A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

Admin of SLRPNK.net

XMPP: prodigalfrog@slrpnk.net

Matrix: @prodigalfrog:matrix.org

  • 159 Posts
  • 409 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I would suggest that it is as complex as you wish to know.

    My explanation above is not truly required to effectively use a federated platform, in the same way that most email users don’t actually know how precisely email works, and would find an in-depth explanation of it very complex.

    All someone needs to know about email is that they must login to their email host provider, and that every user they might send email to has a unique name, and possibly a different host name after the @ symbol.

    In the same way, the only thing someone needs to know about this platform, is they must login to the same place they signed up to (their host provider). They can then use it in a similar way to reddit. They might wonder why usernames or communities have different names after the @, but it doesn’t actually impede using the platform to not understand.

    If anything, that might make it easier to use than email.


  • The workers were not paid what they generated in value, they were paid just enough to make them do the work reliably without leaving. The excess value they made went into growing the business and employing yet more workers, which increased the value of the business tremendously. At the end, all of that extra value went to Ben & Jerry at the sale, not the workers who made that transfer of wealth possible.

    Ben & Jerry did not personally contribute 325 million dollars worth of labor into the company, they decided to take that excess value for themselves.

    If hypothetically Ben & Jerry’s had been a worker owned coop from the start, if they had decided to sell it in 2000 for 325 million, that money would’ve been split amongst all of the workers fairly evenly, and all of them would’ve been made very wealthy from their collective labor, instead of only two people.





  • Lemmy is a software that people can host on their computer, and many people doing that form what is essentially a bunch of mini-reddits that can talk to each other to create one big platform.

    Piefed is trying to fulfill the same goals as Lemmy, and is even fully compatible with Lemmy, so someone hosting a piefed server on their computer can join in with all the Lemmy servers, and to the Lemmy people, it appears to them like any other Lemmy server.

    But underneath everything, the code base is entirely different. The commonality they share, along with mastodon, is they all use ActivityPub, which is the standard that allows them to all communicate and be compatible with each other, just like there’s an email standard.

    Kbin (now Mbin) is yet another Lemmy compatible software that you can host on your computer, but it also tried to implement features that make it more like mastodon (twitter-like), so it can act both like reddit, with threads and comments and communities around single subjects, or be like mastodon and work with hashtags and following individuals instead of communities, like a microblogging website.

    They also use different interfaces, but it’s only visible to people who directly use that server; to others who access it from their home server, it’ll adopt the look of the software their home server is using.

    So as an example, you are using Lemmy since your home server is Lemmy.ml. if you visit a community hosted on a piefed server from within your Lemmy, like !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social, it’ll look like any other Lemmy community.

    But if you directly go to that piefed server by going to https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube you’ll see it from the piefed interface, since you’re accessing that piefed server directly.

    All of three of the different federated Reddit-like softwares are intercompatible, so they all make up one big network.








  • Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

    I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

    Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

    EDIT: With more context provided by @artyom@piefed.social, this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)


  • To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

    1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
    2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
    3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
    4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

    But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

    1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
    2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
    3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
    4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
    5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.