If this turns out to be a measurable and reproducible effect for most humans, online gambling and video game loot boxes just became a while lot scarier in my mind.

I suspect there is wisdom to be learned from forest management, specifically how regular, small controlled burns are how you avoid huge, unmanageable forest fires.

It’s probably not what you’re imagining, but there is the lemmynsfw instance which is a Lemmy instance that is more or less explicitly for porn.

The magazine coming with a free operating system is something that will probably never happen again. Wild to think about.

I don’t expect ai/LLM tools to make it easier to create nice looking art, but they should make it easier for anyone to create their own placeholder graphics that at least would allow them to run the game on their own.

I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.

People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).

I like the idea, but then who gets to decide who is and isn’t a credible source? Is it only intra-account verifying? Can anyone verify anyone else, or do you need to be authorized by bluesky to start verifying others?

I love the paper-collage-effect! If I may ask, what’s your technique?

Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data “firehose”).

According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (that’s what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs it’s still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.

Maybe my view of “decentralization as in democracy” is just fundamentally different from the author’s. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I don’t think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - it’s a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, I’m not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so there’s definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.

Thank you!!!

Doo you happen to have a good, informative link? Or perhaps a company name I could look up?

This sounds incredibly cool.

Metrosexual bash is not what I expected…

On the one hand, sure.

On the other, gimme back my lesbian lumberjack flannel esthetic you poser-ass, milquetoast, basic bish of a command line. I didn’t fight with my prompt var and bashrc to get associated with someone who calls others “nerds” as a put-down.

My naive, optimistic guess is that they really don’t want the Ukrainian forces to summarily execute him from a distance, and so many Russian soldiers have faked surrenders over the past 2 years that they figure anything less than taping this man’s arms around a tree will just get this guy killed.

Big news! I hope this is from a position of relative trust and not the SDF feeling like they will disappear elsewise.

The whiplash from the two titles in your second pic really hit me hard

A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

Thank you both (@NinjaFox@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org) for taking the time to make this post not just more accessible but somewhat more bit-/link-rot-resilient by duplicating the image’s info as a text comment.

We don’t talk about it as much as authoritarian censorship, ip & copyright related takedowns, and their ilk, but image macros/memes often have regrettably small lifetimes as publicly accessible data in my experience. It might be for any number of reasons, including:

• because many of them are created on free generator websites that can’t afford to store every generated image forever,
• because people often share screenshots of things instead of a link to it,
• because for-profit social media websites are increasingly requiring account creation to view previously accessible content,

or (more probably) a combination of all three and more.

In any case as silly as image memes are, they’re also an important vector for keeping culture and communities alive (at least here on the fediverse). In 5-10 years, this transcription has a much higher chance of still hanging around in some instance’s backups than the image it is transcribing.

P.S.: sure, knowyourmeme is a thing, but they’re still only 1 website and I’m not sure if there’s not much recent fediverse stuff there yet. The mastodon page last updated in 2017 and conflates the software project with the mastodon.social instance (likely through a poor reading of it’s first source, a The Verge article that’s decent but was written in 2017).

P.P.S.: ideally, OP (@cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.world) could add this transcription directly to the post’s alt text, but I don’t know if they use a client that makes that easy for them…

It’s a bit sad, but not that surprising, that if this is true then Microsoft is clearly not tasking their most experienced engineers on the control panel (you know, that part of the OS who’s function is to allow you to tweak all the rest of the OS?).

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).

I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.

From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.