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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m pretty sure @randon31415@lemmy.world was trying to create a simplified example. To include a generic autistic tech we can modify the example to “40 people making 10 things an hour. A clever autistic person comes along and writes a computer script that improves efficiency. Now 19 people make 20 things an hour, the autistic tech makes 5 times as much as one of the original people and has the specialty job of maintaining the script, the business owner lays off 20 people (4x of their pay compensates the tech) and the business owner pockets the other 16x as extra profit”

    The 19 people still employed don’t get any more pay for their extra efficiency, nor do they get any more time off.

    The 20 people who were let go at no fault of their own now apparently don’t get to eat or live or have any kind of security until they reeducate themselves to a new line of work.

    The autistic tech doesn’t understand where their additional pay comes from, but is happy to get rewarded well for their good work.

    If questioned about why the 20 people needed to be let go, the business owner will blame the scripts efficiency instead of their own decision to pocket the money.

    However, to answer your question directly: it does not matter how many new jobs or specialty positions are created - if the net pay available to workers is reduced and the net jobs workers can fill are reduced, some workers are destined to get the short straw.



  • Honestly, I say we ditch NSFW as a on/off switch and go with a mandatory tagging system. We can clarify NSFW into content warning tags, e.g. CW - Gore, CW - Death, CW - Breast, CW - Genitalia.

    Users could then set their own preferences on which tags would cause a post to be masked or simply hidden.

    But why stop there? Tags could be very useful in our federated environment to help communities mesh better with each other.

    Communities could be able to specify a list of mandatory tags, i.e. the Swallow community could require posts specify African Swallow or European Swallow (or both or neither). Communities could also make some tags implied, so the AfricanSwallow community might just imply that posts are Africian Swallow unless user changes it.

    Underneath the hood, all tags are just treated as part of the post text, so the backend performance impact will be minimal. However moderation tools would be able to consider tags when deciding how to handle a post.

    Of course, the server/instance owner can then simply make a policy of what kinds of content warnings they require, and communities can then build other tags on that to meet their community needs.




  • Let me say, thank you for being here.

    I honestly don’t believe Lemmy is for everyone - at least not yet. There’s too many issues for me to, say, recommend it to my mom. However for Lemmy to become capable of being that network it needs people like you. People that don’t just get frustrated and walk away, but post an honest inquiry about ‘why’. If nothing else the feedback is appreciated.

    The Reddit/Twitter/General Shitification has shaken things up such that pioneers like us are seeding the fediverse with the wide variety of human interests that are richer and deeper than what the developers themselves can provide. Thank you for deciding that, “well, if the experience is going to be frustrating and annoying, at least I’ll go with the frustrating, annoying experience that’s trying to improve itself”. My advice is to take Lemmy itself not too seriously - to laugh when the software has it’s quirks, and to give others the benefit of the doubt. I look forward to looking back and ‘enjoying how wild it was in the early days’.

    Again, thank you. I’m starting to dream that in five years this place might be someplace really, truly amazing.


  • Nobody said we were polished. We’re literally the upstart underdog.

    It is known about, and it’s being worked on, but since it’s ultimately an open source project, there’s no deadline provided for when it will be fixed.

    Luckily it’s not a big deal, it doesn’t prevent the pending subscriptions from showing up in your feeds. If it bothers you just wait for your server to be not busy, unsubscribe and resubscribe, should take care of it.

    There was a different vulnerability found that let the attacker take full ownership of a compromised account - some moderator and admin accounts were compromised. I would prefer the developers fix that first.


  • I’m gonna argue ‘no’.

    Sure, we could do something clever with mesh network access points, or use tunneling (VPN) to build a pocket network on top of the existing Internet (TOR does something generally like this to create a more anonymous Internet). So if this were simply a matter of infrastructure, the tech is already there.

    However, there are two problems. The biggest problem is adoption. What service can our little pocket network provide that would convince the lay person to tap into such a network? How are we going to advertise this to others? Even if we had our own copy of the current internet’s infrastructure, we would have a cool webpage and spread by word of mouth and they would still have advertising dollars. Either we need a killer feature (that they can’t simply replicate) or else they’ll just win over the average person by the pillow talk of advertising bucks.

    However there’s also a philosophical problem. To create a open internet, it has to be available to everyone and our problem is that includes the asshole corporations we don’t like. The fundamental nature of an internet is to be an interconnected network. By building our own separate network, we’re fundamentally creating a walled garden network, not an open network - it’s essentially defined by who we’re keeping out.


    But I’m not going to leave you without a solution. Here’s the framework of what I think we need to do to fix the internet†:

    • We need to stop treating internet access like a consumer good. It needs to at least be treated as a utility, i.e. as something that has an inherent monopoly and doesn’t self-regulate through the process of supply and demand - there is only one internet, no substitute exists. Heck, I’d argue that internet access should be a human right, a tool that fulfills a basic need for connection and communication.

    • We need to restore network neutrality, ISPs need to be content neutral, because if they can pick winners and losers, they’ll make private deals and pick the winners that work best for them (often another branch of themselves). Since we lost network neutrality formally in the USA less than a decade ago, the internet still looks kinda mostly open, but it’s eroding slowly.

    • We need to separate ownership of the physical network equipment from the ownership of the information services. Let’s call these ‘equipment ISPs’ and ‘general access ISPs’. The physical equipment should be owned and maintained by small companies, ideally with about 5-10 field technicians (the physical footprint that covers will vary based on the setting, dense urban settings will need more companies than sparse rural ones). These small equipment ISPs will not be allowed to negotiate directly with the consumer. The Access ISPs will be the ones that will lease an IP address to the general public as well as basic services such as DNS, and will compete on general service quality (up/down/latency speeds) that they’ll have to negotiate with equipment ISPs to ensure quality of service, access ISPs can also sweeten the pot with things like offering an email address or bundling with media services(e.g. Netflix), etc. Equipment ISPs should be expected to have deals with multiple service ISPs, and be prevented from having exclusivity deals. Ultimately, the goal is to allow the general public to have options about which ISP they choose that’s not fundamentally limited by where they are at, and the service ISPs are then on the hook to work with the equipment ISPs to fulfill those promises. Equipment ISPs are being given a small monopoly, but if they perform shoddy there’ll be neighbors on all sides to shame them, also they’ll have to work with at least one or two access ISPs to have any income at all.

    • Start choosing people over brands. The biggest crime corporations perform against humanity is to take credit for the work that is ultimately done by unique, talented people, then internally treat people as fungible assets that can be let go once they’re not useful. lemmy.world is administrated by @ruud and a small team of admins (check your instance’s sidebar for more details). If @ruud and lemmy.world split and he created a new, different Lemmy instance, I’d follow @ruud to the new insurance because he’s proved his talent at weathering the problems of keeping a service up and running in the modern internet, whereas lemmy.world … is just a domain name. Google wasn’t nearly as evil when it was still run day-to-day by Larry Page & Sergey Brin. Valve rakes in money, but Gabe Newell keeps the company priorities on actually being a good game platform. By contrast Steve Hoffman is hated partially because it often feels his job is to be the face of an otherwise obscure board of directors and he serves them in a way that he doesn’t serve his employees, the moderators, or the users in general.

    Overall, that’s four things we can do. None of them are easy. One is on the global level, one on the national level, one on the state or local level, and one on the personal level.

    †I live in the USA, so my perspective is through that lens, but I’m trying to offer ideas that should generalize.


  • They crush a potential rival in its infancy. That’s literally all. It all reads to me as textbook embrace, extend, extinguish.

    If the federated web were a company, they’d just buy them out if they got big enough. But it’s not, so they can’t, and that worries them. But they see the open part of open source as a vulnerability, so they put on a smile, pretend the game is ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ and then sabotage the protocol in a million ways from the inside while convincing users that your app is clearly the best way to experience the federated web.