While I agree that user-generated reddit topics are best left to a dedicated community, I also think that published articles discussing the platform are appropriate for any Technology community; no different than Twitter, Threads, or other social media platform news coverage.
Exactly, text editors are such everyday staples and yet it's easy to take for granted that they are open source. Vim is often the first package I install on new systems when not already present and, outside of my web browser, is certainly the program I use most.
On that note, I'll add Markor to my favourites list. It's absolutely the best Android markdown editor/viewer I've found to date, and it works beautifully with Syncthing folders.
I havent't read the article yet, but I hope they fixed the subpar rendering for general use, because Bierstadt looked terrible in general desktop apps. In fact, none of the proposed typefaces rendered well under native Windows ClearType.
So many to choose from...Linux, Syncthing, Vim, Firefox and Thunderbird/K-9 Mail, Keepass and derivatives, GrapheneOS, Inkscape, VLC/mpv, yt-dlp...there are just too many daily drivers to name them all.
Congrats, I think I'm at about 16 years now myself. I can't quite recall where I was when I first tried SUSE and Red Hat casually. It wasn't until I discovered Arch in 2006/2007 that things really took off.
Edit: I clearly can't math today...guess I'm a bit closer to 20 years myself.
Finally! This is the first instance I've seen of any government participation. I hope Canada jumps on board soon, even if in a limited capacity. It makes so much more sense for a public agency to use a public platform, particularly when it can have domain over its own instance.
The follower-only limitation is likely by design. They don't want you to see only those you're interested in because it limits advertising power. This platform is almost entirely geared for selling things to its users.
You aren't wrong. There were also plenty of software-related mailing lists back in the day where folks used their real names regularly. And even if someone did go by a handle, their real name was often known anyway.
For me, it came down to contributing to open source projects in a meaningful or professional capacity. Commits and correspondence generally contain identifiable contact information, and if you have a professional website or email address using your real name then it's only a matter of time before the two worlds collide.
As a result, I stopped using aliases for most things in the early 2000s. For Steam and other gaming platforms, sure, but for social media, it's just plain old me.
Glad to hear I'm not totally off the mark. I wonder then if instance-to-instance transactions would cause less overall congestion than local user traffic in such cases.
For example, if there are 25,000 users spread across 5 instances (with some overlap in community participation), would the instance-to-instance transactions needed to facilitate these users result in less of a performance hit than having all 25,000 users on the same instance? I don't know nearly enough about databases to make an educated guess.
I believe that your own instance pulls the feed from the other instance, so you're not actually browsing that other instance directly. If other users on your local instance are also subscribed to that particular community, then your local instance is already syncing the feed. Essentially, I believe that each federated instance replicates a copy of the other instances' communities, if and when those communities are requested or subscribed to by a user on the local instance. Hope that makes sense, and if anyone has a better (or more accurate) explanation, please feel free to correct me.
As others have said, de-federation should really be the last resort for the most egregious of actions. The bot serves a well-intended purpose, even if it's something I would never use.
What if the bot was hosted at .ml or .world? Would de-federation even be on the table?
My vote would be to leave it up to the users for now, though I don't fully understand what, if any, performance impact the bot account might have on other instances. Is traffic from that instance excessive? If performance was a factor, then at most I would vote to ban the bot account until the platform has more options to manage such things.
I'm glad to see you've gotten a ton of feedback here, and I just wanted to add another comment in support of flatpaks and image-based computing. I've been using Linux extensively for about 15 years now, mostly Arch and Debian Sid. I've been a distro packager, and I've compiled plenty of my own apps over the years.
This past year I took Fedora Silverblue for a spin after following the project for quite some time, and I am convinced that the image-based system approach, coupled with containerized and sandboxed userspace applications, is the future of Linux for most users. It makes so much sense from nearly all perspectives; whether security, reliability, or flexibility.
Integral parts of the system are mounted read-only by default. Simple commands can rollback unwanted changes, upgrade to a new distro release, or even sideload an entirely different OS. System updates are automated, as are flatpak updates, and there is little-to-no risk to stability due to the very nature of the essentials-only system images. And if something catastrophic did happen, you're just a reboot away from rolling it back.
Consider for a moment the collective energy and time that distro package maintainers must undertake on a weekly basis. Much of it simply repeated by each distro, building the same applications over and over again. Flatpaks are built once and deployed everywhere. Think of the collective potential that could be directed elsewhere.
Couple this with containers and the choice of distro matters even less. Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora are just a keystroke away. Yes, you can run containers on any distro of course, but you don't gain any of the other ostree benefits mentioned above.
I have since moved all of my workstations to Silverblue and I don't see myself ever going back to a traditional system again. If anything, I may start automating my own image deployments, similar to Universal Blue.
Yes, flatpak as a platform still needs some work, and so does ostree, but both are evolving quickly and will only get better with time.
To others who complain about needing Flatseal...in my opinion, this is a feature to be embraced, not loathed. Sane defaults are rarely sane for everyone, and Flatseal exists to give you complete control over what an app can or cannot see and do.
The specific steps will depend on your browser, but it's usually under something like Settings > Privacy and Security. Look for 'clear cookies' or 'clear website data', etc. When you click on it, ensure it is set to clear from All Time instead of just today, etc. Note, this will likely clear all cookies for all sites, so you'll need to login again to all of your usual sites.
Voted C. It's by far the most robust option. It looks stylish, professional, and could easily accommodate a flat, 1-color design.