which is kind of shocking because I feel like lemmy is one of the fediverse "replacements" that most easily replaces.
I feel like most others don't always "scratch that itch" that some of there closed source rivals do. But honestly the only thing at this point imo that lemmy has going against it is the smaller user base and therefore lack of as niche of communities
Lemmy is still very much in its infancy. It's not even reached version 1.0 yet. While we've all been on here for a while now, its future is still very much uncertain and hasn't seen anywhere near the adoption that Mastodon and other microblog Fedi platforms have.
The Western 'free' population is one of the most information censored/restricted populations in the world, and yet they are flabbergasted that China and many many other nations won't allow propaganda from western oligarchs into their country. It doesn't matter that an information firewall is the single most important military defense against the Capitalist information war. That's btw why the western world are propagandizing their population for 'free speech', so we all can see that wevil China don't want free propaganda, sorry, speech.
The most amazing and Incredible is how hateful attitudes can be bought for a few propaganda dollars in the western for profit information market. So western people actually believe all the hateful things the western oligarchy says about China (and ALL the other enemies of the oligarchs).
How convenient and completely coincidental that the western population have the same opinions about nations and world leaders as the top elite.. Could it be that.. nooooo.. no no.. Western news are the BEST, and no Capitalist elite would lie about something like that to their own population, oh no no..
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
Yes, that's a perfectly good explanation for why they need to block wikipedia, deviantart, archiveofourown, github, bandcamp, lemmy.ml, and mastodon.social: they're all just fronts in the Capitalist Information War
Well, they're all methods by which culturally-bankrupt, ideologically-hued art and tech from the West could potentially slip past, ESPECIALLY where settler techbros are concerned regarding github and NSApedia-- I mean wikipedia; but you're being a deliberately-obtuse settler sinophobe right now, so of course you're not going to absorb that.
Much as I enjoy arguments with strangers on the Internet, you've reminded me of my resolution to avoid the most silly ones. If you think I'm a sinophobe your judgement is very poor.
Suuure... nothing to do with the fact that they're a decadent and corrupt failed socialist dictatorship, no sir. Not at all an attempt at stopping ACTUAL communists from toppling their government, oh no.
And there's the predictable, seemingly unavoidable Western need to project their own conditions onto anyone they declare an enemy of state. If you really believe CIA-backed color revolters are the 'actual communists', you've done no investigation of your own, and as a result don't deserve the voice you confidently, ignorantly speak with.
Largely unwittingly. Most of us are labor aristocrats of the imperial core who have been propagandized our entire lives in liberal imperialist ideology.
Then there’s the media.
Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the NYT, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR (here’s Katherine Maher again) and PBS. These are just ones I know off the top of my head. The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion.
A couple more I can think of: CNN’s Anderson Cooper was born into money and interned at the CIA. MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who was also born into wealth, was Obama’s and Biden’s press secretary.
I don’t want to either, I’m just saying you could.
lol at the downvotes. I guess suggesting two accounts to access different Lemmy instances - something many people already do - is offensive to some. 🤷🏻♂️
...and here I am, running a blog that if it gets 15k hits a second, it won't even bat an eye, and I could run it on a potato. Probably because I don't serve hundreds of megabytes of garbage to visitors. (The preview image is also controllable iirc, so just, like, set it to something reasonably sized.)
map $http_user_agent $badagent {
default 0;
# list of AI crawler user agents in "~crawler 1" format
}
if ($badagent) {
rewrite ^ /gpt;
}
location /gpt {
proxy_pass https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse163/20wi/files/lectures/L04/bee-movie.txt;
}
...is a wonderful thing to put in my nginx config. (you can try curl -Is -H "User-Agent: GPTBot" https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/robots.txt | grep content-length: to see it in action ;))
It's not. It just doesn't get enough hits for that 86k to matter. Fun fact: most AI crawlers hit /robots.txt first, they get served a bee movie script, fail to interpret it, and leave, without crawling further. If I'd let them crawl the entire site, that'd result in about two megabytes of traffic. By serving a 86kb file that doesn't pass as robots.txt and has no links, I actually save bandwidth. Not on a single request, but by preventing a hundred others.
I mean, Java has faster developer speed since it's much less complicated than Rust. But it will also use a lot more memory. That being said, I guess most of what happens in Lemmy is database queries anyway and that will go equally fast in Java.
Rust is a very fast language but for a web app like Lemmy it's probably not that important that it's rust underneath.
But I really dislike Java. Lots of issues with code only working on a specific JDK, and code being very ugly due to all classes and shit.
Java has faster developer speed since it’s much less complicated than Rust
[citation needed]
To give some context: Exception-based error handling is insanely complex. The error handling of Rust is much simpler to reason about. Finding out where errors happen is a lot simpler.
The only Java dev I know is an older guy who started university with me at the same time - I was 20, he was 45. He knew Java, I didn't. Java is not the future if you ask me.
"faster to code in"... I would not say so. In my personal experience, Rust can be very fast to code in once you get comfortable with it, since you barely even need to run your code to know that it works. You also save a lot of time via less debugging.
Yeah this sounds like someone doesn't know rust and instead of learning it they're porting to Java? It might also be a way to capture an existing userbase as it's still compatible with lemmy, but also adds features that might cause more people to use it. But being written in Java is an excuse to make it more difficult to migrate the additions back upstream to lemmy. Maybe they hope that this will eventually allow them to build out a private platform?
Yeah its been a journey. My cakeday for the an account I made on ml would be about now, and I think its around a month till this account is officially a year old.
Its an odd time to be on a platform like lemmy.
We're seeing an almost complete adulteration of what we might call the internet 2.0 era sites into walled gardens of exclusion. Effectively, the stealing, en-masse of almost two decades of user generated content. The walls and gates of the gardens we planted get higher everyday; the enshittification of all things.
And yet here we are. On a self-hosted, federated, unbought, unbroken, and unbent platform. Obviously its not all roses, but for what its worth, both the users and developers have created something incredibly special: A ray of hope in a time where it seems like the world has only been changing for the worse. And while the instances have their differencs, we should be looking to embrace those differences as much as possible, because this is what truly gives the fediverse strength. If its Kbin or Lemmy or Mastadon; or .ml or .world or .blahaj.zone.
The point of the fediverse isn't consolidation or control, but distribution and access. There is so much more possible simply because enough of us were willing to make the journey over here. We're providing the future with an alternative that isn't tracking them, trying to manipulate them with an algorithm, or to turn them into commodities. There is power in that.
So happy cakeday. Happy cake season to those who were messing around with a browser plug-in about this time last year, trying to delete their reddit history. Happy cakeday to the developers, to those who post, and to the commenters. And most of all, happy cake day to you dear lemming reading this. You make this place happen.
There's no reason why 114MB of static content over 5 minutes should be an issue for a public facing website. Hell, I probably could serve that and the images with a Raspberry Pi over my home Internet and still have bandwidth to spare.
I think they are throwing stones at the wrong glass house/software stack.
It is not, but a write amplification of 36704:1 is one hell of an exploitable surface.
With that same Raspberry Pi and a single 1gbit connection you could also do 333333 post requests of 3 KB in a single second made on fake accounts with preferably a fake follower on a lot of fediverse instances. That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s. At least for as long as you can keep posting new posts for a few minutes and the servers hosting still have bandwidth. DDosing with a 'botnet' of fediverse servers/accounts made easy!
I'm actually surprised it hasn't been tried yet now that I think about it...
That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s.
On the other hand, if the site linked would not serve garbage, and would fit like 1Mb like a normal site, then this would be only ~325mb/s, and while that's still high, it's not the end of the world. If it's a site that actually puts effort into being optimized, and a request fits in ~300kb (still a lot, in my book, for what is essentially a preview, with only tiny parts of the actual content loaded), then we're looking at 95mb/s.
If said site puts effort into making their previews reasonable, and serve ~30kb, then that's 9mb/s. It's 3190 in the Year of Our Lady Discord. A potato can serve that.
ok so like I don't know if I've ever seen a more confusing use of units . at least you haven't used the p infix instead of the / in bandwith units .
like you used both upper case and lowercase in units but like I can't say if it was intentional or not ? especially as the letter that is uppercased should be uppercased ?
anyway
1Mb
is theoretically correct but you likely ment either one megabyte (1 MB) or one megibyte (MiB) rather than one megabit (1 Mb)
~325mb/s
95mb/s
and
9mb/s
I will presume you did not intend to write ~325 milibits per second , but ~325 megabits per seconds , though if you have used the 333 333 request count as in the segment you quoted , though to be fair op also made a mistake I think , the number they gave should be 3 exabits per second (3 Eb/s) or 380 terabytes per seconds (TB/s) , but that's because they calculated the number of requests you can make from a 1 gigabit (which is what I assume they ment by gbit) wrong , forgetting to account that a byte is 8 bits , you can only make 416 666 of 4 kB (sorry I'm not checking what would happen if they ment kibibytes sorry I underestimated how demanding this would be but I'm to deep in it now so I'm gonna take that cop-out) requests a second , giving 380 terabits per second (380 Tb/s) or 3.04 terabytes per second (3.04 TB/s) , assuming the entire packet is exactly 114 megabytes (114 MB) which is about 108.7 megibytes (108.7 MiB) . so anyway
packet size
theoretical bandwidth
1 Mb
416.7 Gb/s
52.1 GB/s
1 MB
3.3 Tb/s
416.7 GB/s
1 MiB
3.3 Tb/s
416.7 GB/s
300 kb
125.0 Gb/s
15.6 GB/s
300 kB
1000.0 Gb/s
125.0 GB/s
300 kiB
1000.0 Gb/s
125.0 GB/s
30 kb
12.5 Gb/s
1.6 GB/s
30 kB
100.0 Gb/s
12.5 GB/s
30 kiB
100.0 Gb/s
12.5 GB/s
hope that table is ok and all cause im in a rush yeah bye
If you upload a picture to Lemmy, it's going to get saved by a shit of federated instances.
That's how federation works, but once it happens, it's hard to get all of them to delete it.
The fix is easy:
Upload somewhere else (theres a bunch of images hosts) then make your post point to that image host. Federated instances just have to host the link, so it's good for them too.
I'd love to see something like the RES feature where Lemmy can still show an expandable thumbnail for non-hosted images. RES pulled it off fine years ago, not sure how hard it would be.
I have to say, I think the article actually does address what you’re saying, in particular here:
There are a couple of reasons as to why this is so surprising. Firstly, the Trust & Safety aspect: a few months ago, several Lemmy servers were absolutely hammered with CSAM, to the point that communities shut down and several servers were forced to defederate from one another or shut down themselves.
Simply put, the existing moderation tooling is not adequate for removing illegal content from servers. It’s bad enough to have to jump through hoops dealing with local content, but when it comes to federated data, it’s a whole other ball game.
The second, equally important aspect is one of user consent. If a user accidentally uploads a sensitive image, or wants to wipe their account off of a server, the instance should make an effort to comply with their wishes. Federated deletions fail sometimes, but an earnest attempt to remove content from a local server should be trivial, and attempting to perform a remote delete is better than nothing.
I also just want to point out that the knife cuts both ways. Yes, it’s impossible to guarantee nodes you’re federating with aren’t just ignoring remote delete requests. But, there is a benefit to acting in good faith that I think is easy to infer from the CSAM material example the article presents.
Yeah it's like trying to delete a torrent that you created lol, deleting stuff from the Internet is not so easy. Even websites that claim to allow you to delete stuff may still be backed up by The Wayback Machine or similar, or even just a random user who liked your post and downloaded it.
I would like improvements here, but you should probably still be careful about anything you post if you're worried about being able to delete it, no matter what site you're on.
So, to be clear, the story the article links to is specifically a case of local content that didn't actually federate. It was an accidental upload, he cancelled the post, it sat in storage, and even his admin was stumped about how to get it out.
I agree that with federation, it's a lot more messy. But, having provisions to delete things locally, and try to push out deletes across the network, is absolutely better than nothing.
The biggest issue I have is that there's really not much an admin can do at the moment if CSAM or some other horrific shit gets into pict-rs, short of using a tool to crawl through the database and use API calls to hackily delete things. Federation aside, at least make it easy for admins and mods to handle this on their home servers.
Upload somewhere else (theres a bunch of images hosts) then make your post point to that image host. Federated instances just have to host the link, so it’s good for them too.
Those images are still cached as well as the thumbnails.
Couldn't images and videos just be loaded from the instance they were uploaded to instead of getting copied to each instance? It would work almost the same as uploading it to a file hoster but it would be a lot easier usability wise and illegal content would still only have to be deleted at a single point.
That's not exactly what nomadic identity is about, although it can also help with that.
The way nomadic identity is implemented in Hubzilla for example is that you can have accounts on multiple servers and by importing a shared cryptographic identity into all of them, other servers know to treat them as a single entity. Once that is established you can log into your account on any of the linked servers and use it normally. But if a server goes down or you decide to delete your account on one, you can seamlessly continue to use everything from another linked server.
Super cool, the worry of an instance dying will make people avoid smaller instances and pick the big stable ones. Having this safety net should help balance things out.
I wonder if this could work with threadiverse communities. We've seen communities disappear when an instance goes down. Could the communities also be saved like this?
I don't see why not. And in fact, they would benefit from the whole relay thing, allowing multiple accounts on different instances to be the "same" community
Personally I like that there are different communities with different characters, but the option for community moderators to opt into such a nomadic arrangement would certainly not hurt. At least it is much better than if 3rd parties like clients or alternative implementations like Piedfed smash them together with currently no way for communities to opt out of that.
This article was the first time I understood that particular way of implementing nomadic identity, and it's the first time I've felt genuinely excited by the idea.
My concern is that with "instanceless" nomadic identity on the fediverse is that ultimately, it would mean that instance would lose their sense of differentiation and community, and would simply be infrastructure instead, and that's how we we end up with bluesky.
This implementation though is amazing. It lets people actively lean in to community based instances, without having to only pick one, and it gives people protection against loss of any particular instance.
Indeed I am also slightly weary of too easy account migration. Not only do instances lose character because of it, but also are much more likely to be shut down or abandoned if it can be justified with easy account migration. The instance I am currently on for example would probably not exist anymore had not the previous admin felt the need to hand it over to someone else.
But in the bigger picture I think Hubzilla's nomadic identity is a good compromise of balancing out these different considerations.
Super disagree. A community at the protocol level can have just as much character as a community at the network level, but without most of the drawbacks. The "instance as community" idea was always a poor substitute for actual Groups. The community shouldn't be a server that users are bound to; it should be a Group that has access controls and private memberships (if desired). The moderators get all the same benefits of maintaining a limited community with their own rules, but users aren't beholden to petty drama via instance blocks or defederation.
That's one way to look at it, sure. But it fails to account for community dynamics. The fediverse is largely run by volunteers and funded by that small percentage of users that feel strongly committed to their particular instance. If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.
This is also why I doubt Bluesky federation will be ever anything but a novelty for some self-hosters.
If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.
I'm not saying I don't think instances should be able to use that model, only that I think that model should not be the dominant way of building a community on the fediverse. But I don't see why a user would be less attached to a community just because its hosted on a different server from them, especially on the threadiverse which is topic based and where users are most likely going to engage in multiple topics.
I think another way to look at it is that accounts are tightly coupled to instances, to the point of being a detriment. I've personally lost all of my data and had to start over from scratch 5 or 6 times due to servers suddenly going down over the years.
Groups are one way to abstract community functions up a level, and what's crazy is that Group Actors themselves could also have a similar thing. People have talked about merged cross-instance communities on Lemmy; this would be one way of enabling that.
That makes total sense. Still, it removes the pressure of choosing a server, since migration and use of several servers becomes seamless. As it is right now, there’s the resilience and future lifespan of an instance to consider, plus fragmentation of your identify as defined not by your username but by your actual “online persona” constructed from your posts, etc. (unless you’re really going for alts, of course). You can create other identities on other instances but they are separate, you “lose” your posts, etc. if something happens. if I understood correctly, that becomes less of an issue with nomadic identity?
This is almost entirely misdirected. The success of Wikipedia is from its human structures, the technical structure is close to meaningless. To propose a serious alternative you'd have to approach it from a social direction, how are you going to build a moderation incentive structures that forces your ideal outcomes?
Federation isn't a magic bullet for moderation, alone it creates fractal moderation problems.
I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media's self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.
In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.
It doesn't block them though does it? My understanding is that it simply filters them so that you don't see them anymore. They're still there doing their thing though.
It does block them more so than on fedi. When I block someone they can’t see my content nor account, they can’t log out and go see my content. It’s not just filtered, also they have banned accounts and removed content
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