I’m sorry this happened, but it seems rather reckless of the author to be running “Malicious PoCs” on their “daily driver” (re: the PC they use for everything).

If I was in the habit of running “Malicious PoCs”, you can be certain it would be isolated from the rest of my system. This could be in a sandbox or a vm. Heck, just created a dedicated (one time use) “new user” would have been better than "Hey, let me just download and run some random shell script. Oh, it needs root? No problem!

Homer: "… I’m in flavor country. "

https://youtu.be/H8s93B67mpQ

Yeah, bring back Usenet! (rabble, rabble, rabble) /s

Not the Fediverse Chick?

…that last step will be a doozy.

I don’t know if you tried it or not, but I’d suggest that you install the latest release from their Download Page, as opposed to other sources.

I’ve noticed on Android, that the F-Droid Version is not “quickly” updated and frequently breaks due to breaking changes from Google.

(I’ve also just upgraded to v4.0 on my android phone and it’s working - good luck!)

Spotube: It’s not the greatest UX, but will read your Spotify Playlists and supports offline mode.

How about have the bot detect community crossposts and try to funnel the conversations into one post.

I fear, this “to be created” “sync feature” is going to create a lot of noise.

edit: a word

If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.

It’s great that you brought up TCP vs UDP. And you are totally right about TCP being a bit slower, higher overhead, but it’s there for situations where UDP is blocked.

I’ve used my VPN at all sorts of hotels, coffeeshops, etc. I’d say 1 in 10 places block UDP (or more likely don’t properly route UDP). If you’re using a SIM card, you won’t have any issues.

However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only. There are some hacks/workarounds to have it work over TCP, but then you’re going to need to find WireGuard clients that also supports these hacks (which is possible on computers, but harder on cellphones/tablets).

If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)

You will likely want to set up your own instance blocks

As a former Redditor, I gave up on /r/all years before the enshittification (due to the poor signal to noise ratio) and started culling a list of meaningful subreddits. For me this was a game changer.

If you plan on using lemm.ee (or any Lemmy instance) as a pre-curated r/all, I think you’re going to have a bad experience. Lemmy, in it’s current state, wasn’t really made for that (the sorting is too simplistic).

For myself, I simply subscribe to the communities that I’m interested in. If I feel my daily feed is sparse, then I’ll look at what’s threads are trending in the entire fediverse and add those communities, then repeat. After following this process for a couple of weeks, I seldomly want/need to check the entire fediverse.

I appreciate that Lemm.ee will let me choose the communities that I’m interested in, regardless of they happen to exist on Lemmy.world, hexbear, etc.

I’d definitely add a +1 to lemm.ee

The admin is open and honest, he’s got a clear set of goals, which is to make lemmy accessible - nothing more, nothing less.

Lemm.ee doesn’t participate in the whole “federate vs non-federate” drama or crippling features (ie: removing downvotes) because it goes against their ethos/mantra.

There are instances that lemm.ee defederates from, but they are usually due to extreme vore, cp, or other content that could expose lemm.ee to some legal problems.

I had an on site interview with the owner of a small IT company. He was 30 minutes late (and I’d arrived 10 minutes early to be… ya know, punctual).

He offered no apologies and had this whole arrogance surrounding him. Complained that he had to drive to the office for this. Then after 5 minutes, it was obvious he didn’t even bother to look over my CV and was completely unprepared for the interview. … and somehow this was my fault.

Of course, the interview didn’t go well (for either of us). He offered a lowball 30% less than the average salary, I was looking for 30% above. I rolled my eyes, shook hands and left.

Later, I got a call back from the recruiter “I had no idea you were asking that much. From what X (the owner) said, this was a complete disaster.” I said, “I agree” and politely hung up.

In hindsight, I should have probably insisted on rescheduling (or just left) after 20 minutes. But, I was young and didn’t have many interviews under my belt. So, I took it as a learning experience.

I quickly skimmed the title and got:

“What is the first… mind… reading… question?”

answer: “Do these pants make me look fat?”

I’d proposed a potential solution.

I’ll paraphrase : Currently, every Lemmy instance (ie: Lemm.ee, Lemmy.world, etc) is an island. This is one of the strengths of Lemmy (Federation) as we don’t have to worry about information being restricted, censored, manipulated (ie: Reddit).

However, as things are currently, this Federation comes at the expense of splitting the community between instances. asklemmy@lemmy.ml vs asklemmy@lemmy.world is a perfect example. Posts are either duplicated (which creates noise) or it fosters a “Lemmy instance death by starvation”. Meaning, more and more conversations will eventually drift towards one of the two asklemmy communities, leaving the other one to “starve out”. This defeats the entire purpose of federating.

There has to be something better.

For example, instead of “every instance is an island”. Meaning the current hierarchy is “instance” - > “community” - > “post” - > “threads”. We could instead have “community (ie: asklemmy)” - > “post (ie: this post)” - > “instance (Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, etc)” - > “threads (this comment)”.

From a technical perspective, it would mean that each instance (that’s interested in hosting this supercommunity) would replicate the community names and posts (Not the threads).

Lemmy already kind of does this, when a user pulls a post from another instance. For example, I’m on lemm.ee but when I view posts from asklemmy@lemmy.world, lemm.ee will retrieve and cache it on lemm.ee. As long as each instance would share a unique identifier to associate the two communities/posts as “the same thing” (and this could simply be the hash of the community /post name). Everything else would be UI.

Each instance would take ownership of the copy of the community and post, which means they could moderate it according to their standards.

As an end user, you’d view a community and post, but the comments/threads would be grouped by the instance that hosts it. If there’s an instance you don’t like, you simply unsubscribe from it.

For future iterations, it might be nice if the instance itself would auto-subscribe or suggest other instances that host the same community to the user. Meaning, if I subscribed to asklemmy@lemmy.ml, I’d automatically be subscribed to asklemmy@lemmy.world. However, as the user, these are all separate subscriptions, so I can customize it as I see fit.

Welp, I guess this means something bad is gonna happen and Spez is trying to get in front of the inevitable protests.

I wonder what it could be…

Off-topic: Lemmy really needs better crosspost functionality.

Lemmy is a small group of people, let’s not divide it further by having the exact same conversation in two (or more) places.

I don’t have anything meaningful to add, other than my sincere gratitude to you for posting this.

I haven’t laughed so hard in a good while.

Sure, they could block based on your VPN provider, but they’re probably also using Deep Packet Inspection .

The ELI5 verson: It’s possible to just “watch” your traffic and notice that it’s not the “normal” https traffic (which is the most common traffic) . This can be done by finger printing the request itself or just watching the amount of traffic. For example if you “visit” a website, but upload and download 3 megabytes of data and it takes 15 minutes to send/receive that data… well, that looks suspicious… and depending on the country, you may have some people knocking on your door.

All aboard the gold train!

Since you asked:

1. The bot provides little “value” vs the noise it creates.

I don’t need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it’s a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this “threshold for scamminess” would be very subjective.

2. This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point (“value” vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I’d read.

Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I’ve done and I’m much happier with my Lemmy experience.