Left lemm.ee due to inconsistent federation policy allowing extremist instances like Eheads and Lgrad but not Threads.

moved to: @misk@sh.itjust.works (which also kind of sucked)

currently at: @misk@sopuli.xyz

  • 9 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Building complex systems involving humans is hard because humans are flawed. The best thing we’ve come up so far are systems involving extensive checks and balances to prevent thing happening too rapidly and without necessary oversight and even then it’s a tricky part to balance.

    For the record, I’m not for entirely cashless society but organisations that are cash heavy have proven to be source of many headaches. There is a balance to be found on thresholds and barring some types of businesses from using cash and where digital money transfer is required. Banks and other money transfer entities will have to deal with scenarios where malicious parties will try to obfuscate their intent outside of those thresholds.


  • This is all technically true but cash is not the answer.

    Right now there are so many easily accessible ways for governments to spy on people (cell phone geolocation, call metadata monitoring) that I’m not sure that for the purposes you think of you aren’t screwed already anyway. From this perspective fight for cash use becomes a bit theoretical.

    The only people that I know of personally that are strongly for cash are either people that frequently skirt around taxes (“minor” stuff like car repair shops) and unfortunately conspiracy nuts. Genuine privacy oriented people exist but realistically the majority will be there for selfish reasons.

    The societal cost of tax evasion, money laundering and financing organisations that legally require transparency (political orgs, NGOs etc) are massive and immediate.

    What we really need is strong oversight of institutions, government transparency, rule of law and healthy democracy. Those are the things you want to enshrine in your constitution.






  • I wouldn’t reinvent the wheel and borrow r/Europe rules as a starting point.

    Maybe do a little bit more proactive moderation to that community. r/Europe threads could sometimes go off the rails and had cleanup many hours later - I think it’s OK to lock down before that happens (is locking posts a thing on Lemmy?).

    Another approach is to keep rules simple and do a complete philosophy and rule walkthrough separately. I penned this monstrosity for polish subreddit back in the day (linking to archived version since I left since then and it got some meh updates in the meantime).

    Yet another approach is to have a philosophy page like Tildes does. It’s clear enough that you disallow assholery and bigotry but community like this definitely needs submission rules on top anyway.


  • That’s surprising given how close you are to recreational use legalization. Here in Poland MM is legal but we don’t have any producers and get fair chunk from Germany (Aurora Deutschland, 420 Pharma).

    At the same time medical marijuana business got so silly that you basically go to a website, fill out a form, pay ~€20 fee and get an e-prescription in a couple of hours. There’s been some ineffective attempts at cracking down on it in the past weeks that resulted in slight fee increase.












  • Back in the day, like many people then, I had a couple of different accounts across multiple messaging platforms. 2 domestic ones, couple of international ones. It was a fun mess but people were tired of running multiple apps and so loads of multi-protocol apps were developed.

    Usually messaging protocols were simply reverse engineered and some apps also used plug-ins so that niche protocols could be added by community. Some also did gateways that translated proprietary protocols to XMPP.

    By the end of that era many platforms opened themselves up with XMPP. It was nice because most of those multi-protocol apps didn’t have to support as many different platforms explicitly.

    But that’s about it. I had a Google Talk account too and found it cute that I can use it to add my friends on other platforms. I was a nerdbut barely knew any other people that were utilizing it. Realistically it didn’t make any difference because you still had to use multi-protocol app for the ones that didn’t open.

    Soon platforms that were never on or barely on XMPP started to take over. Messenger was the biggest in my country and it was always a PITA on third party apps.

    Google Talk doing a rug pull on XMPP didn’t to anything meaningful to XMPP itself. It was never that big and simply remains a niche to this day.

    I too get an impression that a single article on XMPP Gtalk drama made round on Fediverse that many made their opinion solely on it.


  • So many knee-jerk reactions.

    This is an open protocol with complete freedom to create apps and scripts. If this becomes an issue users could block certain interactions in a granular manner, for example block replies from certain instances.

    XMPP being thrown around as an example makes me think people who do it weren’t there to witness it. XMPP by itself wasn’t really used by many but there were also many more popular messaging platforms at the time. XMPP wasn’t killed because it wasn’t ever alive other than short golden era when it was mostly a way to open itself to third party clients (Gaim, Trillian, Adium etc) which was very nice.

    Next year EU is going to make all tech giants open in this way again. Mastodon can EEE Threads too by being a better implementation. It has no commercial pressure and Activity Pub and formatting tweets is not as complex as a web browser engine or a word processor document format which are way better examples of successful EEE.

    If you defederate you’ll end up exactly where XMPP is.




  • I knew this part would ruffle some feathers since whomever is reading it here is probably on board with Lemmy/Kbin.

    I do think that for many it’s too early but there’s now significant interest into making everything a bit more stable and streamlined. I think Mastodon is already there but it is suffering from bad rep from their own waves of migration. I’m a bit worried it’ll be the same for Lemmy.