Interesting news, to be sure. It’s a shame that the article’s “What People Are Saying” section is really “what high-placed Russian officials are saying”.

Thank you, OP, for sharing an archive link.

I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.

People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).

Sometimes it’s been butch cis women being accused of “being a man”.

Hate and bigotry really break people’s minds, it’s sad to see.

I like the idea, but then who gets to decide who is and isn’t a credible source? Is it only intra-account verifying? Can anyone verify anyone else, or do you need to be authorized by bluesky to start verifying others?

100% agree on this recommendation. Her Young Wizards / “So you want to be a wizard?” makes almost the exact opposite choices as the Harry Potter series does (magic is a choice not inherited at birth, Wizards feel responsible towards the rest of the world instead of wanting to ignore it completely, they learn on their own with their magic tome and some informal tutors instead of going to a school).

Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data “firehose”).

According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (that’s what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs it’s still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.

Maybe my view of “decentralization as in democracy” is just fundamentally different from the author’s. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I don’t think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - it’s a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, I’m not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so there’s definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.

Some digging on the source: https://www.truthorfiction.com/daughter-of-mlk-and-coretta-scott-king-posted-this-advice-as-the-next-six-months-are-going-to-get-real/

Regardless of who the original author is, the advice seems good.

Quelle honte, dans le pays des Lumières, de vouloir proposer ce qui de fait serait une société de caste(s).

From what I understand, you could un ironically do this with a file system using BTRFS. You’d maybe need a udev rule to automate tracking when the “Power Ctrl+Z” gets plugged in.

If it’s a single, generated, “initial” commit that I actually want to keep (say, for ex I used the forge to generate a license file) then I would often rebase on top of it. Quick and doesn’t get rid of anything.

The whiplash from the two titles in your second pic really hit me hard

To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.

funny, this seems similar to how Gordon Ramsey demonstrates “perfect scrambled eggs” in a youtube video I once saw. He basically just pulls the eggs off of the fire every 15 seconds or so.

A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).

I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.

From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.

Slight question/nitpick over the prequels’ CGI; is the opening space battle [over Coruscant] of Revenge of the Sith somehow not up to par with its contemporaries? That sequence still holds up in terms of visual spectacle that takes advantage of its medium (3d rendering in this case vs practical effects) to do specific shots and set pieces.

Or am I just ignorant of how much the original trilogy pushed things?

Le terme anglais est shifting baseline (syndrome), que Wikipedia traduit apparemment par amnésie écologique.

Je soupçonne aussi que cette brigade était autant un coup de comm’ française qu’un réel effort d’aide et de collaboration, vu tous ces commentaires de militaires ukrainiens qui déplorent le manque d’équipements etc dans des unités/brigades existantes.

Encore un coup de l’opportunisme (et de l’irresponsabilité) de Macron pour moi…

Bon, si la France n’est pas capable de fournir davantage de matériel français/spécialisé, ça me paraît assez censé de vouloir regrouper ceux qu’on forme dessus en une unité de combat. Pour autant, ça n’a pas l’air d’être le mouv’ à faire vis-à-vis de l’état actuel des forces armées de l’Ukraine ???

I suspect the foreign sanctions will indirectly prevent a healthy video games ecosystem from forming in Russia, on top of everything you’ve already cited. With these sanctions, there is even less incentive than before for Russia to crack down on (software) piracy (of foreign games). So their game devs are competing with essentially free and high quality games made by everything from indie devs to huge studios.