A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I'm usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn't always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I'm into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
Sorry, I'm a bit low on time right now, so I can't give it the attention it deserves. But from a quick glance... I like it. The user interface looks appealing and easy to understand. I didn't check if adding peers works on a tech level, but overall I think the design is right. It's probably straightforward enough for the average user to understand. I also like how there's links to documentation, explanations what it does and the ideas behind it. I think that's roughly what makes good software. Be genuine and honest to your userbase. Tell them what they can expect. Give them documentation to read more if they like. Otherwise make it as simple and straightforward as you can.
I mean I just thought I'd drop some ideas. Of course you do you. Seems you have a bigger vision. And we/I understand it's quite involved. You're doing a lot. All of that for some broader idea, and there's a lot of detail work to be done. I like talking about things like that and following what other people (who have some sort of vision) do. I see how it's a lot of work. And several things you're doing simultaneously.
There's good and bad tools out there? Most free internet services that pop up on the first page of Google are in fact rubbish. But that doesn't mean there's good ones. I once tried tools for detecting AI text for a different reason and there were one or two who didn't have any false positives with the 20-30 example texts I tried. Schools and universities have come to use the same tools. Seems they also look at how people are typing, that's pretty much 100% accurate, but people do both.
There's also crazy different approaches out there. Like looking at the probability distribution of the vocabulary and see if that matches ChatGPT. And it'll be a certain unique probability distribution since that's what ChatGPT is. It has to leave a fingerprint, since it's picking the words based on probability. And there's more good strategies. We have one or two open-source tools which demonstrate how it can be done without AI. There's of course also the option to train another AI model / classifier to figure out what constitutes AI text and what isn't. That also works.
Yeah, use Armbian. And Debian mainline and Arch Linux (ARM variant) run on the Cubietruck as well. Most of the stuff has been mainlined. I just can't get graphics acceleration working. Other than that you could just install any regular Linux distribution. If you're willing to put in the extra effort to deal with u-boot or whatever we use these days and the other effort involved to put Linux on an ARM computer. There's info on their Wikis. And https://linux-sunxi.org/ has some information as well. Most of the times general instructions for A20 boards apply.
Uh yeah. That is more information... Sorry, I'm not that familiar with Snaps. It looks to my untrained eye a bit like the report on the Snap itself, maybe it advertises to support running in strict confinement. Which it could... but doesn't do. (Alike the other channels, which you could install, but didn't... It's kind of buried with that kind of information.)
It's confusing at least. And the user definitely wouldn't expect it from that wording. So I'd view it as a separate bug as well. And dropping confinement without notice would be the third thing, I'd consider a bug.)
And @cinoreus@lemmy.world : Another democracy idea I recently wrote down somewhere, was the idea of German clubs / organizations I'm familiar with. That can be anything from a few people do sports once a week, maybe your boy scouts, or KDE e.V. or the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
That's a legal status. Comes with minimum standards. But I think one clever thing about it is how it tends to push democracy down to the members / people involved. Like: you have to come up with your individual statute, you're responsible to appoint your management board. And your highest body is the general assembly. The people in power are more in a role to execute what the organization wants. Specifics are down to what the members like to implement.
And the authorities don't care too much(?!). There's standards on how clubs have to operate. Like your group needs to follow a purpose and write it down. Simple majority rule for regular decisions in the general assembly, 75% majority votes to change the statute. But you do it as a community, you do your statute, assemblies, subgroups and elections and then you get to identify with it. Government doesn't hold your hands too much from my perspective. They'll read the statue and care if it meets the requirements. And later on they'll simply need to (occasionally) check whether your organization is up to their own statute. Especially once there's complaints. (And Germans love to complain, so you can be sure there will be feedback once something remotely goes wrong.)
And in practice, you'll get things like a regular general assembly. You can come as a member, listen to the board explain what they did, what issues they faced, what they spent your membership fee on... Maybe you're in a position to vote on something or elect the next board. Or give your opinion on whether you're alright with what your old board did. Sometimes you can send in ideas as a member and make people decide on it. And someone is going to write a summary so there's accountability for third parties in case they're interested.
My idea was to push people towards something more like a grassroots democracy. Maybe as an admin I don't care too much with making exact rules that fit for every community. Maybe democracy should be done and be alive / lived by the involved people themselves. That'll strengthen their group cohesion. And they need to live it anyway. Make them come up with an idea for a community along with goals and rules, the first board of moderators, signed by 7 people and off they go. After that you (as an admin) just check on them. See if they do general assemblies at regular intervals, if those meet your minimum democratic requirements. But other than that they get to live democracy and the community put in the work to make it happen. And what they have to do is send back some accountability to retain their status as a democratic entity.
(And depending on the minimum requirements set, this might even include an Athens style democracy, if a communitiy likes to come up with a statute like that.)
Hmmh. Good point. One remark I have: That's kind of made for councils. So you get a representative sample of the population. And than you have like 501 individuals to discuss and make policy. I'm not entirely sure, but it feels to me there's a lower boundary with group size. Once you randomly sample just 3 individuals, I'd be surprised it works as I expect you more to end up with randomness (in the decisions as well). Not with representation.
But also doesn't feel like a new problem to me. For example the US Americans sample their juries in a court. On the other hand they don't randomly sample the sheriff. Looks to me someone already put in some thought. And there's extra things. Like extra steps when sampling the jurors. It's not ...here's your jury, off you go... But there's an entire complicated extra process to it. I suppose that might be related to something like the comparatively small group size of such a jury.
Yeah. And I'd say with the SELinux problems and with what OP wrote, the security model including things like a failure mode to fall open, ...silently... There's more things to be wary of, than what they wrote in those 4 sentences.
I think it's a great idea. Why the Athens way with a lottery, though? Is that to address some specific thing, or just because you'd like to see how it goes? Because we kind of moved away from that in modern democracy, and now we do elections instead of a lottery. Likely because of ...reasons.
Time slots etc also good ideas. We already have to factor that in because the userbase lives in vastly different timezones. And it's great if spam etc gets removed in a timely matter and we don't always have to wait until it's 5pm in the States. Some good mod and admin teams already do it.
We software developers tend to send that kind of information anyway. We tend to get bug reports "I didn't get a message" or "The button XY doesn't work properly" and now it's massively helpful information whether to look for the bug in Lemmy's codebase, or in Summit. Or any of the other 5 clients. It's also not what people usually complain about. I mean you're sending your entire username to the server, so you're 100% identifiable. And then the server operator knows when you're awake and scrolling, based on when you send requests to the server. What exactly you like to click on and read... So you pretty much have to trust your server admins anyway. A user agent string is more information. But sending it or not sending it both leaves you 100% identifiable once you log in.
And Tealk is right as well. We've now come to use it in the war against the AI scrapers. They've nearly brought several Fediverse servers to their knees. It's only due to patterns in the traffic like this (and JavaScript to burn CPU cycles on your device) that still allows us to distinguish you from the AI companies so we can fulfill your requests instead of letting the bots use up all the bandwidth. The current situation is real bad. And turned out the user agent string, while technically not being essential for the servers, they're a real good telltale sign for this. It's my first line of defense, since blocking IP ranges got meaningless.
As a suggestion: If it's not in any of the existing Apps: Request it. Find the one or two App(s) you like the most. Navigate to their bugtracker and feature requests. And ask politely whether they'd like to add that feature for you. Maybe other people are interested as well. Include a bit of info: what you'd like the app to do. why. and a few words about your specific use-case. Maybe you can get a conversation going.
Sorry, I don't see it. Seems it was co-founded by a German dude and an Indian IT student. Other than that, their about page looks like the international collaboration, most Free Software projects are. It has its origins in Arch Linux, which was invented by a Canadian, and is an international collaboration as well. And regarding Firedragon in specific... Looks to me that project wasn't even started before Librewish (from India) went on a hiatus. Maybe I missed something? I mean I do see the name "Garuda". That's from Hinduism.
Why India? Isn't it by the Garudalinux.org people? "Stefan" certainly doesn't sound like an Indian name to me at all. And some other names in the commits sound like the westernized version of Japanese names to me.
If I had to guess, this isn't a bigger issue because Snap is mostly pushed by Canonical. And in a bit of a weird way (proprietary backend, exclusive apps) so... reception in the rest of the Linux community is ...mixed. To put it charitably. It's probably not that relevant for most people outside of the Ubuntu ecosystem. And probably also not a priority for Canonical or the proprietary software vendors.
Thanks for sharing your perspective and writing all of this down.
To be honest, don't worry too much about the dbzer0 users. They've defederated from you, I've defederated from them. There's all this other thing going on with them. I share your perspective, I also get to read less slurs and toxicity since I started pulling some ripcords... I don't like it either. But maybe that's how it is.
Best of luck anyway. I think the YouTube thing is a good idea. I mean you can probably make quite some impact, considering the current scale you're operating at. But I also think the entire Threadiverse isn't huge compared to YouTube people. Larger "influencers" sometimes fill Dicord communities larger than all of us combined. And smaller "influencers" sometimes have a very loyal and committed fanbase/community. All of that is useful and/or positive traits. I see how the hard part is finding someone with overlap and who wants to cooperate. And you're going to have to welcome them and provide them with whatever their wants and need are... All of this is quite some effort. But certainly worth it in my eyes.
And I don't think there's an issue with weirdos in itself, just be a tolerant and positive kind of weirdo and it'll be alright.
By the way, the Germans kinda established their own niche with (I think) with a noticeably different atmosphere and behaviour towards each other. Not necessarily better, we're also doing mostly politics and the meme/shitlords are very active... But yeah, maybe we need some niches which aren't just because of some language barrier. And like... more than Linux content. We also have that. But I see how that's not everyone's leisure activity. 😅
Sorry, I'm a bit low on time right now, so I can't give it the attention it deserves. But from a quick glance... I like it. The user interface looks appealing and easy to understand. I didn't check if adding peers works on a tech level, but overall I think the design is right. It's probably straightforward enough for the average user to understand. I also like how there's links to documentation, explanations what it does and the ideas behind it. I think that's roughly what makes good software. Be genuine and honest to your userbase. Tell them what they can expect. Give them documentation to read more if they like. Otherwise make it as simple and straightforward as you can.
I mean I just thought I'd drop some ideas. Of course you do you. Seems you have a bigger vision. And we/I understand it's quite involved. You're doing a lot. All of that for some broader idea, and there's a lot of detail work to be done. I like talking about things like that and following what other people (who have some sort of vision) do. I see how it's a lot of work. And several things you're doing simultaneously.