I think that’s a great description, in part it’s what drew me here with the idea that the discussions and topics are always from a kind and informational perspective, without the common “sneer tone” that can so often overtake conversations on the internet.
Personally my experience with users on Beehaw has been entirely kind, thoughtful, and full of knowledgeable people, whatever the topic may be. The few poor experiences I have had here were from outside instances, it’s true, and I can’t imagine just how much of that you all must have to deal with. But I have also had just as many incredibly thoughtful interactions from some federated instances as well, generally the (seemingly) smaller instances. I feel like maybe every 1 in 10 comments through the posts I go to read in All might have be negative or purposeful troll, but all the rest are at least coming from a perspective that I can understand even if I may not agree - but it’s always worth engaging because it drives good thoughtful conversation.
I have an account on slrpnk that is federated with lemmy.world and it can be unbearable to use sometimes - the slrpnk community itself is wonderful, but lemmy.world dominates the All feed, and lemmy.world comments… it’s a mix of dismissive and instigative. I feel like every 1 in 10 comments might be coming from a kind and thoughtful perspective. Comments are immediately downvoted, often times there’s comments no more than a sentence long through a whole thread. Except for moderators, but there’s just a tone that I can’t quite place among reading the interactions that feels… maybe not entirely welcoming? However I also understand they have a lot going on there, and certainly some history I’m missing.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying I really, really value both the Beehaw community & mods and our set of instances, even if there may be a few that still have problems that I don’t get to see as a regular user. But I do know that I value all of your comments enough to see what you have to say and get to know my internet friends - Chris, your determination for community is inspiring and you’ve got some cool hobbies! And the few times I have seen moderator intervention and extended discussion, I’ve yet to come across an example where I think any of you handled it poorly. (All of you) Your contributions here are more than mod team leaders when you need to be, you feel like community members through and through - which unfortunately feels rare for a mod team!
Regarding federation and instances - maybe the family analogy is something that can be adapted? Here on local we are the immediate family but the instances that I appreciate the most I still feel are cousins. I think many of them appreciate us as well. Unfortunately, I think the negative users overall will not be prevented from their bad habit by a sidebar and our philosophy. With that in mind I think federation with servers that focus on sharing knowledge is the most important.
From the recent post made on I think lemmy.ml regarding Beehaw’s federation - the reception was terrible. It felt terrible to read. But looking through the comments, I would say over 80% of them at least had to be lemmy.world users who have never even interacted here - or if they did were soon defederated from and clearly salty about it, all of those getting ~30-50 upvotes. It was a literal circlejerk about our instance coming from a flawed or probably just intentionally wrong perspective. Information like a game of telephone. If it weren’t so inflammatory it would have been funny, given my actual experiences here.
However, the rest of the comments though were from a wide, wide array of instances saying they would miss our presence, with it being about a 50/50 split from lemmy.ml itself. And each instance I happened to see that felt positively about us, I likewise had only ever had good interactions from members of those instances as well.
Luckily, I had already seen just how awful lemmy.world can really be, as I mentioned I’d created my slrpnk account just a few weeks ago which is actually where I saw that post, maybe just last week or so? Suffice to say, the reception from them was not surprising in the least because to me it seems clear the intent is to tear down, not lift up. You cannot share knowledge in a tear down community because no matter what, somehow your knowledge is wrong.
Users here just have a completely different intention and way of using and interacting with the internet. Users on other smaller instances feel like that intention is there too. We share knowledge with the intent of further gaining and growing our ideas and abilities and because it helps another member of our community. That is becoming more and more rare on the web and I really value our presence in the fediverse and I believe that there are others that do too.
Whatever the future may hold for our instance, I’ll likely migrate with and keep it as part of my sites, but I do worry about the continued level of engagement over time. On the other hand, I realize I don’t like the wider fediverse as much as I thought I did after my last month or so looking around on other accounts. (I definitely need to curate better, though). Anyway, I saw this post 14 minutes in and I only got distracted once so… Happy new year to all and I look forward to our next interaction!
This is an important difference that always gets left out in these articles.
Of course people will be anti-China when the CCP is making the movies (edit, I meant “moves” but movies works too haha). It’s one thing to ask for companies to make a version of media specifically for your country, but using your weight to make that the version? That is an insanely big red flag when Tencent has roots in everything and also goes by the whim of the party.
On the flip side, my friend from college moved to China a couple years after we graduated and he’s been doing really, really well. He loves it there. Ironically he ended up getting a job with Tencent and is a pretty big part of their last released Synced. So I’m glad he’s doing well, but it’s also been weird talking about certain topics with him. It was also weird when I was asking about how he was talking with me and he’s like “oh I just have to get on a VPN and etc so I that’s why I’m not around much, but it’s cool lol.” Kinda freaky when I also just see the articles about a company getting fined for using a VPN. I’m sure he’ll be fine but it’s still slightly worrying.
Which ultimately kind of sums up the situation. My friend loved his experience in China so much so that he moved back there seemingly permanently and set himself up with a nice life with the culture seeming to be a big part of that. And then there’s the actions of the government. Many of the same criticisms can absolutely be held toward the U.S. regarding housing and towards a not-so-small portion our political actions, however it seems the difference is that we don’t have a knitted corporate government quite yet. I dunno, the sway of Apple, MS, whoever else just doesn’t have the same weight as the CCP and Tencent. That generally seems to be peoples issue
This seems pretty whack dude. Proton has been heavily contributed to via Valve, if at least only by paying people to work on it. Without Valve proton would be in a much more dire state than it is now. Seriously, just look at its progress just 6 months before the Steam Deck and after its announcement. It’s a night and day difference.
“some games don’t even work” I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. With a library of 1.2k trying to see games that don’t work when they’re “unsupported” I’ve yet to come across any. I’m sure there are but, again, what’s your point? That gaming on Linux still has some games that don’t work?
They don’t officially support piracy. What company does? And does Valve do anything to prevent your cracked Non-Steam game from running? So… Their “lack” of piracy support means nothing because you can still do whatever you want. Ok.
“Didn’t make games easier to buy because you have to create an account”. Alright, have fun redownloading things you’ve purchased with no record. Even indie stores have you make an account dude.
“You will get banned if a key is illegal” lmao, what the fuck is an illegal steam key?? You bought games from a stolen credit card or a region resell and had the key revoked? They don’t ban you. And if you’re talking about being region locked, congratulations, Valve is complying with that government. And if you’re talking about being in the U.S. trying to buy keys from other regions, that is hurting people in the region it’s priced for and you’re a jerk for that.
How about this perspective? You are being tracked regardless. Do you have friends? Do they have your number? You have a tracking ID. Have you ever used the Internet at home not on a VPN and not on a fingerprint-preventing browser (i.e. JavaScript off)? You have a tracking ID.
This tracking ID is surrounded by data it gathers from your interactions with others, regardless of whether you want it to or not. Your lack of presence here is far more telling than actually existing. Unless you literally live off the grid no contact, there’s no getting away from it.
On the bright side, guess what? These tracking IDs are practically solely for advertising metrics. The chances of any of this data being meaningful beyond “vestmoria likes vintage cheeses after” is pretty much nil. I would even go so far as to say by having a presence in this space you are likely to be less targeted by prying eyes that actually matter, as opposed to right now where you are a clearly visible dark spot in a sea of lit beacons.
To put it another way - privacy now is through obfuscation, not lack of existence. Google solved the dumb-phone problem in 2013 and they have had advertising IDs on these from the moment they get used. They have had your data already for a long, long time now. Your advertising ID is better used clicking on every ad you come across using AdNauseam than it is trying to de-google a smartphone or avoid carrier data. Make the data on you inaccurate and worthless.
If you really want to avoid using tracking aspects of a smartphone, your best bet is convincing your people to download signal or matrix and use them exclusively, with notifications turned off on the phone. You’ll want to run a VPN you trust. Others suggested custom ROMs to get away from Google, though I’m personally no fan of MicroG either.
I think it’s worth considering accepting that unless you are very specific in how you use it, there is no real feasible way to not be tracked. Even if you take all precautions, even then, you are still being tracked by other peoples phones. With that in mind, your mental health should be put at ease knowing that rather than trying to avoid it, there are ways of feeding it dirty data to make you look like everyone else.
Using Linux you probably already are aware of quite a bit of this, but I’ve always felt that being off the grid or off the radar of adver-govs is a false hope and while there may be measures against it there’s nothing that actually prevents it in full and it’s so much more effort than allowing it to happen but lying about yourself. So what if they have data on you if it’s irrelevant! On top of that, what does it matter if your calls have data on them (date/length). The content of the calls is a different story of course, I don’t have a solution for that.
Maybe you can fake phone calls by spoofing phone models and locations and having their conversations spoken via AI.
Wow, that’s awesome. I’ve been thinking a lot about the scale of the universe and how cyclical it is.
Take a scaled out view of our solar system and then compare it to a molecules composition (the atom or group of atoms surrounded by protons and neutrons) and the similarities are just uncanny.
Like this image, what’s to say that we aren’t just part of a molecule making up the chemical composition of something far larger than ourselves. An ant has no concept of the vast empty space between the United States and Europe, we know that is the case between solar systems but our actual understanding of our relationship in space is limited.
P.S. look at the patterns of discharge of electricity in wood/paper/stone and then look at the patterns of the Grand Canyon. They’re the same! And the Grand Canyon is the only formation we have that exhibits this quality, which makes it extra interesting.
Because the uploaders are doing it for free and it’s been working the way it currently has been, free for 20 years.
If YT had made it their monetization scheme to charge users for an account - by all means. They did not, they set up the expectation of their product that it is free*.
with ads, which they show on repeat and do nothing but waste the users time. There’s no reason why we can’t use an adblock. If the uploader or YT wants compensation, they have ways of obtaining that, either via donations, patronship, or premium accounts.
There is no reason that YouTube should suddenly be for pay or forced ads to use it. If they wanted that, they should have started out like that. If they wanted to not run at a loss, they should have planned for that. They did not, and it’s not on the users to suddenly make up for that shortsightedness.
Tl;Dr, while you can set up a foundation and decide to change it decades later doesn’t mean anything. The expectation from the users has already been set.
Not really over a 5 year period, especially if you talk about more than a single subscription service. If you mean by preserve as keeping a full 3-2-1 backup, then yeah sure, but most people don’t need that. Double backup the truly important/rare content, everything else can be redownloaded in case of tragedy.
For posterity, 1 year of HBO Max or Disney+ is $150. Over 5 years that’s $750. If you are someone who knows you annually rewatch content, then that’s likely a guaranteed expense. Btw, if you pay month to month unless it’s less than 8 months of the year, monthly is more expensive, so I’m being generous here. No managing monthly subscriptions is also a major benefit.
That price nets you at least six 8TB HDD’s at $109 each, which 48TB is far more storage than most people would ever need so some of that cost can go to a power efficient Optiplex and some to spare for a VPN leaving you with at least 32TB.
As mentioned, each additional streaming service is going to exponentially increase that cost, further justifying your investment, and the peace of mind that whatever service hasn’t removed it.
Technically you use your time to pay for “setting up and maintaining it” but… That’s some BS honestly. Plex/Jellyfin are set up once and forget about them. Us nerds put in time to curate and go the extra mile, but most people can very easily have a simple low power server running. If they can set up the *arrs (not really very hard) then good automation for them, if not manually searching for what you want as you want it is one more step than a subscription. More steps if you need to sign up for the first time ;)
Granted - a streaming service doesn’t charge you $325 for the initial server+storage, however streaming services also don’t give you a lot of things for 2.10 years of streaming so I’d say it’s worth the investment. And it definitely does not cost more to preserve your media if you subscribe to more than 1 service. If you subscribe to only one and cancel monthly and spend your time managing that then maybe. (but if you don’t need 4k and consume that little content, you may still be better off with a Pi-like and a hard drive…)
This reads eerily similar, so basically the same parallel that the U.S. and Australia have been struggling with together for the last 20 years (and assuredly before then).
I more just didn’t want to list more than 3 companies, hence “whoever else”. You’re right that Google and Facebook are closer to the tendrils of Tencent than MS or Apple, or well, Apple at least.