Well I didn’t want to have a bio, but Lemmy doesn’t let me null it out, so I guess I’ll figure out something to put here later.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Why not? Plasma is much more usable out of the box for many users including myself. GNOME’s out of the box experience is really lacking IMHO and requires me to install and configure several extensions just to get what I consider to be a functional UI. I know they have this vision for how they want people to use their OS, but that vision is not aligned with how I actually want to use it. The best way distros can vote against the design choices of GNOME is by making something else the default. The problem I have is that I generally prefer GNOME’s app suite to KDE’s, so that makes the decision a bit more complicated for me.


  • Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

    I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.





  • E2EE only exists up to the bridge, not the whole way to your client

    I just want to clarify that most bridges can be set up to have E2EE between the Matrix client and the bridge (regardless of whether the bridge supports encrypted chats on the bridged service because not all do, e.g. Facebook), but it is true that the bridge itself has to decrypt and translate between Matrix and the 3rd party chat service, so as you mentioned trusting who hosts bridges or doing it yourself is really important.


  • You can run headless or do what the person I was responding to recommended and put it behind an authenticated portal, but that’s not really going to stop other instances and clients from accessing the same resources that op is hoping to limit access to except in the most basic case of people casually browsing op’s Lemmy instance through op’s own lemmy-ui.

    Edit, but to be clear, what I was responding to and my response didn’t directly address op’s specific concern (which I kind of misunderstood myself before just now rereading) that outside/guest users shouldn’t be able to search for communities from other instances and I think it’s a fair concern because just searching for a community from another instance brings in posts and could be a vector for spam/abuse.


  • Wouldn’t this do basically nothing to prevent a 3rd party client from browsing your instance without authentication? I don’t know that there’s much that can really be done about this because you need open APIs for other instances to be able to access the content of your instance in order to make federation possible. That said, it’s an important consideration that anybody running a single person instance should consider. If you run a single person instance, people can learn a lot about you just by seeing which communities are available on your instance. The only way to obfuscate your actual interests is to have a dummy account subscribe to all the top communities on the biggest instances. (Which, honestly, this isn’t a bad strategy to employ anyway if you’re wanting a fresh All feed).







  • They take a fair amount of getting used to, especially if you get an ortholinear variety. You might find yourself not really enjoying it out the gate, but it’ll force you into better typing posture and you’ll grow to love it over time and hate the times you have to type on a standard keyboard. I have an Ergodox and the ortholinear aspect took a while to get used to and settling into a function keys layout I liked took another good while. Expect to be worse at typing and less productive at the outset. Your hands and wrists will thank you in the long run, though.


  • The goal of Bluesky is to turn social media into a shared public commons.

    I agree with most of their blog post and it sounds like they’re taking a very measured approach to building out federation, but I really want everyone to stop trying to insist social networks be “public commons”. Moderation tools that do anything more than the bare minimum of blocking forms of speech that are not protected free speech by definition transform the social network into a place that’s not a public commons. Being able to block individuals, communities, topics (via keywords and hashtags), and entire federated servers makes it so that if you really want, you never have to see viewpoints you strongly disagree with. The same is not guaranteed in real public commons. Every day you walk down the street, you have the potential to be confronted with ideas you never considered and your only recourse is to engage, drown out, try to ignore, or walk away from those people, which is not analogous to blocking and thereby deplatforming them online.

    That said, I do not want my social network to be a public commons (and from what they’re describing, it doesn’t sound like Bluesky actually does either). Online, I want to be able to block and deplatform e.g. Nazis and MAGA trolls pre-emptively and with extreme prejudice because I want to enjoy my time on social networking sites, not raise my blood pressure.