Just to get it out there… I checked this out about a year ago. It’s not completely open source. The project consists of many executables and “pre complied dependencies” that don’t appear to share matching checksums which may indicate modifications of some sort. Looks like a great tool, but I’m extremely skeptical of what’s going on under the hood.
Hopefully they do truly open source it and prove me wrong, I’d love to give it a try some day.
Lemmy is, like a lot of Fediverse platforms, about as private as it can be. There’s no trackers, you’re not forced to use real names or any other identifying information, no adverts follow you from site to site, no browser fingerprinting and no instance owners are trying to sell your data.
Beyond that, what you choose to say on Lemmy is your responsibility and yours alone.
I personally enjoy that this sort of information is public, it keeps people honest and gives a tool to use against bad faith actors. People lie. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s forcing you to post personal information online. Some level of responsibility needs to be put on the user.
Nope, reading people’s history is the number one reason i liked Reddit and now lemmy. It’s just anonymous enough that you can keep your private life separate, and having a comment history stands in as an online barometer of who the other people your talking to are generally like
You can control who sees it by how and where you post it. If you don’t want people to see it, just don’t put it on the Internet at all. Even sites with fine-grained privacy controls can have flaws that result in information leaks.
From the previous issue it sounds like the developer has proper legal representation, but in his place I wouldn’t even begin talking with Haier until they formally revoke the C&D, and provide enforceable assurances that they won’t sue in the future.
Also I don’t know what their margins are like, but even if this cost them an extra $1000 in AWS fees on top of what their official app would have cost them (I seriously doubt it would be that much unless their infrastructure is absolute bananas), then it would probably only be a single-digit number of sales that they would have needed to loose to come out worse off from this.
I prefer the complete lack of privacy settings because it is open and honest about the reality of what Lemmy is able to provide.
Even if you’re running your own instance, you are necessarily submitting your data to another party. I don’t have to trust the platform as much when my data isn’t private. It’s much easier to engineer a system around that assumption.
If we suppose that anything I submit to Lemmy is submitted to the public, I can’t be misled. My data cannot be leaked because I’m presenting it to the world already. Lemmy is a young social project with many problems to solve, still trying to gain traction and hold on to users and with an uncertain future. In brief: bigger fish to fry.
Maybe privacy controls could be on the list, but I don’t think it addresses the main problems or applications of the platform and creates its own set of issues. Keep it simple and stupid.
I’m glad the threat of being on a FOSS Hall of Shame is effective for some companies, and that they can’t just frivolous lawsuit away a hobby developer without consequences to their bottom line, which would have set a bad precedent against small-time FOSS developers everywhere.
Now their status to me is moved from “Shitlist” to “Shitlist Pending”, they’ve talked their talk so now it’s time to see them walk their walk. Best would be to allow users to control their Haier products from their own servers rather than Haier’s. That will reduce their cloud computing bills from 3rd party users but they can still offer “compelling value” in their walled garden ecosystem as a simple one-and-done setup. Win-win right?
I read up on it at some point and it was essentially a matter of their UI framework just being custom-implemented. Any advanced UI concept would need so much overwhelming support from the community, that a core dev then sits down for a few months to dish out the necessary UI components, that this is just not really happening. The core devs aren’t exactly bored most of the time anyways.
Having said that, they did recently renovate the settings menu using the UI components they already had, and that turned out really cool.
Also, I do feel like some smaller improvements could be made without big code changes, but yeah, those then end up in too many discussions.
The font has been discussed many times. To give you a taste:
Many want a font with fantasy style, but Minetest can also depict a futuristic setting. Others want a blocky font, but those usually aren’t very legible (i.e. accessible) and often only support a narrow range of languages.
I think, just a font, which looks less serious and less thin, already improves it massively, but you can’t even get folks to agree on that, because well, if the font is tweaked, you might need to adjust lots of UI components and mods and such to work with the different font dimensions. So, if a font change is made, people want to get it perfect from the start.
The button gradients are another case, where most people agree that something else would look better and it could be easily changed, but discussions just never end.
The community is just so big and so public, that there’s always someone new joining into the discussion, so that no consensus can occur…
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