Pamasich

Discourse decided to do its thread context in a way that’s currently incompatible with projects like Mbin or Lemmy. Those expect threads to be represented by some kind of post (Page, Article, Image, etc objects), while Discourse decided to use an OrderedCollection, with the first item being the opening post.

Even if Lemmy decided to add support for OrderedCollection threads, there’s another issue though: the barrier for initial federation is too high. Discourse only gives you the fediverse handle of its categories, but to federate them in, you need their JSON-LD URL, not the handle. And Discourse decided to use separate URLs for its HTML and JSON-LD pages, with no way to derive the latter from the former. So to initiate federation with a Discourse category, you have to manually do a WebFInger query to get its URL to then give it to your instance. I think most people probably fail this hurdle, either out of laziness or lack of know-how.

Also, I don’t know about Lemmy, but the Mbin instance I’m using seems incapable of processing Discourse categories anyway. Not sure why that is.

That means Lemmy is entirely reliant on Discourse users replying to posts that are visible to Lemmy, similar to Lemmy-Mastodon interaction. But with less users, hence less overall interaction frequency.

Discourse does too.

Does this even make any difference outside of Switzerland (were pirating for personal use is actually legal)?

Youtube seems to be blocking access to a seriously large amount of publicly listed videos

Creators can choose whether their videos should be accessible and whether they should be listed anywhere. Which you don’t seem to have ruled out being the case here. So I’d say you’re jumping the gun here.

I have seen channels which delisted (and later privated entirely) almost all their videos for legitimate reasons, so it’s certainly possible.

And I can attest that at least one of the remaining 26 is hosted, but invisible.

This one is almost certainly just delisted.

everyone needs to jump ship to Odysee

The fediverse has its own video platform (peertube).

Do you think there is a “best” most efficient programming language for building the program?

I think that depends on how important performance is for large instances, which I don’t really know. Python has a huge advantage due to being notoriously easy to get into, even for non-programmers. This means it can find contributors much more easily, leading to faster bugfixing and feature development. But Python is also slow, which might be an issue for large instances that have a lot of work to do.

In general, barrier of entry and performance act as trade-offs to each others. If you use a language with a lower barrier of entry, it tends too come with lower performance, and vice versa. So whether there’s an ideal language depends on whether performance matters and how much it does.

Why are there so many separate platforms in the Fediverse like Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, and PeerTube? It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.

Simple answer: Because people have different visions, different priorities. Expertise in different programming languages and tooling.

Why do we have three Reddit alternatives in Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin? Why don’t all their devs work on the same project?

1. The Lemmy devs are highly controversial. The other projects don’t have such issues.
2. Lemmy is written in Rust, Mbin in PHP, and Piefed in Python.
3. The scope is different between them. Lemmy only cares about communities. Mbin targets wider compatibility with the microblogging side of the fediverse. Piefed plans to one day add microblog support iirc, but their priorities lie elsewhere.

Some platforms care about interoperability more than others, trying to push for FEPs (basically standardization proposals for the fediverse), while others don’t. Some care about privacy even if it degrades interoperability, some believe the latter outweighs the former. Some disagree on how to implement a specific feature.

Mbin adopted Reddit’s karma system, Lemmy didn’t. Sure you could combine both of those and give the user the choice, but this reflects a difference in design philosophies. Lemmy users don’t just lack a karma system, they outright don’t want one. It’s a system which promotes karma farming, so it’s associated with the worst of Reddit. But ironically, it also encourages contributing, which is probably why kbin (Mbin’s predecessor) originally added it. The fediverse is in need of contributors over lurkers, so whether a karma system is bad or good for it depends on your perspective. And that perspective differs between the developers of these two projects.

Ultimately, sometimes projects are just born out of a dev wanting to challenge themselves by recreating something themselves. Iirc that’s how Minecraft was born, with its creator originally wanting to test his skills at an Infiniminer clone and that spiralled into the most successful game ever.
So why a separate project is started isn’t always logical even. Sometimes the dev just felt like it.

I for one like Mbin but dislike Piefed and Lemmy both. But most people seem to think differently, as Mbin is the least popular of the three. There’s a lot who have sworn off Lemmy in favor of Piefed, but there’s also a lot of people who prefer sticking with Lemmy. If there was just a single option, there’s a possibility I or others might not be here today, because we don’t like the choices that single option went with.

Finally, there’s also the danger of a company acquiring the project and enshittifying it. They can’t really acquire an entire federation protocol and every software implementing it.

In the first place, the fediverse is about interoperability between different social networks. If you have just one social network, you have no use for the fediverse anymore. So your question is really more like “why do we need the fediverse?”. There’s no such thing as “unifying the fediverse”, as that’s the antithesis of the fediverse. Unifying it would undo it. The fediverse is nothing without its nature of connecting different projects together.

Is there a fediverse messager people could use?

There is one in active development. But it doesn’t seem to be federating YET according to the description. That’s an item in the planned list, and federating with other instances of itself is marked as wip. But work is being done on that front, the latest commit on the main branch is from 4 days ago.

OP is using paragraphs. I checked the post on your instance and it’s also showing paragraphs. Like OP said, if you can’t see them, something is wrong on your end.

I think I have to read up on the exact definition of “group”.

Here you go.

Represents a formal or informal collective of Actors.

has there ever been discussions regarding SSO?

Don’t know about Lemmy specifically, but there has been discussion on SSO in the fediverse in general. There is an FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which lists some implementers. I have also heard the client-to-server API part of ActivityPub could be used for this, but I don’t think projects usually implement that (it’s optional). It should be theoretically possible to provide SSO for any fediverse project which has an API with authentication. I think. So sign in with Lemmy should be possible, but it’s up to those other projects to implement it.

Like others have said, you can follow accounts from those servers. If they present themselves as group actors, as Lemmy (unlike Mbin for example) doesn’t allow following non-group actors.

You can’t however just go to their website and log in with your Lemmy account. ActivityPub doesn’t have a built-in mechanism for this, but some platforms like Mastodon iirc have a solution and there have been efforts made to standardize something. But there’s nothing supported by the Lemmy side of the fediverse yet afaik.

If you want to subscribe to a group actor from Lemmy but can’t find them, try searching for the full URL from its home instance. That should tell it to go and fetch the actor. If you want a Lemmy-like experinece but also the ability to follow non-group actors, switch to Mbin. Same applies there, if you can’t find an actor on your instance, search for their full URL on the search page and it should fetch them from their home server.

Just donate to them if you want to, why make it this complicated. If you don’t want your money to go towards running the instance, then donate directly to those devs not involved with running the instance.

Why? “Threadiverse” has been used before Threads became a thing, and “thread” is a generic term that has existed for ages and doesn’t belong to Meta.

I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?

Like, they obviously can’t enforce these fines. This article says as much. The fines can’t be enforced, but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article). Which are fair measures imo.

Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way? The US has these laws too, like COPPA iirc. It’s not really something the UK came up with, it’s a bit of a standard with laws like this as far as I know.

I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.

Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we’re really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There’s no way we’ll take a stance against EU law.

This already exists, I have seen it used before, don’t know any exact repositories though. The reason it’s not really used is because it’s pointless. What are you trying to achieve with it? Your community won’t look more active if it has more posts with zero upvotes and zero comments all made by the same user.

Hiding posts from bots will also hide posts from this bot.

Keep in mind that not everyone here uses Lemmy, so a Lemmy feature isn’t a good defense in a federated world like this.

Like I said, I love Windows 11. I actually prefer its features in general to what I’ve seen of Linux, I prefer its design a lot, and there’s some stuff, like WSA and autohotkey, which simply doesn’t exist on Linux with the same simplicity as far as I know. Can’t use classic shell on linux either, and the start menus I have seen either looked ugly or were more launchers than start menus.

I love Windows 11 (the non-copilot+ version) and am positive on AI, but if they pull through with this vision, I WILL switch to Linux once Win11 support ends.

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest.

You mean like how the french aren’t protesting their country’s support of Chat Control? At least I can’t find any information on them doing so.

Donating costs me money. Donating to every single website I like or rely on requires far more money than I have available or am willing to spend. I don’t know your situation, but I’m not rich. I don’t have that kind of disposable income to just throw around.

That said, thanks for mentioning that. I did donate to kbin when it was still around, but I’ve forgotten to set up donations for mbin and kbin.earth since switching over. I’ll have to get on with that.

YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus

They’ve been A/B testing anti-adblock attempts for months or even years now, idk exactly with my sense of time. Sometimes adblocker A doesn’t work, sometimes adblocker B doesn’t work. Sometimes switching browser makes the same adblocker work, sometimes clearing cookies helps, sometimes its dependent on your account. Different users at the same time report different experiences with different adblockers. Sometimes watching a single non-blocked ad restores adblocker functionality magically for a few days.

What I’m trying to say is, this didn’t “just” happen, and it’s specifically the author’s current experience. I myself use Adblock Plus on Edge and Youtube works perfectly fine currently. This has been happening for a long time, and I’m sure there’s uBlock Origin users currently who have the same experience while Adblock Plus works for them. Since that’s how it’s been the last times I’ve seen people talk about this, everyone talking about different experiences.