In the past 5 years of using Matrix, I have received exactly 2 direct spam messages, and seen maybe 5-10 in public rooms. (There have been none in my private chats, of course.) If you're seeing much more, I guess it must depend on how you use it and what rooms you join.
I don't have any reason to think this is particular to Rust. The MIT license is popular because it's permissive, simple, and well-known. Developers often choose it when they want to maximize a project's reach.
“While AT&T and Verizon only provide notice of surveillance of phone lines paid for by the Senate, T-Mobile has informed my staff that it will provide notice for Senators’ campaign or personal lines flagged as such by the [Senate Sergeant at Arms],” Wyden wrote. “Three other carriers — Google Fi Wireless, U.S. Mobile, and Cape — have policies of notifying all customers about government demands whenever they are allowed to do so. The latter two companies adopted these policies after outreach from my office.”
You might be surprised how many informed geeks will defend mass surveillance until their last breath, if it's built with or adjacent to a technology that they feel connected to in some way.
I think most of them mean well, but unrealistic idealism and naïveté are definitely in play.
If you upload an image, the URL field is populated with the URL of the uploaded image, so there’s not really multiple fields like it appears.
Sure enough; I just discovered this for myself when running some tests. I also noticed that Lemmy offers an Alt Text field, which it looks like the bot is already populating.
Test 1 : The URL field and the image attachment field were used; the latter overwrites whatever is placed in the former. I guess this might be modeled after Reddit.
Test 2: A direct link to the image at xkcdcom was placed in the URL field, and the source link placed at the top of the body. Result: This is similar to the bot's current format, including the flaw that a desktop browser with strict privacy settings won't show the comic image as part of the post when the thumbnail is clicked, because it's an off-site image. Having the source link at the top of the body does at least make it a little more convenient to click through to xkcdcom's single-page view.
Test 3: Only the image attachment field was used; the URL field was left blank. Result: This allows a desktop browser to show the comic image in-line when the thumbnail is clicked even with strict browser privacy settings, if the post is being viewed on the Lemmy instance where the post was made, because then it's not an off-site image. Unfortunately, it's still an off-site image when viewed on other Lemmy instances. The source link was again placed at the top of the body.
(Side note: I used m.xkcdcom links instead of plain xkcdcom links in these tests, just to see how the mobile site looks in different browsers. In practice, either ought to work.)
Conclusion: I don't have one just yet. It would be nice if we could direct all Lemmy instances to make their own local copy of a post's attached image, to avoid the off-site image problem. Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to do this, and I suspect it would be too burdensome for some small instances.
Having the source link at the top of the post body is helpful, at least.
I'm not sure the current comment votes are representative, due to the selection bias that forms as people engage (or don't) with idea comments & their replies, but I acknowledge that it is possible that a proper vote would end up as you expect.
EDIT: Lemmy posts have both an URL field and an image field. What would happen if the change I suggested was made, and the image field was used for the coming image? Hm... Maybe that's worth a test.
If directly linking to the full comic page as the main link is a no-go, how about putting the source link at very top, as the first line in the body? That would at least make it a little easier for desktop users to target the link they need for a single-screen view of the whole comic.
The thing is, with xkcd, the image is not the full comic. Part of the comic is the hover text, which you don't get with the image alone.
The way things are now, I click the title and it takes me to a bare image, so I then have to go back, and then read through the post body to find the link to the whole comic, and then click that. It's a hassle.
(And since you mentioned viewing comments alongside the image, you should be aware that Lemmy's default interface shows only a thumbnail fragment of the image on the same page as the comic. I guess you might be using a mobile app.)
In the past 5 years of using Matrix, I have received exactly 2 direct spam messages, and seen maybe 5-10 in public rooms. (There have been none in my private chats, of course.) If you're seeing much more, I guess it must depend on how you use it and what rooms you join.