Hello!

While discussing about privacy on Lemmy and in the Fediverse, I've stumbled upon an idea that would solve some of the issues inherent to the fact that you need to have a home instance, that is under control of someone you have to trust. But my knowledge about ActivityPub is lacking, and I'm not sure if something like this would be possible or not. Also - it possible that something like that already exists, but I didn't manage to find anything.

So, would it be possible to create a Fediverse/ActivityPub app that is just a self-hosted frontend for interacting with other apps, such as Lemmy or Mastodon, that only hosts your own personal data related to your account, but not the content you post to other instances?

The main thing I'm unsure with is how Fediverse works in this regard - who hosts the content. If my home instance is programming.dev, and I create a Post or a Comment on lemmy.ml, who is the source of truth for that post? Does the content get saved on my home instance, and Lemmy.ml only gets an ID that it queries if an user requests it, or do I send the content to Lemmy.ml to live on their server?

Depending on this, it would make such a self-hosted app easier or harder. If the content lives on the instance I post it to, it would mean that you can create a fediverse app that only stores your personal user information and DMs, and you don't have to deal with serving your posts to others - because they live on the other instance you posted it to. Then all that would be left is to create an UI for displaying and querying content from other instances, and you have a way how to interact with the Fediverse without risking any of your personal private data.

On the other hand, if the content would have to live on my instance, I would have to deal with serving it to whoever requests it, which would make it a lot harder to self-host.

I kind of hope it's the first option, because then it would allow for public communities of content-only servers while also letting users have their own personal-data only instances that allows them to interact with the rest. And I really like that idea, because it would allow you to for example have reliable E2E for messages, since you have the code that generates and stores the private certificate under absolute control, and only need to share your private key with others.

In general, it seems like a great solution to many privacy problems on the Fediverse, and if something like that would be possible (without having to serve the content, because then it may get too resource-intensive for a regular user), I would definitely try to come up with such a solution.

And now that I think about it - if you actually have to host the content, then it maybe be possible to create a combination of user-data / content servers, where you select a public community run content server to host your data, and have the personal user-data server self-hosted. And if a request comes to your user-data server for content, you just redirect it to the community-ran server. But that's just brainstorming.

Hello!

Ever since I've seen the screenshot of permissions that the Threads app requires, I've been thinking that it would be a great idea if you could have an app that would give them the permission, but kept feeding it random and bullshit data.

This could extend to other fingerprinting tools on the web - I can make my browser have limited fingerprinting, but as far as I know, it's usually static. Using letterboxing will set your pixel size to a common value, and privacy focused browsers are using constant User Agent that includes everything.

But that's not going to help too much - I want my fingerprint to be random, and totally wrong. Feed them unusable data, something that not only isn't useful for them - but also actively sabotages their analytics. Pair that with a VPN, and now they have no way how to track you across sites, and also get a lot of bullshit data.

Another great thing would be an Adblock extension that not only hides every ad, but also click on it. Multiple times. Sure, it would be giving money to the websites you visit (which may be good), but it will also cost advertisers who pay for clicks (and will probably get you banned anyway).

I'm assuming that nothing like that exists, but I suppose that forking UBlock or forking LibreWolf could work, and just adding a Random here and there into their anti-fingerprinting code could maybe not be so hard.

There is one argument I've seen missing in most of the de/federation discussions, that I think should be mentioned, and warrants it's own discussion.

I've seen a lot of people mentioning that defederating with Meta means we have broken the promise of Fediverse, that you can use one account to interact with whatever service you choose, and that it should be inclusive.

But I don't agree that's the main idea. There is something that's more important, and to make sure I'm not misinterpreting it, I'll just directly quote various websites about the Fediverse I've found (I was just taking top results for Fediverse on DuckDuckGo, but I did select only the parts that are the most important point for me personally). But I do concur, I was not able to find a single source of truth, and I'm not really sure how credible the resources are, so please disagree with me if it's wrong or I've chosen some no-name site that just matched my rethorics.

https://www.fediverse.to/ has the following sentence as the main hero header:

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.

Each fediverse instance is managed by a human admin. You can find fediverse instances dedicated to art, music, technology, culture, or politics.

Join the growing community and experience the web as it was meant to be.

Another search result is for fediverse.party, which has the following quite in https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/ :

Fediverse (also called Fedi) has no built-in advertisements, no tricky algorithms, no one big corporation dictating the rules. Instead we have small cozy communities of like-minded people.

The page also mentions some link for knowledge about the fediverse. Some of them are only tutorials about how to join, but there's also https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_the_Fediverse%3F , with the following part:

How does it compare to traditional social media?

...

Morals

• Traditional social media is neither social nor media. It is not made for you, it is made to exploit you and it is full of misleading ads and fake news.
• This is because the aim of traditional social media is to make a whole lot of money.
• The aim of the Fediverse is to benefit the people.
• The aim of traditional social media is to control and steer the users.
• The aim of the Fediverse is to empower the users to control the Fediverse.

I wasn't able to find more websites directly about the fediverse, and I did not want to quote random articles. But for completion sake, here is a list of FAQ/About sections of websites that are about the Fediverse, but don't directly support or imply the point of view I was trying to make (one that can be best summarized by the Morals in the last quite):

• https://fediverse.info/frequently-asked-questions
• https://fedi.tips/what-is-mastodon-what-is-the-fediverse/
• https://framatube.org/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
• https://the-federation.info/

The split seems to be 50:50, but at least for my DuckDuckGo search results, the https://www.fediverse.to/ is the first result you find, and that one is pretty clear about what Fediverse should be. I wanted to start a discussion about what do the users here see as a main selling point of the fediverse, and whether morals and non-profit nature of the instances is important to most of the users as it is to me, or whether you'd rather have interconnectness and inclusivness.

Hello! I was looking through the sidebar's list of recommended earphones, and after clicking through some of them, I've realized that I actually don't know if that's a list for me, a consumer looking for something to jack into my phone.

I've tried quickly looking for differences between IEMs and headphones, but didn't managed to reach a conclusion. I've vaguely familiar with the term "monitors", since I do help out from time with band shows, but I never actually dealt with audio equipment or audio setup (aside from carrying it to the stage). From what I assume based on what I've seen, monitors are the the speakers that play on stage, so the band can hear what they play. And IEMs are earbud versions of monitors that the band uses instead.

I've always assumed that they are basically headphones/earphones, just connected to some kind of transmitter, and calling them IEMs just makes it easier to find earbuds focused on audio quality, because the term is not as mass-marketed as earbuds are. But judging by the cable connector I've seen on some of the IEMs I've looked at, it's probably not a jack.

So, what are the differences? Is it a different tech all-together, or are they really just a higher quality earphones with better connector? Would looking for IEMs instead of earbuds make it easier to find better earbuds for regular use, or are they meant only for studios and I'll have a hard time even connecting them without aditionall equipment?

Thank you for any reply or explanation. I realize this question may seem pretty basic, and I hope it's not too out of place - I have almost zero experience with audio, but I did start recently DJing (where all I needed so far was to be able to connect RCA into a mixer) and helping out with setting up band shows, so I'm asking this question not because I'm shopping for earbuds, but because I'm honestly interested in learning something new about how different tech around music work and what's the common language around it.