As an avid NewPipe user I like that it’s an approximately identical tool with more functionality!
It seems like a fork where (I wish) a plugin could (ideally) be in NewPipe. It may also be a nice nod to the original devs to change the default color scheme of the fork so nobody gets confused as to who forked from who.
Overall very cool work! I hope they continue to have success and make progress.
The problem is that there isn’t a singular replacement. People use Twitter for that feeling of being up to date with everything happening in the world. Until one of the alternatives can deliver that on a larger scale, Twitter will retain a considerable userbase.
I’m pretty sure the people who still use Twitter use it for the drama. Mastodon and Bluesky just aren’t as spicy to them. Hell, Mastodon takes setting up to even get anything interesting.
Probably lukewarm take: Social media shouldn’t be a utility because it provides no social value or improvement of quality of life in the same way other genuine public utilities like electricity, water, sewer services, or general access to the internet, might. It’s also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis, climate deniers, anti-vaccers, and every other person with “insert terrible belief here” included.
Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities. Just because it’s fun to use doesn’t mean it’s good for society or come anywhere close to meeting the definition for the level of necessity typically attached to something as a public utility.
When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.
It’s also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis […]
Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces. If your government gives people with terrible_belief.jpg the chance to preach on public property, that’s not a public property issue, that’s a government issue.
Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities.
No, it isn’t. If anything, turning certain popular social media apps into public utilities would limit them from being pure dopamine hits. Let other websites exist to fill the cesspool void. Not the one my grandma uses.
When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.
Except…no, it’s not. That’s an extremely naive understanding of what a “public utility” is. A public utility is not defined by how many people use something. Public utilities are essential services that typically operate on economies of scale. That is to say services without realistic replacement and which have large upfront creation and maintenance costs and which only make sense to provide access to a large number of people. You can’t replace electricity with some alternate source of power. It’s electricity. Same for water. They’re fundamental services that are required for other services to exist. Without electricity you don’t have phone or internet. Without water you can’t have sewer systems or indoor plumbing.
WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace. A business chooses to use WhatsApp for customer service. They could just as easily setup a Discord server or just establish an 800 number for you to call. They have immediate drop-in replacements. Arguing otherwise is sort of like arguing that Coke should be considered a public utility because a business serves Coke products. They don’t have to serve Coke. They could serve Pepsi. Or anything else.
Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access. It makes literally no sense to say “WhatsApp should be a utility” without first arguing that “internet access for all individuals at a national level should be a public utility.” Which I would personally argue is something that does qualify as a utility, far more than any specific social media services or app, and the fact that it isn’t is a huge problem for the United States.
Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces.
Oh, okay, “Godwin’s Law” is it? Cool. Here’s an actual law. Like a literal piece of legislation that exists: it’s called the First Amendment. I don’t know if you’re just speaking from a non-American context, or just don’t know how “freedom of speech” is codified into law in the United States. Maybe you’re a kid or something and just haven’t learned that in school yet. But freedom of speech in public places is universally protected under the constitution. Like, there are still public Klan rallies in certain parts of the country. This is what allows those to happen. If the United States government maintained its own social media service, it would functionally not have the power to moderate any content that was not explicitly illegal. Bigotry and hate speech are not illegal under the constitution.
First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.
WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace.
Olvid, a French alternative to WhatsApp, was made in 2019. It took a law passing last month banning all ministers from using non in-house messaging services to stop people from using WhatsApp. I wouldn’t consider that “trivially easy”.
Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access.
You didn’t mention Internet access and so neither did I. I’m happy we both agree it should be a utility.
I don’t know if you’re just speaking from a non-American context, or just don’t know how “freedom of speech” is codified into law in the United States.
I already said this is a “government problem”. I said this in reference to the US government, because this isn’t really an issue for most countries :/
The squawker seems interesting to me. Unfortunately it’s only available on android and there are some issues probably out of their reach. But since I use it for something basic (literally seeing images of some profiles I follow), it serves me well
This community is full of people who simply “don’t like certain things”. They may say “it’s overkill” disregarding the fact that it solves their use case perfectly. Or it could be written in a language they don’t like. Or maybe they heard somebody else complain about it on a forum once and now think it’s bad.
I think flatpaks are good. The performance penalty for containerized software can be felt much more when you’re not using a good CPU. So containers do not “solve” my use case.
Yeah, it’s also the same group of people who are always complaining about how much RAM a desktop environment or app uses, that app being whichever one they are using right now.
I did it with blob storage, ended up being much cleaner and cheaper. You’ll need to toy with it a bit, but from scratch will be a lot easier than the migration I had to do. You’ll easily eat up 100+GB in pictures, which on the cloud on a VM’s drive that’s a fair chunk of money. Object storage is pennies.
Yup Yup! I’ve got it uploading objects. It seems to be an issue with fetching them. The hash is either mismatched or it’s not correctly trying to grab from the sled repo. So, I get a 500 error in store response. Not really sure how to fix it.
This looks interesting, but I don’t understand what it’s for. I read through the readme, but came out none the wiser. What exactly is a compose sequence?
A compose key (sometimes called multi key) is a key on a computer keyboard that indicates that the following (usually 2 or more) keystrokes trigger the insertion of an alternate character, typically a precomposed character or a symbol.
It’s a method to combine several characters on your keyboard and use it to create a special character which is not on the keyboard. For example “ and e produces ë. This tool allows you to configure those combinations.
But thanks for the feedback. I’ll update the readme to add some more context.
On Lemmy any comment you post gets federated out to other servers, so it’s available to anyone who sets up a server. So by design it is not possible to control who gets to see or archive your comments. I could set up a server to permanently archive every comment it sees, and if your server sends me your comment it goes into my archive. Probably people are already doing this for data mining. It’s not clear that you could bolt some kind of privacy control on to this architecture, which is fundamentally designed for sharing.
Although I agree that is how things work now, one could imagine a different approach:
For instance, I could maybe control who my content gets federated to. That is, if I decide I don't particularly want my content blasted to certain places that my instance would not call any blocked ones with my data.
If that causes some issues with ActivityPub, you can imagine encrypted blobs that could only be opened by others with a shared key.
We don't need to achieve perfection out of the gate, to me these questions are worth discussing so that we can build out more high quality tech for the fediverse, let's not try to just immediately shut down discussion.
How would you ensure other instances are not sharing your content?
To me this seems to be a question of ideology. I came here from Reddit because this is an open forum with transparent history.
Federetion by design ensures that accessibility (as far as I understand, correct me if I’m wrong). This design principle to me is the core. If that seems like an issue maybe this style of social media is not for you.
In this context, it’s an open public digital space. Noone is obligated share anything.
The part that is discussed as a privacy issue is a design element. It is by design post are visible to everyone, it is by design that comments are visible to everyone.
How is it a privacy issue when the user desides what to post for everyone to see?
If you are looking for a different design ideology then maybe you need a different social media platform.
So regarding an open, public digital space like Twitter, how do you feel about people having the ability to lock their accounts and instantly hide all their tweets from the public?
Mastodon doesn’t have that, but it could.
My reaction to adding something like that will always be “that would be rad” regardless of previous assumptions about how public an app should be, or truisms like “the Internet is forever”, because I believe strongly that trying to fix issues is better than letting them languish unchecked.
I’ve never been on Twitter. Besides Reddit I really disliked all other main platforms. So answering your question: I don’t care, it’s a different platform for different style of social media interactions.
the Internet is forever
My position has nothing to do with this sentiment. Internet forgets, and often.
I like federated nature of Lemmy, I like that there is no “private” accounts. This is a feature not a bug.
I’m not trying to argue against privacy, but what you are describing isn’t a privacy issue or an issue at all. It’s a design element. And it’s this design is why I like it here.
As someone here has said, at some point the responsibility has to fall on the user. You don’t need to share anything. As long as the nature of the platform is clear (and it’s a separate discussion) the is no issue to be fixed.
If to you that is seems as an issue, well then maybe you are at the wrong place. And if the platform changes in the direction I don’t agree, I will leave.
For example, privacy settings on Facebook are available to all registered users: they can block certain individuals from seeing their profile, they can choose their “friends”, and they can limit who has access to their pictures and videos.
We were talking about the definition of privacy, and I was giving an example to bolster my definition of it. We can switch to a different topic if you want, but first I want to cement this definition.
Those didn’t completely break federation, they just had some issues with a few services besides lemmy. They’re addressed now, but federation compatibility will always be an ongoing task as new services get added and existing ones change their activitypub responses.
As far as I’m aware the most widely-accepted standard for responsible disclosure is 90 days. This is a little different, since that’s normally between businesses and includes the time needed to develop a solution; it’s not typically aimed at federated or self-hosted applications rolling out an already-created patch. On the one hand, granting them that extra time to upgrade seems reasonable. On the other, wouldn’t anyone wanting to exploit a vulnerability be able to reverse-engineer it pretty easily by reading the git history?
The 90 days disclosure you’re referencing, which I believe is primarily popularized by Google’s Project Zero process, is the time from when someone discovers and reports a vulnerability to the time it will be published by the reporter if there is no disclosure by the vendor by then.
The disclosure by the vendor to their users (people running Lemmy instances in this case) is a completely separate topic, and, depending on the context, tends to happen quite differently from vendor to vendor.
As an example, GitLab publishes security advisories the day the fixed version is released, e.g. …gitlab.com/…/critical-security-release-gitlab-16….
Some vendors will choose to release a new version, wait a few weeks or so, then publish a security advisory about issues addressed in the previous release. One company I’ve frequently seen this with is Atlassian. This is also what happened with Lemmy in this case.
As Lemmy is an open source project, anyone could go and review all commits for potential security impact and to determine whether something may be exploitable. This would similarly apply to any other open source project, regardless of whether the commit is pushed some time between releases or just before a release. If someone is determined enough and spends time on this they’ll be able to find vulnerabilities in various projects before an advisory is published.
The “responsible” alternative for this would have been to publish an advisory at the time it was previously privately disclosed to admins of larger instances, which was right around the christmas holidays, when many people would already be preoccupied with other things in their life.
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