tal @ tal @kbin.social

Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbi

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2 yr. ago

Yelling at Amoco or BP makes no sense.

Those are oil companies. They operate within the bounds set out for them. If there is an externality present, some kind of positive or negative effect not captured in the market price of what they're selling -- say, that burning oil produces carbon dioxide -- it's not the job of the company to address that, but of market regulators. If a company did refrain from extraction, another company would just step in -- a competitive market specifically should not allow any one company to withhold a resource from the market; a company that did that would have monopoly power. As it stands, market regulators have a market says that companies should extract oil, so that's what they're doing.

If sale of oil doesn't incorporate the cost of carbon emissions, or if oil shouldn't be sold at all, that's an issue for the regulators.

A company getting yelled at is going to make some polite noises and brush complaining people off, not because they're not doing their job, but because restricting global oil consumption is not their job.

You want to complain at someone, complain at market regulators, because they're the ones that are responsible for taking into account said externalities, not the companies that operate in those markets.

You'd yell at a company if the company were breaking the laws that have been put in place for it, or something like that -- if BP were smuggling black-market oil or something, then that's an issue with BP. But as things stand, they're acting as the system intends.

I'd say that Reddit's been pretty reliable for some years.

When they were scaling up, there were points where it was a lot flakier.

I think that that part of it was more testing before stuff went to production. Also, they have a lot of publicly-visible monitoring stuff now that didn't exist when it was young, and I'm pretty sure that they have someone who gets notified immediately if one of various things breaks, since they started putting up a message quickly when something broke with a quick summary and giving an ETA on a fix; their time to get stuff fixed also fell off. The early days, I remember things not infrequently breaking for a day or so.

If you search on either a lemmy or kbin instances, it should be able to find comments/threads on communities/magazines on Threadiverse (lemmy/kbin) instances that (a) are federated and either are local to the instance or (b) have a local user who subscribes to the community/magazine in question.

Neither will typically search the entire Threadiverse, because they only search content that they have a copy of locally, and no one server intrinsically gets a copy of all content on the Threadiverse.

I don't know how kbin deals with searching for comments off Mastodon. That's a good question. You can set a magazine to include comments with given hashtags, and I am wondering if basically it sees the content on local magazines or remote magazines with the same rule above as having a local user who subscribes to such a magazine.

I mean, that visualizes the changes, but what I'm saying is that I think that it'd be possible to go further with collaborative art than having a one-pixel-per-person cooldown.

There is a legit UI issue on kbin right now that it doesn't make the magazine and instance name super-visible in the mobile web page, much less the description. You need to look in the URL (which some people have their browsers set to not keep visible, to complicate matters) or at the bottom of the page, which you don't see until you've gone through the comments. And you don't see an instance description.

I strongly suspect that this has led to at least one interaction I've seen, where someone was complaining about furries on pawb.org. Probably had no idea that they were on a community on a furry instance.

For example, I might self host a server just for my account but I read all my content from lemmy.world. Am I not using their bandwidth and their resources anyway?

Well, it'd use your CPU to generate the webpages that you view. But, yeah, it'd need to transfer anything that you subscribe to to your system via federation (though the federation stuff may be "lower priority" -- I don't know how lemmy and kbin deal with transferring data to federated servers rather than requests from users directly browsing them at the moment, but at least in theory, serving the user browsing directly has to have a higher priority to be usable).

But what would be more ideal -- and people are going to have to find out what the scaling issues are with hard measurements, but this is probably a pretty reasonable guess -- is to have a number of instances, with multiple users on each. Then, once lemmy.world transfers a given post or comment once via federation, that other instance stores it and can serve up the webpages and content to all of the users registered on that other instance.

If you spread out the communities, too, then it also spreads out the bandwidth required to propagate each post.

As it stands, at least on kbin (and I assume lemmy), images don't transfer via federation, though, so they're an exception -- if you're attaching a bunch of images to your comments, only one instance is serving them. My guess is that that may wind up producing scaling problems too, and I am not at all sure that all lemmy or kbin servers are going to be able to do image-hosting, at least in this fashion.

Most of the early discussion I recall on Reddit was around programming languages. Some startup stuff. Was probably partly the Reddit team themselves posting stuff they were interested in, and partly intake from Slashdot -- I found Reddit from Slashdot -- and Slashdot had a tech bent.

Here's an early snapshot of Reddit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051202065421/http://reddit.com/

I also think that a factor is that people who can host their own instance are particularly interested, because you can't do that at all on Reddit and the Threadiverse suddenly lets you do that. For them, it's not just "Reddit is doing something that I don't like", but "the Threadiverse has the network structure that I wish Reddit did". That'll slew towards techies. Like,

The sheriff said the homeowners then disarmed the suspect, who was later identified as 62-year-old James F. Garrett of Seneca, and held him until deputies arrived.

I don't normally expect to hear about burglars in their 60s.

There isn't a desktop app that they want to send you to, but there is a mobile app.

You can enable desktop mode in your browser or, as someone pointed out, stick ".i" onto the very end of the URL.

Or just don't go. I mean, there are whole communities on the Thrediverse where you can creatively complain about Reddit. Not like one has to go to Reddit to find upset people doing that.

Kbin does image-hosting when you attach an image to a comment, and I assume that Lemmy does too. I don't know if either has size restrictions (though if they don't, I assume that they're going to have to have some level of constraints to avoid abuse).

I have never subscribed to any video service where the service provider knows what I'm watching and has my financial data. The last service I got was (traditional, no provider-provided box) cable video service, about fifteen years back. All the provider knows there is that I got the basic cable package.

The closest I ever came was being in the random sample for a Nielson Ratings poll, which I did not respond to (and in any event, I am sure that they do not profile individuals, because their sample is too small to make doing so worthwhile).

I remember, as a kid, once going to a Buddhist sand-painting exhibition at an art museum. They made these huge, beautiful mandalas by carefully shaking colored sand into designs. When they were done, they dumped it out into the ocean. I remember -- being pretty impressed with it -- asking something like "but why would you destroy it", and the Buddhist monk guy said something like "it reminds us not to be too attached to material things".

Don't know if I agreed with the guy, but I think that there is probably a very real perspective out there that ephemerality has intrinsic value.

Japan has on the order of a 99.9% conviction rate, which a number of people would say is problematic itself.

I don't know what his argument is, but Stross's account seems to be @cstross.

yt-dlp. Just "yt" rather than "youtube".

youtube-dl is an ancestor program of yt-dlp.

In fairness, the amount of YT that I watch on TV/iPhone makes it worth the cost

Yeah, my take was "the good I get out of YouTube is worth that, so if I'm in a situation where I need to pay that, I'd pay it".

For me what I don't like is that I haven't seen anything about Google not using it to profile me. If I get an account with Google, pay them, then they have not just the usage data, but it linked to financial data, which makes it a lot easier for them to build a profile. And that I don't want.

Google provides some good services, and they are services that I'd be willing to pay for, but I don't want to be paying the bill and having Google building a profile on me. Maybe some people don't care about that, but I do.

Hell, even if Google were to say "we won't profile you", I'd have no way of knowing that they wouldn't change their policy in the future.

I use yt-dlp to pull down YouTube videos, and have ad blockers on my web browser (I didn't actually realize that YouTube even had ads until what was apparently years until after they'd rolled out, was stunned when I used someone else's computer).

However, I would assume that if a significant chunk of people go that way and YouTube decides that they're losing out on sufficient ad revenue and/or profiling data doing this, that they're going to start blocking those. I would guess that they can make life unworkably difficult for any third-party clients connecting to their service if they put their minds to it.

YouTube probably doesn't care about SponsorBlock, because they aren't getting a piece of that money. Heck, they probably benefit if it encourages advertisers to go through YouTube rather than content creators on YouTube. But the profiling and the YouTube-displayed ads are probably something that they are going to care about, if push comes to shove and the impact on their bottom line is large enough.

And one more point -- I can believe that the Threadiverse could potentially displace Reddit. Usenet was distributed and was once the norm for Internet forums, and something like that could be the situation again.

But the bandwidth costs of videos are a lot higher than the bandwidth costs of forum text. I am not convinced that PeerTube or something like that will necessarily work at the scale of replacing YouTube. At the least, it's going to be a rather larger chunk of money that has to come from somewhere than is the situation with forums. Someone is going to have to be writing checks, at the end of the day. Maybe it doesn't have to be via watching ads or users getting profiled, but the money's gotta be coming out of someone's pocket.

YouTube also has some of its content creators putting material up to be paid. Reddit doesn't -- well, didn't, as it looks like now they're exploring that -- have that commercial model, where they try to pay people who create content. For YouTube content where the creator is doing it with the aim of generating income, any hypothetical YouTube replacement would need to generate money to cover not just bandwidth costs, but also paying content creators.

It looks like people have created /r/place alternatives. If you like /r/place, could just use one of those and go draw something neat and popularize that. I don't really see what drawing a bunch of images complaining about spez using the service that spez runs is going to accomplish. On the other hand, if people are doing neat things elsewhere, then other people might want to participate.

https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/64zlnw/aneasyguideforrplacealternatives/

That was six years ago, so could be newer stuff out.

I can't speak as to why other people use their alternatives, but if you use mpv with yt-dlp like the guy above, and which I do -- which isn't really a full replacement for YouTube, just for part of it -- then you can use stuff like deblocking, interpolating, deinterlacing filters, hardware decoding, etc. Lets me use my own keybindings to move around and such. Seeking happens instantly, without rebuffering time.

Also means that your bandwidth isn't a constraint on the resolution you use, since you aren't streaming the content as you watch, though also means that you need to wait for the thing to download until you watch it.

There, one is talking about the difference between streaming and watching a local video, and that mpv is a considerably more-powerful and better-performing video player than YouTube's client is.

I generally do it when I run into a long video or a series of videos that I know I'm going to want to probably watch.

EDIT: It also looks, from this test video, like YouTube's web client doesn't have functioning vsync on my system, so I get tearing, whereas mpv does not have that issue. That being said, I'm using a new video card, and it's possible that there's a way to eliminate that in-browser, and it's possible that someone else's system may not run into that -- I'm not using a compositor, which is somewhat unusual these days.