Goons are responsible for the destruction of so many good things on the internet. Best $10 I’ve ever spent.

That’s a misquote: it’s “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. It’s basically saying that you, as a consumer, cannot legitimately make ethical decisions when buying, because the entire system is built on being exploitative, and thus any decision you make cannot be ethical because the choices you have are already the result of exploitation by the time you’re making the decision.

A good example is the “going green” fad: it does not matter which consumption choices you make, because your choices are effectively irrelevant. You spend a little bit more money for the “green” product, and that money will go directly to megacorporations that are exploiting and polluting on a scale that so outstrips your ability to combat it. Thus, your “more ethical” choice did absolutely nothing but fund the exact same polluters and environmental exploiters as if you had not made the “green” choice in the first place.

Good news, then: http://canvas.toast.ooo/

A list of who an instance federates with or is blocking is at https://an.instance.youre.wondering.about/instances (replace with the proper site name)

The constant politics argument is tiring. Do you know the politics of the guy who made your favorite game? What about the guy who made your text editor? Or your browser? Or the software in your microwave? Or grew your food? Or the guy who made that song you like? What about the owner of the last convenience store you bought your mtdew from?

Even if the commentary is coming from an honest point of view and not just shitty astroturfing (and it very much isn’t), it doesn’t matter. If you don’t like it, use an instance that’s not run by them and who cares.

I’m configured to point the cloudflare tunnel -> nginx container in the lemmy stack -> nginx.config provided by the devs reverse proxies the rest of it.

I didn’t have to make any changes from 0.17.4 to 0.18.0 beyond updating my docker compose to the new version; tunnel config stayed the same, nginx config was the same, and the docker compose network config was the same.

Because you can’t make thousands of spambots on your own instance because as you noted it’d take about 5 minutes to defederate and thus remove all the bots.

You want to put a handful on every server you can, because then your bots have to be manually rooted out by individual admins, or the federation between instances gets so broken there’s no value in the platform.

And for standing up more instances, you have to bear the cost of running the servers yourself, which isn’t prohibitive, but more than using bots via stolen/infected proxies (and shit like Hola that gives you a “free vpn” at the cost of your computer becoming an exit node they then resell).

Also, I’m suspicious that it’s not ‘spam bots’ in the traditional sense since what’s the point of making thousands of bots but then barely using them to spam anyone? My tinfoil hat makes me think this is a little more complicated, though I have zero evidence other than my native paranoia.

Oh, no, it is absolute: if you say and do nothing, then at best, you’re allowing the harm they cause to happen, and at worse reinforcing their behavior.

So yes, if you have racist friends and you sit silently then yes, you’re a racist supporter.

Depends. Do you just keep your silence or do you call them out when they’re being shitty?

No, you’ve (maybe) limited your singular solitary instance’s growth: your instance is not “Lemmy” and admins should do whatever they find works for them, is something they can easily enforce, and resolves the problem.

If you want to geoip limit signups to Skokie, Illinois? Great! If it works for you and keeps your instance from being The Problem, then it’s a valid solution.

(I don’t disagree that email domain blocks are not a singular solution to any abuse problem, but I also think that whatever works for the individual admin is perfectly reasonable, and email blocks CAN be worthwhile.)

This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There’s been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.

IMO that’s the main driver behind this change: don’t feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.

As with all things non-corporate, you determine if the instance you want to use is run by a reliable person by uh, vetting the person. This is absolutely impractical and absolutely not something you can ask an average person to do in order to post cat memes on the internet, so long-term the right call would probably be to move the “big instances” into a foundation/corporation model (think OSI or Apache or Gnome or…) to provide proper shared ownership of resources, continuity planning, and better handling and monitoring of donated funds as well as better opportunities for outside funding - it’s actively easier to get funding or support for actual foundations/non-profits than some dude running a thing in his basement.

You then have a very public entity that’s much simpler for any random person to decide if they’re reasonable - the fact they exist AT ALL is a huge indicator of legitimacy because the work required to even get that far is not entirely trivial.

Monetization is… problematic. It’s probably going to HAVE to be donation-based because I don’t think ads or data mining or segues to our sponsor are acceptable on federated platforms and won’t result in you getting anything but tossed out.

I’d also say that there are fundraising options for larger instances that offer valuable communities: you can get a LOT of donations out of corporate America (this is US-centric, of course) if you’re a registered non-profit they can donate a tax write-offable donation to, and something like a Lemmy instance is just a rounding error in donations, if you can get in the door.

I’m also not a lawyer, but have worked with lawyers on a GDPR compliant policy, and boy, is it an absolute mess. The larger instances are absolutely going to have to comply, and there absolutely has to be a way to export and delete your data, and federation is absolutely going to run into the data processor vs data controller dual-responsibility pile and it’s absolutely going to be a mess… maybe, at some point, or not. For the MOST part, it’s a policy where as long as you’re being reasonably compliant and nobody is complaining or suing you, it’s not quite as horrifying as it is on paper.

The deletion stuff absolutely needs to be done sooner rather than later, and there needs to be a way to export all the data an instance has on a given user, but those two things will probably cover the worst risks any particular instance has.

Dyamic pricing is risky: it’s all sunshine and rainbows until suddenly something happens and it’s $9,000/kwh.

The hardest part you’d have is convincing anyone to take the downside risks for… what, exactly?

There’s no upside for the consumer here unless ‘investing in more stuff for your solar panels’ is in some way a useful thing.

Dumping electricity into a hole in the ground (your pool) is pretty much the LEAST green thing you can do with it.

This sounds like the consumer should spend their own money to fix the grid’s inability to cope with changes and the oncoming future, rather than put the impetus on the billionaires that already own the infrastructure but aren’t willing to update it.

I have to wonder if the real discussion here is between ‘pre-internet’ or ‘not the internet where you’re the product being sold and sold to’, because I strongly suspect it’s the latter that’s the issue here.

I’m just barely old enough to recall how things worked before the internet and I don’t think people would ever really want to go back to not being able to watch anything they want, any time they want, or not having turn-by-turn directions or even things like ordering a pizza by having to call someone on the phone.