If you’re comparing stock Android against stock iOS, Apple has more privacy protections against tracking because of App Tracking Transparency.

I have two phones as daily drivers, one Android and one iPhone. Compared to Android, the iPhone is very restrictive and locked down. Adblockers don’t work and you’re forced to use whatever iOS interface it throws at you. Buttons and gestures move around with every update. There’s no way to view and manage internal files, no sideloading, lots of options that are just not accessible to normal users.

The positive side is that iPhones are very optimized and I can get similar performance to my Android phone despite the iPhone being older and having worse specs. The closed ecosystem also has its benefits, because it makes data very hard to get out, so I use the iPhone as a device to sandbox all the Meta crap that I’m forced to use.

Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it’s inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.

This one is probably either small enough to fly under Disney’s radar or has already been shut down. Disney successfully copyrighted one Club Penguin revival project for using the art assets and logo, even though the code was completely rewritten. Maybe this is the one?

There is either no chance of that getting off the ground or the project you are talking about has already shut down. The Club Penguin IP is owned by Disney who aggressively copystrikes Club Penguin revivals.

Yes, it started from this terminology change at Twitter in 2020. They’re the reason that version control systems call the primary branch ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ by default, because ‘master’ comes from the master/slave terminology that is used in electronics hardware design.

There’s a comment here saying that master/slave in hardware design is being replaced by primary/secondary because of the software trend, which I think is stupid. Master/slave works much better in that context because the master device controls the slave device. Primary/secondary implies that the slave device is a fallback of the master device.

This instance is hosted in Germany, one of the countries with the strictest anti-piracy laws? Seems like a very risky decision (I’m aware that a lot of the good and affordable hosting providers are German).

This goes completely against the principle of “federated network”. It’s directing new users to join one instance, with plans to expand the list of instances that can be joined through this website to… four. To be selected as one of the four (actually three, since mastodon.social will always be one of them) instances, the instance has to abide by mastodon.social’s rules, and selection is done by mastodon.social staff. At what point does “make onboarding easier for new users” become “return to centralized social media except Eugene Rochko instead of Elon Musk is CEO”?

I don’t understand why these types of people come to the Fediverse if what they want is total control of their community and all interactions within it. Just create a closed message board with restricted sign-ups.

Great timing for this post because Beehaw just defederated two very large instances for having open signups. Kbin is big and has open signups too, so you guys are next on the chopping block. Yes, it is a good idea to cultivate multiple communities so that if one instance makes a stupid decision like that, there will be a good replacements available.

Yes, by default files are stored directly on a volume on the disk but it’s possible to configure pict-rs to use object storage, although there isn’t much documentation for configuring and using it with Lemmy yet. Kbin has support for S3 storage in its environment variables. I’ll do some research and see if I can add it to Lemmy.

Imgur was created as an image host for Reddit back when Reddit did not support direct image uploads, so any self-hostable image storage solution including Lemmy’s built-in pict-rs will work. Federation of the file host is not necessary as there is no need to mirror the files between instances, they are linked to federated posts and the file can be viewed directly on the uploader’s instance. As for the community features of Imgur, the “community” on Imgur is, as one Redditor put it, “the sewer rats who don’t realize they’re living in the sewer”.

Agreed, sort of. I use Bookwyrm but I don’t get the appeal of “social reading”. I don’t discuss books with others because my taste in books is lame, my opinions are usually controversial among book enthusiasts and I would rather not have people looking at what I read. Bookwyrm is also apparently much more expensive to run per user compared to most federated services so I feel bad for costing the instance admin money. But I don’t want to switch to a completely offline or personal instance because I like being able to sync across multiple devices and get book recommendations from the larger instance’s database.

This comment also reminds me that my reading has been paused for several months and I should get back to it.

That, and for Lemmy specifically, its history of being a tankie forum. Without the Reddit refugee migration, if you joined Lemmy as a single user, you would be alone among communists and eventually get bullied into leaving. Already in 2020-2021, Fediverse users knew about Lemmy, but they avoided promoting it because of its userbase. This Reddit situation provided the push to get many normal users over to Lemmy at once to drown out the communist users.

Given the number of bots on the internet trying to crack captchas, this is already happening. I don’t think captchas are being used for AI training that much, since hCaptcha uses AI-generated images with prompts like “Select the images with a hamster eating a watermelon” for its tests. All of the reCaptcha road captchas I receive also have answer validation and won’t let me pass if I answer incorrectly because of a misclick.

Yeah no, this “America Bad and backwards 3rd world country while us Europeans are so enlightened” circlejerk isn’t constructive either. The American political system is terrible but a lot of European countries, mine included, are copying their “celebrity drama show” attitude towards politics because of extreme American cultural influence. We shouldn’t deny our own problems.

Surely that already happened in the Code of Conduct drama a few years back? Or the “Linus is rude and difficult to work with” callout even before that?

He has American citizenship and lives in America, he’s talking about America here. And I promise you that other countries, yes even those in the magical fantasy land of Europe, also have lots of political drama despite having more than two parties in the government (They tend to form alliances based on left/right and split into two blocks anyway).

Gloating? Complaining? I thought the FOSS community has matured past “creator’s views = views of everyone who uses their creation”, honestly. And isn’t Linus supporting the Democratic party already well known?