Ah, right. I forgot that they’re based in Sweden. That’s understandable if it’s simply a lack of familiarity with the language, but, still, I would expect a company like Mullvad to at least have one native-equivalent English speaker to look over their public facing English stuff. None of this is the end of the world, ofc — I’m just mildly surprised.

I honestly forgot that this game existed. I remember it being very well made, but I could never fully get into it for some reason.

There are a surprising number of grammatical errors in that blog post. Did anyone proof read it, I wonder?

I was trying to say that the hardware cost to host it may not be expensive, but the management cost could be quite costly.

What do you mean by “it’s standard”? As in that is the intended functionality? It shouldn’t be — the whole point of blocking instances is for the user to be able to, well, block an instance, ie content originating from it no longer shows up.

It’s likely both. The ratio, however, I’m not sure of.

How about supporting users who want to improve their community instead of finding a new one?

I support that as well. My initial point was from the perspective of users not originating from lemmy.ml being annoyed with how lemmy.ml is administrating itself. If the users of lemmy.ml wish to stay to try and improve it, then I fully stand behind them, but, at the same time, I still support lemmy.ml’s autonomy.

It’s breaking the stated aim of open federation by tampering with comments, posts and mod records, which in turn get propagated or de-propagated to connected instances, right?

I’m not convinced that this is in conflict with the aim of federation. The whole point is to give people the power to create their own instances with their own rules instead of having to rely on a single central authority. The network isn’t necessarily distributed — it’s decentralized. An instance can administrate their content as they see fit. An instance cannot alter the content produced by any other instance. An instance can only manage the content originating from itself.

but 1) one instance (particular a significant one like ML) affects other instances

Would you mind being more specific?

they’re breaking the spirit of their own software by shamelessly abusing admin powers, in turn helping to normalize that behavior to the Lemmy side of the FV.

Hm, well, it depends on your perspective. The whole point of the Fediverse is to give people the freedom and power to control how they interact with the service. A server has the freedom to associate with the users that they wish in the same way that you have the freedom to consume what you wish. The spirit of the software is to enable people to have this freedom that otherwise wouldn’t exist with a large central service. The way I like to look at the Fediverse is where each instance is like a country, and each community is like a regional/state/provincial government within the country, and federation between instances is like cross-border policies between nations.

a supposedly transparent […] social network?

I’m not sure what you mean by “transparent”.

a supposedly […] user-run […] social network?

It is user-run, in that any user can create an instance.

a supposedly […] P2P social network?

It’s not P2P. A P2P network would be distributed. The Fediverse is decentralized.

I agree with both statements.

Empty on Thunder.

Yeah, take a look at the solution at the top of the post.

Hm, perhaps I didn’t see it in my cursory glance of the article’s text, but is there a distinction made between the physical sex difference of a mother and feminine/maternal traits? What I mean to say is: is the article claiming that a female is important, or that the stereotypical traits of a female are important? If the latter, I would wonder, then, if a masculine presenting female would be negative in the eyes of the study.

I’m not sure if they count as underrated, but the band that immediately comes to mind is The Dear Hunter.

Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough

Not including the time cost to manage it.

Yeah, Alison Tifel wrote the episode “The View From Halfway Down”, which is what this poem is from and shares the same name with.

“The View From Halfway Down” by Alison Tifel has always resonated with me:

The weak breeze whispers nothing
The water screams sublime
His feet shift, teeter-totter
Deep breath, stand back, it’s time

Toes untouch the overpass
Soon he’s water bound
Eyes locked shut but peek to see
The view from halfway down

A little wind, a summer sun
A river rich and regal
A flood of fond endorphins
Brings a calm that knows no equal

You’re flying now
You see things much more clear than from the ground
It’s all okay, it would be
Were you not now halfway down

Thrash to break from gravity
What now could slow the drop
All I’d give for toes to touch
The safety back at top

But this is it, the deed is done
Silence drowns the sound
Before I leaped I should’ve seen
The view from halfway down

I really should’ve thought about
The view from halfway down
I wish I could’ve known about
The view from halfway down

Local Only Communities

Local communities are an interesting concept, though I am concerned about unintended side effects. I have noticed many times that people from other instances chime in to meta-communities to provide some alternative viewpoints and context when instances are discussing interactions with the rest of the network. I worry that some will become too isolated/sheltered. But I suppose, in the end, that’s ultimately up to the individual instances to decide.

Lemmy can now federate with Wordpress, Discourse and NodeBB.

Increased federation capabilities is always awesome to see!

In order to improve interoperability with Mastodon and other microblogging platforms, Lemmy now automatically includes a hashtag with new posts. The hashtag is based on the community name, so posts to /c/lemmy will automatically have the hashtag #lemmy. This makes Lemmy posts much easier to discover.

This is a clever solution. I think this is a good way to go about it.

RSS feeds now include post thumbnail and embedded images.Security

I really appreciate the continued attention given to keep RSS alive.

A security audit was recently performed on Lemmy.

Awesome! And congrats!

• Added Community local_subscribers count
• Support for custom post thumbnail
• Indicate to user when they are banned from community
• Added alt_text for image posts

Great features for improving the polish and user experience on Lemmy!

Would you mind pointing out examples of them boycotting the software? From what I saw in their comment history, it was mostly them talking about moving away from centralization on lemmy.ml.

There is no issue with either. I fully support civil criticism and discussion. And I also support users moving to a place where they feel a better sense of community. I think it’s wrong to force people to interact with those that they don’t wish to. This is why the fediverse exists — to remove centralized control over the discourse.

the devs have absolutely no say over how the software being used

According to some recent posts, ML admins (and maybe even mods?) have the ability to erase any record of mod actions, for example disappearing critique of the CCP’s brutal actions in Tiananmen Square that were posted on ML. That left no record in the public mod logs, and the users were never informed that their contributions had been (completely) deleted.

That isn’t an example of them having a say over how people use the software. That’s them using their own property as they wish.