I’m quite crazy:

• Marginalia with the no JavaScript filter, then with that filter turned off
  • Good for finding technical stuff, and sometimes recipes! I often find cool blogs this way.
• SearxNG via farside.link
  • Unfortunately (and understandably) many of these sites use Anubis now, so I have to turn on JavaScript, and thanks to Google’s ratelimits the results are either fantastic or not helpful at all
  • But, the public instances can work, so I try with 3 instances before moving on

Depending on the thing I’m searching for, I have search shortcuts set up. These shortcuts are really handy. It seems much easier to get good results on dedicated search engines for each task, than finding another general purpose search engine that’s as good:

• Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikidata
• Some other wikis
• Lemmy (of course!)
• Peertube and podcast indexes
• Websites of grocery shops near me

Finally, if all else has failed, I use Google (which still unfortunately happens at least a couple of times per day 🙁). Although, reading the posts now, I should switch this stage to DuckDuckGo instead.

I’d quite like to set up my own instance of SearxNG + YaCy at some point. It’d be nice to configure SearxNG to basically do all of these steps at once that I’m doing manually, prioritise my YaCy index, but use other engines to fill in the gaps, and then gradually fill in the gaps in my YaCy index.

I agree with you, and I think there’s a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the “education”, users will converge on particular instances because that’s what’s most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

I don’t know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There’s certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they’re used to?

Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don’t care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

For the first group, we want software that’s easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I’m not sure.

Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.

The export function doesn’t include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:

• Matrix
• Signal
• XMPP
• Zulip
• Stoat
• Rocket.Chat
• Mattermost
• Discourse

Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn’t come across it before and it’s pretty nifty!

Ok, I know this is crazy, but I’ve had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:

No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.

When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn’t breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.

My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as “no thanks”, and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.

Although I don’t believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It’s probably one of the few things I’ve remembered verbatim for so long, and it’s completely useless :D

I would like it if, in all incidents, the self driving car companies were required to release to the public all of the video feeds for 30s before, during and 30s after.

That would prevent situations like with Cruise, where they released the first part of the video, and neglected to talk about running the pedestrian over after hitting them.

Then, we can judge for ourselves whether we think the car behaved correctly or not. In most cases, it should be obvious if there was any more it could have done.

I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won’t mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don’t care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

I worked at a bank at the time. We were moving to a new system and running recons against the old system to check the behaviour was the same. I had to run a manual recon of the old system vs the new 4 times per day. There was a lot of focus from management and users on the new system.

The week leading up to Christmas, I was the one person not on holiday yet, and also the most junior person on the project. I found that week so stressful, as I had to run these recons and quickly decide whether each break was real or not before reporting to the users. Despite having worked on that system, I had very little confidence and didn’t have the same intuitive mental model of the system my colleagues had. I had to dig into each break case-by-case, but they seemed much more able to understand what was going on via a few simple queries.

Anyway, I get through the week and left for the holidays on Thursday evening. I’m just grateful that I’ve gotten through it. Then, around 3pm on the Friday, I see a missed call from the tech lead. I log in, and everything’s on fire. I join the incident call, and it turns out that we hadn’t processed a single trade in the new system that whole week. I discover that it was thanks to a config change I’d made several weeks before, that had just made it to production. No-one (neither the users, nor I) had realised! But we missed several hundred million pounds worth of payments in that week as a result.

It was so jarring, having been relieved that I made it to the holiday, then joining the incident call and struggling to work out what to do. I completely dissociated and my mind was blank. I remember being on the call and really passively and calmly walking around my room. I kept thinking “I need to do x, I need to do y” but my mind couldn’t focus and I was just staring at the screen. At some point I just lay in bed with my laptop while on the call.

There had been a total failure of process: my change had been approved by two people, the nonprod environment was configured differently in a way that didn’t expose the bug, the recon failures looked very similar to the false positives, and there were so many false positives that it was impossible to dig into all of them. Meanwhile, we didn’t have basic queries monitoring that trades were flowing in, and the users weren’t paying much attention either, until they realised that it was broken.

Still, I made a lot of mistakes. I should have just escalated that there were breaks instead of trying to figure it out myself. I shouldn’t have been afraid to call the tech lead and bring them out of their holiday. And I shouldn’t have been afraid of the confrontation with the users.

Anyway, that experience really messed me up mentally for a long time. I lost so much confidence and became so much more scared of production (not in a healthy way). It really was not the right environment for me.

There are a few such foundations!

• NLnet (among other things) donates to a lot of fediverse and similar projects, including multiple donations for lemmy.
• Software in the Public Interest acts as a fiscal host for its 45 member projects. You can make a general donation, or a donation to specific projects.
• The Software Freedom Conservancy, among other things, acts as a fiscal host for its projects. You can donate to individual projects, or make a general donation to conservancy and they will use it in whatever way best advances software freedom.
• Likewise, the FSF has a “Working together for free software fund” which has a few projects listed. I can’t see a way to donate to the fund as a whole, but if you don’t mind some (most?) of the money going to things that aren’t directly developing software, you could make a standard donation to the FSF.

I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.

Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.

As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.

I independently thought of the same idea. While I’m daydreaming, I had some extra features that would be useful to me in a dream world:

• It would be good to be able to apply this to posts (that are not mine) as well, or even to a link (i.e. all comments that would show up under the crosspost aggregation feature)
• One problem I have with GitHub is that the subscription list perpetually grows and is never pruned.
  • It would be nice if I could make such subscriptions, for instance, automatically expire n days after the last interaction
  • Or, if there is a list of subscriptions somewhere, if I could manually “prune all whose last interaction is more than n days”
• I’m not sure what the best UI would be, whether everything should go in notifications, or whether there should be a dedicated view for these subscriptions
  • And, should that view show the whole thread underneath the top-level post you subscribed to?
  • Or just the “new” comments?
  • My feeling is the former, but not sure.

Now, I’m not asking companies to open-source their entire codebase. That’s unrealistic when an app is tied to a larger platform. What I am asking for: publish a basic GitHub repo with the hardware specs and connection protocols. Let the community build their own apps on top of it.

I agree with this. I think the most important thing is not necessarily the original company releasing their proprietary code (although that would be nice), but it being easy (and legal!) for hackers to reverse engineer and/or build on top of the platform.

The irony is that, since most such products will have some GPL’d code in there somewhere, most products already basically have such a requirement, thanks to the section requiring complete corresponding source including installation instructions. Hopefully, the Vizio case will establish the precedent that users, as well as copyright holders, can take action against such companies.

For me, it would be for her to actually respect my boundaries, and to show an active interest in who I actually am instead of what role I can fulfill for her.

By dumbing down the suite, are you talking about things like flatpak / atomic distros?

If so, I am also not a fan of those things - give me Debian stable and the software in the repos and I’m happy - but I also don’t think I will be harmed by others coming in and trying different approaches. From what I can tell, with each paradigm shift, the old approach doesn’t go away, but stays powered by the volunteers who care about it.

I will give my guest a three course meal!

• Starter: Mackerel sandwich
• Main: Half a frozen pizza
• Desert: Lidl’s fake Ben and Jerry fish food ice cream

That’s interesting - I hadn’t heard too much dissatisfaction with IPv6 before, except for the slow adoption, and the not-as-nice looking addresses. Is it an aesthetic preference or just that IPv6 is overkill? Or any other advantages to doing it the “IPv5” way?

I think the only one I’ve seen (or seen and remembered) is 12 Angry Men. It’s one of my favourites.

I like the message, the way it’s presented and the timelessness of it.