I have been playing squad on linux without any issues for a while now, I don’t think I even had to do any tinkering.

I mean I couldn’t do that either, not for very long at least. I have the tendency to walk around aimlessly when doing something like that (same when I’m on the phone), which means I have to clean the floor after. So mostly I either brush my theeth in the shower or I sit down/lie down.

Damn, I just noticed that my theeth brushing habits are probably very weird, bit hey, at least that way I do it 2 - 3 times a day.

When it comes to cutting expenses, government institutions are always very interested, so it makes sense to outsource all sorts of things.

On paper, sort of. Government IT projects are often seen as cash machines by private businesses where I’m from because there is often a generous budget and government institutions tend to want to use those budgets completely because if they don’t, some will start wondering if they really need that much budget or if it maybe can be shortened a bit… There have been notorious cases where there were huge projects that ended up being even more expensive than initially planned because the private contractors just milked it. And there is of course a lot of mutual masturbation between government institutions and big tech.

And government institutions tend to follow the private sector. The private sector has been pushing to the cloud for a long time now to the point where virtually nobody is suggesting or providing support for on-premise solutions. When every IT contractors says that moving everything to the google/microsoft cloud is the state of the art (and that there are 0 downsides to it and everything is 100% secure), most will not question it.

some countries have decided that all of mining industry, railways, electricity and water must be kept in government hands, no matter the cost. Same sort of things can happen with IT services once you burn your fingers badly enough.

Recently there has been somewhat of a push for open source solutions and big tech independent solutions for government institutions as they start to notice the downsides and potential security risks. And I mean it’s absolutely ridiculous, there are entire IT projects where entire systems and solutions were developed to provide a secure software solution for the military (costing hundreds of millions), but then they want to share those files with sharepoint online…

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it’s not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because “cloud is the future” and hosting your own instances is not “cost effective”.

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that “they will take care of everything, you don’t need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything”.

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…

I have a fariphone 4 since it was released and I’m very happy with it. It’s does not have the most powerful or newest specs, if you only care about performance the price is pretty high, but you wouldn’t buy one if that’s your priority anyway and so far, it works great.

wants to ban any regular porn if it doesn’t come from a “trusted source” and wants people to ID themselves with their government IDs if they are deemed “too young looking” by the moderation.

So that admin wants to actually make sure that there is only legal and ethical content on their platform? How is that “abuse”? How else are they supposed to protect themselves against legal accusations that they are hosting illegal porn? The admins here aren’t working for multimillion dollar corporations, it’s probably just a matter of time until corpo social media starts targeting popular instances by exactly this kind of legal action…

ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with “little dictators” hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.

And with reddit, admins don’t just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.

REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.

I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don’t use/sell your data for profit.

There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It’s important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.

This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases.

Here I have to speculate because I just don’t know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.

Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue.

I think you might have replied to the wrong person?

If you seriously compare socialism with opensource then I’m sorry for you.

This is how big tech saw free software until quite recently. Microsoft used to call linux communist.

FOSS basically goes against the concept of private property of software and embraced common ownership of software. Without private property, there is no capitalism. I wouldn’t call FOSS communism or socialism, but there are elements in it.

You wouldn’t have react.js without capitalism.

Ok, and what’s your point? If you read Marx, one essential point he claims is that without capitalism, there cannot be socialism.

They could have used different library for js. one made totally by volunteers, but they haven’t. Why?

Probably because they saw no use in reinventing the wheel? And why should they?

It’s as if you told a revolutionary during the French revolution “You used weapons that you looted from the Bastille, weapons that were produced by the king.”. What exactly would be the argument here?

the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”

Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don’t want their ads getting related to “controversial” content.

Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.

This is the reason why I don’t like equating socialism with “workers owning the means of production”. Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).

When leftists say “workers”, they generally mean “the 99%” or “the working class”, not individual workers. When leftists say “the means of production”, they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.

If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.

We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.

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Yeah I’m not sure why it’s nowadays common to simplify socialism as “workers owning the means of production”. It’s not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.

A company being owned by it’s employees is not necessarily “socialism”. In today’s global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don’t orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.

Traditionally, when socialists talk about “workers owning/seizing the means of production”, they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.

Workers means “the working class”, which would be pretty much everyone (“the 99%”). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.

What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.

Hasn’t the French police (or law enforcment) been killing citizens since before America was colonised?

I probably can’t help you since I assume you are not from the same country as me. I would recommend that you use a more or less local service, but in order for us to give good recommendations, you will probably have to tell us where you are located.

Yeah that is indeed true unfortunately. I think small communities will be around eventually, it just takes time.

Did you even bother to read the sidebar and rules before you joined lemmy.world?

Lemmy.world doesn’t allow for discrimination, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. It doesn’t even allow for name calling and requires posts with controversial topics to declare that it is a controversial topic… In other words, most lemmy servers, especially the lemmy server you have chosen to join, have much stricter moderation rules than reddit, twitter, etc…

If you don’t want “snowflake crap”, you should probably join another instance, or host your own server where you make the rules… And you are free to do so, but demanding that a server, which you don’t own and have no control over, panders to your specific wishes seems a bit entitled…

One could even say that your attitude seems a bit “snow-flaky”…

You are only going to see how truthful the platform is when the owners get a court demand or law enforcement at their doors.

Wait, so you expect a site admin to openly resist a court order and/or law enforcement when illegal activity takes place? And what does that have to do with “honesty”? There is a reason why servers like this have rules such as “don’t request or link to specific pirated titles”. It’s because they don’t want to get in trouble with the law… And for good reason, they aren’t superman after all, they cannot fight the law…

And surely we can agree that there are cases where providing law enforcement with information on illegal activity is not only the legal thing to do, but also the moral thing to do.

Yep, anytime anyone accesses anything on the internet, there are certain privacy concerns to be had. They are generally not an issue if you aren’t being reckless, but there is still always a risk.

If you are worried about anyone knowing your IP, the only way to avoid that is to not access the internet at all. The IP address is the address which is used to send you data, which is a necessity if you want to access anything. When you access a website for example, you are asking the web server to send you a webpage which you then see on your screen, otherwise you could not see it. In order for the server to send you that webpage, it needs your IP.

It’s as if you asked “If I order a package online, do they know my address?”. Well yes, they have to know your address, otherwise they cannot send you the package.

building trust with a host.

This is indeed one of the risks with lemmy and other federated, decentralized and self-hosted services. Those services are generally hosted by hobbyists, not by companies, which seemingly makes it a bit harder to evaluate if you can trust a given server or not.

But it’s worth it to keep in mind that even though companies generally have a lot more resources to take care of security, there are still a lot of examples where they simply don’t do that, for example to cut cost. You also have no idea who works as an admin at “socialmediacompany x”. For example, there are a lot of admins working at twitter or reddit who you have never heard about (and never will hear about) who probably have access to your data.

And companies often just sell your data, an issue that you probably don’t have to worry with lemmy anytime soon (hopefully).

The way I deal with that and why I don’t worry very much about lemmy is to take care about what information I share. I don’t care that a server admin could theoretically find out which country I’m from through my IP. I don’t post sensitive information and I don’t send sensitive direct messages. I use throw away e-mail addresses. I also don’t plan on reading illegal content. And I don’t feel attached to a specific server/lemmy instance, I don’t care if my account is lost.