Doesn't have to be a state secret. Just any Information to which access is restricted or it'd be dangerous or undesired if it were just handed out to the public.

Edit: Don't reveal any secrets here. This is a public forum. Proceed with caution when answering this question.

Tl;dr: I think we have too much "empty" content and noise here and it drags down the place for 2 years now. Does PieFed include an approach to change the situation?

I'm sorry, this is going to be a bit of a rant. And about PieFed's role in the "Lemmy" community and more broadly, what I think the place should be about. Feel free to skip this, unless you have a good amount of time to waste to read my long post and you want to think about the future of the community here.

To preface this: I'm mainly here on the Threadiverse for the comments. To have meaningful conversations with people. That could be the charm of this place. Yet, that's regularly not what happens here.

The high-frequency posters use Lemmy to dump the news of the day and re-post memes. And that's okay if people want that, I myself try to cut down a bit on news shaped by social media, so again it's mainly the comment thread underneath that I deem useful, not the post itself, since we have the news at a bazillion other places and it's not what sets this place apart. (Plus I think following the outcry of the day is corrosive and usually less informative than it seems, so I went further and actively unsubscribed from many of the big communities here.)

And the now more meaningful (to me) part isn't huge by any means. I comment on things and write answers to questions, some communities work very well and it leads to a conversation or I can help someone with their Linux woes. Half the time at least I type something into the void and it feels like I've wasted my time since I don't get any replies, maybe one or two upvotes at best and not even OP engages. So I wonder why they even made the post. Clearly not because they want to talk about something.

I think the interesting part of the Threadiverse needs to grow so I can have meaningful conversations here. When I look at the user count of Lemmy, I see how it stagnates at about 45k users for 2 years now. Sometimes we get an influx of a few thousand users but we're not attractive to them, so we always lose them again. And the place just stays whatever it is. I think not really attracting people and at the same time losing that many people constantly (who actively volunteered to have a look at the place) tells us something.

I think we could do better than that and set the place apart from countless other platforms in many ways. But that seems to a minority opinion in the bigger Threadiverse. The Lemmy devs regularly say it doesn't need to grow and it'll maybe grow organically (which it doesn't). Most users here tell me we need to dump more posts in an desperate attempt to kickstart engagement. I think we've tried that for 2 years now and it clearly doesn't work. On the contrary, it's kind of empty (or fabricated) content and I'll find out once I try to engage, that these are lower quality, less engagement than some other posts. And it actively drowns the few people talking to each other in added noise. I think the idea to address the issue this way is exactly why Lemmy stagnates and why we always lose all the users that come here, sign up to have a look and then leave again, because this isn't what they've been looking for. (And this is a multi-faceted issue, we have some other drama and issues here as well, but this post is long enough, so I'll skip that here, feel free to add your perspective in the comments.)

Now this week I've complained a bit, since I saw piefed.social communities with really high-quality conversation. And then the same people come, determine we need more content, and they dump re-posts of the lemmy.ml equivalent over their heads. And then I've taken tens of minutes out of my day to reply to posts elsewhere (not a piefed community) and give a nuanced perspective, only to find out it's unmarked Reddit re-posts, and I've basically wasted my time. It wasn't a genuine question in need for my answer, I was betrayed, tricked into increasing the number of comments underneath something that wasn't even genuine. When I could have spent that time interacting with high-quality conversations instead, which definitely exist as well. It's just that those people drain that. And I can't even tell which is which.

So it actively takes away from quality content. And I end up with a feeling like with the Reddit content bots, fabricating engagement. Which I dislike and specifically avoid. And it makes the entire place feel kind of empty to me, despite the many posts we have each day.

I think first of all people really need to stop dumping posts in an ill-conveived attempt to help. It's a misconception. We need more comments here, not posts. Yet they do the opposite and their user profiles rarely have comments, just hundreds of posts. If you want to grow and foster the place, add comments.

PieFed

That's my perspective, feel free to tell me how it feels to you. I'm definitely not against posts, just against fabricating them, and focusing on an unfit approach instead of doing the right thing.

Now my question: Does PieFed want to address that issue (if it really is an issue to more people than just me)? Is PieFed just a piece of technology, connecting me to the same community, just with an arguably better approach? Or does it go further? Push towards a certain atmosphere, change the community and behaviour? Do we do higher quality communities on piefed.social or are they basically the same thing as the ones before, just on a different domain? Do we go as far as to kick the re-posters so at least the posts aren't just exactly the same?

That'd be mainly social engineering. And I'd really welcome if we had ideals and a clear vision of where to go. We kind of have that. In contrast to some other Fediverse software where I can't see a clear vision.

And then we have technology. We could devise tools to address it. And PieFed already is about providing better tools to address some things. We have an ambivalent view of concepts like Karma. And algorithms to steer attention. I could try to address this with software. Calculate scores and devalue everyone who dumps posts and doesn't contribute to the conversation. That's likely going to give some advantage to conversation itself and foster genuine engagement. Do we want to do that?

And as a bonus question: What's with the entire voting system? Seems I deem different things interesting than what's popular. And that's all the scores underneath posts and comments tell us. So it's of little use to me. A post with 5 upvotes could be as interesting as one with 250 of them, and that happens each day to me. Once I switch the sorting method from "new" to something else, what it does is make lots of interesting content disappear from my feeds.

References:

• Are some questions here just to simulate activity?
• Please be Advised for Help Farmers
• Content jacking/reposting is a problem on Lemmy. and this comment highlighting how what makes other places "great is the community and not the posts."
• Statistics for Lemmy on the Fediverse Observer
• PieFed features for growing healthy communities and PieFed Features
• Moderation & the design of social platforms

I've "flaired" this "Feature request". Mind this is an opinion piece containing my perspective (and preaching). I'd like to hear your's and request the name PieFed to encompass a clear vision, to be not just technology but a broader approach to shape the nature of the society we want to create. And put in lots of effort to actively lead us towards accomplishing more than we do today.

And I definitely need some good ideas and tools to turn my feeds into something that caters to my own needs and wants. If there's some overlap with other people, we could talk about some specifics.

Sometimes I can't tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?

I just found out I can buy a decent 400W solar panel in the local hardware store for around 90€ these days.

Are there people around with experience in off-grid solar? There is quite some supply in cheap MPTT charge controllers on the internet. And I can't afford a 700€ power station. But I would be able to buy a few power tool batteries or one of the lead-acid batteries people put in their caravan. Are there projects building a power station myself? Is this even worth it?

Maybe someone alredy wrote a blog post with recommendations or findings and failures along the way. Or has something similar running at home?

(Thanks to the mods for steering me towards the correct community.)

I'm developing a small Python webapp as some sort of finger exercise. Mostly a chatbot. I'm using the Quart framework, which is pretty much alike Flask, just async. Now I want to connect that to a LLM inference endpoint. And while I could do the HTTP requests myself, I'd prefer something that does that for me. It should support the usual OpenAI style API, in the end I'd like it to connect to things like Ollama and KoboldCPP. No harm if it supports image generation, agents, tools, vector databases, but that's optional.

I've tried Langchain, but I don't think I like it very much. Are there other Python frameworks out there? What do you like? I'd prefer something relatively lightweigt that gets out of the way. Ideally provider agnostic, but I'm mainly looking for local solutions like the ones I mentioned.

Edit: Maybe something that also connects to a Runpod endpoint, to do inference on demand (later on)? Or at least something which I can adapt to that?

I've been using Etar for years now. But the Samsung calendar app on my wife's phone looks way better, while I'm missing things like the titles in the appointments once it gets crowded. And the all day events and birthdays aren't that prominent either. Plus I don't have some features on Etar like adding notes/emojis to days.

Is there a better calendar app out there? It has to be open source and somehow connect to my Nextcloud. That'd be my requirements. But I believe all calendar apps can connect to webdav.

Have you tried it? It got merged 3 weeks ago and is a bit hidden. You have to go to a user's profile page, click "More" and then "Edit note".

I use it to attach the emojis to users that I like, dislike... Users who offer particularly great advice. Users who ask a lot of questions and then ghost everyone in the comments by never engaging with the discussion or follow-up questions. Clowns...

I would say this makes me a bit more at ease once I have a negative encounter on the platform. I can just mark the users and be sure I don't make the same mistake again. And I make sure to factor in positive encounters, too, so I know whom to pay attention to and invest some time in a good answer. I'm not sure where this is going long-term. In the few weeks I've been using it, I randomly had some note pop up and remind me both to be nice, or to ignore other discussions.

Seems Meta have been doing some research lately, to replace the current tokenizers with new/different representations:

• Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space [Github] (December 11, 2024)
• Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens [Github] (December 12, 2024)

I got a new phone. Skipped a few generations and now I'm running the current GrapheneOS, based on Android 15. I've moved most of the apps, but now I'd like to install my 3 banking apps and 5 discount program spyware apps. I guess I best separate them from the rest of the arbitrary stuff. Banking apps so they can't be messed with, and shady discount programs so those apps can't mess with me and my data...

The internet has a lot of information about Shelter, work profiles, the new(?) private spaces... But I don't know what is current advice and what's outdated advice... What's the current best practice?

During the summer the European Commission made the decision to stop funding Free Software projects within the Next Generation Internet initiative (NGI). This decision results in a loss of €27 million for software freedom. Since 2018, the European Commission has supported the Free Software ecosystem through NGI, that provided funding and technical assistance to Free Software projects. This decision unfortunately exposes a larger issue: that software freedom in the EU needs more stable, long-term financial support. The ease with which this funding was excluded underlines this need.

CC BY-SA 4.0 - SFSCON 2024

Cross-posted from the FSFE Peertube Channel

Seems they recently changed something on Spotify and all the tools I've tried fail now. And DownOnSpot which seems promising has received a cease and desist letter and got taken down. What do you people use? I want something that actually fetches the audio from Spotify, not just rip it from YouTube. And it has to work as of now. Does the latest commit from DownOnSpot work? Back when I tested it a few weeks ago it failed due to some API changes. Are there other tools floating around?

I just found https://www.arliai.com/ who offer LLM inference for quite cheap. Without rate-limits and unlimited token generation. No-logging policy and they have an OpenAI compatible API.

I've been using runpod.io previously but that's a whole different service as they sell compute and the customers have to build their own Docker images and run them in their cloud, by the hour/second.

Should I switch to ArliAI? Does anyone have some experience with them? Or can recommend another nice inference service? I still refuse to pay $1.000 for a GPU and then also pay for electricity when I can use some $5/month cloud service and it'd last me 16 years before I reach the price of buying a decent GPU...

Edit: Saw their $5 tier only includes models up to 12B parameters, so I'm not sure anymore. For larger models I'd need to pay close to what other inference services cost.

Edit2: I discarded the idea. 7B parameter models and one 12B one is a bit small to pay for. I can do that at home thanks to llama.cpp