*Regarding Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, [this](https://beehaw.org/post/567170) post goes into detail on the why and the philosophy behind that decision. Additionally, there is an update specific to sh.itjust.works [here](https://beehaw.org/post/594843).* For now, let's talk about what federation is and what defederation means for members of Beehaw or the above two communities interacting with each other, as well as the broader fediverse. *Federation is not something new on the internet*. Most users use federated services every day (for instance, the url used to access instances uses a federated service known as DNS, and email is another system that functions through federation.) Just like those services, you elect to use a service provider that allows you to communicate with the rest of the world. That service provider is your window to work with others. When you federate, you mutually agree to share your content. This means that posting something to a site can be seen by another and all comments are shared. Even users from other sites can post to your site. Now when you defederate, this results in content to be no longer shared. It didn't reverse any previous sharing or posts, it just stops the information from flowing with the selected instance. This only impacts the site's that are called out. What this means to you is when a user within one instance (e.g. Beehaw) that's chosen to defederate with another (e.g. lemmy.world), they can no longer interact with content on another instance, and vice versa. Other instances can still see the content of both servers as though nothing has happened. - A user is not limited to how many instances they can join (technically at least - some instance have more stringent requirements for joining than others do) - A user can interact with Lemmy content without being a user of any Lemmy instance - e.g. Mastodon (UI for doing so is limited, but it is still possible.) Considering the above, it is important to understand just how much autonomy we, as users have. For example, as the larger instances are flooded with users and their respective admins and mods try to keep up, many, smaller instances not only thrive, but emerge, regularly (and even single user instances - I have one for just myself!) The act of defederation does not serve to lock individual users out of anything as there are multiple avenues to constantly maintain access to, if you want it, the entirety of the unfiltered fediverse. On that last point, another consideration at the individual level is - what do you want out of Lemmy? Do you want to find and connect with like-minded people, share information, and connect at a social and community level? Do you want to casually browse content and not really interact with anyone? These questions and the questions that they lead to are critical. There is no direct benefit to being on the biggest instance. In fact, as we all deal with this mass influx, figure out what that means for our own instances and interactions with others, I would argue that a smaller instance is actually much better suited for those who just want to casually browse everything. Lastly, and tangential, another concern I have seen related to this conversation is people feeling afraid of being locked out of the content and conversation from the "main" communities around big topics starting to form across the Lemmiverse (think memes, gaming, tech, politics, news, etc.) Over time, certain communities will certainly become a default for some people just given the community size (there will *always* be a biggest or most active - it's just a numbers game.) This, again though, all comes down to personal preference and what each individual is looking to get from their Lemmy experience. While there may, eventually, be a “main” sub for <topic xyz> (again, by the numbers), there will also always be quite a few other options for targeted discussions on <topic xyz>, within different communities, on different instances, each with their own culture and vibe. This can certainly feel overwhelming and daunting (and at the moment, honestly it is.) Reddit and other non-federated platforms provided the illusion of choice, but this is what actual choice looks and feels like. [edit: grammar and spelling]

hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!

> We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

Looking to find more indie/small-web content to replace big tech sites. I enjoy Lemmy and Mastodon, but does anyone know any good Gemini and Gopher protocol sites that actively post content?

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/282116 > We've posted a number of times about our increasing storage issues. We're currently at the cusp of using 80% of the 25gb we have available in the current tier for the online service we run this instance on. This has caused some issues with the server crashing in recent days. > > We've been monitoring and reporting on this [progress](https://beehaw.org/post/237080?scrollToComments=true) occasionally, including support requests and comments on the main lemmy instance. Of particular note, it seems that pictures tend to be the culprit when it comes to storage issues. > > The last time a discussion around pict-rs came up, the following [comment](https://lemmy.ml/comment/280731) stuck out to me as a potential solution > > > Storage requirements depend entirely on the amount of images that users upload. In case of slrpnk.net, there are currently 1.6 GB of pictrs data. You can also use s3 storage, or something like sshfs to mount remote storage. > > Is there anyone around who is technically proficient enough to help guide us through potential solutions using "something like sshfs" to mount remote storage? As it currently exists, our only feasible option seems to be upgrading from $6/month to $12/month to double our current storage capacity (25GB -> 50 GB) which seems like an undesirable solution.

Big Tech wants to kill the password, with "Passkeys" being the hot, new password replacement standard on the block. Passkeys are backed by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and the FIDO Alliance, so expect to see them everywhere soon. iOS picked up the standard in version 16, and now Google is launching passkey betas on Chrome and Android. The Passkey standard just trades cryptographic keys with the website directly. There's no need for a human to tell a password manager to generate, store, and recall a secret—that will all happen automatically, with way better secrets than what the old text box supported, and with uniqueness enforced. The downside is that, while every browser in the world supports showing that old text box, passkey support will need to be added to every web browser, every password manager, and every website. It's going to be a long journey. Not only that, there is also talk of it being locked to a mobile device, and what about those who move across all platforms like me having an Android as well as iPhone, and a Linux and Windows desktop? I make use of apps such as Authy and Bitwarden that sync and work across all my devices. I can't use Apple's Passkey as that only works on Apple devices, and Android's one is not going to help me on Linux. I just get this queezy feeling that Big Tech has been out to grab land as quickly as it could here for itself, and has not tried to really work openly with each other, and others, to create a truly portable solution. I want to make use of a solution that does not belong to any platform owner, and which I can use anywhere. Problem is, Big Tech owns platforms and they end up being the majority voice. I really would have preferred cross-platform players to have had a louder voice. See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/google-rolls-out-beta-passkey-support-for-chrome-and-android/ #technology #passkey #passwords #authentication #BigTech

RIF will be shutting down on June 30, 2023, in response to Reddit Inc's API changes and their hostile treatment of developers building on their platform.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/667480 > Like many other subs (apparently [over 5000](https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247)) /r/joplinapp is going dark for the duration of the blackout. > > The HN thread about it (or one of them): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283249 > > One of the top comment puts it nicely: > > > The cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app. Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour, creativity, stories, humour, talent, wisdom, advice, skills of their users to try and make themselves billionaires whilst delivering a hopeless piece of tech in return, thats only been made useable by others people writing software to make the site bearable, Reddit Enhancement suite, Apollo, RIF. And yet here they are ready to make it rubbish again to get their filthy lucre. The more I think about it the more infuriated I get.

The biggest challenge to getting an agreement over the European Union's proposed AI Act has come from France, Germany and Italy, who favour letting makers of generativeAI models self-regulate instead of having hard rules. Well, we saw what happened (allegedly) with OpenAI "self-regulating" itself.

From the article: “In some ways, the current situation has spurred an arms race. YouTube has inadvertently improved ad blockers, as the new knowledge and techniques gained from innovating within the YouTube platform are also applicable to other ad and tracking systems.”

> MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — The parent company of Instagram and Facebook has sued the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to stop the agency from reopening a 2020 privacy settlement with the company that would prohibit it from profiting from data it collects on users under 18. > > In a lawsuit filed late Wednesday in federal court in Washington, D.C., Meta Platforms Inc. said it is challenging “the structurally unconstitutional authority exercised by the FTC” in reopening the privacy agreement.

Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world. New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think. This video is sponsored and contains an ad.

I’m sure the email I sent to an academics using proton has gone in the spam. :( too bad

> Researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, who said their study was the largest of its kind, said they found no evidence to support “popular ideas that certain groups are more at risk” from the technology. > > However, Andrew Przybylski, professor at the institute—part of the University of Oxford—said that the data necessary to establish a causal connection was “absent” without more cooperation from tech companies. If apps do harm mental health, only the companies that build them have the user data that could prove it, he said.

November 28, 2023 - Turbo Pascal turns 40 Turbo Pascal was introduced by Borland in November 1983. It's officially turning 40 years old this month. Turbo Pascal was a milestone product for the industry, it started Borland as a company and it was the first popular Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It was a great product for the time, and its success was incredible. You can read more about Turbo Pascal it in this recent blog post from David I, but also on Wikipedia and many other sources including blog posts of mine, including the talk I did this summer in the first Pascal World Congress in Salamanca. At Embarcadero, the company continuing working on the successors of Turbo Pascal, we just shipped version 36 of that compiler. In fact when you read "Embarcadero Delphi for Win32 compiler version 36.0" (the version of the command line compiler in Delphi 12 Athens) the compiler version number, 36, dates back to the first Turbo Pascal. Not only that, we decided to dedicate the product Easter Egg to this great anniversary.

> If you get a message from someone you never matched with on Tinder, it's not a glitch — it's part of the app's expensive new subscription plan that it teased earlier this year, which allows "power users" to send unsolicited messages to non-matches for the small fee of $499 per month. > That landscape, in fact, is largely populated by apps owned by Tinder's parent company: as Bloomberg notes, Match Group Inc. not only owns the popular swiping app, but also Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge, and The League. > Match Group CEO Bernard Kim referred to Tinder's subscriptions as "low-hanging fruit" meant to compete with other, pricier services, though that was before this $6,000-per-year tier dropped.

cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2883134 ([email protected])

>The new data — comprehensive and definitive — should put to rest the countervailing narratives over Musk’s management of the app. Under his stewardship, X’s daily user base has declined from an estimated 140 million users to 121 million, with a widening gap between people who check the app daily vs. monthly. X’s remaining daily users are engaged similarly as before. But the pool is shrinking. Apptopia pulls its data from more than 100,000 apps on iOS and Android, along with publicly available sources. So apparently it lost only 13% of daily users? Thats a smaller number than I thought. Still bad news for Twitter though. On the other hand, it shows the power of content creators and niche communities. I used less Twitter but cannot delete it because it is literally how I connect with my niche community on there.