Lvxferre [he/him]

I hope so, too. Their current situation isn’t currently the best (a lot of them went away in the late 10s, simply because people were using them less); I’m kind of hoping to see a revival, but that’s at the mercy of the STF, so I can’t completely rule out that the situation will evolve exactly like in the UK. It’s “let’s wait and see”, you know?

I’m also wondering the impact of that on chatrooms, that used to be extremely popular here.

When something similar happened in the UK, it was pretty much exclusively smaller/niche forums, run by volunteers and donations, that went offline.

[Warning, IANAL] I am really not sure if the experience is transposable for two reasons:

1. UK follows Saxon tribal law, while Brazil follows Roman civil law. I am not sure but I believe the former requires both sides to dig up precedents, and that puts a heavier burden on the smaller side of a legal litigation. While in the later, if you show “ackshyually in that older case the defendant was deemed guilty”, all the judge will say is “so? What is written is what matters; if the defendant violated the law or not.”.
2. The Americas in general are notorious for sloppy law enforcement. Specially Brazil. Doubly so when both parties are random nobodies.

So there’s still a huge room for smaller forums to survive, or even thrive. It all depends on how the STF enforces it. For example it might take into account that a team of volunteers has less liability because their ability to remove random junk from the internet is lower than some megacorpo from the middle of nowhere.

Additionally, it might be possible the legislative screeches at the judiciary, and releases some additional law that does practically the same as that article 19, except it doesn’t leave room for the judiciary to claim it’s unconstitutional. Because, like, as I said the judiciary is a bit too powerful, but the other powers still can fight back, specially the legislative.

For context:

There’s an older law called Marco Civil da Internet (roughly “internet civil framework”), from 2014. The Article 19 of that law boils down to “if a third party posts content that violates the law in an internet service, the service provider isn’t legally responsible, unless there’s a specific judicial order telling it to remove it.”

So. The new law gets rid of that article, claiming it’s unconstitutional. In effect, this means service providers (mostly social media) need to proactively remove illegal content, even without judicial order.

I kind of like the direction this is going, but it raises three concerns:

1. False positives becoming more common.
2. The burden will be considerably bigger for smaller platforms than bigger ones.
3. It gives the STF yet another tool for vendetta. The judiciary is already a bit too strong in comparison with the other two powers, and this decision only feeds the beast further.

On a lighter side, regardless of #2, I predict a lower impact in the Fediverse than in centralised social media.

The stick in question is off-site; it sees the PC once per month, then it gets back to the drawer in another room. And regardless of its fate, if I had a flood or fire affecting my PC, in the second store of a brick house, odds are that I’d have far more pressing matters than the data.

It’s mostly fluff kept for sentimental value. Worst case scenario (complete data loss) would be annoying, but I can deal with it.

That’s one of the two things the 3-2-1 rule of thumb doesn’t address - depending on the value of the data, you need more backups, or the backup might be overkill. (The other is what you’re talking with smeg about, the reliability of each storage device in question.)

I do have an internal hard disk drive (coincidentally 2TB)*; theoretically I could store a third copy of the backup there, it’s just ~15GiB of data anyway. However:

• HDDs tend to be a bit less reliable than flash memory. Specially given the stick and SSD are relatively new, but the HDD is a bit older
• since the stick is powered ~once a month (as I check if the backup needs to be updated), and I do a diff of the most important bits of the data, bit rot is not an issue
• those sticks tend to fail more from usage than from old age.
• Any failure affecting my computer as a while would affect both the HDD and the SSD, so the odds of dependent failure are not negligible.
• I tend to accumulate a lot of junk in my HDD (like 490GiB of anime and shit like this), since I use it for my home LAN

That makes the benefit of a potential new backup in the HDD fairly low, in comparison with the bother (i.e. labour and opportunity cost) of keeping yet another backup.

*I don’t recall how much I paid for it, but checking local hardware sites a new one would be 475 reals. Or roughly 75 euros… meh, if buying a new HDD might as well use it to increase my LAN.

No, it’s really not.

It is enough for my use case, considering the likelihood of my SSD and the USB stick going kaboom in the span of a single month is next to zero; if only one of them does it, I can use the other to recover the data to a third medium.

I mean just about anyone of sufficient size is susceptible to this.

Sure - the bigger the business, the more expendable each user/customer is. And Microsoft is really huge.

Just keep multiple backups.

Two are enough for most people (the 3-2-1 rule); sometimes one. The catch is that at least one of those backups must be off-line, and in a different medium than the original. While you can use the cloud to increase the reliability of the whole system, you should never rely exclusively on it.

Reminder “the cloud” is someone else’s computer. If you’re going to use it at least make sure the “someone else” isn’t a clown hat like Microsoft.

(This article also prompted me to update the backup of my personal files. I’m not following the 3-2-1 rule; a USB stick is enough. I do like to keep it updated though.)

The site works fine for me, but the same software is available from Github if desired.

Note I’m recommending anime streaming software (instead of an Anitaku-like site) because it’s a bit less likely to be taken down.

As Kolanaki said, copyright holders killed it.

If you’re looking for alternatives give Hayase (formerly Miru) a try.

Catposting? Is it catposting time?

Seriously I miss memes. Local, fresh memes. Like the beans thing, or the no poop challenge.

The problem is not being communist (or following Deng Xiaoping), that’s fine. It’s to follow certain Reddit patterns of moderation that you see regardless of the mod being communist or not, such as hidden rules.

And the presence of that specific hidden rule (“don’t criticise the Chinese government here”) there is an open secret. It’s enforced so often that, even in cases like this - where dessalines is actually saying the truth* - people don’t believe it.

*check the modlog, the guy was behaving like a wild monkey.

If a mod tells someone “don’t say this here”, or “get the fuck out”, their word is law. That’s power. And that power is delegated by the other users, when they join the community, under the condition the mod will use that power to improve the collective space that everyone (not just the e-janny) is building there.

And without users, there’s no community. It’s only when you have a bunch of people there, sharing stuff, connecting, etc. that you can say “yup, this is a community”. Same deal with an instance - without users, it’s just a computer wasting power.

So it’s a give and take. Both sides owe each other, as both are necessary to build the community.

There’s also the matter that all human beings eventually fuck up, sometimes really bad. If that human being is a mod, acting as such, a community needs tools to tell them “you fucked up”. And then decide to either keep trusting the mod or pack their things and emigrate. But for that, you need transparency - and for transparency you need to know why the mod did something.

Regarding money, instance costs should be a collective effort. That’s why so many instances rely on donations.

It’s sensible to provide a reason for the bans because the community should be able to know when, why, and how you enforced the power they delegated to you. It isn’t just for the one being banned.

And mods do owe the community something. At the very least: transparency, safety, fairness, and reliability.

I didn’t even need to read the instance name. Only “Rule 1, 2” was enough to know this was from .ml. The admins there behave pretty much the same as Reddit admins; always fucking enforcing hidden rules. The link Blaze posted should show well enough which is the hidden rule in question.

Note that this is clearly done by the admins, not by some power-tripping mod. For example, one of the communities listed there (SNOOcalypse) has been locked down for a whole year, and the only mod there is my old account. (In fact one of the reasons I locked that comm down was because I wasn’t willing to play along this shit.)

If you don’t hold it, you’ll eventually lose it. Plus sharing is loving, and if you don’t have it you can’t share it.

[Sorry for the double comment]

Disclaimers: I’m aware that I might have an incomplete picture of the situation. As such take what I say with a grain of salt, and do call me out if I say something that is bullshit. Also, I’d rather not take intentions into account.

With that out of the way: Kiwi Farms is a cesspool, and I think that Leni should take this whole situation as a wake up call.

That site doesn’t just “happen” to contain harassment; it exists for harassment, even if Leni claims otherwise. It is not for “an angle of freedom of speech”. And even if she’s just there for some popcorn, or to discuss random stuff, clowns only perform where there’s an audience clapping and laughing at their stunts. I don’t know if she actively harassed someone, but she’s still condoning it. It’s still bad.

And, like, I know popcorn is fun, but this sort of site is better treated as “don’t touch it”. GIF related:

[I’m posting this to lighten the mood.]

And linking the Fediverse in KF is even worse. The Fediverse hosts lots of disempowered people, often from marginalised groups. Linking it there is the same as saying “hey guys! Here’s a barn full of lolcows!”. Don’t - those people have enough shit to deal with, you’re only making it worse for them.

So, while I personally don’t hold any strong opinion for/against Leni, I do think those instance admins did the right thing - they’re protecting their users.

Someone give him gold!

EDIT: I SAID HIM, NOT ME, BUT THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!

Wow, the analysis is great - thanks for sharing it! For me Stickerbush Symphony always evoked some sort of loneliness or melancholy…

And yes, the whole series has great music. I agree DKC2 is the best in this regard; not just because the tracks are great on their own, but because they fit really well the mood of each level. Disco Train is on its own a rollercoaster, Mining Melancholy’s “mmhmm mmhmm” evoking winds and machinery, Bayou Boogie making the level sound m… mois… swampy. From other games of the series DKC1 Forest Frenzy and DKC3 Nuts and Bolts are also great. (Now thinking, the DKC3 soundtrack as a whole is a bit more industrial.)

Hard level with all the wasps

So all of them? …sorry, I couldn’t resist. (This reminds me world 4, Krazy Kremland. The hive levels are awesome!)