ciferecaNinjo

@ ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io

Posts

72
Comments

225
Joined

3 yr. ago

Moderating

Brussels⚜ fedia.io

2y ago

Fedia.io instability
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1

ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago
Thanks!
Apparently it’s not as reproduceable as I thought. I was just now able to render my profile before logging in.

2y ago

Fedia.io instability

I noticed that when I visit my profile page (https://fedia.io/u/ciferecaNinjo) while logged out, I get a 504 gateway error, but if I login then my profile page renders fine. It has been this way the past few days. If I view my profile from a logged-out browser while logged in in another browser, the logged out browser sees the profile fine. So to reproduce it would be interesting to visit anyone’s profile who is logged out.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.

On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.

I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.

Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

Suppose an instance has these users:

Victor who uses a VPN
Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
Terry who uses a Tor
Norm who uses the normal clearnet
Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to !travelpics@exclusivenode.com. Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

tl;dr:

Lemmy ← shit show for years
(mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
piefed ← never heard of it

I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.

mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.

The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.

Cloudflare filters lacking

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

2y ago

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)

2y ago

Barcelona is banning Airbnbs. Other European cities have cracked down already — with some success.

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions -- which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.

¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.

2y ago

403 forbidden when DMing

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

It works. Thanks!

2y ago

weird artifact in my timeline showing the same thread twice, but with different vote counts

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Visiting Sopuli directly shows that the post is a crosspost of itself. I guess a developer on the project must love recursion.

2y ago

weird artifact in my timeline showing the same thread twice, but with different vote counts

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Even weirder is this post itself. I posted this photo thread once, but two posts appeared in fedia discussions. I then opted to delete one of them, and the delete action on one deleted both of them. So I reposted again using the “add new photo” option, and again it created two threads.

The post in the snapshot was a case where I posted in https://fedia.io/m/Brussels and then posted a link to that thread from a sopuli community. The duplication in that case is apparently due to another anomaly. Or perhaps not.

(edit) interesting to note as well that this comment was not duplicated. So there is a parallel universe but without the contents therein being mirrored.

Also noteworthy: after deleting the thread it became non-existent to me, so I had no way to undelete it. Which means I had to re-upload the image to recreate the thread. Lemmy does better on this.. when you delete your own Lemmy thread, you can still undelete it.

2y ago

Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

What do you say? Am I too lazy or it is unpractical to stay away from big tech?

Laziness is what the surveillance advertisers are exploiting. It is everyone’s duty to resist the tyranny of convenience that Tim Wu articulates in a famous essay.

After a year I'm starting to think that maybe my data is not worth the hassle just to keep big tech out of my digital life.. I guess Big Brother wins

Think of it as boycotting. Exposure of your personal data may not be worth the effort of protecting it, but the big picture is that privacy seekers are not just looking for confidentiality. Privacy is about power and agency. You are exercising your right to boycott a harmful entity. Boycotts are no longer simply a matter of not handing money over, because data is worth money. So boycotting now entails not handing your data over. Giving Google your data feeds Google’s profits.

So you are really asking, “should I give up the boycott”? The answer is no, because the boycott is not just a duty to yourself; it’s a duty everyone benefits from (except Google).

2y ago

Degoogling my phoone - Feeling like is too much trouble for the privacy

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Cloudflare is not at all sensible from a privacy standpoint. Cloudflare is a bigger privacy offender than Google and far more detrimental to our rights.

https://git.kescher.at/dCF/deCloudflare/src/branch/master/subfiles/rapsheet.cloudflare.md

Reverse proxying your website through Cloudflare is actually an attack on privacy. You make yourself part of the problem by arbitrarily blocking several demographics of people from your website including Tor and VPN users (people doing their part to retain privacy).

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

2y ago

What is your favorite Scandinavian country?

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

I’ve only been to Denmark but certainly concur with voting Denmark last.

society is designed to render people without a CPR № dysfuctional
- could not check out a library book without CPR №
- could not make a photo copy without CPR №
- could not open a bank acct without CPR № (bank falsely advertised to expats the possibility to process paperwork before even arriving)
- could not get student rate on trains until the CPR № was granted. Took a month to get the number, the clock of which only started ticking after finding a seemingly legitimate place to live. Not counting time sleeping in a classroom. No way to get the train fare difference back retroactively.
society is designed to render people without a bank account dysfuctional
- many restaraunts refuse service to cash payers, including university campus snack shops
- university events required electronic payments (someone has to use their personal bank acct to let cash payers participate)
- someone could not simply do laundry
university e-mail outsourced to Microsoft, forcing everyone on campus to share their school-related email with a US surveillance capitalist
university itself used Facebook to announce events, thus excluding those who do not use FB
university forced 2FA on some academic resources, which then required SMS (thus denying students without a mobile phone or the will to share their number access to school resources)
university outsourced e-book service to a Cloudflare service (Proquest), who then blocks access to some demographics of people
banks themselves are cashless. If your ATM card fails because of some persnickety paperwork issue, you have no money access unless you visit a branch during opening hours, at which point a banker actually has to walk down the street to an ATM with you, carrying a special internal ATM card. So getting your own money out of your bank account is comparable to asking dad for money.
banks app can receive inbound international money, but cannot send outbound international transfers (only domestic)
housing crisis: the waiting list for an apartment is years; had to sleep illegally in a classroom and dodge night guards, or deal with lots of dodgy landlords exploiting the crisis. Had a landlord who was illegally subletting, who demanded cash payment (fine) but then refused to give a receipt.
severe shortage of on-campus dorms. Just enough to house foreign exchange students. All “dorms” for locals are scattered in private apartments. Getting one close to campus is a competition.
was denied a CPR № because the dwelling had more people than officially allowed on paper, despite some of the officially known people not actually living there.
expected this country with the world’s highest degree of income equality to be quite liberal, but the people & culture were ironically conservative. No concept of privacy.
cycling actually sucks. You might expect it to be the best place in the world for cycling, but the cycle paths are so popular they are like driving on a highway. Overcrowded. If you cruise along slowly a bicycle traffic jam becomes possible. Car driving stresses are there on the high traffic cycling lanes.

That’s just off the top of my head. The nannying is endless.

Can anyone confirm or deny whether many of these issues are replicated among Denmark’s neighbors?

2y ago

[answered] Electricity prices are more than double gas prices in Belgium (so why do Belgians overwhelmingly favor electric ovens?)

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Luckily you don’t need to burn uranium to avoid 5 steps of energy transformation.

2y ago

[answered] Electricity prices are more than double gas prices in Belgium (so why do Belgians overwhelmingly favor electric ovens?)

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

No you haven't. Read your own source. Hint: biogas

biogas was used in 2009, not in 2020 when the stats were collected. Nor would it matter if it were still used. Hint: it would be an increase on the 80%.

recall: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

Also, nuclear fuel is not gas, so this speaks for electric stoves, silly.

That’s fuel. That’s in the 80%.

again: fuel energy → heat energy→ steam → turbine → transmission → heat energy

2y ago

[answered] Electricity prices are more than double gas prices in Belgium (so why do Belgians overwhelmingly favor electric ovens?)

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ciferecaNinjo @fedia.io 2y ago

Ignoring other renewables

I have accounted for all the renewables mentioned in the linked wikipedia page, which covers sources as insignificant as hydro (<1%). What else is there? Have you thought about updating wikipedia with whatever you think is missing?

Ignoring French nuclear imports

That would only increase the proportion of fuel energy even more, which only works against your botched claim. If you want to count French nuclear, then the portion of solar, wind, and hydro is proportionally even less. Brussels currently has a nuclear power plant inside the region. Why do you think it would it be sensible to transmit over such distance? That would introduce even more substantial inefficiency in the transmission.

Ignoring current state but talking about possible future plans

The status quo only has 1 year left on it. And nuclear power still has the same stages of energy transition loss you’ve failed to debunk. What’s the point? Your claim is nonsense either way.