schnurrito @ schnurrito @discuss.tchncs.de

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2 yr. ago

Yes, but then you can have malicious servers sending fake numbers without other server operators being able to check whether this is at all plausible.

(It's still possible for malicious servers to send fake votes, but server operators can see which users they are stated to originate from, then block that server if that looks like it's doing that. At least that is my understanding.)

Yes, after all other servers need this information in order to prevent double voting, you can't just have servers sending each other information "somebody upvoted this" and also tell when servers are allowing users to vote more than once.

So upvotes and downvotes aren't actually private, never have been, some servers may display them publicly even if most don't.

absolutely, e.g. right now

No, although XMPP is similarly federated to the fediverse. If by fediverse you mean ActivityPub, then XMPP and IRC are both much older than AP.

and is saying that it somehow means Facebook owns it

owns what?

It does mean that Facebook owns the copyright to a software component that TikTok (apparently) also uses. They licensed it under a free and open source software license, so anybody (including TikTok, including you, including me) can download it and use it as part of their own software. It does not mean Facebook owns TikTok, nor that Facebook owns any other piece of software this is used in.

If you want to see more examples of similar notices: if you are using Firefox, enter about:license into your URL bar. If you are using Chrome, enter chrome://credits/ there. You'll find that these browsers, like many pieces of software nowadays, rely heavily on open source components developed by third parties.

I used to read RSS feeds from Thunderbird a long time ago, but that required me to set them up again on every reinstallation and every device, so I eventually stopped doing that.

Nowadays I read RSS feeds on Mastodon. There's a service https://rss-parrot.net/ that converts any RSS feed into a fediverse account, so you get RSS feed updates into your feed along with everything else you follow there. Of course it would be even better if blogs and news sites just posted directly on the fediverse, but not all of them do.

inb4 Iceweasel

Most things are in German, but if something isn't translated to German yet or I can't be bothered to change it from English, it doesn't bother me much to use it in English either.

This has also been the narrative on recent techdirt.com posts, e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/13/at-last-doge-and-musk-are-finally-named-in-a-lawsuit-albeit-officially/ - I (not being American) do not know or care enough about the topic to have an opinion about it.

nothing at all is universally "blocked on Lemmy", different instances + communities set rules that apply there, that is kinda the point of it all...

If you think this is a good idea for a specific community, ask its moderators to create and enforce a rule for this, or create a community of your own where you can set any rules you like.

I only comment when I feel I am adding something to the conversation that nobody else has added. On many contentious topics, nearly everything that can be said has already been said by someone, so I usually don't comment on them.

I only downvote when something is blatantly factually false or posted in bad faith (i.e. obviously trolling and I can't think of a good-faith reason why someone would post this).

If I merely disagree with something, I write an answer explaining why, or if there already is one that I agree with, I upvote that.

One major change that has happened is: forums used to be linear with thread bumping (phpBB, SMF), now they are mostly conversation trees with sorting by upvotes or similar (Reddit, Lemmy).

Some people might still be subscribed to it, so you will reach an audience. I never check whether moderators are active before posting.

My understanding is instance admins can change moderators, so depends on the instance the community is hosted on.

Why would you not want to post there?

The world overall has changed.

Copyright used to be one of the main threats to a free and open Internet that empowered people to communicate freely, to a digital society overall.

Now the "digital society" is very much something that's been realized and isn't going away any time soon, meanwhile there are other threats to the free and open Internet from all sides of the political spectrum, such as: age verification laws, attempts to censor "hate" and "misinformation", bans on specific platforms (TikTok) etc. etc. etc. This has distracted people from copyright, everybody seems to have now accepted the fact that copyright will mainly be enforced by DRM and if the DRM is broken, there's no effective way to stop the spread of information.

Literally anybody who thought about the idea for more than ten seconds already realized this a long time ago; apparently this blog post needed to be written for the people who didn't do even that...

probably, I remember something along those lines

Yes. Here's what it looks like for your example website on my end: