A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I'm usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn't always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I'm into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
Delete the All feed! It's just stupid. Subscribe to what you like. Maybe have a short glimpse at the All feed on a biweekly basis for 5min, but that's it.
I feel at this point it doesn't even matter. I've recently renovated parts of my IT infrastructure... And I mean they're not only harming news outlets and Wikipedia... Everyone is under attack. They're scraping my sites, searching for all kinds of stuff until the database process catches on fire. They put weird stuff into every web form, send plenty spam mails... Sign up random people for your newsletter, unsubscribe people from your newsletter... The OpenClaws are able to solve the CAPTCHAS and/or sign up... It's crazy. Law aside, I don't think I have any option but to block them myself. This will also block legitimate crawlers because I have to put in place some drastic measures with some services. But at least I can continue to run my website.
I see other people do the same. And I also run into rate limiting all the time. Back in the day, my Home Assistant could just query trashday, whether the train is on time, which flights are overhead... I could just run yt-dlp to save some YouTube videos. That's all becoming more and more difficult because of all the countermeasures. There's still some chance to force people to sign up and offer some protected API...
But whether someone passes a law or doesn't... I think the internet admins are still going to (have to) kill the bots.
Dunno if that's "on purpose". I think it's more, back in the day .ml was the defacto standard instance, so lots of average people went there and you'd find a wider bandwidth of people. That might have changed with some people leaving and the new visitors not signing up on .ml anymore. That makes the rest of the group condense to people who pick .ml on purpose. But that's not a deliberate plan, more how maths works. 😅
Yeah dunno. Did they follow instance rules? It states inflammatory posts need a Content Warning and I can't tell whether the author is in violation of the instance CoC or following the rules?! Seems there is no such warning on the screenshots. We could probably ask the admin or mod in question. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it wasn't... We don't really know any details besides how Kazim thinks they've being wronged.
And what exactly is is the real number according to Cloudflare? They're hinting at it all the time but never telling the actual number?! Is it 9%, 2%? What kind of article is this? Isn't the one job of journalism to tell us what reality is? But they deliberately(?) omit this one thing?
I wish my friends and family did the pre-screening of messages and their importance to me as well 😆 I get important messages and silly memes all mixed in the same group chats, so it's impossible for me to tell whether I need to pick up my phone.
Background will do. I think even swiping it away is fine, as long as you don't force-close it. Just pay attention there is some Play store or Aurora store doing automatic app updates. I skipped on the updates and once WhatsApp hadn't been updated for several months, they closed the connection.
I run continuwuity and the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. It's not 100% reliable, but close enough for me. Especially after I moved it from the NAS in my basement to a VPS in some datacenter. I occasionally had some issues with my ISP doing maintenance, a power outage at home... I let WhatsApp run on my kitchen tablet 24/7 so it keeps that 14 day timer running. To my knowledge that's unavoidable unless you switch WhatsApp Business or something.
And I like Continuwuity way better than Synapse and the ridiculous amount of resources it uses to forward text messages.
But yeah, silently dropping the connection isn't great at all. I think the only proper solution is to nag people into using a different messenger. Signal is relatively straightforward to use, made for average people and comes with the same functionality as WhatsApp.
Thanks but I guess regular Stable Diffusion is a bit too old for my taste. Seems we have better, more efficient models as of today and they're way easier to prompt, can do text, the right amount of fingers... And all of that requires constant fiddling with the earlier models.
Yeah, my VRAM budged is a bit of an issue. I don't own any GPU 😆 So I'm basically fine with every recommendation. Either it's some "Turbo" model doing just 4 steps, I'll be patient run it on CPU and just wait 20min for my image being edited... Or I'm gonna have to rent a bit of compute on a service like Runpod. I can do both. And cloud compute can do 80GB of VRAM or whatever I put in. It's just that I'd like to know what to try beforehand, because I then get billed by the minute.
Thanks for your kind answer. Maybe I'll ask in the stable-diffusion community in case I don't get any answers. I just figured I'm massively into open source and maybe I'll find some similar-minded people here. And/or people who don't do it all day as a hobby and have a beefy graphics card and super elaborate setups... Because I don't, I just want it as a tool 😅
You're probably right. I don't spend a lot of time on Mastodon. I likely missed drama and defederation. Other than the occasional shitstorms. But I think that's just "a thing" on microblogging platforms. And the German privacy nerds I follow on Mastodon do way less of it anyway.
And regarding language... That seems to be a factor as well. The German speaking community here on Lemmy established a different atmosphere. From my perspective, there's way less yelling at each other amongst the Germans than in the broad English speaking Threadiverse. There's trolls and a lot of memelords, but seems to me some people still remember the "Netiquette". And those ideology- or identity wars aren't as loud. I heard from other people, it's similar (also a noticeably different atmosphere) in the French speaking corner.
Reads a bit like the description of the average nerd? We're nearly all into Star Trek (to some level), write way too long and measured paragraphs. A good chunk isn't really into politics, instead they'll spend their time reading blog posts on how this place is designed... The Threadiverse has in fact stopped growing (by user count)...
I'd say we better stop all the witch hunts. We already have plenty drama here, every other week. Leave them be and focus on something constructive. For example using all the activity tools and statistics to filter out all the slop bots 😅
Thanks for explaining. I'd agree with the reasoning. And it's a mix of several factors, I think. Basically our history. We grew and that means you can get away with more (bad) things in a large group of people than in a smaller, more tightly coupled group. We attracted a wider audience, so now it's not just a few privacy nerds, Linux users and a buch of tankies coexisting, but all ideological factions of society. We also got a few Reddit refugees who got banned over there for good reasons.
But in my opinion it's an entire thing: The political landscape got way more extremist in recent years in general. And we do lots of talking about politics here. So with being a link aggregator and sharing news articles we get all the polarizing stuff and due to psychology, people share negative news articles because that gets you riled up and want to talk. Or fight. We also copied some social media design elements which reinforce some specific kinds of negative behaviour. Subscribing to groups does compartmentalization. And the entire philosophy of the Fediverse adds yet another layer of compartmentalization, which doesn't always work in our favor. I think it also awakens some tribal instincts in some people. Which might not even be bad(?) unless they start to disunite and fight each other. Which some do. I don't think that's an issue on Reddit for example, because that's just one central place, plus they keep a tighter leash on their mods. And Mastodon would be yet different because you can't split up into groups/communities, there's just people to be followed and global hashtags. And once there's any level of normalization of drama and negativity, the internet will add more on top 😅
I wonder how many people realize the importance of independent platforms. Especially with what's going on in politics, big tech, shaping discourse in a top-down way... All not really healthy for society. And we got an uptake in surveillance, manufactured truths, all the age-verification already cost us some internet forums in the UK... I think the Fediverse is more important than ever.
Did we grow, though? You say it like it's accepted truth. But every time I have a look at the numbers (for example on Fediverse Observer), it seems to me like we're doing the opposite. We peaked 3 years ago and we've been shrinking since. It's even worse for platforms like Mastodon. Seems they've lost several hundreds of thousands of users. I'd say we here on Lemmy/PieFed/MBin kinda stabilized(?). I also think there's been a slight uptake in content and discussion. Feels to me we've become more active over the years. But judging by the numbers, I'd say it's because we lost the new users and lurkers. And these days our average userbase shifted to people who (on average) post more. But we didn't grow as in: there's more people around than it used to be.
Delete the All feed! It's just stupid. Subscribe to what you like. Maybe have a short glimpse at the All feed on a biweekly basis for 5min, but that's it.