One of the big problems social and collaboration platforms is people go to where the people are, like Lemmings, with disregard to principles and ethics. I go to the ethical venues regardless of where the people are. Instead of feeding a harmful network effect, I would rather feed free and open spaces. If I were to contribute to MS Github, I would have to consider myself part of the problem.
That bug tracker is in MS Github - a place I will not go. And I have yet to find an organised or simple way to find downstream trackers. I generally check Debian but when a pkg is not in official Debian then I report to [email protected] and [email protected].
Did you report the bugs on the Lemmy github?
No, and I wouldn’t. I created this community specifically for reporting bugs when bug trackers are in bad places like Github:
Most people are indeed probably using Firefox
The cross-posting problem is specific to Tor Browser, which is Firefox based. But that one was fixed in 0.19.5.
I was actually shocked to recently learn many are using their phones, which often means 3rd party apps (and which would not have any of the stock UI bugs).
0.19.5 only fixes one of the 4 bugs (cross-posting). None of them seem to be mentioned in the change notes.
141 servers are already running 0.19.5
Ungoogled Chromium and Tor Browser are perhaps less popular than they should be.
Yes, that’s a good tip and I use it. But that doesn’t replace the search tool on the stock Lemmy app of the instance. Usually lemmyverse is just a precursor to a localized search.
When you cross-post, there is a pull-down search dialog that has a quite limited number of slots and they’re often filled up with centralised instances. Then it becomes a pain to cross-post. The only other option is to use the full screen search page to go straight to the target community, then paste everything over.
Lately lemmyverse craps out a lot, likely due to popular demand.
FCC blocks Tor so I can’t see the page, but I just wanted to mention a hack if number porting is refused for some reason (based on @[email protected]’s hint that it could be): downgrade the vz contract to the full extent possible (ideally make it a prepaid acct if that’s possible, so you can nix the monthly fee). Then dial whatever magic code forwards your vz number to your new number.
So not what their running debt is but only whether they can take on a new, specific one.
I knew the criteria was out of the hands of EU-based lenders, but didn’t realise the data is also out of reach to the lender. I suppose it makes sense that the lender would get no info other than a yes or no, if lenders have no discretion.
I noticed A shop had a rediculously priced phone (like €800+, something I would never buy) but advertised something like €9 if you take a contract. So it’s effectively a loan factored into a locked-in phone service plan. IIUC, the phone shop must arrange that with a bank and does not have the option of taking on risk, and then the bank asks the central bank if customer X can handle that loan, correct?
You can reverse payments through the bank in the EU as well but it’s seldom necessary, since the companies tend to revert the charge willingly when confronted by the consumer protection bureaus.
I’ve only had to resort to bank reverse a couple if times.
One was when I ordered a pair of shoes of what appeared to be an Italian website. It later turned out it was a scam site that listed popular models that were not made anymore and then sent you a ridiculously poorly made knock-off copy from China. I explained the issue to my bank and showed the knockoffs I got and a week or so later the charge was reversed.
That’s quite a surprise. I heard SWIFT/IBAN transfers were permanent and irreversable. I heard of mistakes being corrected but it required the two banks to collude and the bank of the recipient to do a money grab on their account, which I suppose would be impossible if a criminal closes their account. I wonder if your bank took a loss or if they colluded with the other bank. IIRC, banks have a minimum “investigation” fee of like €25 plus an hourly rate to pay bankers to deal with bad transactions. Did your bank offer that service for free?
The only similar things I know is the central bank keeping a listing of “unpaid credit” which make ban you from getting any new credit for a certain time.
Indeed that’s what I’m talking about. In Belgium it seems consumers have no control over whether a creditor can access the central bank’s records. Apparently the central bank simply trusts that creditors are checking records in response to an application for credit. I would like to know if any EU countries make use of an access code so consumers can control which creditors can see their records.
I don’t mean to imply anything about scoring, but certainly there must be some kind of mechanism to expose bad debtors to lenders.
In Belgium, there are no private credit bureaus but there is a central bank. Belgian banks are obligated to report loan defaults and cash transactions to the central bank, and creditors are obligated to check the central bank’s records. Consumers have no way to control creditors access to their records in the central bank. It seems to be trust based. The central bank apparently trusts that a creditor is checking a consumer’s file in connection with an application for credit by the consumer.
I wasn’t aware of the “Privacy Shield”, but the article mentions that:
“In the Schrems II judgement, the CJEU raised several points regarding the U.S. intelligence agencies’ access to EU data. The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework tackles them and includes significant improvements compared to the mechanism having existed under the Privacy Shield.”
Found this and this to help me catch up on this.
(edit) in this doc I counted 81 “should”s and 33 “shall”s, to get an idea of the strength.
Wish I could see it. www.onem.be seems to be dropping my packets.
“One more step…”
Nothing like a privacy abusing Cloudflare site to expose privacy abuse. If anyone has openly accessible Cloudflare-free links, or can post the info for the excluded people, plz post.
I can see that you’re upset about cloudfare being forced on anyone using the large instances.
This implies some kind of emotional drive and disregards the nuts and bolts of the actual problem. The breakage that manifests makes the fedi less usable and more exclusive, which the design rightfully tries to avoid but falls short. CF being pushed on ppl using large instances is not at all the issue. That’s self-inflicted harm. Cloudflare and big instances both independently pose a centralization problem which can easily be condemned together. Neither form of centralisation benefits the fedi. The fact that CF-centralised nodes and disproportionately large nodes tend to be the same nodes is the universe organising the garbage together – like when Bayar and Monsanto merged. Easier to deal with the baddies when they are consolidated.
The lemmy.ml instance is less trivial because it’s disproportionately large, but they shrunk a bit and ditched Cloudflare. They bring a lot of political baggage, but they are also said to be less tyrannical than they were in the past. So what how to treat lemmy.ml is questionable and messy.
You’re right that the large instances are not democratically governed,
Yes but to be clear, governance is your focus not mine. I’m saying centralized instances are detrimental no matter how they are governed. If they are well-governed then you might say they are more likely to be decentralized, but then of course users could decide to unblock them if they achieve that.
But more importantly, most people just aren’t going to do that.
This is more of the “people don’t boycott” logic. First of all, the perception that people do not boycott does not justify stripping people of their power to boycott. The feature I propose gives people boycott power. And not only that, it gives them a way to function – a way to get the exclusive junk and broken images off their screen.
I was on Twitter long before elon took it, and before phone numbers were required. When Twitter started demanding a mobile phone number from me, I walked. Boycotted. Not long after that I got news that Twitter was caught selling users’ personal data which was inconsistent with the privacy policy. Then shortly after that announcement, it was announced that cybercriminals breached Twitter and stole people’s personal info anyway. My boycott was not emotion driven. It was me making a calculated decision not to trust Twitter with my profitable data, and me deciding not to help Twitter profit from their policy of exclusion (people denied access who do not have mobile phones). And it was the right move. It paid off in the form of not being a victim. I’m grateful that I had boycott power. If boycott power is available but underutilized, the idiots who don’t use it can blame themselves.
The solution should be addressed at a system and process level, not by relying on people making personal choices.
This is a bit false dichotomy-ish. People should be empowered with agency to control their own interactions. That empowerment does not obviate system-wide improvements. It complements them.
But again, what I’m driving at is let’s get big, but do so democratically.
It’s defeatist. To grow disproportionately is to be centralised. Good governance is useless if it fails to prevent centralization. Maybe good governance can lead to a detrimentally centralised instance splitting into many decentralised instances, at which point those nodes are participating in the free world.
If some giant node organises a democratic process, it’s not for me or anyone to stop them. The feature I propose does not interfere with that in the slightest.
Everyone might decide to save money and use Cloudflare anyway. It’s shocking how many people see no problem with Cloudflare. And it’s mind-boggling how selfish people can be in large numbers. Xenophobic Trump supporters shows at what great scale it can happen on. Another example: a majority of the population has a mobile phone subscription, and a majority is also not ethically opposed to tax-funded public services that exclude non-mobile subscribers (e.g. like a public library requiring SMS confirmation to use wifi). They will vote for what benefits them personally at the detriment of the minority. So if a democratically controlled service opts for Cloudflare anyway, it’s the same problem. People marginalised by Cloudflare still need tools to tailor their view to show venues where they are included.
It’s great to have our little corner of the world that’s sun and roses, but as long as there are giants roaming around we’re at their whim and will eventually get stepped on.
You are literally advocating for the status quo that causes the giants to step on the rest. My searches are clobbered to a dysfunctional extent because these shitty exclusive nodes fill the top results (that’s another bug I already exposed in this community).
Sure, we can boycott mcdonalds, but we’re essentially begging them to make a change.
Not at all. Begging them to change is the position you take when you neglect to boycott – begging is the shitty option you have. I’m not begging. I walk. McDs can fuck right off. They get zero begging from me. To keep feeding McDs is to be in that disempowered defeatist position of weakness. In the case at hand, enough people made the right decision to put McDs in the begging position; begging for customers to return.
wintermute announced this instance when it came into existence ~2 or so years ago. So they might be interested and might have some information about it.
Notice the cross-post. Funny how that works… I did not cross-post this, but because I linked the URL to community.xmpp.net the cross-post link was autogenerated.
What would be an acceptable outcome for you?
You seem to be asking for a book here. The requested feature is just one facet of a multifaceted problem – to diminish the centralisation problem. One specific benefit we get from this one feature is the ability to get rid of the exclusive content that pollutes the timeline. Part of living in the free world is getting the non-free world out of the way. I need a view of the free world showing only venues where I am not excluded.
Instances close because people stop running them, not because other larger instances exist.
These two reasons are intertwined in a causal relationship.
Ultimately people vote with their feet, so if you want to see more smaller instances they need to become more appealing than large ones.
That’s not the only way. The small instances are buried in litter. Clearing the litter out of the way is a much simpler and much more effective way to see the smaller instances.
Also not sure what you mean by seven instances under one corporation? Are you talking about cloudflare or are you saying they’re all run by the same entity?
All seven instances are Cloudflare-centralised. They all give CF a view of all traffic (public and private) and they all arbitrarily discriminate against the same demographics of people. If you are denied access to one of them, you are denied access to all of them. Exceptionally, programming .dev has whitelisted Tor. But that’s just one demographic; that instance still blocks all the other demographics excluded by Cloudflare’s blockade. So users are all being controlled by the same entity.
I don’t like Amazon. Why do people use it? Because it’s convenient, it has the stuff they’re looking for, and it has that stuff at low prices. If we want people to use an alternative, we won’t do it by trying to guilt them to use a more expensive and inconvenient option.
You seem to be claiming boycotts do not work, IIUC. When it became widely known that McDonalds was giving free meals to Israeli soldiers, high numbers of people gave up the convenience and pricing that attracted them to McDs. McDs is a franchise, so different shops have different owners. McDs was forced to directly buy all the shops owned by the Israli who was giving away free meals, just to cancel that policy, just to protect the McDs brand.
Of course there are always unethical consumers. Some consumers continued eating McDs non-stop. Ethical consumers have integrity, a spine/constitution, and they practice it. They should be equipped to empower their ethical choices.
Lidl was caught relabeling their Israel-sourced produce with the name of a different country in order to deceive consumers who boycott Israel. The feature I’m requesting would be hypothetically comparable to a single button robot… a “hide Israeli produce” button. If I press it, the Israel sourced food is robotically covered to make it easier for me to find the products I’m interested in. Or along the same lines, a vegan shopper with a “hide all animal-based products” button. Ethical consumers exist and they need to be empowered with good tools.
To change the status quo Amazon can get hit with antitrust law and prosocial regulation
I could write a book on all the reasons to boycott Amazon. Amazon exploits legal loopholes. They are organise their business to get away with murder (legally, or without detection). If you wait for regulators to find some cause to slap them on the wrist, it’d be a pitiful demonstration of non-activism. The very first best move to make is to stop being a part of the problem yourself by not feeding Amazon. From there, there are countless other activist actions you can take without just waiting for them to somehow shoot themselves in the foot.
Be the change you want to see.
The per user cost goes down the more users there are, and the network effect means more users will go towards bigger instances. So fine, let an instance get big, but let it be democratically controlled and funded.
The best thing you can do is walk away from the instance, not feed it or participate in any way. AFAIK, none of the seven have this democratic structure. But if they did, it’s still a harmful force because you still have a centralised policy that affects a disproportionate number of people and which also keeps smaller instances small.
Self-hosting is a different scenario than the way most users reach the fedi. Self-hosters certainly have fewer reasons to have multiple accounts. But obviously the one unescapable reason is privacy. If all activity is under the same account, doxxing risk is pegged.
Another reason a self hoster would want multiple accts is followship. Someone might want to follow you because they love your French posts about oil painting, for example, but since you do everything with the same account they also have to see posts in English about politics, religion, phones, movies, etc, they may not want all the other noise. Compartmentalisation improves followship.
Mastodon is not niche. Mastodon is a diverse community of nerds and low tech people, artistic brains and analytical brains, white collar workers and blue collar workers. A substantial portion of Mastodon is from Reddit refugees. Reddit is no more niche than Facebook.
The greater Mastodon venue who that poll reached lacks right wing conservatives, who tend to stay in their bubble of extremist networks. That does not make Mastodon “niche”. Running the same survey on a right wing Mastodon node might be interesting, but we can see from the linked poll that political affiliation is generally orthoganol on this issue.
I don’t see an issue with large instances. I value having a bunch of different options, and we do have a bunch of different options.
Having 7 disproportionately giant instances all centralised under the same oppressive corporation is not “a bunch of different options”. More than half the threadiverse is controlled by a single corporate power-abusing gatekeeper. The greed of the people farming ensures you have fewer options because it makes ghost towns out of instances that could have been great. Many good themed instances never got traction and pulled the plug. For example:
These are great options that we lost because of foolish over-crowding on general purpose giants. If you put a McDonalds on every single street corner, that’s a lot of real estate that cannot be used by more creative restaraunts. Imagine if McDonalds was general, and had a huge menu (Chinese food, Mexican, Italian, French, Indian, etc). And there are no Indian or French restaurants in town but the McDs on every street corner has Indian and French cuisine. Are you happy with your options?
Do you think the amazon.com store gives you lots of options? I boycott Amazon because the way I see it Amazon destroys options by driving businesses out of business and thwarting the emergence of competitors. Some items are not even carried in local shops anymore. The shop staff will say “we don’t carry that anymore, check Amazon”. I can no longer find somewhat obscure goods locally.
General purpose nodes is not great from an organizational standpoint. We have ~15+ “privacy” communities because every general purpose node created one. Are there 15 significantly different rule sets that makes it sensible to have that much division?
Running an instance yourself requires a fair amount of work
Your choices are:
① self host
② use a decentralised host in the free world
③ use a centralised host in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden
Nixing ① does not imply ③.
If anything, on the subject of control, I like the model of social.coop over on mastodon where users can vote on direction and volunteer.
That is meaningless with Cloudflare nodes, because no one can vote to make Cloudflare inclusive. Suppose 100% of voters say CGNAT users should get access. There is no way to force Cloudflare to change their policy.
There is a new law that allows merchants to stop giving paper receipts.
The forced use of e-receipts in Europe (France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, England, & Italy)