As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

Access directly from Fediverse

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30039870

(00:42)

Detailed Show notes, because tons of links this episode

(01:38)

Air Conditioned Nightmare - Mr. Bungle

(02:51)

SFTPGo - Simple Folder Sharing

(05:49)

Sponsor - Ameridroid. Use LINUXPREPPER at checkout.

(06:45)

ChapterTool - Show and Chapter Notes for Audio & Video Platforms

(07:49)

openDAW - Browser-based Multi-track Recording

(09:13)

Kanboard - Project Management

(18:09)

• Offline Tools. What do you use?
• Dead Tech. What do you use?

(18:34)

No more Skype. Try Signal!

(25:58)

Figlet, Toilet - Terminal ASCII Artwork

(27:15)

Meme

(27:56)

Dead Tech - What do you use? Take a quick survey

(29:18)

Offline Tooling. What do you use? Take a quick survey

(29:49)

Epson Ecotank Printers. Can be converted to Sublimation

(34:07)

Kill Doctor Lucky - A print and play boardgame

(35:43)

Root as a Print and Play game. Insanely popular as a modern, commercial board game

(36:04)

Skull card game. Classic bar game, played on napkins, etc.

(39:03)

Paper Circuits

(44:08)

• Pinecil Soldering Iron
  • Soldering is Easy web comic by Mitch Altman
  • Fine Soldering Tip Set
  • Large Soldering Tip Set
• PinePower Travel Charger w/ International Adapters
• PinePower 120w Desktop Charger

(51:21)

• Paperless-NGX - digitize that paper
• Kavita
• Komga
• Codex
• Calibre-Web
• LibreOffice Suite
• pdfarranger. Fork of pdf-shuffler: a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split PDF documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface. It is a front end for pikepdf. Available on Windows, as flatpak, snap, in repos, etc.
• pdftk - terminal app for universally password protecting pdf files.
• pdfbook2 - terminal app to convert your pdf document page layout into a printable book, or zine.

(56:01)

Ronin Solo RPG

(57:20)

Notorious Solo RPG

(58:12)

Snake Acid web browser game

(59:23)

• Lutris, which includes Itch support, Steam, GOG, Epic, local games, etc.

I think this is the way we should communicate, when presented with the question on how to get on Mastodon:

Copy paste from the link:

How do I use Mastodon?

• Download the Mastodon app from the Apple app store or Play store.

• Create an account (just like Twitter or any other social media)

• Follow people, and get posting.

Why do tech journalists say it’s too confusing to catch on?

I have no fucking idea.

EDIT for clarification, don't take this too seriously:

This “guide” is a bit of a joke made out of frustration. If you actually want to know more, including why I feel it has potential to free us from the dystopian hellscape that is modern social media, here is the “real” guide to Mastodon. It still uses simple language (and has lots of pictures!):

Please share widely

Any website that implements ActivityPub APIs properly can federate with other sites as part of the fediverse.

In the light of the above ☝️ statement and in the context of the given lemmy post, l am presenting three websites as an example :

https://zessa.in/

https://urthy.in/

https://1ness.in/

Can such websites be created and made to federate as a part of the fediverse ?

Hey folks! We’re a small community working on a new Fediverse-based platform with privacy-friendly services, aimed at making onboarding easier—especially for Indian users.

We're still in early stages and would love your input on what you'd actually like to see.

If you're interested, you can fill out this short survey to help guide our direction: https://app.formbricks.com/s/cmavbkwso0c89wb01dp4j0z3f

Feel free to ask any questions—happy to chat!

Decentralization is obviously the big thing about the Fediverse but is it TOO decentralized to gain traction?

There is no reason why they have to be fully separate domains in the same branch. You can set up a system of fully independent moderation and extreme levels of customization while having them all on one site with a front page that allows everyone to see whats popular.

A front page wouldn't prevent individual subgroups from requiring approval to join, it wouldn't prevent subgroups from banning those it doesn't want. It doesn't prevent users from blocking subgroups that it doesn't want to see on the front page.

What would be most useful is that now someone could create an account on the Reddit, Twitter, Facebook(?) alternatives and give them access to every community, and then allow each community to set its own rules, and customize its own to be unique while having a unified product to "sell" and get people to move.

Hot take? Blue Sky should be worked with to join the Fediverse as the twitter alternative and Mastodon should work to be the Facebook alternative

TLDR: One front page and general site for Lemmy, Mastodon....and to sign up and see whats popular and then have fully independent subgroups.

how much does running a mastodon instance of 1000 users costs? Disabling Images and allowing only text is one of my condition. So if I do that, will that change cost? I am thinking of a VPS so that i can have greater control over instance functionality

How much Storage and RAM will be required roughly?

Don't know what the exact cause was/is for this big surge - but I am glad to see it. No matter what personal problems people may have with the main devs, they are doing great work on the platform.

https://join-lemmy.org/donate

https://liberapay.com/Lemmy

Also of interest, since this is a good place to plug things, other threadiverse things:

https://liberapay.com/PieFed/

And I couldn't find a way to donate to mbin, in lieu of that:

https://docs.joinmbin.org/contributing/

EDIT: The creator of mbin gave a link in the comments: https://melroy.org/donate.html

I am a reddit refugee from the mod wars. I love it here. I originally made an mbin account but then 9 months ago mbin seemed to die so I made a new fedia.io account and things have been going swimmingly so far.

A few days ago I noticed that fedia.io pages have been loading increasingly slowly. All I am wondering is where the best magazine/online place/other forum I can check is to see if there are any issues happening on fedia.io or anything that might be responsible for the slowed performance.

I can't just search "Is fedia.io down" like I would with other online resources. Any help or steer towards more appropriate places for me to ask this question would be much appreciated.

Lemmy needs AI features integrated, this would help increase the efficiency of poster and commenter workflows, allowing for maximal upvotes per minute, and as a consequence it increases engagement across all communities. The direct increase in output of posters when they enhance their workflow with LLMs is staggering, and comments per minute for each post go through the roof. This allows for discussions to be longer, and LLMs can be deployed on the site in such a way as to write comments that leave the reader desperate to see what the next reply is, even further boosting how many hours people spend on each post.

Lemmy not integrating AI workflows is denying a choice that everyone should be making, AI will replace posters that don’t keep up, so learning AI workflows is now essential for posters and commenters. AI will be completely different tomorrow, the workflows are going to be completely different in a months time, and it will produce even MORE text, and even MORE images. You hear me, you should learn AI right now, otherwise the posters and commenters who use AI will overtake you in terms of upvotes, and then, well you all know how important upvotes are.

I propose that accounts have a mode that can be turned on to auto generate posts overnight, and on top of that AI should try to autocomplete every sentence people type into the editor. This will maximise the benefits to Lemmys written communities. I also propose having an AI art generator built into each post, so every post can have an image, further maximising engagement. Moderators can benefit from the shift in paradigm that AI have brought about, with AI being able to create and moderate communities that no one has even asked for! Lemmy should not only allow but encourage the adoption of these tools, and everyone should be jumping on this revolution like there is no tomorrow.

I also think that the developers should integrate AI into their workflow, it could automatically add features that people don’t even know they want. I am SHOCKED that the developers are still creating Lemmy at this point, as AI can already do 110% of their job, the other day ChatGPT wrote me a sorting algorithm that it told me was totally new, and that it was able to sort any list instantly regardless of size.

My stock portfolio has nearly doubled since I went all in on AI stocks, and I expect it to double in coming months, this tells you just how amazing AI is. Since all the companies are valued this highly despite having quite a small consumer base.

Feddit.org announced today that they are changing their rules to match German law despite their server not being hosted in Germany.

Feddit.org now bans:

• The sentence "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"

• Comparing Israel to the Nazis

• Calls to end Zionism

• Calling for the dissolution of Israel

And much more. The full original post can be found here, or

Click here for full text of original post:

Hi.

In the past few days, discontent regarding mod decisions in this community has been brewing, particularly when it comes to comments on Palestine, Israel, and Israeli politics and actions. There are also misunderstandings regarding mod intention and German law. We hope to clear that up with this post.

While the servers of feddit.org are in Austria, most of the mods of this community as well as admins of this server live in Germany. Speaking of, our server admins have also posted a write-up on the same topic.

And with that, let's go:

In Germany, antisemitism is specifically sanctioned in German criminal law, both for speech and as a motivation for other criminal behavior. In addition, Germany seeks to protect the Jewish state of Israel (the so-called "Reason of State" introduced in 2008) and thus verges toward protecting Zionism as well. Certain criticism of Israel/Israelis is also categorized as "Israel-related antisemitism".

Since criminal law is involved, enforcement can mean things like police raids and device confiscations. After such police action, it does not really matter if it was appropriate or if cases are dropped or never charged: The damage is done. All told, it's not that fun.

There is also no point in engaging in discussions about the veracity of statements that could get us into legal trouble. In addition, we believe that you can express most opinions without breaking rules.

If your comment contains the following, it will be removed from this community:

• Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
• Calling for a destruction, annihilation, an end of all Zionism or the like.
• Equating Israeli actions and (historical) Nazism.
• The slogan "from the river..."
• Endorsement of or justifications for Hamas or Hezbollah, or slogans or graphics positively referring to these organizations. These are considered terrorist organizations in Germany.
• ... and obviously: Any of the common antisemitic tropes or calls to violence against Jews or Israelis

Comments will not be removed for the following:

• Denouncing genocide.
• Denouncing Israeli war crimes.
• Criticizing Zionism as an ideology or political movement.
• Referring to the current Israeli government as "criminal," "expansionist," or "far-right".

If your comment is removed nonetheless, these are not the reason. I'd also like to stress that this community was never a free-speech-absolutist zone: It is a (usually lightly) moderated community. There may also be times when bans go too far. In such cases, please DM the @EuroMod@feddit.org account (which all mods have access to).

spoiler To help you understand why, I'll leave an assortment of sources here (translations via DeepL).

• A news report:

  Berlin in mid-May [2024] around 6 o'clock in the morning. A loud, continuous "banging" against the apartment door wakes student Alina T. from her sleep. [...] When her husband opens the door, several LKA officers, two employees of the district office and the SEK "storm" past him into the apartment. Puzzled, he looks at the search warrant. [...] The background to this was a Facebook entry in the student's profile: "From the river [...]

• A legal treatise:

  In November 2023, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs also issued a prohibition order against Hamas.[60] According to the order, "the slogan 'From the River to the Sea' (in German or other languages)" is a distinguishing mark of Hamas[61]. [...] the current legal situation [regarding "Denial of Israel's right to exist"] is - contrary to what the statements of the Federal Ministry of Justice suggest[63] - anything but clear. Whether incitements to eliminate the State of Israel are prosecuted depends on the respective legal opinion and the prosecution will of the respective public prosecutor's office.

• Press release from the previous government:

  In this context, Section 111 StGB, which covers public incitement to commit crimes, may also be relevant. Incitement to extinguish Israel's existence by force may be punishable under this provision. The same applies to calls to publicly display the Hamas flag. If Hamas attacks are publicly cheered and celebrated, this may also be punishable. This means that people who cheer on Hamas's actions or publicly express their sympathy with the attacks may constitute the criminal offence of "approval of criminal acts" under Section 140 of the German Criminal Code (StGB).

• Another news report

  In connection with the controversial Palestine Congress in Berlin, the German authorities have also imposed an entry ban on former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. "In order to prevent antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda at the event", several entry bans have been issued, the news agency AFP learned from security sources on Sunday. One of these concerned Varoufakis. (Notably, Varoufakis would have spoken about one-state solutions ...)

• Overview Germany in 2024 by Amnesty International

• Overview Germany in 2024 by Human Rights Watch

federal reverse (on behalf of the mods of !europe)

---

:::

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/761023

PieFed uses PDQ hashing to generate a fingerprint of an image and can use that fingerprint to detect other posts that use the same or fairly similar images, for moderation purposes. Hashes are added to a block list which stops the image from being re-posted in future. Demo

PieFed does not generate PDQ hashes itself - it uses a separate service to do it. Several different instances could be using the same hashing service which will be more efficient than everyone running their own. When an image is being federated around the URL of it will be sent to the hashing service by multiple different fedi instances and only the first will be slow as all the subsequent requests will be served from a cache.

Get the code from https://github.com/rimu/pdqhash-python

By doing a GET request for https://yourdomain.tld/pdq-hash?image_url=url_to_image_to_hash you will receive JSON like this:

{ 
    "pdq_hash_binary": "100100100011...",  
    "quality": 100  
}  

The quality score (0–100) indicates how well the image content supports a reliable perceptual hash.

Higher scores mean better contrast, edges, and texture in the image. PieFed accepts anything > 70.

Today I found out that on this platform, "block" is just a fancy word for "filter". Just had an individual user go through my entire profile and downvote everything. So I blocked them, thinking that this would make me safe from any future stalking. But I was just informed that no, any user that you 'block' is actually still able to see everything that you post and vote freely.

All that 'blocking' actually does is hide the person from you. But they're still free to stalk and do as they please. I just tested this out for myself using my other account and sure enough, it's true.

I just want to know, how is this acceptable? I bet you that if I called out this user publically, I would probably end up in hot water myself for harassment or something. And yet 'blocking' is completely fkn useless too. So what recourse does a user actually have here when faced with a hostile user that wants to ruin their experience on Lemmy?

Coming from Blåhaj, I thought I would try 'moderating' my own experience for a bit. But you can't 'moderate' your own experience if the tools to do so are fkn useless and only trick you into thinking that something has been achieved, without actually doing anything useful.

And now I'm starting to see a new value in instances like Blåhaj. Because you actually need admins that give a shit around here or else you're just left to the wolves on a platform that seems more interested in protecting abusive users than allowing users to protect themselves.

Edit: watching you all upvote the person talking shit about how this works on other platforms while downvoting the actual correct information that comes with a source has certainly taught me a thing or two about this platform and the people on it. You all actually prefer misinformation to fact as long as it suits your vibe or opinion more. Like a bunch of fkn MAGAs. I really wish there was a way to disable notifications for this post (another feature missing here) because watching you people upvote misinformation is enough to make me no longer give a flying fuck what anyone here says or thinks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29785220

PeerTube Picks is now available on the official Firefox Add-ons page! Firefox users no longer have to worry about losing their data when the browser closes:

FireFox add-on link

The name PeerTube Picks was chosen through collaboration with the PeerTube Lemmy community. This add-on provides video recommendations using a cosine similarity algorithm based on videos you've watched and liked. It aims to predict which videos you're likely to engage with—either by watching for longer periods or hitting the like button.

Updates: The PeerTube Picks icon now appears next to the search bar on any PeerTube page. Clicking it opens a list of recommended videos, ranked by engagement and relevance.

A new Options page allows you to:

-Download or upload your video watch history

-Delete your watch history (recommended occasionally to refresh your recommendations)

I’m open to suggestions and contributions—feel free to share ideas or improvements!

I hope this is a suitable place to ask about this. I've noticed now after 3 account migrations that no matter which instance you import settings into, all of your subscriptions end up stuck listed as "Subscribe pending". Functionally, everything works as it should though, and all of those communities still show up in your Subscribed feed. It's just an eyesore / annoyance.

You can get them to properly say "Subscribed" again by unsubbing and resubbing but eventually I might end up with a huge list of communities to do this with any time I try another instance. Is there any way to resolve this besides unsubbing and resubbing one by one?

Hello. For some reason I don't have access to slrpnk.net and feddit.org. I tried to connect from another IP and it worked. My IPv4 is 89.169.34.191. Is it banned on these instances?

@fediverse Have you ever wondered how Lemmy and Mastodon federate?

Well, I made a few tests and put it all in an easy to read table! Take a look!

https://gist.github.com/helloyanis/c201908666b2c6341e05f7e77b2fbca2

Some things may be wrong or missing but if you notice that, tell me and I'll update it!

(Yeah! I'm even posting this from Mastodon! How cool is that?)

#fediverse #mastodon #lemmy #federation

I was looking at Christine Lemmer-Webber's Wikipedia page and had a thought that it should show her Fediverse handle.

I know nothing about Wikipedia, I know community can edit it.

Anyone have any thoughts about looking upbyour favorite Fediverse stars and adding their Fediverse handle to Wikipedia?

I know George Tekai is active on Wikipedia, seems like an easy onboarding to Fediverse. Here's all the wiki info about George oh and HERE is where he's active on the Fediverse.

I think we need to start slipping these kinds of things everywhere so it starts people clicking. Will it be huge, probably not, but each little click can turn into a tsunami eventually.

I was discussing this on another post and when we're doing internet searches for any kind of information I feel we should be discussing that on the Fediverse or bringing back the info to the Fediverse.

But some folks brought up some excellent points that Kagi has a Fediverse bang.

I run SearxNG and asked in their Matrix channel: https://matrix.to/#/#searxng:matrix.org

possiblemeatball pointed out that SearxNG also has a Fediverse !bang . If you go to Preferences - Engines - Social media there are bangs for lemmy comments, lemmy communites, mastodon hashtags, etc. We need to be leveraging this!

What other search engines foster the Fediverse?

I was just pointed to https://fedi-search.com/ which seems awesome, but I haven't leveraged YET!

I've been on the Fediverse for nearly 15 years now. I've seen platforms grow, change, and evolve, and I've taken inspiration from projects that have a lot of really good ideas.

This is a conceptual pitch / brain droppings on Postmodern, the Fediverse platform I hope to eventually build.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.one/post/27858506

This post serves as notice that Lemmy.one will be shutting down in 90 days.

Unfortunately, the moderation features in Lemmy never progressed to the point required to continue maintaining this service, and Lemmy simply does not have the userbase to justify the cost of this service. Myself and the moderation team apologize for the inconvenience this will cause.

This is sad news. Hopefully the comms can migrate to other smaller instances.

Edit: just saw this

as this is a fairly active community we just wanted to let you know that this community is no longer federating with Lemmy.World due to defederation from lemmy.one for lack of moderation.

Our announcement can be found here: https://lemmy.world/post/28173093

We recommend migrating to a community on an instance that is maintained better.

I guess it's been an issue. I think the lemmy.one meant they needed better administration features

I was just thinking about this, when I'm facing an issue, the first thing I do is go to a search engine and usually there's a Reddit post. But I don't want to ask there. And the only way we're going to build up the info for folks to find us and come here is for us to just start asking here. On the Fediverse. We need to build up that mountain of knowledge that Reddit has and will always have. So we should be championing ANYONE asking questions here. Even if we think it's obvious and we think you can just Google it. There was a time where you literally couldn't just Google it. That was built over time. We need to build that here. So start asking your questions here! Find the answers and then post your answer to your own question. Or let someone do it for you. We need to build the knowledge here to be found. It's not just about people looking for alternatives. We need our knowledge to be more valuable than their knowledge.