pitninja

I stopped paying for YouTube the moment Google killed Google Play Music and forced YouTube Music on me. Now Google gets no money from me and Apple does because they still offer a true music library service.

Ah, dang, yeah if you don’t have admin rights on your server I’m not sure there’s anything you can do manually 🫤

Are these bridge puppet users from 3rd party chat services? If so, I don’t know if it would mess anything up, but you might be able to edit those users in Synapse admin (assuming you have that set up). You might even be able to change avatars that way. I’d try it with a contact you don’t care about accidentally breaking first.

For sure, hands are generally getting better, but they are still a persistent problem. Mostly you need a prompter who isn’t lazy and is actually looking at the outputs.

Why not? Plasma is much more usable out of the box for many users including myself. GNOME’s out of the box experience is really lacking IMHO and requires me to install and configure several extensions just to get what I consider to be a functional UI. I know they have this vision for how they want people to use their OS, but that vision is not aligned with how I actually want to use it. The best way distros can vote against the design choices of GNOME is by making something else the default. The problem I have is that I generally prefer GNOME’s app suite to KDE’s, so that makes the decision a bit more complicated for me.

Presence tracking allows users to see the state (e.g online/offline) of other local and remote users.

Disadvantages include (this list is probably not exhaustive):

• Presence is disabled (as this uses a fair amount of resources)
• It has a tendency to be overloaded occasionally because so many people use it
• You have to play by their rules (not a problem for most users, but it bears mentioning)

You could also join other Matrix servers, especially ones that cater to a particular interest of yours.

If you go with self hosting, running a decent personal Matrix server that is capable of joining large rooms like Matrix HQ is likely going to cost you money and/or time.

Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.

It’s almost not even fair to say they’re merely contributing back to the upstream bridges. Most of the bridges would not exist at all without the Beeper developers.

It’s also kind of funny that the section of their website you quoted still has language that implies you have to pay for Beeper when it’s been free for months at this point. The primary reason to self host Matrix at this point is for privacy and complete control. And self hosting Matrix is only free if you use existing hardware and I would recommend a cloud instance for most people.

Beeper’s server set up is actually a lot more complicated than just standard Synapse at this point. When they say you can “self host Beeper” that’s really not accurate at this point at all. All of their 3rd party chat bridges are dynamically spun up on a per user basis with hungryserv and those servers operate in parallel with a synapse server for Matrix interoperability all behind a roomserv server. Here’s a presentation that one of their lead developers created regarding their new architecture.

Afaik, that isn’t in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.

As long as they don’t try to mandate that tech companies provide encryption backdoors, have at it.

E2EE only exists up to the bridge, not the whole way to your client

I just want to clarify that most bridges can be set up to have E2EE between the Matrix client and the bridge (regardless of whether the bridge supports encrypted chats on the bridged service because not all do, e.g. Facebook), but it is true that the bridge itself has to decrypt and translate between Matrix and the 3rd party chat service, so as you mentioned trusting who hosts bridges or doing it yourself is really important.

I’m a little surprised the drop in activity was that low. What the fuck were people browsing when most of Reddit was blacked out?

They take a fair amount of getting used to, especially if you get an ortholinear variety. You might find yourself not really enjoying it out the gate, but it’ll force you into better typing posture and you’ll grow to love it over time and hate the times you have to type on a standard keyboard. I have an Ergodox and the ortholinear aspect took a while to get used to and settling into a function keys layout I liked took another good while. Expect to be worse at typing and less productive at the outset. Your hands and wrists will thank you in the long run, though.

The goal of Bluesky is to turn social media into a shared public commons.

I agree with most of their blog post and it sounds like they’re taking a very measured approach to building out federation, but I really want everyone to stop trying to insist social networks be “public commons”. Moderation tools that do anything more than the bare minimum of blocking forms of speech that are not protected free speech by definition transform the social network into a place that’s not a public commons. Being able to block individuals, communities, topics (via keywords and hashtags), and entire federated servers makes it so that if you really want, you never have to see viewpoints you strongly disagree with. The same is not guaranteed in real public commons. Every day you walk down the street, you have the potential to be confronted with ideas you never considered and your only recourse is to engage, drown out, try to ignore, or walk away from those people, which is not analogous to blocking and thereby deplatforming them online.

That said, I do not want my social network to be a public commons (and from what they’re describing, it doesn’t sound like Bluesky actually does either). Online, I want to be able to block and deplatform e.g. Nazis and MAGA trolls pre-emptively and with extreme prejudice because I want to enjoy my time on social networking sites, not raise my blood pressure.

TOTP support will be coming very soon: https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/pull/56

Still needs to be reviewed, but keep tracking this over the next couple days.

You’re probably good, then 👍

If Reddit were to reach out privately to this group, the first thing they’d probably do is ask for proof. It’s trivially easy to provide proof you’ve carried out a hack; you just present some specific information that was not public and describe what all else you have in specific enough terms they know you’re not bluffing. (Or, I suppose you could just send them your whole dump if you really want to make it clear what all you have). The only way the rest of us will be able to validate these claims is if they leak and it either matches users’ own private account info or Reddit issues a disclosure about the hack (which I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to do regardless).

Unless you have a pretty beefy server, you really do not want to try to process and store all the federation events and data from everything on all the big instances. I would recommend just using one of the Lemmy community indexing tools to search and discover communities across instances and only join ones you and your users are interested in.