@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

SnotFlickerman

@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman

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SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’m not Scott Aukerman, I’m just one of his many names…

TrickShotterman, AfterShockerman, ShockJockerman, YachtRockerman, Blog Gawkerman, Stop Clockerman, Flip Flopperman, Crop Circleman, Flash Backerman, Bob Johnson… Oh wait.

I like to think of Snot Flickerman as one of those newscasters played by Tom Kenny.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Nerds have always been easy to please.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

One of my favorite Crow quotes, from my favorite Crow.

Privacy Concerns on Lemmy: A Call for More User Control (github.com)

I’ve been grappling with a concern that I believe many of us share: the lack of privacy controls on Lemmy. As it stands, our profiles are public, and all our posts and comments are visible to anyone who cares to look. I don’t even care about privacy all that much, but this level of transparency feels to me akin to sharing my...

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If you’re not running your own server privacy policies are not even worth the pixels they’re presented on.

Literally, you’re just taking a random person’s word for it (whoever the admin is). A website is a black box, you have no idea what’s going on on the back-end.

The only way to be in complete control of your user data is to run your own server and be literally the only user on it.

Even then, any public comments you make are, you know… public.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If all the people complaining would just contribute to the codebase this wouldn’t even be an issue.

Often, you even see the devs coming into threads like this and making suggestions, like “make a pull request.” They want more people contributing.

It’s tons of people whining, very few people contributing. Guess what? While at a certain point, adding developers stops increasing productivity, there’s a small window where adding developers does increase productivity.

If I am correct, Lemmy only has four main developers. That’s well within the range to add more developers and increase the productivity, making new features and security come faster.

So I get it, but things take time, and are complicated, which you thankfully can see.

People whinging about it in threads does nothing to change it. Donating to Lemmy’s development costs or contributing code does.

So much of it sounds like it sounds like its from less-technically-inclined people (some of its valid critique from experts, but they generally… write bug reports and do pull requests…) who just want it to be better but the only way they know how is to “bring awareness.” Well, all that “awareness-bringing” just amounts to spreading FUD.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

And I believe privacy defeatism is unhealthy.

Is there such a thing as “perfect privacy?”

Because it seems that, to exist in society, is to give up some form of privacy by dint of existing in it.

You cannot stop yourself from being observed by other people, if they can see you. That’s just basic reality.

To be completely private, you would have to live in the woods and not interact with anyone or speak with anyone.

Is it defeatist to be realistic about the limitations of the idea of privacy?

As someone who has spent a lot of time seeking internet privacy, I’ve learned that more often than not I’m making myself more conspicuous. That doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on privacy, but it does mean that I’m going to consider its limitations.

EDIT: I’m reminded of an interview with Mark Hossler from Negativland. The interview is long gone from the internet (it was on an obscure website pre-youtube) but the center of it always stuck with me.

“If you really want full control of your art, don’t show it to anybody, keep it in your home.” His argument was Richard Dawkins’ argument for memes. The human mind functions by copying and mimicking. When someone else has viewed your artwork, they’ve already created an internal image of it in their memory. That memory is inconsistent with reality, but if they have a good memory, they can recreate it relatively easily (if they have similar artistic skills). You can’t really stop that kind of copying from happening, so the only way to fight it and keep “complete control” is to not share it at all.

Similarly, the only way to have complete control over your privacy is by not interacting with anyone at all.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I think that’s worth considering: an open-source volunteer project requires and leaks way more data than a private corporation it’s mimicking.

It couldn’t be that one has had loads of VC funding for *checks notes… 15 years. Whereas one has been barely funded for five years and has more people complaining than adding code.

Actually, it makes perfect sense that an open source project that doesn’t have a big organization behind it isn’t going to have the same capability anywhere near as quickly. Reddit also makes money from advertising. The money for Lemmy is from donations and an abysmally small set of grants.

Hell, Matrix, an actual open source communications protocol is 9 years old and they still haven’t gotten encrypted video group chats working properly and if I recall correctly still offload a lot of that to JitsiMeet. I was using Matrix/Riot.IM (now Element) in 2016 and it was garbage that barely worked, and updates constantly broke what previously worked, etc. It took time to become better and Matrix does have a whole ass organization backing it.

For comparison, Lemmy has been around for about five years and they’ve had far less financial backing and developers contributing to the project. Matrix has governments like France and Germany lining up for services for private communications, which means they’ve literally got people paying them for the service of helping manage their Matrix servers. Lemmy doesn’t have the same advantages. They don’t have a service or ads to sell (no ads is part of the appeal.).

For what its worth, Veilid exists, if you’re looking for a better framework to start with than ActivityPub.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

These people should be looking into spinning up Matrix servers if they want a private club with real privacy so bad.

It’s definitely a weird thing to constantly be upset about: “People can see what I posted in public when I post them publicly!”

It’s like complaining about people being able to take photos with you in the background in public. It’s a public space, there is no expectation of privacy.

If you want a private internet experience, you have to put some work in.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

True! All your data will pass over other hardware owned by other people.

The only real online privacy is not connecting to the internet to begin with.

The whole system is based on trust.

Which is why I think some of these privacy demands are straight silly.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t disagree on those points, but I think it’s the nature of Lemmy being decentralized that makes all those things necessary.

server should discard voting info after a brief interval for abuse detection

What if the server has not federated out the votes yet? Some of that stuff can get backed up in a queue. There’s definitely a possibility that votes could get “lost” on the way. Hell, that already happens, and that’s with a system that tracks them.

Servers have to keep a lot of this info to pass to other servers. If I upvote something on Lemmy.blahaj.zone, it doesn’t mean that upvote has been federated outward to hundreds of other servers yet. I would assume this is part of how Lemmy is able to keep things “organized” between all servers.

In other words, a lot of the privacy complaints come from technical limitations of how Lemmy works. Lemmy, by it’s decentralized nature, has to transfer tons of data back and forth between all Lemmy instances.

However, there are technologies that are trying to work around this kind of technical limitation. You might be interested in something like Veilid. I’m not sure about the details of putting together a Veilid-based social-network, but I’m willing to believe it’s possible.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

No! How dare you suggest something so absurd!

I don’t care how little money they have and how few developers they have, they need to bring a feature-set that is on par with corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal and thousands of developers! Fuck that, they need to even do better than those companies on the privacy issue!

Big fat /S

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Welcome to the Corporate Internet.

Get ready to play by Their Rules on Their Services.

Good thing a lot of them are useless fucking Dinosaurs like CNN that need to die anyway.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000

I’m not really sure I buy this meaning they’re really affluent corporate types. I’ve met a lot of Trump supporters who own big properties out in the country, who own big trucks, and who work jobs in trades. Stuff like plumbers and carpenters and mechanics. I mean hell, in my state, the average pay for plumbers is $80,000 a year, and yep, a lot of those people are self-employed. Last I checked the trades is where all the folks who struggled in school go…

So, does this really mean they aren’t who we think they are? All the people I’m referring to were dumb as fuck country fucking bumpkins who needed a swift kick in the ass. All they’ve really gotten “invested” is a house on a big valuable piece of land, a little bit of stock on the market (maybe), and a bunch of physical items that add up to them being “wealthy” even though two of the trucks don’t work, the tractor is falling apart, and so is the barn, and so on. On paper, they’re wealthy, in person, they’re still missing some fucking teeth.

Oh yeah, and the obsession with guns… Guns ain’t cheap… These people piss away a lot of money on useless stuff.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

They don’t call it “the banality of evil” for nothing, I suppose.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

You can’t do this ridiculous shit to me this early in the morning.

Take your upvote and get out!

that's how it works, right? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

Description: A three panel comic often referred to as “No take, only throw.” The first panel is a dog biting a toy with the caption “I want to be good at my hobbies.” The second panel is the dog looking angry and refusing to let go of the toy when a hand reaches out to throw it for the dog again, and it has the caption...

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’ve seen it described as humans need some general ideas to feel like life has a point.

I’ve seen it broken down as autonomy (the feeling of driving your own destiny), mastery (the feeling of mastering a subject), and purpose (the feeling that what you’re doing “means something”).

Hobbies often fill the niche of “mastery” despite not improving our lives appreciably outwardly.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Fuck I loved that game like you loved my mom.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Sorta like my mom?

https://i.imgur.com/WrbzRwF.gif

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

As a fisherman, I’ve been told I’m a Master Baiter.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Always has been

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

That is very easy to say when you are not a dissident living in one of these countries.

Literally why I used the US as an example.

EDIT: Also, you’re literally reducing their access to non-Propaganda media sources.

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Once is an accident, twice is a pattern, three times is just straight negligence from management!

SnotFlickerman,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

He is so old he certainly looks like a Guild Navigator.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Peter Sunde, the coolest of the three Pirate Bay admins.

The other guys (Gottfrid and Fredrik) had more technical chops, but Sunde brought a lot of thoughtful politics to the table, had better social skills, and was the only one to actually willingly surrender to his prison sentence while the other admins skipped the country to avoid prison, only to be arrested and deported later anyway.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Do what you want cuz a Pirate is Free!

You are a Pirate!

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