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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It came to me today that I should play the devil’s advocate. Everyone who comments seems to like this, therefore there has to be someone to take the job of un-hypeing it. So this is just a different POV … because I can.

    It’s a kind of social experiment which could be fun for some. The idea is to try to make a drawing with very limited resources (a single pixel per message, perhaps a few hundred pixels over a couple of days), and concurrently with hundreds/thousands of participants.

    The outcome is less an artwork than it is a work of art that shows the (dire) state of collective creativity and imaginative capabilities of people who have been “rised” in dominance-hierarchic, competition-centric, societies: imagine one of these squatted houses where the walls quickly get filled with tags and political messages. While they in theory could have collectively put on an artwork that really speaks, they’d rather endulge in “us vs. them” group think, competing for the space and overdrawing each others messages.
    – Thus, in a “canvas” action, those who can captivate the minds of the masses, and those who have the proficiency to have armies of machines fight for them, will win the most space. People will say this is fun but it’s rather the same as in politics. The outcome is perhaps pretty or hilarious in some details but it’s mostly logos and flags and symbolism, flat colours and two-dimensional cartoon caracters. So rather boring; rarely one will see a detail where one would say, “wow, someone really did put some thought and skill into this”.

    Regarding me, I could imagine taking part in a project to create a bot that would facilitate collective decision making (about division of labour among drawing project participants and on-the-fly decisions about how to interact with neighbouring bits – stop at boundary, colour-mix, or overdraw – and drawing of colour-dithered, possibly three-dimensional, pre-planned graphic design (or algorithmic graphics), while at the same time automating the tedious sending of draw commands from many locations (it’s the most inefficient way one could do it but who cares in times of HD video streaming).
    … Another fun idea that just pops into my mind, would be programming a “game of life” automaton which respects pixels that are already occupied, or overdraws them then re-draws them in their original colour. It could be made to completely vanish until closure time. :-D



  • Umm… I was not so very clear perhaps. The idea would still be that user accounts as well as forums all contain their domain name, as their site of origin rather than a location identifier. Just that the host could change to any other domain (after negociation with the new host, that is). So it’s not about domains being tied to specific hosts/IPs but entities being tied to domains. It would be up for design discussion if that identifier should change or not, iin the case of a migration. The idea would be to give entities the ability to roam or be resurrected from any federated copy in case they are dissatisfied with the policies of their hosts, or in the event a domain gets taken down by authoritrian actors. (That’s why this actually is off-topic here)

    From my glance into the ActivityPub doc, I concluded that it’s really only about the data exchange protocol, yet I might have overlooked something as I never had an in-depth talk with people who implement the thing. Yet, just because many do it in a certain way does not mean to me that this is written in stone somewhere. :-)


  • [OT; tl/dr: the issues with forums and user accounts being under hegemony of server instances is by design but it’s not actually the way one would design a truely de-centralised network]

    It’s a feature but not the best practice if the idea would be forums (and users) being free of domains (and the dangers of domains being taken down, and host admins’ whims). The design approach of Lemmy however, speaks “hegemony” all over. It says a lot about the mindset of its creators.
    An alternative would be indeed distributed directory systems, employing concepts like DHT … well proven de-centralized resiliency for quite a while. Would it have been done in such a way, there would be no difficulty with migrating forums and users across instances, and even a domain getting lost would not necessarily lead to all forums/accounts there-on to be lost. Also the issues with link creation across instances were due to forums being bound to domain names instead of them having Universal IDs thus being agnostic of which node they are actually hosted on.

    ActivityPub, AFAIK only defines a protocol for communicating datasets between instances, not the structures in which federation should be done.



  • Compelling concecture. I also wonder if there are really groups of people like that (i mean, how do they behave in physical, that must be sort of punks?) – or if it is part of an orchestrated disruption and possibly false flag. I read it’s only about 15 accounts to block if one wanted to get rid of the obnoxious ones.

    Have any hints that back it up?
    Edit: do not mind, i have read farther down. It also seems to have deviated from the original CTH community, as in “unfriendly take-over”, which was even stated by a HB account.

    Besides, this helped me to finally understand the confusion about the “liberal” adjective. It’s understood differently in USA, from most everywhere else. :-)



  • If posted text is not properly “escaped” (meaning possible HTML tags and scripts made non-executable), an attacker can post (“inject”) javascript in a comment which is then loaded and executed on other people’s browsers. It seems that such a method was used to steal log-in cookies from admin’s browsers. The attacker then could log in as the admin and proceed to change stuff in other areas of the site.

    Edit: someone posted a screenshot of an app displaying the scipt here: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/850269 – the app doesn’t execute JS but displays it as text. That might be the safest way to go atm while malicious comments are spreading over the net.
    (From that post we also learn about a fix that came almost immediately, so hopefully this issue is being done with as soon as all vulnerable servers have been updated)



  • my interst will probrably change to something tommorow which is annoying.

    The last line triggered me to write some “feel with you”. Dreaming big, or thinking big, can actually be a gift. Big inventors, philosophers, people who build companies – they all are/were capable of thinking in bigger terms than what they could accomplish themselves or in a day.

    As others commented, a plan should be broken up into smaller “achievables”. It might be less simple than that, though. The problem comes with a lack of persistence, or even a perceived iniability thereof.
    This could be traits in the neurodivergent spectrum. Breaking a process up might be a no-brainer to you, but then there are perhaps a lot of things to get done before even starting with the project itself (like needing to acquire the hardware, or funding). If your (main) interest is constantly shifting, and you will have the next big idea tomorrow, then it’s hard to get anything started. Having to accomplish a lot of small goals, while being constantly rewarding to some people, can also be constantly distracting for others. The end goal is just so many little pieces away, and any small task can get your interest astray because that thing that brought the reward is now much closer than the big goal.

    As someone who suffers from the same problem, my understanding of what it would take is this: A constant motivator that can direct your interest back to the one big thing again and again. I think what would help is to not do it all on your own, but find other people who have the same kind of interest and keep close exchange with them. The primary goal is not to get the big idea manifested at all costs, but to keep motivated to pursue the path that leads there, while also allowing you to switch your attention to all those other things. Like-minded people who go the same path could be that constant motivator.
    (… Yes i’m aware there may be other issues as well, like the thing one has in mind being out of the ordinary, or being afraid of being amateurish)

    If this resonates with you, feel free to PM me, or come to the !neurodivergent@sh.itjust.works group that i started (and have yet to get going, sort posts by “new”!) specifically for such purposes.







  • Not cancel the votes but new people will ofc have the possibility to bring existing rules newly to discussion. It may be totally reasonable to review rules, assuming they can get outdated. And ideally, yes, if it was a real community (real verifyable persons) then any new member must be asked if they had any objections to the existing rules, and given the opportunity to newly discuss them (or add to a constantly ongoing discussion). It just isn’t all too practical in certain circumstances.