web page. But it's functional You don't have to load the whole site at once and links take you from page to page just like it did in the original website. The content is stored in monolithic ZIM files and you can get a decent selection from archive.org. But it's mostly reference material and the content is quite static.
Only tangentially related, but in the vein of privacy and circumventing surveillance, one communication idea I really like in that vein is from the show The Leftovers--the way the "Remnant" group communicates only by simple handwritten notes.
I just like the idea that something so rudimentary could theoretically overcome a lot of very high-tech snooping equipment. Good luck using your Stingray cell tower simulator to intercept my notepad scribbles.
Obviously, yeah, it wouldn't work in the middle of a Target. And given the AI tools that can use keyboard typing sounds to determine what was typed, it's even theoretically possible there's some bleeding-edge capability to circumvent it. But in general, if you're in some context where you're not sure if you're being listened to/monitored, handwritten notes would definitely work, because your biggest concerns are e-mail, text messages, phone calls, GPS, etc...
You are not overreacting, an alternative to internet is needed and it's not that hard to create, there are many projects already of networks working over radio and wifi, we should probably just stick to one of these and work to expand it
If doing an overlay network (network on top of the Internet), you probably won't be able to do much better than Tor or i2p.
We confirm the trilemma that an AC [anonymous communication] protocol can only achieve two out of the following three properties: strong anonymity (i.e., anonymity up to a negligible chance), low bandwidth overhead, and low latency overhead.
I have always wondered about distributed hosting, like BitTorrent, but for websites. You go to a webpage, and it gets seeded from however many people host the file. It should be harder to take down. I do not code at all. Is that a thing? Why not?
I tried really hard to use IPFS. I set up a syncthing and did some auto-publishing scripts.
It's slow AF, and unless you pay some big player to pin your files there's only about a 1 in 10 chance of it actually being available everywhere. I had to actually peer my computers together to get sure fire access to my own data.
Then there's very little in the way of privacy. I did some JavaScript crypto self-decrypting archives that was kind of fun But with the distribution problems it just became more of a hassle to use than anything.
Tribler has inbuilt onion routing. If I understand it correctly, tribler <-> tribler connections don't need exit nodes and it's fast enough to stream video
Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator is, but there's still a single point of failure and a person to blame for the community.
We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service's operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.
In the future new technologies will maybe bypass internet but right now the best thing to do it's to start being less internet dependent: archive stuff for your home server, buy physical media, preserve what you'd need and like.
with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet
I don't think this is true. It's a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I'd assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.
Tor is slow
It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it's much faster than its historical reputation
and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers
This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they're doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.
Nvidia would have you believe that with MFG and DLSS. Anyways, never trust the manufacturer's claims, we'll see what this triple slot 4060 competitor can do when it gets in the hands of independent reviewers.
Nvidia run at the bleeding edge of what throwing more wattage at the problem can achieve, so you'd need to literally be the world leader by a significant margin to drive Nvidia into the ground (without the power of economic sanctions)
Most people don't buy top of the line NVIDIA so they are okay with lower performance. If lower performance is sold at significantly lower price.. they are likely to make a lot of sales. For example if someone offered me a 4060 equivalent for $100, I would buy it instantly and lower my graphics settings if needed.
The absolute majority of Nvidias sales globally are top-of-the-line AI SKUs. Gaming cards are just a way of letting data scientists and developers have cheap CUDA hardware at home (while allowing some Cyberpunk), so they keep buying NVL clusters at work.
Nvidia’s networking division is probably a greater revenue stream than gaming GPUs.
Celso Amorim, lead foreign affairs adviser to leftwing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told the Financial Times those attacks “are reinforcing our relations with the Brics, because we want to have diversified relations and not depend on any one country”.
I believe in the BRICS proposal. For any of you who don't, if you lived in a third world country you would understand what the missed potential is all about. Latin America is somewhat integrated, but people from Brazil could do scientific exchange with Uzbekistan, or an Algerian could be a professor in Senegal. The human potential is so great, because there are a lot of people who are left out from the current state of things.
Everyone wants to go study or be a professional in Europe, but what about all the other countries? Doing the hard thing (working together to reach new heights) is difficult, but it is the only way forward. And that's what the BRICS propose.
Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives.
This is compounded by mass arrests and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons, which have effectively become torture camps, and tearing apart the social fabric of Gaza, including the destruction of Palestinian educational and cultural institutions. The campaign is also an assault on Palestinian identity itself, through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps and attempts to undermine the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The term genocide refers to a socio-historical and political phenomenon involving acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstance, including as an act of self-defense.
Genocide always occurs within a context: there are conditions that enable it, triggering events, and a guiding ideology. The current onslaught on the Palestinian people, including in the Gaza Strip, must be understood in the context of more than seventy years in which Israel has imposed a violent and discriminatory regime on the Palestinians, taking its most extreme form against those living in the Gaza Strip. Since the State of Israel was established, the apartheid and occupation regime has institutionalized and systematically employed mechanisms of violent control, demographic engineering, discrimination, and fragmentation of the Palestinian collective. These foundations laid by the regime are what made it possible to launch a genocidal attack on the Palestinians immediately after the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.
The assault on Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the escalating violence being inflicted, at varying levels and in different forms, on Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and within Israel. The violence and destruction in these areas is intensifying over time, with no effective domestic or international mechanism acting to halt them. We warn of the clear and present danger that the genocide will not remain confined to the Gaza Strip, and that the actions and underlying mindset driving it may be extended to other areas as well.
The recognition that the Israeli regime is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the deep concern that it may expand to other areas where Palestinians live under Israeli rule, demand urgent and unequivocal action from both Israeli society and the international community, and use of every means available under international law to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
You could be forgiven for looking around Reddit and saying "this is the most Left wing place on the Internet".
But there is an even bigger Left wing bastion of insanity, Transgender orthodoxy, and unchecked out of control Moderation. And its called "the Fediverse"
Never in my life have I seen such a Hive containing the Damned and Reprobates of life.
A wise man once said "I may had voted for Obama.....but you people are insane".
Oh no, what a terrible thing to believe in live and let live and minding our own business. How dare we suggest we should treat everyone as equals and keep the government out of people's private lives. The horror.
I get where you're coming from. There's certainly a "I know best and should never reconsider my views" anti-sympathic thinking to be found here, mostly of the communist variety. But I wouldn't say it's more than elsewhere.
In any case, the technology is wonderfull. Start your own instance, be the change you want to see in the world.
Try to find a flower today, appreciate how beautifull it is.
Start your own instance, be the change you want to see in the world.
This right here is the beauty of the Fediverse. And as such, it's not "The Fediverse" that's a "Left Wing Circle Jerk", it's just the servers you've found so far.
Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.
In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society.
Multiple international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine’s most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action.
Two ~~leading human rights~~soon-to-be-terrorist organisations based in Israel
I guess this would be the important internal test for this society. Wether they'd snap out of it and face the crimes they committed and drastically change direction as a result. Or wherher they double down and increase domestic repression against dissenting voices who bring up those crimes. I bet on the latter since that's where many economic interests are vested and it would avoid instability at least for a while.
yeehaw
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