It comes from Lemmy’s origin as a link aggregator. You can imagine that every link one the web has 0 votes by default. When you submit a post for the first time you are voting for it. You are saying “this is interesting to this community”. In this way the submitter is no different than any other voter, each upvote is saying “I think this is interesting” and every downvote is saying “I don’t think this is interesting”.
The Flat Earth Society.
I don’t remember the exact URLs or wikis but about 10 years ago I stumbled across one of the funniest websites I have ever seen. It was a wiki with an alternative science that justified a flat earth. It had some incredibly clever premises such as gravity is due to the Earth accelerating upwards at 9.8m/s^2 and an explanation for now this didn’t fail to continue as they approached the speed of light. There were layers and layers of explanation explaining many corners of the premise and providing explanations for things that at first felt like flaws in the simpler layers. It wasn’t anti-science, it was cleverly twisting science with the holes hidden away. It was an incredible amount of work by a lot of clearly very clever people. While I enjoyed all of the slightly flawed science my favourite page had to be the one answering the question “But what about the photos of the earth that show it to be round” with a short dismissal like “All of the images are clearly doctored.” The non-scientific dismissal was startling contrast to the rest of the site and gave me a good chuckle.
Of course the trolling was so good that people started believing it, the hard work of god-tier troll was converted into a religion for the mindless. What was once beautiful art is forever tainted by the inadvertent damage that it has caused.
On about:preferences#privacy I see a bunch of options:
- Forms and Autofill
- Address Bar
Off the top of my head that should handle most cases where your history pops up onto the screen without being explicitly requested.
It would be really cool to have a stream/present mode extension that could provide a one-click or automatic toggle for these options. But unfortunately with the new extensions API this probably isn’t possible anymore.
I agree, 10% is huge. I only started using Wayland a handful of years ago and I would consider myself a somewhat early adopter of technology. Just about transition will follow a roughly sigmoid adoption curve. The first tiny fraction will switch soon, then the early adopters. Now we are at the point where most major distros are all shipping it by default and LTS releases where it wasn’t the default are dropping out of support. There are still a couple of big blockers such as some graphics drivers but when those drop even more people will transition by default. 10% is significantly more than just early adopters so I would expect that as more and more people fall into the “enabled by default” category the number will steadily rise to 90% over the next 3-5 years. Then it will slow down as the final blockers are eliminated and the resistors finally give in.
It looks like I would have to jump through hoops whereas x11 just works.
If you have to jump through hoops I probably wouldn’t bother. Most distros are shipping it by default so I would just wait until that happens.
Some benefits that I can think of off the top of my head:
- Top quality high and mixed resolution support.
- Tear free rendering and capturing.
- (Small) improved performance.
- Games are much better behaved. I can reliably window, maximize and full-screen them. They also never mess with the display resolution.
- Seems to have less windows (especially hover tool tips) just hanging around. I guess the compositor can close these at the right time under Wayland.
- Proper secure screen locking. (I think GNOME + GDM can do something safe on X but most display managers + lock screens can’t cooperate well enough to manage this.)
Honestly it is nothing major (except the mixed dpi stuff) but a nice step up. And if the X devs say that X is unmaintainable and this is going to lead to many improvements and be able to be maintained for the next age of displays on Linux I’m happy to make the switch now that it is the default and I am not aware of any problems for my workflow.
FWIW you can’t reliably unpost anything anyways. It would be trivial to run an instance of lemmy that just federated and logged everything. Deletion should always be treated as a “Please delete this” on the internet.
Of course there are some benefits if everyone does actually cooperate, however it does raise the question of should we pretend this is the case if it isn’t forced. It may lead users to believe that they can actually reliably delete something.
Yeah, sending user-content is hard. Maybe I can try to whitelist lemmy.ml and see if that helps. Unfortunately sometimes this simple filtering happens way too early. But come on, at least put it into my junk folder ☹
That’s unfortunately not true. Lots of data in matrix is currently unencrypted. Message content is but state events (like the room topic), reactions, stickers (if your client supports them) are not.
This is slowly improving (the proposal for encrypted state events is going to be a significant improvement) but unfortunately strong privacy doesn’t seem like a strong priority of the spec owners.
If it was up to me I would block every new proposal until it had a strong privacy proposal, but instead their plan is to implement everything insecurely first. Then they will try to get people to propose private versions of the specs and try to drive adoption of those. Not a great plan for something that advertises itself as “an open network for secure, decentralized communication” if you ask me.
I’m talking about RSS auto-discovery via <link> tags. In the head of the page there should be a link take like <link rel=alternate type="application/atom+xml" href="https://lemmy.ml/feeds/c/lemmy.xml?sort=Hot">. This way browsers, extensions, search engines and feed readers can discovery the link automatically without the user needing to identify the feed link on each site.
Client-side hashing doesn’t really do much. It just makes your hashed password the effective password. The only advantage it provides is some defense against password reuse because the “source” password is hard to discover. However you shouldn’t be reusing passwords anyways so that shouldn’t matter.
An actual improvement would be using something a PAKE like SRP or OPAQUE. This way the server never learns enough information to authenticate as you.
A major downside of these systems is that because they aren’t natively supported by browsers they require javascript. But that probably isn’t a major issue because IIUC all interactivity on the webui requires JS anyways.
It would be nice if the RSS feeds were advertised. For example if I browse https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy I wouldn’t know there was an RSS feed until I find and click the little RSS icon.
If a <link> to the RSS feed was provided my browser extension would light up and I can subscript just by putting the community URL into my reader instead of having to spot the RSS button on the page.
A common pattern here is making part of the URL human-readable but non-normative. For example instead of https://lemmy.ml/post/112460/comment/110439 you have https://lemmy.ml/post/Lemmy-112460/comment/Lemmy-URLs-should-be-human-meaningful-110439.
There are a couple of minor downsides here:
- This can be used for phishing because the server ignores the text here. A malicious user can put something malicious.
- Can affect caching. I don’t think this is a major issue and can be resolve by redirecting all to the canonical URL. The redirect is cheep and the canonical URL can be cached.
This pattern is used on a number of sites such as Stack Overflow and Reddit and seems to work well.
Yup, a much more reasonable system and largely prevents the scam. That is why I didn’t use a credit card when I lived in Europe. IBAN transfers also make it feasible for online without credit/debit. However debit (or credit) is still significantly more convenient for day-to-day transactions in my opinion.
IMHO the best and most supported way is just to post a message whenever you make a post. For example I toot on my mastodon whenever I release a new post. People then that share and reply to that toot.
This is done via simple automation that watches my feed and hits the mastodon API.
For actual blog subscribers I like to stick with regular RSS + WebSub, I don’t see much advantage to ActivityPub integration here.