this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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Finally deleted my LinkedIn account!

After putting my account into "hibernation" for the past few weeks, I finally closed it. But I'm still looking for work. Thankfully I can still find positions (SRE and software dev) by just going directly to the company's site and finding a Jobs page.

Good luck to everyone else out there looking for work!

#privacy @privacy

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Its good to hear that someone does something besides talking, I‘ll give you that.

But imagine, you‘d do so much good making PRs for the existing fedi and not having the attention and pressure while working on the now.

If we prepare for it falling apart before it even matured, we‘re dooming it. You could instead make a pr for a new search function (because its insanely easy to search through all dederated servers on your server, we just need it to be the default) and by working on something different with no momentum while depriving the thing that has momentum is a bad idea imo. Sorry.

Voting, as in you vote for something to happen. Democracy. We should federate it so everyone can do it, probably cryptographically or some other way.

Now you‘re contradicting yourself. You‘re making an alternative to the fediverse because of issues you cant be bothered to solve but speculation isnt worth to call crypto worthy of a successor. Do you see how that is illogical? Also, reinventing the wheel is why we have corporate control. We need to work on one thing and make it good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

making PRs

I have actually made a few PRs when I first came to lemmy. I fixed a few bugs that bothered me, implemented a feature I wanted, and took a couple extra bugs from the issue tracker that bothered others. I thought about making my own client, but decided to try patching the existing ones first, and that ended up being easier.

I've stopped being active though since I'm satisfied with the platform as it is. I've considered hosting my own, which might get me to optimize the BE a bit, so I guess we'll see. But I really do think the project is solving the wrong problems, so I prefer to spend my hobby time experimenting with P2P apps since I think that's what we'll ultimately want, but I'll absolutely help if there's any project that's remotely close to what I want.

I don't have anything to show yet since it's rough and I don't want to publish anything without a good moderation story, but hopefully I'll have something later this year.

new search function

I almost did, but the current one (new since I was originally interested) is good enough. Maybe I'll add it to Jerboa or something since it completely lacks post/comment search AFAIK (should be easy now), but searching on my mobile browser works well enough.

But this gets back to the core design decisions. It can't search stuff it doesn't have cached locally, and abusing ActivityPub to broadcast search would have a risk of enabling amplification attacks.

The proper solution to search, imo, is a separate service that indexes as much of the fediverse as possible. That's a massive project, and about on the scale of building a replacement, not to mention hosting costs. I could probably build it as a P2P app though, but at that point I might as well continue with my project since it has other benefits as well (e.g. single namespace, almost no hosting costs outside a few relays, etc).

Voting, as in you vote for something to happen. Democracy. We should federate it so everyone can do it, probably cryptographically or some other way.

Right, but how does that actually work? Every proposal I've seen for distributed voting systems has issues, and federating it won't solve them. Here are a few off the top of my head:

  • barrier to entry - how are you going to get Grandma to use it?
  • malware voting on your behalf
  • privacy - how can you prove dead people aren't voting while also preventing people from knowing if you voted?
  • are normal people going to trust it? We have enough issues with people not trusting voting machines, despite no evidence that voting machines have been exploited to any real degree

I'm satisfied with the current system in my area, which is mail ballots with a barcode so voters can see whether their vote was counted. That's good enough, to the point where I'm going to put my efforts toward getting better voting systems (i.e. ranked, approval, or STAR voting) instead of more cryptography.

You‘re making an alternative to the fediverse because of issues you cant be bothered to solve

I'm making an alternative because the issues I want to solve are fundamental to federation, namely:

  • confusing namespaces - you need "community@instance", and most people would prefer just "community"
  • power hungry mods - the ones I've seen are okay, but they were also okay on Reddit until they weren't; we could vote for mods, but then interested parties could just bot spam their way in
  • hosting costs are high - you need to store everything for every community your users are interested in; that's not going to scale well, especially with so much duplication

I can't submit a PR to fix those, because if I try, it'll just be a hack that's going to have repercussions. Those are design decisions we'll just have to live with for now.

So I'm addressing it with a personal research project, and here's briefly how I'm solving them:

  • no namespaces, just "topics"
  • no permanent moderators, moderation is based on people you explicitly or implicitly trust (everyone would start with some default set)
  • hosting costs are $0, unless you run a relay on a $5 VPS; all storage is on user devices (aside from caching nodes to help with availability)

The hardest part is moderation, which is also the biggest selling point, at least until lemmy instance admins can no longer afford to keep hosting.

I think I can make an ActivityPub bridge as well, and I may end up having it act like a lemmy instance to help seed with data. But that's not in the initial goals, I just want to see if client-side moderation based on votes and whatnot can actually work well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have actually made a few PRs when I first came to lemmy.

Awesome!

solving the wrong problems

I would say this is far too generalized. Since you seem very smart you might want to reflect on this. The issues that lemmy solves are still prevalent outside of it and you are speaking from a place of privilege imo since you (as am I) are educated enough to make it here, build stuff and change things. We are the minority and we should not go running away before the world can catch up.

The proper solution to search, imo, is a separate service that indexes as much of the fediverse as possible.

I disagree, respectfully though since you make good points. I think it is already enough to index the servers you have federated with. For example, my own instance federates with world. I want to be able to see all communities, not posts or comments, that are on world, together with a rought member and post count. That way I can make an informed decision. I think you are making this too much a low level decision. The reason we are all here and the ultimate goal of lemmy and the fediverse imo is agency, nothing else. And that is what we should be striving for.

I have to run but I might come back to this later to answer the rest. I think we're pretty constructive together. Maybe we should connect on github or something. I'm working on another fediverse thing.

See ya later. Feel free to send me a dm if you like.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

The issues that lemmy solves

Oh, I'm not saying the issues it solves aren't important, I'm saying it's focusing on the wrong goals.

What I want out of lemmy is a credible Reddit alternative (so link aggregator with comments), that will be around long term with minimal disruption. It succeeds as a link aggregator, I'm worried about longevity based on its design.

Lemmy also had a goal of being on ActivityPub. Link aggregators (I assume) have a ton more shared data than something like Mastodon. But I don't know for sure, I haven't hosted either, it's just a hunch. Likewise, people already complained about having to deal with a ton of instances on Mastodon, which seems to be an adoption issue for new users. Those aren't solveable with lemmy as designed since they're quirks of federation, but it was probably a faster way to get something out.

I want to be able to see all communities, not posts or comments... together with a rought member and post count

Ok, that's pretty reasonable. I'm not sure how syncing those statistics would go without subscribing, but it's probably not a ton of work.

But isn't that essentially what [Lemmy Explorer] (https://lemmyverse.net/instance/lemmy.world/communities) is for? You get all of that info, and can narrow by instance if you want, even if your instance doesn't federate with it.

Not sure if it was you, but there's an issue for it with generally positive responses. I agree with Nutomic's concern that this could be a lot of data (world alone has >10k communities), but as another user mentioned, we could filter by active communities and drastically reduce that.

The reason we are all here and the ultimate goal of lemmy and the fediverse imo is agency, nothing else

That's pretty vague IMO.

I'm here because I want Reddit, but Reddit made some choices I strongly disagree with, such as:

  • effectively closing its API, which killed my favorite apps
  • selling user data (more recent)
  • "new Reddit," which harvests more data than before; also, new Reddit isn't open source AFAIK
  • sacking mods and probably replacing them with AI

I honestly don't care about federation or ActivityPub, I'm just here because it replaces a service I like but refuse to use. Maybe that's what you mean by agency, but for me personally, I'd just not use any social media if lemmy didn't exist (or maybe I'd go back to hacker news).

So that's the lens I'm seeing things through. I see Lemmy as a temporary stopgap, and I'd really rather not invest a bunch of time into something I think needs to be replaced. But I do believe in cleaning up my corner of the world, so I'll contribute here and there, and I hope to donate to my instance once they accept donations (I've asked).

Maybe we should connect on github or something

Perhaps. I'll save this comment so I can come back later if interested. I'm not in a position to really commit to anything right now, but perhaps starting a Matrix channel for like-minded people would be interesting.

I'd much rather keep discussions in some publicly accessible medium than over DMs, so hopefully someone else can pick up the torch when you or I inevitably lose interest.

That said, once I have a working project, I'll post it on a few relevant communities for review (probably under an alt). So you'll at least hopefully see that. I work primarily in Rust and plan to build my MVP with Tauri and Iroh, but I'm fairly comfortable in a variety of languages (Python and Typescript at my day job, lots of years with Go, looking into Haskell because FP rox and I want to study SimpleX chat).

If you want help on a project, post about it and I'll take a look. I'm comfortable with most fullstack stuff (databases, React, Docker, etc).