If you think you can make a better lemmy instance than anyone else, just start one up. It’s free and open source, and there’s good tutorials out there.
Since it seems that you’re convinced that with your ideas you can create massive communities, you should surely be able to become the largest Lemmy instance out there.
I notice that hexbear is defederated from exploding-heads.
Let’s just say “similar reasons manifested differently”
chkdsk in dos never had the ability to scan the disk surface for defects, ndd did that, and then magically scandisk showed up and looked awfully similar to ndd.
But I agree, some really great tools. And sysinfo was our de facto “how fast is this thing?” for years.
And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they’re famous for now.
I remember there was one program that claimed it would update the microcode on your CPU to allow you to basically update your CPU for free to a newer type of processor, for example making your 486 operate like a pentium pro.
Entirely fake, but given the miracles of the time it seemed plausible.
“I don’t remember a performance penalty, because everything was so slow it didn’t matter”
This was a double edged sword. For a while I wanted to play with Windows 95, and my hard drive wasn’t large enough. So what I did is I’d run drivespace on dos 6.22 which would double the size of the drive reported and let me install windows 95.
Big problem is that this is prior to journaling filesystems, and Windows 95 was buggy as hell. So windows 95 would crash, it would damage the File Allocation Table, the drivespace file would get corrupted, and you’d have to reinstall windows from scratch all over again.
Really frustrating era of computing, but on the other hand, something like drivespace made the impossible possible even if it was flawed, and many such technologies were coming out that were like that. Video game console emulation in the late 90s was another such thing that was like “What? This shouldn’t be possible…should it?”, as well as stuff like downloading video or audio, or even voice chat over a modem which is sort of insane when you think about it.
So a lot of stuff was frustrating and broken, but also miraculous and impressive. Really interesting time to be in love with computers as a hobby.
I’m a millennial. First computer was a TRS-80 CoCo 2 with extended color basic. Then a C64 (which was sort of disappointing since extended color basic was way better than anything on the commodore, but the games were much better), and then I started with an 8088 with a herc monochrome monitor and no hard drive and only went up from there.
Defederation is a big deal because it’s a solution that acts like a bomb, indiscriminate and destructive.
“I don’t like this” great. Lots of people don’t like stuff, and they shouldn’t sub to stuff they don’t like, and unsub or block users and communities they don’t like.
The problem is that someone is making a final decision for everyone on that instance, about everyone on the other instance.
Person A on instance A doesn’t like something Person B on instance B said. So they call for defederate. Suddenly, nobody on Instance A can see anything anyone on Instance B says and vice versa. Person C on instance A wasn’t offended, Person D on Instance A liked Person B’s content. Persons E and F on Instance B are perfectly fine people who never did anything wrong.
But nope, Person A defederates, and now nobody on either instance can talk unless they want to either hop around instances trying to find instances that are neutral to both(and there is such a thing as “guilt by association” on the fediverse so Instances might defederate just for not defederating with Instance B), or they’ll need to have a bunch of accounts to get onto a bunch of different parts of the fediverse.
Defederation in anything but the most extreme of circumstances is actively damaging to the fediverse. Prior to the reddit migration, most lemmy instances were highly trigger happy with defederation, and fairly ban happy too. Thus, the system just stagnated. People still actively avoid the threadiverse because nobody wants to be walking on eggshells wondering what incorrect political opinion is going to get everyone on their instance dumped.
It’s particularly bad with lemmy, because communities are server-centered instead of being decentralized. If you’re subscribed to a bunch of communities on an instance and that instance defederates from you, then you’re not only disconnected from the people on that instance, you’re disconnected from all the other people on all the other instances connected to that community.
So rather than “I’m unsubscribing from this newsletter I don’t like”, it’s “I don’t like some of the articles in this newsletter, so I’m going to force everyone on my block to unsubscribe whether they want to or not”
Glad I’m not the only one thinking that…