Piefed has promise, particularly in the way it makes a serious effort to make votes private, but it’s got a ways to go. It’s missing some features Lemmy provides, and better third party app support is needed, too.

My kingdom for another instance with admins like this one.

This is a non-answer.

What matters most is the type of people in charge of the instance, why the decide to do certain things, and the types of decisions they’re likely to make in the future.

Not all instances are the same in that regard.

Problem isn’t so much defederation policy in and of itself, as much as it is just the general level-headedness of the admins

Lemm.ee’s lead admin had exactly the type of philosophy towards managing this platform that I want to see in wherever I go next.

This post alone is what convinced me to create a primary account there. It’s professional, level-headed, nuanced, well spoken, and you can tell they’ve actually thought a lot about the big picture in an unbiased way. Not aggressive, preachy, standoffish, snarky, snobbish, and above all, not reactionary. Seeing the instance as infrastructure is what I want to see more of, but I also just want to see admins with this attitude overall.

The images might be missing because of other people moving their accounts. I’m still seeing images, though.

Not sure if that’s a joke but you replied to a comment from lemm.ee, and I’m replying to you from it.

Problem is, if it’s visible to mods, it’s effectively public.

This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.

Of all the many things reddit did poorly, choosing not to let mods see votes was an excellent decision.

Votes are private as well.

Why should people “Avoid at all costs” a manufacturer that will let you unlock the device with a code? I’ve never had a problem getting an unlock code from Motorola, and once it’s unlocked, it’s unlocked.

Why is this only including Play Store games and not F-Droid?

Because far and away the free, no Ads, no IAP Android game I’ve gotten the most use out of is Unciv.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we be honest about this, please?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moreover, they’re going to want an emulator that can be managed alongside the rest of the museum software.

That’s like saying what’s the point of the air and space museum if they’re not actually flying the planes.

They’re not going to use the original hardware and put wear on them. That’s a standard part of archiving.