The whole point of federation and open protocols is that you aren’t tied to any specific piece of software, or any single provider, or any single set of features. People can experiment and innovate and collaborate and expand to build new things on top without losing access or interfering with people who prefer the old methods. People or software that abuses the system on the other hand, can be blocked or defederated.

A healthy software ecosystem should have many different pieces of software all written by different people with different goals, but all implementing most of the same things. Some will be more popular than others, and the popular ones might not agree with your own personal tastes, but that’s just life. The point is that we (and software developers) all have the freedom to choose how we interact with this system without any formal rules or maintainer group deciding what is allowed and what isn’t (except within their own software and/or instance).

and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?

They are already cross-compatible enough, they are as cross-compatible as they need to be. It’s not clear what more you could ask for. If you want them to all look and work exactly the same then what’s the point of having different software at all? You’re acting like the different features and choices are a downside when it is in fact a benefit. Pick the one you like the most and use it. If you like Piefed’s hashtags, then use Piefed, it’s great! There’s nothing “locked away” in Piefed, everything in it is available to everybody, as it should be!

Really nice that they’re doing a sunset period with advance warning instead of just randomly going dark. As Lemmy’s first major “shutdown” we need to accept that this sort of thing seems inevitable from time to time, maybe this can set an example and open a conversation on how to handle this sort of situation in the future. I’d hope this creates some pressure to Fediverse developers to improve portability for users (and communities!) moving between instances, maybe even some kind of immigration/emigration mode for people or communities who want to apply to transfer their account and history rather than simply sign up a new account while posting a link from their old account. Federation should be able to do better than that.

It’s my “opinion” that a device running a slightly modified Linux 2.6 kernel is literally running Linux, yes. Maybe you’re making the point that it’s not a full GNU/Linux distribution that most people imagine when they hear Linux, and that’s a valid and valuable clarification which I thank you for providing, but you don’t need to imply I’m wrong to provide that clarification.

Kobos are pretty nice. They’re not cheap, as you pointed out, but you can get an older or used one for quite a bit cheaper and it’s just as good. They run Linux. It’s almost completely open, and anything that isn’t might as well be. That said you really don’t need to open it up much, just enough to install something like koreader which basically completely replaces the OS on the thing. It does everything I would ever want to use my ereader for … granted that’s pretty much just “read ebooks”.

It is not new. I downloaded (copyrighted) porn movies from my ISP’s own Usenet servers in the early 90s. On dialup. It was a decentralized, federated service before anybody even knew what decentralization or federation even meant or why they would want it. It was just assumed that everyone would want to run their own Usenet servers because the technologies of the time didn’t allow direct, continuous, real-time connection between everybody. Sharing was expensive but running a Usenet server was relatively cheap and was a good way to share all that data to all of an ISP’s users at once. It was ALWAYS an option to use it for piracy, and people did.

Nowadays, sharing is cheap, and running Usenet servers is expensive, so almost nobody runs their own Usenet servers, especially not ISPs. But that’s not the technology’s fault, it’s just the way the world has changed. The internet is a very different place now, and we use it in different ways. Usenet, on the other hand, has not changed at all. Only the people using it have changed.

So far, this seems to be exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks so much!

I don’t want to have to dig through 100 communities all spread out to find things.

So don’t. Hang out on Lemmy.world. You’ll be fine here. It’s as centralized as you can get. All you’re really asking for is to deny others the ability to choose or run their own instance and still be able to talk to you, like I’m doing right now.

Federation alone would give a lot of utility. The whole point is not to be a walled garden of discrete silos. If I can post on Lemmy from Mastodon, why shouldn’t I be able to post a comment on a model?

Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.

should actually be

Parenthesis, exponents, (multiplication and division), (addition and subtraction).

Addition and subtraction are given the same priority, and are done in the same step, from left to right.

It’s not a great system of notation, it could be made far clearer (and parenthesis allow you to make it as clear as you like), but it’s essentially the universal standard now and it’s what we’re stuck with.

I doubt there is video of that… why would they be filming his back?

What bubble have they got you trapped in? Literally every video I can find shows both Nazi salutes Elon Musk did. Here’s a link to PBS’s video.

Honestly escaping AI slop may be the hardest part of any situations (nevermind just the small web) soon if this anti-human distributed-denial-of-service attack on our awareness continues the way it’s going. There will always be spammers with little to lose and more to gain, even if it’s not financial gain they’re after there can be benefits to simply increasing the level of noise in an environment, whether it’s to hide something else they’re doing or to weaken opposition to some goal.

Honestly the hardest part of doing this seems to be settling on what we’re going to call it. Ironically, it is difficult to search for and discover sites following this philosophy precisely because they are so decentralized and independent and nobody’s even using any common terminology for it. I’ve heard variations of this called Web 1.0, Small Web, Indie Web, Nostalgia Web, Old Web, Retro Web, Analog Web, Free Web, Libre Web, and dozens more terms even more vague and difficult to remember off the top of my head. “Small Web” seems to have the most traction from what I can tell but discovery remains such a hard problem to solve, especially without falling into the same traps that led us here.

I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”

I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don’t really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they’ll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That’s their racket.

The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom’s) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.

Unless you’re willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you’re going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It’s literally a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation.

Welcome to the enshittification phase of the economy. Everything will be enshittified, even the economy itself.

I trust the community, but not blindly. I trust those who have a proven track record, and I proxy that trust through them whenever possible. I trust the standards and quality of the Debian organization and by extension I trust the packages they maintain and curate. If I have to install something from source that is outside a major distribution then my trust might be reduced. I might do some cursory research on the history of the project and the people behind it, I might look closer at the code. Or I might not. A lot of software doesn’t require much trust. A web app running in its own limited user on a well-secured and up-to-date VPS or VM, in the unlikely event it turned out to be a malicious backdoor, it is simply an annoyance and it will be purged. In its own limited user, there’s not that much it can do and it can’t really hide. If I’m off the beaten track in something that requires a bit more trust, something security related, or something that I’m going to run it as root, or it’s going to be running as a core part of my network, I’ll go further. Maybe I “audit” in the sense that I check the bug tracker and for CVEs to understand how seriously they take potential security issues.

Yeah if that malicious software I ran that I didn’t think required a lot of trust, happens to have snuck in a way to use a bunch of 0-day exploits and gets root access and gets into the rest of my network and starts injecting itself into my hardware persistently then I’m going to have a really bad day probably followed by a really bad year. That’s a given. It’s a risk that is always present, I’m a single guy homelabbing a bunch of fun stuff, I’m no match for a sophisticated and likely targeted nation-state level attack, and I’m never going to be. If On the other hand if I get hacked and ransomwared along with 10,000 other people from some compromised project that I trusted a little too much at least I’ll consider myself in good company, give the hackers credit where credit is due, and I’ll try to learn from the experience. But I will say they’d better be really sneaky, do their attack quickly and it had better be very sophisticated, because I’m not stupid either and I do pay pretty close attention to changes to my network and to any new software I’m running in particular.

I skimmed through most of it, it’s a huge and badly organized info dump, but it seems legit, most of the research was done through the internet archive and everything it listed is verifiable and reproducible, although as far as I can tell the link to the CIA is pretty weak and relies on a single news story with a single example alleged “CIA site” that allegedly leaked out of , it’s not really that hard to believe that they would have such sites. Almost certainly all spy agencies do. It’s totally plausible steganography, like the numbers stations on radio, or botnet controllers quietly directing their army of bots through normal-seeming posts on normal-seeming accounts on social media. Hiding operational information in plain sight allows a useful hidden communication method that doesn’t raise any obvious alarm even if it is noticed to be a bit strange or dumb. It blends in perfectly with all the other strange and dumb content on the Internet.

Obviously all the sites are gone now and there’s nothing of any particular intelligence value there but the appearance and contents of the sites are still available on the archive, and of course there are at least hundreds of them, in various languages, on various topics, with a variety of different technologies in use, but the similarities also seem pretty clear. It’s not much of a conspiracy this is fairly basic stuff although of course we don’t have rock solid proof I don’t think that would really make it any more interesting. If the CIA did come out and say “yep, those were our sites” would it actually be any more interesting? would it be less interesting? or would it be the same interesting? I think it would be the same interesting. But that’s just, like, my opinion.

I think you’re missing mine. I know it’s not clever. I think everything it creates is either slop, plagiarism and almost always both.

My point is: An arbitrary random number generator without any stable internal model of the world would still be a bad thing if it can, without any conscious intention, trick/confuse people into thinking its so awesome and clever that they choose it to be emperor of Earth, leader of the economy, decider of reality, and build it a great throne upon which they can worship it and and an altar to burn oil on as a sacrifice to the environment. That’s what LLMs are doing. It doesn’t matter whether the LLMs intend to, it doesn’t matter whether they have intentions at all. What matters is that it’s so “well presented” that people fall for it. It’s the effectiveness it has at making people fall for it that’s the problem. Dismissing those people as weak, naive, stupid can’t be done because their actions matter, their votes matter, their financial choices matter, they’re part of the civilization we live in, and frankly, they seem to be the majority.

Fooling people is evidently all you need to do to become President of the United States and Commander In Chief of the world’s largest military with personal control over a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons. Fast talking computers could be dangerous when they’re infinitely faster, and probably smarter and slightly less neurotic than the current president. “Hey, come to think of it, has anyone ever even seen the 2028 president-elect on anything other than a screen?”

That’s arguing the same thing.