Thanks! At the time of writing, I wasn’t aware of the existence of piefed and sublinks. I read some of the Piefed blog posts today. Seems the author has some really good ideas how to address the shortcomings of the current approach. (Or what I view as shortcomings.) Splitting NSFW and NSFL is a really good start. Implementing better moderation tools is also a regularly requested feature. And judging by the other articles they mention, the project is closer aligned to my vision of a welcoming and inclusive platform. I’ll definitely keep an eye on it. Hope it approaches a usable state soon.

I guess I have my answer, here. I’ll wait until Piefed comes along and then use that. I’m somewhat optimistic about their claims. And if not, they included extensibility.

Hehe. On weekdays I go to a building that is owned by a company. I sit down on a chair at a desk, stare into a device and sometimes push some of the 105 buttons on it. Sometimes I also fill out forms on paper. After 8h plus break I leave and go home. In return the company advises my bank to increase a number each month.

We have really advanced technology, so few people have to work in agriculture or as handymen and theoretically it’s enough to feed us all. The rest of us keeps busy by shuffling paper around. And in recent times we were able to do away with some of the paper and replace it with those machines. There are some slightly different variants, but they pretty much all look the same.

I’ve made a post a few days ago. I’d argue we should make a proper distinction. Adult content and NSFW isn’t the same thing. Currently everything from sex education to gore and death is the same category. I think it’s really not. NSFW tags help so you can scroll through things in an open-plan office or while commuting. Porn is porn and gore is gore. I think we shouldn’t oversimplify this but keep the nuances and have different categories. Also I’d like to not mix stuff like sex education which might be fine, and minors ask those questions all the time on Reddit with other things like fetish.

You’re right. It’s an oversimplification I made there. I recently tried MacOS in a VM and I talked a bit to people. You usually get a really smooth desktop experience. Apps are sandboxed, there is a fine permission system, they keep their stuff together and don’t spread them across the filesystem. I think(?) the software brings their libraries along? Usually a used Macbook Pro is still fine and runs fast after 6 years. I think MacOS really shines on the desktop.

On Linux it’s a bit more diverse. I mean we have the XDG specification file locations. But there’s also lots of ‘grown’ stuff. We’re still working on the sandboxing. And you get a different experience depending on the distro you’re trying. And I’d prefer Linux on a server every time. It really excels for that use case and on the server we have Linux > everything else. And as a matter of fact I personally also prefer Linux on the desktop. And my Debian is also still running perfectly 6 years after I initially installed it. Had some minor issues with NVidia during the times, but that’s to be expected and it wasn’t that hard to fix. I wouldn’t have had issues had I not mixed in testing and unstable, but there are lots of guides and tutorials around for the common woes. Which makes my argument a full circle.

Hehe, you got your answer. You’re lokking at the places where 0.05% of the users are discussing their problems and some others share their crazy customizations that aren’t possible with anything else. And it seems like 95% of users having issues to you.

I’d argue Linux is way more stable than Windows. If that’s your perspective. (Unless you do silly stuff.) But less stable than for example MacOS. It depends on which Linux Distro we’re talking about. I’d say it’s MacOS > Linux > Windows. With the biggest step down from Linux to Windows.

NSFW is already off by default when you sign up to most instances

I don’t think this works in practice. Most big instances have gone the extra step to also defederate from the two major porn instances here. Showcasing that there are additional issues, otherwise they’d just have used this instead. I took a quick random sample of the biggest Lemmy instances and ~50-60% additionally block them entirely.

NSFW and 18+ aren’t the same thing. The NSFW tag is made for a slightly different purpose. And it’s a crutch that doesn’t work well for this purpose. There are some slightly vulgar topics that shouldn’t inadvertently pop up at your workplace but they might be safe to consume for minors. Also I think minors should have access to sex education. The Wikipedia has a similar stance. There are videos of “the act” on Wikimedia. You shouldn’t watch them while sitting in your open-plan office. But I think especially with the situation of sex ed in the USA, adolescents should get a chance to ask their questions and learn something about important aspects of life. The NSFW tag as is is doing them a disservice because now they can’t. Or everything else immediately gets mixed in. For example I’m not comfortable sharing my experiences >!sticking bluetooth-enabled things into somebody’s bum!< with kids. Or having sex ed and hardcore fetish stuff being the same category.

And I mean it’s not even just that. Gore and pictures of dead bodies in the Ukraine war also fall into the same category. So everyone just gets a yes/no decision on everything ranging from sex education to gore. In practice both these extremes aren’t very common on Lemmy. But in theory it’s just like that. (It’s not entirely theoretical. We just have a different community here. But there are examples in the wild. For example 4chan mixes pretty tame porn with fetish with crime, gore and death.)

So in summary the current state of (mis)using the NSFW tag actively leads to defederation and it’s doing a disservice to both people who participate in adult conversations and also adolescents. And its overly simplistic design prevents some conversations which should be allowed.

Why do you think porn is bad/unsuitable for 14-17 year olds?

My opinion doesn’t really count here. There are legal requirements people need to implement, whether they like it or not. So that’s kind of already the end of this conversation.

I think it makes a difference if you watch (somewhat tasteful) plain sex, or >!somebody dangling from a hook in the ceiling getting whipped by a disguised old man!<. I think it’s just not the same category. And we shouldn’t treat it as such. Similarly it’s also not the same if you deliberately explore that when you’re 17. Or you’re inadvertently exposed to it when 12 while researching what sex education has failed to provide you with.

And there’s the aspect of me inviting friends and family to my self-hosted services. Or discussing Linux server administration with people. I don’t want to mix either of that with porn. I think having it hidden per default is a good first step. And just requiring an extra, deliberate step to enable it is a good design. It just lacks any of the nuances to it, mingles valid use-cases with filtering that is made to do something else, and as I pointed out with the defederation happening, it comes with issues in practice.

And I think the Fediverse offers some important advantages over other platforms. ActivityPub is very vague. We can just attach fields to label content and the technical aspect is kind of simple to implement. And with federation, we have diversity built-in to the platform. This is our unique advantage. People have different use-cases, different moderation needs and perspectives and opinions on something like my proposal with the filtering. And I think the Fediverse turns out to be made exactly for something like this. I could have my instance my way and someone else can have a different opinion and have their instance another way.

But it requires some coordination effort. We need to agree on a foundation and some technical aspects. I don’t think a crazy rag rug works as a whole. And we already see some consequences of other disputes. Moderation being a constant issue in the background and instances seperating from each other because there’s no nuance to moderation and defederation. And ultimately we want to talk to each other and connect. And provide everyone with a place they like.

Sure. For me it’s the other way around. I’ve never really fell in love with microblogging. My hobbies are kind of mixed and sometimes niche, I sometimes don’t have anything of substance to post from my everyday-life and I really disliked the mob mentality and regularly surfacing toxicity in places like Twitter. And at some time I tried Reddit and got hooked. It’s a very different approach whether you follow people or topics/communities. It’s less about who you are, but more a marketplace of ideas. A level playing field. Sorted by ideas and hobbies and you can just dip in. It also makes you target different audiences for different niche hobbies. And everything gets ordered like that. I mean you also have hashtags on Mastodon, but it’s not really designed around this concept.

It really has some appeal to me. I also sometimes participate in web forums and found a similar structure in this. And I always liked how the free software community is supposed to work. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re 15 or a 40 yo woman… You just all come to the same place and discuss your ideas and perspective on things.

It does have downsides. And it doesn’t necessarily foster good behaviour and being nice to people. I don’t have an ultimate opinion on this. I think encouraging good behaviour in discussions, requires some degree of ‘it matters who you are’. Because having an image stick to you incentivizes you to behave properly. It’s not than big of an issue in practice, the overwhelming majority of people is nice and they use the platforms to everyone’s benefit and not to troll and cause trouble.

Thanks for your input. I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I need to broaden my perspective. Have a closer look at other places in the Fediverse. I’m pretty sure Mastodon ain’t it for me. But Friendica might be a good place to start. I’ve also had Akkoma reccomended to me in this discussion. Maybe some other software than Lemmy is more closely aligned to my vision of what I’d like to run on my server. I’d like to stay compatible with Lemmy, since there are lots of nice people here and it’s usually fun to talk here, more so than in some other places.

Meh. Since you’re here… How is Friendica? Should I try that? I read it’s focusing on privacy and being a nice place, has communities and distributed forums, “relationship control” and add-ons.

On the paper it looks like it has many more features to offer than for example Lemmy. I’d be interested in the distributed forum aspect. Do the added features tie into every aspect of the platform? Or is it mainly microblogging with a basic forum added on top? And when participating for example in this Lemmy discussion… Is it a smooth experience, or can you tell you’ve left Friendica and only have basic functionality here? (I mean I can tell from over here, that you’re from a different platform, since it includes the @ user mentions like Mastodon does. And I’ve tried Mastodon and I think it’s not really a great experience interacting with Lemmy and KBin communities. Some of the structure of the threads gets lost in the process and comments from other branches of the discussion don’t show up.)

Sure. But what about federation? Arbitrary content is pulled from other instances. And my users are confronted with that content, too. Not only with each other. I’d need to also disable federation. (Or am I missing something?)

I think at that point I’d be better off installing Discourse or Flarum. And I’ve changed the whole vision of my instance. I’ve started with envisioning a federated platform that simultaneously can cater to adults and adolescents. And now I’ve locked it down to just cater to the few adolescents I directly invite, done away with the federation aspect and also cancelled all the appeal to adults. I think there’s not much left of what I’d like.

Wouldn’t you find exactly the same stuff on porn websites ?

Yes. And i think it’s bad practice. We should strive to be better than the average porn site.

How would you do otherwise with preserving user privacy

I think there are two issues at play:

1. It’s a complex task. Usually that leads to people saying “we can never achieve 100%” and “it doesn’t fit every purpose” and then nothing gets done. I’d argue this gets us like 40% the way and that’s better than nothing. And it’d get me all the way and probably a few other people, too.

2. I think verification should be delegated to the instances. There isn’t a single solution. In some jurisdictions it might be enough that people claim to be 18. Those admins can choose a really simple solution. Other admins might not care or cater to minors, they can not activate the filters. A compromise might be requiring signup. That’d hide content from kids who aren’t logged in and just browsing the web. And already far better than just displaying it to them. What I’d like to do is have users request access and handle that manually. Alike some Discord servers or other software does. I know a few people I’d like to invite and their age. So it’d be no problem to unlock their accounts. I think it’s the same for other communities. And usually “eyeballing it” also works to some degree. It might be a valid approach for some admins. I know from experience you can often tell if your opponent in a computer game or the person you’re arguing with is a 13 year old kid, or 35. It’s not perfect but surely does a decent job with the extremes.

I’d like to abstain from privacy-breaching methods that are in use by big tech companies like Google etc. Requiring phone numbers on signup or showing your ID into the camera is too much. And it’s bad. I don’t want to tell the admins how to handle verification. If they’re required to, or would like to see the IDs and their users are comfortable with it… I’ve included extensibility to the requirements. So they can. Maybe we’re provided with a solution in the near future. My German ID card can already vouch for my age without revealing my identity. It’s a zero knowledge proof and the proper technical solution to age-verification. I can also envision some “Web of Trust” providing this. Something like PGP or CAcert does.

I think there are some valid ideas and some technical solutions are already out there and available. The issue is just nobody uses them. And neither do we.

Also, how do you avoid falling in the reddit trap where every discussion vaguely about sexuality end-up being 18+

That is a good question. These categories need to be concise. And the people ticking the boxed need to comprehend the meaning and consequence. I think moderators will do. With the users, I’m not sure. I don’t think I had that issue on Reddit. A year ago when I still was there, I’ve occasinally replied to people on relationship_advice and some more explicit subreddits. I didn’t see any problems. But I’ve not been a heavy user. Maybe I didn’t pay attention. I’ll listen if this is deemed a likely scenario or proves to happen in practice.

That is part of my idea. I don’t think it should be water-tight and not circumventable. My personal opinion is if a 16 yo really wants to watch porn or something, and they put in the effort to circumvent something that is a bit more elaborate than just clicking on “Yes” on a popup… They should be allowed to see it.

But that’s just my opinion. And I’m not really concerned with what other instances do. It’s enough if it enables me and a few other people to have my instance how I like and invite people to my instance without worrying too much. I mean my own server is also the only one I’m held responsible for. As far as I’m concerned other people can do what they like.

And it’s kind of pointless to try. Kids don’t need Lemmy or the Fediverse to watch adult content. They can just go to Pornhub and click yes. So I’m already in a position where I don’t care about other domains. But I’d like to keep my own Website and Minetest server clean. And also potentially offer some more services and at least do my best to do it right there.

I’ll research that. If you have some specific examples for federated platforms that provide more than a simple blocking or allowing on a domain level, feel free to drop me a hint to get me in the right direction. I’m not really a social media person so I have limited experience. I didn’t specify a platform. My initial motivation was linked to Lemmy as I really like this platform type. But I also like and use Peertube, maybe others.

That is kind of my point. I’d like to be able to do that. But Lemmy’s design /feature set prevents me from being able to do it.

I think I have a proposal with a bit of overlap. At least the privilege implementation could do both things at the same time: A call for better age-restriction and moderation/filtering on the Fediverse on !fediverse@lemmy.ml

So what’s your opinion or alternative solution? I can see filtering being a controversial topic since it has been applied to restrict users.

My own motivation is: I want to run my own small federated instances. I’d like to invite friends and family and also maybe random people. And I want to like and use my instance myself, not lock it down for everyone and defederate too much. Currently Lemmy prevents me from doing that. I’d either need to close registrations and exclude minors, make sure my family also likes the communities I like to visit… Or be comfortable with potentially breaking the law or ending up with a severely limited instance I don’t like myself.

If it were possible to invite everyone while not blocking content, and I’d have some means of unlocking accounts… It’d allow me to provide service to everyone. And with this proposal it wouldn’t necessarily change anything for people on other instances.

Also it would allow me to swear and discuss adult topics in dedicated communities without taking into account whether that’s appropriate. That’s probably more of a concern for people who do more than just discuss politics here… But that’s some additional benefit.

And maybe clean the insides of your laptop, that’s probably the first thing that could solve the issue. See if all cables are still locked in their connectors. Maybe take out the SSD, clean the contacts and you can use compressed air to clean the socket. But be careful, you want to do it right or you might cause damage. No dampness or water, it has to be either isopropyl alcohol or dry. And don’t use a rag that introduces static electricity. And no workshop air compressor. Maybe something like a paintbrush is better suited. And don’t just shove the vacuum in. I’ve done that and it might dislocate small components or key-caps and suck them in and it’s a major annoyance to get them out of the vacuum cleaner bag 😆 Just be a bit careful. But I already had something like loose connectors/components cause random errors. Especially in equipment that is moved around or gets dropped occasionally. After 5 years, you might also find some dust inside. At least it used to be that way, It seems to be less of a problem with modern laptops. And more and more stuff gets soldered anyways.

And don’t do too much if you’re not comfortable with that. IMHO the SSD should be a safe thing to touch for most people. But it’s really easy to break or bend some tiny contacts from other components or ribbon cables. And there are consumer devices that aren’t really meant to be serviced. I wouldn’t disassemble such a model without prior experience. If it’s still working you might also leave it as is. Do backups. Storage devices often fail even without prior warning.

Yeah, I think we should extend on the sandboxing features like AppArmor, SELinux and Flatpak for desktop use. Look at MacOS and Android and what they’re doing for desktop users. That is currently not the Linux experience. Ultimately I’d like my system to have an easy and fine grained system to limit permissions. Force third-party apps to ask permission before accessing my documents or microphone. have sane defaults. make it easy to revoke for example internet access with a couple of clicks. make it so I can open an app multiple times. and have different profiles for work, private stuff and testing. This should be the default and active in 100% of the desktop applications. And apps should all use a dedicated individual place to store their data and config files.

Librewolf and more […] used as Flatpak, […] its way more stable.

That’s just not true. I’ve been using Linux for quite a while now. And I can’t remember my browser crashing in years, seriously. Firefox slowed down a bit when I had 3000 tabs open, but that’s it. How stable is your Flatpak browser? Does it crash minus 5 times each year? How would that even work? And what about the theming and addons like password managers I talked about in the other comment? Use the distro’s packaged version. It is way more stable. And as a bonus all the edge-cases will now work, too.

I mean it’s not even my own problem. I just have Spotify, Microsoft Teams and Zoom installed that way, and a few pieces of software that I’m testing. I use a rolling distro so I have the most recent versions of every software I need anyways. And I have the skills to configure stuff. So I myself don’t have an use-case for a spyware-riddled Chrome browser from Flathub or something. I have a nice LibreWolf from the unstable channel of my distro. Steam and all the other stuff is there, too. And it works almost flawlessly. Why would I trade that in for a 4GB version of the same software that has downsides?

It’s the newer users I’m concerned with. Their sub-par experience of Linux.

This is what I mean:

• https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/7352 (Maybe Keepass works as of now(?) I don’t think so but I haven’t tried. At least some addons do. But other’s don’t. It requires the permissions to be configured by the prople preparing both flatpaks that want to talk to each other.)
• https://itsfoss.com/flatpak-app-apply-theme/ / https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/desktop-integration.html
• All the issues people had with Steam, the graphics drivers, attaching gamepads/controllers or headsets, getting Discord and extras working. (Some of that seems to have been resolved in the meantime. They put quite some work into it.)
• Some distros don’t update Flatpak packages as part of their standard update mechanism. You need to learn to regularly run “flatpak update” or learn how to activate that.
• I have some packages still rely on old runtimes that are missing security patches. I suppose it’s the same for a lot of other people. And there isn’t a mechanism to warn you. You also need to learn how to figure that out.
• I don’t remember which of the video conferencing solutions this was, but I remember fighting with the webcam permissions and advice on the internet was to disable sandboxing entirely. I set the permissions a bit better but then also screen sharing wouldn’t work.

As I said, it’s okay for someone like me - and probably you - to use, and I don’t complain. I’m glad I have Flatpak available as a tool. But look at the issues I’ve linked above and the steep learning curve for the beginner. They need to learn what GTK is, what QT is, what desktop they use, learn what Flatseal is, use the CLI. They have no clue why it is even required to do that much work to get their Keepass set up. And that it’s not Linux’ fault but their decision from 2 weeks ago to install the browser that way. And their experience is just worse than it needs to be. And this isn’t unsubstianced, I’m speaking from experience. I’ve answered these questions over and over again. It’s already annoying to get the NVidia stuff set up reliably, find new software and adapt your workflow. And the switch from X11 to Wayland broke things like screen sharing/recording, anyways. And we’re now piling 20 other things on top, to learn and do manually if you happen to be one of the users who don’t use the default standard setup.

And nothing of that is “bad” or can’t be fixed… We’re making progress with all of that. And we’ll get there. All I can say with my experience helping people with their Linux woes and the current state of Flatpak: The “use Flatpak for everything” mentality is causing issues for some newer users. And experience shows: They rarely understand the consequences but heard the hype about Flatpak. And few of them can explain why they used Flatpak over the proper packages in their distro.

So my opinion in short:

• Flatpak is nice : yes
• try a Flatpak first, then the distro package if it doesn’t work: hard no
• you can get recent software on older distros with flatpak: yes
• you can recommend Flatpak: Yes, if you also explain the consequences of the sandboxing and pulling things from potentially unreliable third-party sources. You’re doing people a disservice if you don’t.
• some of this will change in the future: yes
• we should have more sandboxing: yes

Hehe, No. It’s the sandboxing.

But with this approach you take over the answering questions to newbies… Why doesn’t the webcam show up in the videoconferencing? Why doesn’t my GTK / QT themes apply to some software and it’s a 2 page tutorial with lots of command line commands to fix that? Why can’t I install Firefox add-ons and on Windows and MacOS everything just works? Why is Linux so complicated and regularly stuff doesn’t work?

I had this argument multiple times now. There is an easy solution: Do it the other way around until you know what you’re doing and about the consequences. Distributions are there for a reason. They put everything into one package and do testing to make sure everything works together. They provide you with security patches if you choose the right distro. LibreOffice and a Browser even come preinstalled most of the times. If you do away with all of that, it’s now your job to tie the software into your desktop, your job to handle the sandboxing if there is addons that need to pierce the sandbox. Your job to make sure the Flatpak publishers do quick updates and keep the runtimes up-to-date if a security vulnerability arise within an used library…

I’m not directly opposed to using Flatpak. I’m just saying there are some consequences that aren’t that obvious. There are valid use-cases and I also use Flatpak. But in my experience hyping some of the available technologies without simultaneously explaining the consequences is regularly doing a disservice to new users.

I’d be happy if people just cut down on advertising Chrome/Firefox and LibreOffice via Flatpak to new users. They should use the packaged version. That’s why we have distributions, to make the whole system a smooth experience and everything tie together.

Flatpak is slowly getting there and I think at least some distros have it preconfigured so the default GTK themes are in place.

Ultimately, I’d like sandboxing to be available natively in Linux, at least for desktop applications. And we can talk about a packaging format that is available to the user, allows pulling software directly from the upstream project, includes libraries and runtimes.