TheTechnician27 @ TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come t

---

Read more

Posts

171

Comments

1,328

Joined

12 mo. ago

Nine times out of ten I hear people say "join Lemmy.World, it's the catch-all and de facto default instance". I honestly don't think I've seen people recommend Lemmy.ml unless they're already ideologically aligned with Marxism–Leninism; if anything, most people seem to expressly recommend people don't join Lemmy.ml for ideological and censorship reasons (edit: reasons I agree with and echo, to clarify).

Can I, though? Can I really trace it?

Didn't downvote you, and I do agree that "mixed economy" doesn't technically have a concrete meaning. I could've said "welfare state" as well. Here, "mixed" is generally understood to be somewhere near the middle-ish, however we define that. As you note, the US and Cuba lie on this spectrum but far to either side of it. So even though "all economies are mixed", the economies of the Nordic states are more mixed than most.

In general, I believe we agree that Norway and Denmark aren't "socialist".

Consider the following:

• nutomic and dessalines are human beings with finite monetary resources.
• These monetary resources are fungible.
• nutomic and dessalines pay money to run lemmy.ml.
• Thus, some of their finite monetary resources go to running lemmy.ml.
• Much of their finite monetary resources go to keeping themselves sheltered, alive, and presumably accommodated with some basic first-world niceties.
• They raise donations to spend time developing Lemmy because otherwise they would have to be employed either at all or more than they already are so they could continue to be sheltered and alive.
• Consequently, if the devs have literally any expenses that aren't staying alive for the express purpose of developing Lemmy, you're financing those too.

This isn't some scandal if you understand basic microeconomics. Inherently this is true unless nutomic or dessalines stop running lemmy.ml or find a way to run it off of dreams and unicorn farts. They're not "misappropriating funds" or whatever; the nature of funds is that they're fungible.

Edit: And it's not like in light of increased donations, they'd be taking the Lemmy development funds and using them to buy a schwanky new servertron 3000 with kung-fu grip for .ml. .ml was already open-registration, so it's not like it's possible for them to misappropriate development funds to open the floodgates and let thousands of new users in who were previously locked out. We can monitor how many users .ml has, and we can audit the software it's running.

Actually, Norway and Denmark represent what's typically called a mixed economy.

Personal anecdote: after going vegan a few years ago, a lot of criticisms of veganism I've seen have taught me that these kinds of holier-than-thou attacks of less-than-perfect action often come from people who don't want to take any action themselves.

Cognitive dissonance arises when they see people taking action feel good about what they're doing, and they suddenly feel deep down like they could be doing something wrong by not taking action. To resolve it, in lieu of taking action, they justify why they shouldn't, usually "well that's not literally perfect, so actually why should I do anything?" Meanwhile, the people taking the less-than-perfect action are even more painfully aware of its flaws but are putting in the work to do better than they would've been otherwise.

I use Lemmy despite these alternatives existing.

I contribute nothing in terms of development or money to these Lemmy alternatives or to Lemmy.

If ads have to come, I'll just use adblockers "like an adult" to the detriment of other users.

How is running ads on instances supposed to fuel development costs when everyone uses an adblocker? Who cares, fuck you.

Then I'm going to go out of my way to bitch and moan about people contributing to Lemmy's development so there's a corner of the Internet that isn't suffocated with corporate garbage.

$100 says you're only here because you got booted from Reddit for shitty behavior, not unfair treatment, the rampant enshittification, or a belief that FOSS or the Fediverse are better. Just donated another $10 to compensate for your "the 'F' in FOSS stands for freeloading" ass.

Entirely true, but as I said, it seems that a small proportion of whatever's donated goes to the server costs of .ml since it's run by Lemmy's maintainers. It's understandable and even a good thing to be put off by that.

Addressed this in an edited-in second paragraph. Answer is "unfortunately, you can't" unless you wish to fork Lemmy. But as someone who's sickened to my core by tankie ideas, I still think funding this piece of FOSS is by far the lesser evil, I think I make a compelling argument for it, and I do think the Lemmy team do good work on the software side.

If I can hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil, I need to follow that same principle when it's not just my vote I'm casting but where I'm putting my time and money.

Edit: I completely forgot that you could, in theory, try helping out on their GitHub if you have a background in CS. It won't pay for the developers' cost of living, but it could reduce the maintenance burden if you know what you're doing.

For those with decision paralysis, Liberapay is a great choice. They're a France-based non-profit which is itself run off of donations which it crowdfunds on its own platforn (pretty based tbh), and the site itself is FOSS.

Of some note unfortunately is that donations for development also go to the maintainer-run instance .ml – whose tankie position is to expressly deny genocides like the Holodomor and the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs by China – but the costs of development versus the costs of just running the server are completely disproportionate in favor of development. With that in mind, being ideologically purist here enables much greater evils, and I think Lemmy has easily given me more than this value: donated $20 (edit: upped to $30 for drama reasons).

Correct and not at the same time. I'll use Wikipedia as a source to hopefully show you that I'm in a position to understand some of the nuances.

1. Never, ever, ever cite Wikipedia in formal writing unless it's to cite some meta aspect of the project itself (such as "this article was 5879 words long as of 4 May 2025"). If you really do need to formally cite Wikipedia, always make sure to grab a permanent URL for the current revision.
2. If you already know a fact but just need it cited, look at the inline citation in the article, evaluate the source, and use it if it's to your liking.
3. You don't necessarily have to look at Wikipedia's sources at all if you don't want to. You can look at something stated on there then go out and try to find more in-depth information about it if we just cover it in a sentence or two with a shallow citation doing the bare minimum to support only what we say.
4. There are some subtle qualities to articles you only pick up on as an experienced editor, but here are some less vibes-based things: does the article have a little grey or blue padlock at the top right on desktop? Those are protection templates, and they prevent IPs and very new editors from changing the article. Is there a green circle or a bronze star at the top right on desktop? Those represent a good article and a featured article, respectively. A good article has been peer-reviewed by an experienced editor, and a featured article has been peer-reviewed by at least several highly experienced editors. These articles are routinely scrutinized to make sure they keep up their overall quality, and this status can be removed if they deteriorate.
5. Wikipedia legitimately has high standards for the information presented – way higher than when teachers were (absolutely correctly) panicking about students sourcing it in their writing. In 2012 – 13 years ago, when I would consider Wikipedia to have had much lower standards than it does today – it was found that its information about psychological disorders was of higher quality than Britannica and a psychiatry textbook. 2012 Wikipedia was still climbing its way out of the hole that Wikipedia stopped digging around 2006 when it implemented quality standards, and it's vastly better in 2025 than in 2012.
6. There's honestly nothing that wrong with using Wikipedia as a source in casual disputes over popular topics. For how many Mughal casualities there were in some obscure 1608 battle? Yeah, probably continue on to the source the article cites instead. For the date of JFK's assassination? Just take it at face value, to be honest. For something where you just want to give someone a casual overview of the topic? Really just link them to Wikipedia; it'll likely do a better job than you unless the subject is very underdeveloped there or unless you're a subject matter expert.
7. As for using Wikipedia as a source in your own private life when you just need to check something? In that case, just try to keep in mind your own level of familiarity with the subject, how obscure the subject is, how contentious the subject is, if the article overall looks well-cited or if it looks/sounds like someone just injected their own original research, if the inline source looks credible (this last one doesn't guarantee anything; if you want a guarantee, check the source yourself to ensure it says what Wikipedia says it does), if it's plausible that Wikipedia isn't showing the full context here, and if the consequences of an inaccurate understanding are worth risking.
8. If you see something on Wikipedia that's uncited or poorly cited, please either remove it or attempt to find a robust citation for it. It helps a lot.

Based The Conversation appreciator? On my Lemmy? It's more common than you'd think.

Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?

Because it's called "lifetime"? As in the entire point of the product is that it will not ever be taken away with the exception that you close your account? "Why pay for anything if there's nothing enforcing the core premise of the product?" The gardener advertised a "whole-yard mow" for $100, but I've already gotten the area around the driveway, and honestly would it really be that bad if they just stopped right now?

You can talk about odds all you want (although I think around $100 million in VC funding puts those odds squarely in favor of "lifetime" users getting the floor sawed out from under them Looney Tunes-style), but the fact it's even possible is what's deeply disturbing, because it's deliberate. Lifetime's meaning should be unambiguously stipulated in a contract, not inferred. Know why? Because companies out there advertising "lifetime" subscriptions right now have little disclaimers like "approximately five years or so but honestly we don't really know or care lol this license disappears whenever we want it to").

People are assuming it's for the lifetime of your Plex account, but my response is: based on fucking what? Plex on their website doesn't seem to specify this anywhere, even in their terms of service. People asking on their official forums receive responses saying things like "probably for the lifetime of your Plex account" with no sources to anything. I'm not trying to sealion here; I literally can't find a single instance of Plex stating officially in writing or verbally what "lifetime" actually means to the end user. If Plex isn't going to rugpull, why can't they add a couple sentences to their TOS saying something like: "The purchase of a lifetime pass grants the user a non-transferable license for [blah blah] starting from the date of purchase. This license will not be revoked unless 1) the associated account is terminated by the account holder or 2) the aasociated account is terminated by Plex for one or more of the reasons outlined in section [blah]"?

They could, they should, they don't, and you have no good explanation, otherwise you would've offered one by now. They have enough money to afford a legal team that wouldn't overlook that. The answer is that they want to reserve the right to destroy the "lifetime" pass whenever they want. If you can find official documentation from Plex Inc. saying that if I buy a lifetime pass today for $250, the license will only end with the termination of the account, then I'll have no idea why they make this too hard to find, but I'll take back everything else I said in this comment and stop using "lifetime" in scare quotes. I genuinely want to know if they say anything about this anywhere.

Another reason donating to FOSS is better than paying for proprietary software. Proprietary software devs get to run around stealing whatever code they like from the open-source community and never suffer any consequence because they don't make their source available. I can think of a select few proprietary projects that have the balls to be source-available.

If you want to intentionally create a system that lets you evade accountability for stealing code, "fine", but I have zero respect for you or your product, and I'm certainly not paying you a dime. I'll put my money toward the developers who work to better the world instead of the rat fucks who steal from them to make money and pollute the software ecosystem with proprietary trash.

You literally said you have Plex pass in the other comment, why are you playing dumb?

They care about the people who don't have a "lifetime" pass? Having empathy for others who don't have what you have, caring about the ethics of a company whose products you use and pay for, and taking a stance that software should be as free and open as possible aren't "playing dumb". If anything, as someone who isn't just using Plex for free, they've earned more of a right to complain, because they've shown they're willing to pay for quality services but think this one is exploitative.

Maybe even disregarding empathy, they're worried that existing features will become locked behind a tier that the "lifetime" pass doesn't apply to? Maybe they're worried that their "lifetime" pass won't be so "lifetime" if "lifetime" wasn't explicitly defined to mean lifetime at the time of purchase? Anything bad that can happen will happen with VC-fueled enshittification.

I also want to emphasize that relicensing from the GPLv2 to something proprietary is damn-near impossible for a project this large with a team who are so ideologically motivated to make FOSS. If I today submit a PR to the Jellyfin codebase, they can't legally relicense to a proprietary license without 1) getting my consent to give them ownership of my work (I'm not likely to be paid off or convinced it's a good thing that work I submitted for free is being enshittified), or 2) removing my work from the project if they can't get in touch with me or if I say no. To emphasize: this consent is affirmative.

Thus, the process is to survey who's contributed to the project, reach out to anyone whose work is still in the project (preferably in writing in a permanent, court-admissable format like email), ask them to transfer ownership of their copyright to you, keep track of who's said no, said yes, or not answered, fulfill conditions for anyone who wants something in return, and meticulously rip out all of the code from people who say "no" or don't answer. One of the project's major contributors died 10 years ago? Legally, too fucking bad: they didn't relinquish shit to you. Rip out that legacy code and start over.

Just like for instance if you want to take a Wikipedia article and own it for yourself, you can't just go ask the Wikimedia Foundation nicely. You have to contact every single contributor whose work is extant in that article, and rip out work that isn't explicitly given to you by its owner.

Some points as someone who does not use Tailscale:

• Tailscale the software is under a BSD license. Plex is proprietary.
• The discussion in this thread about Jellyfin is less corporate versus non-corporate (where in the context of proprietary software this would be payware versus freeware) and more FOSS versus proprietary software.
• To be clear, Tailscale is proudly doing the same Series C venture capital bullshit as Plex. They're seemingly just as corporate as Plex, but at minimum, the software as it exists right now isn't tied down to Tailscale.
• Additionally, this isn't Tailscale versus Plex; it's Jellyfin + Tailscale versus Plex.
• Jellyfin + Tailscale means that you're using Jellyfin, which is FOSS. Using FOSS doesn't just benefit you but also everyone else using it because it benefits greatly from the network effect. Any money that goes to Jellyfin that would've otherwise gone to Plex is given back to the community and hard-working developers rather than lining some soulless venture capitalist's pocket.
• With Jellyfin + Tailscale, everything you're using locally is FOSS. With Plex, none of it is. And even taking corporate into account, with Jellyfin + Tailscale, most of what you're using locally is non-corporate. With Plex, all of it is corporate.
• Tailscale is giving you a real service through use of their VPN. Because Plex is run on the end user's infrastructure and barely touches Plex's server for remote streaming, they're basically just making you pay them a "fuck you, that's why" subscription fee.

TL;DR: This isn't a binary "corporate versus non-corporate".

Dollars to donuts it's the corpo-fascist "tread on me harder, daddy" version of "freedom" they're advocating for.

Not quite. Jellyfin does take in donations, but they intentionally hide this feature on their website – first you need to go to their Contribute page, then you need to read "Find a way to contribute" blurb and notice and click Other, then you need to click Help Pay for Expenses, then they give you a speech practically asking you to reconsider:

As a project, we generally do not like asking for donations - we are entirely volunteer-run and intend to keep Jellyfin free as in beer, as well as free as in speech, forever. We do not wish, support, nor intend donations to privilege any user's voice or priorities. That said, if you do want to help us cover some operating expenses like our VPS hosting, domains, developer licenses, metadata API keys, and other incidental expenses, check out our OpenCollective page to donate. Our entire budget as well as all expenses are publicly visible there.

And then you have to click that link and intentionally donate money – any amount you want either one time or monthly. The level of integrity compared to Plex – who take in VC money hand over fist and are descending into nickel-and-diming their customers – isn't night-and-day: it's the surface of a star and the center of the Boötes Void.

same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of "openness". it's stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it's happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

"you could technically argue"??? That's literally, unambiguously the law. That's how the licensing works. This isn't a technicality; it's a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. That's how the license was designed to work. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we'll go with that.)

Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project (no matter how large): 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they've said no.

The fact that you called this process "stupid easy" for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I've heard today, and I'm not even wasting my time reading the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.