Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
A few days ago I asked about taking the big leap, but I use my PC for work in the arts (voice over, music, digital art, etc).
I've been playing around with Bitwig to replace Cubase and ideally Adobe Audition. It's... a learning curve but I'm willing to make it work if I can get everything about my PC lined up with Linux.
I then discovered Wine and Proton. So, they're basically bridges that allow you to use some Windows programs in Linux? I read they can use vst files with a bit of work, and people have had some success with Cubase, though Adobe is still right out but I'd love to get away from Adobe anyway. Also games??
Is there a difference between Wine and Proton or are they basically just different programs that do the same thing? The big leap might be more feasible than I thought if they do what I think they do.
Edit: This seems like it could suit most of my needs. I need to do more research into it but you guys answered my questions. Appreciate you all taking the time, thanks!
Wine and proton are the same valve takes wine and adds some tweaks to it to work beter for games. Wine can work in a pinch but I wouldn't rely on it for your workflow as wine could always be playing catch up when your software updates versions.
Wine/Proton is a translation layer that translates windows system calls Linux system calls. So if wine/proton doesn't have a feature windows has for your knew version then it will break. That's okay for games but for something you need for work that can be a deal breaker. If you can switching to something Linux native will benefit you in the long run.
Wine can work in a pinch but I wouldn't rely on it
In this case I would say the other way round. Proton works in a container, so getting to the sound interface for example might be harder than just using Wine
Comments on Reddit seem to suggest that UI problems with NeuralDSP plugins seems to be solved with some onstallation of DirectX libraries (? Not sure about the technical details) :
was able to fix it just yesterday after seeing someone suggest this:
install WineGUI
use it to install DirectX 9/10/11 and DirectX 12 packages
This instantly fixed the GUI not being responsive, tested with the new Nolly X
As a side note, a couple of things that might be handy for you:
Bottles is a GUI for running Wine things that might make it a bit easier to navigate. It's helped me out a few times.
Also there's an AppDB on the Wine site where you can search for specific software to find out how well it runs/tweaks that people have used etc.
ALSO yeah games are in a pretty good place on Linux nowadays. I have a Steam Deck and it runs a surprising amount of stuff, even things that aren't listed as being compatible. I think the main source of trouble is the online AntiCheat stuff, that's not always compatible with Linux (although sometimes those work too, I think it just depends on the game.) There's also protondb for checking which games work in Linux.
Proton is built on top of Wine in order to make sure games specifically work well.
You can check protondb.com/ before buying a game (with Steam or otherwise) to insure it works as expected. A lot will work with 0 tinkering but some might next extra command line parameters.
You might get the same result with Wine directly but Proton it doing everything it can to "hide" away those (hopefully small) challenges away from the final user, a gamer (like me) who wants to just sit down and play.
So... the heuristic is basically :
games? Proton
not games but Windows applications that somehow do not have a better open-source equivalent running on Linux? Wine
Edit: for the anecdote I wrote this reply on my SteamDeck, the gaming console by Valve coming with Steam, and Proton, and running Linux to... just play BUT I also use it to work while traveling. So yes, works like a charm!
Proton is designed for gaming and its a fork of Wine, designed for gaming contains alot of tools and patches for gaming compared to regular wine. Wine is designed for apps, but can be used for gaming.
I find using Lutris for gaming is easier, but there is also Bottles, both allow you to setup all the MS junk as needed per game, including options for using Wine's Proton if need be or desired.
So, they're basically bridges that allow you to use some Windows programs in Linux?
They are like really Bad cocaine. Sure, it may work, but if you want to give up that much time, might as well learn an alternative because the next version will need a new workaround.
I read they can use vst files with a bit of work
That's an emulator.
Is there a difference between Wine and Proton
Proton-ge is a fork of proton is a fork of wine, which only exists because Wine isnt made for gaming specifically and proton can't include a bunch of stuff because of legal reasons which enhance gaming further.
It’s a shame that only a minority of Ontarians even fucking voted for the second time in a row. Maybe don’t let Conservatives walk into power and then complain about all the damage they do.
Those of us who live in the province but voted for someone else aren't quite sure, but the fact that a lot of people seem not to have realized the last election was even taking place may have had something to do with it.
To be fair he didn't really offer. He threw around the term buck a beer a couple times but booze has actually been increasing in price since hes been elected.
Half the reason we are in this mess is Toronto was too smart to elect Doug mayor and now instead the whole province gets to deal with him. He also gets to get revenge on Toronto by demolishing bike lanes.
Didn't doug run after his brother? I'm not 100% familiar with Torontos political history i just remember something about doug not winning mayor of Toronto.
As the Linux world increasingly moves towards adopting Wayland in place of X11, there is a serious risk that a third of a century's worth of FOSS desktops and windowing environments would get dropped and left behind. Wayback could prevent that happening, and retain the diversity of choice in GUIs while modernizing the tools upon which they run.
Why do I feel like narrowing down the options would not be that bad? The whole world of Linux is, IMO, in dire need of consolidation behind tried and tested, universally accepted technologies instead of endless number of choices for specific tastes. That is at least the case if Linux aims for desktops (like it now very much should and could with all the Win 11 mess).
There really can’t be half a dozen or more alternatives for any particular task. Two desktop environments for example has to be enough for 99% of users, same with package management systems etc. Otherwise the newbie user will only get scared and confused, or not be able to easily find support relevant to their ”version” of Linux.
Man, we really need to make "The ~~Church~~ Cathedral and the Bazaar" required reading.
You clearly have missed the entire point of Linux, which is the freedom to do with your machine as you like. The endless number of choices for specific tastes is the result of people having the choice to write their own thing.
When consolidation happens, when people say "make my choice for me, I can't make decisions" we end up with super constrained setups like MacOS, Windows 11 and stupid Gnome the way it is now; no choice, do it our way or not at all.
And the answer is still freedom. It's obvious in the plugins and addons for gnome that get it to do basic customizing you find in, say xfce as a toggle in the settings. You find it in the myriad of softwares written for windows and mac that let the user do what they want to do.
And I will likely not be the first to point out to you Linux doesn't "aim for desktops", linux isn't an organization the way ms and apple are. And it likely never will be.
Newbies will be scared and confused no matter what's in front of them.
Why do I feel like narrowing down the options would not be that bad?
Perhaps because you miss Microsoft or Apple? In a rather misdirected way?
Half the point is there are multiple ways to do things - and mind, Windows is like that too (you can get to some settings though the new Control Panel, the old Control Panel, the Regedit, the Powershell...). Just about the only thing in Windows you are forced only one vision of is the desktop itself, but as soon as you double-click an icon, all bets are off.
Also if what you want is getting behind "tried and tested, universally accepted technologies"... that's what sysvinit, ALSA, X11 and automake / build-essentials; no need for systemd, Pulseaudio, Wayland and Snaps. Pulseaudio was basically a stillborn deformed baby whereas I've never seen ALSA fail since 2002 (to the point even today I have to "fix" Flatpak not having audio on Pipewire unless Pulseaudio sits behind it by just seating both of them behind ALSA). I don't even have to begin on Wayland, it started as just vaporware; Systemd is largely an attempt to microsoft-ize Linux system management; and Snaps make me want to snap.
As for newbies... others have addressed the point but honestly, if someone gets scared and whiny at the "choose your starter" screen of the game, they're not gonna last any in a Pokémon game nor would I want them around whining about things they couldn't even be bothered to be here for.
oh i remember this. it was that guy who thought he could fix xorg by himself, and ended up breaking it further. then accused gnome of being "dei" when they kicked him out lol
Sooo there's free software (“Everyone should be able to write open source software!”) and there's open source software (people programming their own computers for their own communities). Ideally, Neima should be able to program her computer to help her kids do their homework or for their sports club. So there's open source software that's written for the developers community, and there's open source software that's written for the GNOME community, which is polished and truly a delightful experience for new users: if for example you installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon, you'd connect to the wifi and probably be immediately greeted with a notification telling you that your printer has been added and is ready to go.
I'm not saying that Linux users should learn programming, especially if they don't know about e.g.GNU Guix, Skribe/Skribilo/Haunt, or SICP (that's directly referenced by the Haunt info pages – I promise you, starting a blog as an English speaker with a Skribe implementation and reading SICP once you get comfortable enough could get you started in months); but that of course, learning any field on such a platform as Stack Overflow would provide an absolutely stupid experience, whereas the ideal learning medium is books.
It isn't enough for Google to insert far-right suggestions in YouTube shorts; they've deliberately sabotaged features in their search engine to get us to generate more ads, and Google Scholar results are, by the way, the bottom of the barrel too. Compare queries results to "sex work" or "borderline disorder transgender" with those of HAL and wonder why there's a public distrust in science. More broadly, Google hinders our relationship to information, and we're both trading it for a far-right agenda.
The same is just as true for LaTeX: it's a great, intuitive language, provided that you read some good introduction on the topic. As a matter of fact, Maïeul Rouquette's French-speaking book is available for free on HAL.
I'm more and more fed up as I write that and I'm pretty sure it shows. You may totally use open source software, meant for the non-technical community of a graphical library, desktop environment, Linux distribution, and so forth. But if you really wanted to "learn Linux", please install any distro you're comfortable with and read some good book on whatever topic you want to work on.
As you can see in the screenshot there are a couple of parts of the F-Droid application page in F-Droid that are in a different language. This isn't actually the first time I have seen this and is not limited to the F-Droid application. Currently it's just this one, but in the past I have had more apps than not displaying some or all of their content in a different language despite my phone being configured for English.
No, I am not. I'm based in the US. I was wondering if it could be VPN related, but I haven't connected to a node anywhere outside of the US in months. My phones language is set to English (US) with no other languages selected, and I have explicitly set F-Droid's language to English (US) in my phone's configuration as well.
I just now opened F-Droid after a reboot and without being connected to a VPN and began scrolling through latest and quickly found a random assortment of apps displaying the same way. None of them are installed though.
have you tried changing either/both to another variation of english? my phone has a plain “English” in addition to “English (US)”, and/or you may have a “(UK)” variant
I have, and that didn't seem to work. The Gitlab issue that the other user posted seems to be highly relevant because all of the users reporting an issue have the same phone that I do.
interesting! i didn't see that comment at first. i see somebody mentioned in the issue thread that it doesn't occur in f-droid basic, so hopefully you can just use that in the meantime.
AP spoke to the two contractors for UG Solutions, an American outfit subcontracted to hire security personnel for the distribution sites. They said bullets, stun grenades and pepper spray were used at nearly every distribution, even if there was no threat.
In one video, what appear to be heavily armed American security contractors at one of the sites in Gaza discuss how to disperse Palestinians nearby. One is heard saying he has arranged for a “show of force” by Israeli tanks.
“I don’t want this to be too aggressive,” he adds, “because this is calming down.” At that moment, bursts of gunfire erupt close by, at least 15 shots. “Whoo! Whoo!” one contractor yelps. “I think you hit one,” one says. Then comes a shout: “Hell, yeah, boy!”
“Nanook” is a slur for northern indigenous people in the same way “Chan” is a slur for Chinese people. Sure, there might be some members of that demographic with that name, but using the term as a generalization for that demographic is derogatory in intent.
Using the term “Eskimo” in the instance name is problematic for at least two reasons.
The term itself is considered problematic and derogatory for reasons I don't have time to go into here, but feel free to research why it’s under fire.
I haven’t checked, but the admins are probably not part of the demographics that the term would refer to, so they’re not “reclaiming a slur” so to speak
The comparison between “Nanook” and “Chan” is misleading and not linguistically equivalent. “Nanook” originates from Inuit mythology and is not inherently a slur, while “Chan” has been used in explicitly mocking or derogatory ways. It’s important to recognize the context and history behind each term rather than assume they carry the same weight.
You're right, but also taking together their comment history, we can reasonably assume that they chose their username with the intent to slur rather than as a more benign meaning.
When Ubuntu 25.04 made Papers its default PDF viewer rather than keep shipping Evince, it did so knowing that the expectation was that upstream GNOME would do the same — now it has. The GNOME [&h...
Steam Survey issues prevented the survey results from being posted on the evening of the 1st as is traditionally done, but the results were just uploaded now to the Steam website
European authoritarians and their enablers in the media are misrepresenting GrapheneOS and even Pixel phones as if they're something for criminals. GrapheneOS is opposed to the mass surveillance police state these people want to impose on everyone.
There are ongoing coordinated attempts at misleading people about GrapheneOS and Signal in multiple European countries. A consistent pattern are completely unsubstantiated claims about exploits with no evidence. These are contradicted by actual evidence, leaks and their behavior.
GrapheneOS is not immune to exploitation, but the fearmongering done in these ongoing attacks on it is very clearly fabricated. They feel threatened enough by GrapheneOS to engage in coordinated attempts at convincing people that it's unable to protect their privacy and security.
GrapheneOS eliminates many classes of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities and makes the vast majority far harder to exploit. It even puts up a strong fight against attacks advanced forensic data extraction tools with physical access. See discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344… for an example.
There's currently an example of one of these attacks on the project ongoing across Swedish forums and social media. This reached our forum at discuss.grapheneos.org/d/23535…. An account pretending to be just asking questions goes on to pretend to be an expert citing non-existent sources.
This same thing is currently ongoing across several Swedish forums and on social media. It's generally not in English which makes it inaccessible to the broader GrapheneOS and privacy community so they can get away with extraordinary, unsubstantiated claims much more easily.
GrapheneOS is not supposed to stop people installing malware and granting it invasive permission. It does provide alternatives to being coerced into granting invasive permissions by apps via our Storage Scopes, Contact Scopes and other permissions, but it's a user choice.
GrapheneOS similarly not supposed to prevent authorized access to data by someone with the PIN/password and access to the device. Rather, we provide far stronger protection against unauthorized access via exploit protections, 2-factor fingerprint unlock, duress PIN/password, etc.
Our features page at grapheneos.org/features provides an overview of how GrapheneOS improves privacy, security and other areas compared to the most secure Android devices running the stock OS. It's not immune to exploitation and cannot be. Products making that claim are scams.
Not being immune to exploitation doesn't mean it can be successfully exploited in a given real world scenario. It's significantly harder to develop and deploy an exploit successfully. It can be exploited, but it doesn't mean it is happening especially at scale or consistently.
Having far from perfect security does not mean real world attacks including sophisticated ones will be successful in practice. Don't fall for security nihilism propaganda. We'll keep working on advancing security for general purpose computing devices. It will keep getting better.
Los Google Pixel son los máximos representantes de Android, con permiso de Samsung. Es por ello que convencen a los usuarios entusiastas del sistema...
Apple stores which devices/users install which apps. They have the device IDs. US government could obtain a list of people who installed the app if a court authorized it. Not clear what they mean by having to store device IDs. Those IDs aren't accessible to Android apps.
ANDROID_ID is a per-app-per-profile random ID. Not clear why they would need it. Android has privacy-preserving hardware-based attestation if they're talking about making it harder to spoof a location. Can't prevent either iOS or Android users making false reports via attestation APIs regardless.
Making posts with inaccurate technical claims about Android doesn't inspire confidence. It's a closed source app with a closed source service fully under their control. Why is that the approach if their goal is helping people rather than monetizing interest in it?
Apple records which apps people install and requires an account to use their app store. Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) has comparable privacy to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). However, iOS apps must use APNs for push while Android apps do not have to use FCM.
Android apps can implement their own push service or allow the user to choose a service via the UnifiedPush framework. Play Store has a policy of requiring FCM for most use cases for battery reasons but there are exceptions. Unlike iOS, Android allows installing apps from other app stores / sources.
ICEBlock app is very clearly misleading people about privacy and their safety. Apple has a list of which accounts/devices have installed the app. They will provide it to the US government if they receive a court order. FCM is also not less private than APNS and FCM doesn't work the way they claim.
iPhones have good overall privacy and security but Apple does collect telemetry, forces people to have accounts and knows which apps each user/device has installed. They do not have magical privacy and security properties. An app like this claiming iOS gives them 100% anonymity is very strange.
iOS has significantly worse support for VPNs than Android and requires using Apple services. Android exists without Google services and people can install apps from elsewhere. The mandatory or effectively mandatory services on Google Mobile Services devices and iOS have comparable privacy.
I'm genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)
Bluesky blew itself up cos they failed to be sufficiently decentralised and became an echo chamber. Activpub systems are less echo chambery but still have a very strong left lean that is significantly effecting out ability to grow especially among the centre who represents the majority. We need more right wing opinions and allow said right wing opinions if we want the majority of people to adopt it.
The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
Oidc is the protocol by which auth can happen its the evolution of oauth. U need to build some kind of decentralised ledger then u set up a server that checks that ledger against the user provided auth then u simply make this server have an oidc endpoint allowing it to be plug and play with existing fediverse services.
I say oidc cos almost all fediverse software is already compatible with it.
My point is: if you have a ledger that the user controls and can use to redirect to different auth endpoints, then you don't need oauth. You just use the record in the ledger as the authentication mechanism directly.
Yeah exactly. But instead of having to implement that auth process in every different fediverse service in however many different languages u simply write it once with an oidc endpoint and all fediverse services can run it as a container in their stack. It makes implementing such auth system a simple config change and updating a docker compose to add a new service.
What I am trying to say is that "getting the user to complete a login" is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.
So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That's good, but it doesn't solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.
Ahh I see what ur saying now. Yeah the actor id is hard as it needs to be an actual dereferenceable uri as actors need an inbox and outbox of activities.
I don't think u can maintain cross instance actor ids. The only issue I see with having multiple actor ids for the same user is that they will have their content and profile split across multiple instances.
I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
Ahh I see I've never looked into how atproto works might need to look into it and sees if some of its systems can be adapted for Activpub. Thx for the info
If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I've done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the "ledger" mechanism.
Specific to the DID, I haven't published yet. But what I am doing is based on my Typescript SDK for ActivityPub, so you can follow that repo for updates.
God, shut up. There's the "communist" dumbass instances which is just far right levels of stupid, and then literally the entire rest of this platform is just normal centrist europe views. "Leftist" is a term Americans use to describe giving immigrants healthcare and thinking homeless people should be given homes.
Go say something against trans and see how the fediverse reacts most instances will hand out an instant instance ban. That's a pretty mainstream right wing belief but its almost completely censored on the fediverse.
Normal centrist European views huh? I don't think so their are a lot of right ringers Europe who wouldn't be allowed to say what they want here. Perhaps that's what some Americans mean when they say leftist but that's not what most people mean pretty shit straw man imo.
Hate speech has no place here, no matter how comfortable these creeps feel around their fascist politicians and policemen at home.
Hating Jews was "pretty mainstream" in the NSDAP.
Hate speech is hate speech no matter how many bootlicking pieces of shit might agree, and this is not a platform that's friendly to the miserable fuckers who have nothing better to do with their lives than to spread hate and intolerance. They have Twitter and Truth social to spread their shit.
And here lies my point. A vast majority of people don't think its hate speech. And a vast majority of people believe free speech supersedes hate speech.
Please define hate speech.
I've seen many people defending violence against Jews in the name of Palestine right here on lemmy so I'd say hating Jews is pretty mainstream in the fediverse right now.
I believe the right to free speech grants you the right to express hatred as long as ur not calling for violence u should have the right to say whatever the fuck you want.
That's a pretty mainstream belief for a lot a people who have been completely ostracised and discriminated against by the fediverse as a whole.
In common language, “hate speech” refers to offensive discourse targeting a group or an individual based on inherent characteristics (such as race, religion or gender) and that may threaten social peace.
A related reading would be the paradox of tolerance, which goes far in explaining why we do not want this shit anywhere near our communities.
As for anti-Semitism, I've seen some of it in response to Israel's ongoing genocide, and of course the current context makes both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments a very real problem. However, I think people on here mostly seem to be able to distinguish Israel and Judaism, and when they don't it seems moderators are generally doing a better job than on most platforms in my experience. But I doubt you're here in good faith, so I don't see much point in discussing something like this with you.
That's a pretty mainstream belief for a lot a people who have been completely ostracised and discriminated against by the fediverse as a whole.
If you feel discriminated against because people don't want you around, feel free to vote with your feet.
First I always discuss in good faith its a far more rewarding and enjoyable way to engage with the shared human experience. Second the condescending attitude isn't particularly pleasant I'm not speaking with you in such a way I ask you have the same respect for me.
Sure that's a fair definition.
I would argue the paradox of tolerance is widely misunderstood the full quote in which it is based is as follows:
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise." - Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies 1945)
I think most people ignore the second half of it as its convenient for them to do so.
If you feel discriminated against because people don't want you around, feel free to vote with your feet.
Ahh yes vote with my feet and leave the fediverse hence why op is asking why the fediverse has stagnated and doesn't seem to be growing. You have expertly just proven exactly the original point I was trying to make.
U see I also believe in equality (of opportunity) if you have the right to spread hate against right wing views then said right wingers should have said right to spread hate against your views.
I'm tolerant of your hate speech and combat it with ration argument. Your not tolerant of my speech and combat it with deletions, bans, and personal attacks. We are not the same.
And here lies my point. A vast majority of people don't think its hate speech. And a vast majority of people believe free speech supersedes hate speech.
Actually, a vast majority of people don't support being a shitbag to other people. You're confusing popular sentiment with the whims of the conservative elite. If you don't just hide in right wing echo chambers all the time you might be surprised to find out how unpopular your terrible views are.
I frequent many forums both digital and physical under a multitude of identities and the only ones who despise free speech are the extreme left. Pretty much everyone likes it. Lemmy is the most echo chambery of all the places I visit.
If your views are so popular how did trump win the election? Why have almost all right wing parties across Europe gotten a larger percentage of the vote? Why did almost every state in the us shift more right in the last election? These are the facts. You are objectively wrong
I've provided more facts to support my claim than you have for yours. I've provided nothing, whereas you have actively lied about the nothing you've brought forth. I don't need to prove anything to you.
Not that I could, conservatives don't think anyway, and you can't logic someone out of a position they felt their way into.
Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election,
Like, no. You can't even read and parse one paragraph, and you want me to compile a bunch of research you won't understand? You want me to explain the difference between a scant majority of the population who decided to and were permitted to vote and a vast majority of all people everywhere to someone who struggles with basic reading? What a laugh.
I made 2 claims u said I was wrong because my claims where wrong I proved my claims where true. Now ur refusing to provide evidence to support your claims. Engage in good faith. Stop being a hypocrite. Have some honour lest I lose what little respect I used to have for u.
The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.
I've never felt this was as important as people say, at least here in the Threadiverse I don't see it being important. Can you explain how this would help Lemmy/PieFed?
Because it would solve the whole issue of people deciding what instance to sign up to. It would make the fediverse better than the mainstream "the one account to rule them all".
Instances still exist its just that u can log into literally any of them with 1 account. I get instance banned from an instance ur still banned from that instance.
So people still have to choose an instance to login to? This is just to save you from creating an account which is like 25 keystrokes and 4 clicks?
I also don't really want to make things easier for people who get banned often, sounds like it would be easier for trolls to bounce between hundreds of instances with fewer accounts.
A lot of right-wing beliefs have become so extreme that I am frankly happy to not be around them, regardless of how important I feel it is to avoid echo chambers (very). Its one thing to want to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with even though it's challenging, it's another thing to constantly have to contend with people who would like to debate whether you're a human and deserve basic human dignity because you're a minority.
But I would appreciate if we could at least manage not to attack other left wing folks over not being left wing enough, or over what methods are a productive way to solve the problems we're facing.
It's kind of just a microcosm of the infighting and purity testing of the left more broadly (at least in America, I have no idea how things are with the culture of leftwing communities or voices in Europe or the rest of the world), but it still sucks and I'd like to hope we can find a way to do better.
Tbh I'm not even sure what the right and left wing means or believes anymore.
Both terms have been so utterly corrupted and coopted that they have become meaningless to the point of simply being a term used to other one group by the other.
Well that's the problem everyone thinks they are exactly the minimum amount of left and that anyone right of them is a facist. If someone is continuously called a fascist Nazi eventually they will listen.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it" - Joseph Goebbels
Australia wasn't so much on the extreme of Americans but we are getting there. Interestingly both the right wing and the extreme left got fucked in our most recent election. Mind u I'm not happy with the current federal government they are introducing a pre capital gains tax on everyone's savings.
I can appreciate how twisted and emotionally charged the labels have become. As a queer(-ish, it's complicated) person in the US, it is not uncommon for right wing spaces on reddit to offhandedly describe me and all the people I care about as groomers. Thats not a good faith discussion of whether the way that I want to see problems solved is productive, it's just dehumanizing people because they're minorities.
I don't want to be around that. I think it is extremely important to have conversations with people you don't agree with, and I still have very little emotional capacity to engage with people that far away from me in terms of what's considered an acceptable way to engage with other humans.
I don't wish them death and dismemberment or for them to face violent retribution (and before people take issue with that, that would radicalize people and harm every single cause I care about, making every problem I'm facing worse. Even just purely pragmatically that's a horrible way to solve our problems like 99% of the time), but I don't wish to share space with them, I don't have that in me.
The left does absolutely have an issue with calling anyone we dont like a Nazi, which is a painful problem to confront due to the fact that our government is descending into outright fascism, and it is now infinitely harder to have a conversation about the fact that this is what fascism looks like now that the word has been so diluted as to be almost meaningless. It essentially just conveys "I really really really don't like that person" at this point, which is a big difference from "this person is framing minorities as responsible for all that ails society to gain power while stripping us of our freedoms and amassing personal power and currying favor with billionaires by selling them our institutions at all or our expense"
I'm curious, how did both the left and right get fucked in the recent election? I'm pretty much entirely unfamiliar with Australian politics save for a couple friendly jordies videos
The issue is the worst of both sides are the ones defining each other. I won't deny that I disagree with some of the things being pushed as part of education for young children. But I wouldn't say that that's grooming let alone define an entire group of people by that. Its defiantly not good faith.
I think the beautiful part of the internet is if u don't want to be around a particular person u can block them and they simply disappear. They have a right to speech but nobody has the right to force you to listen.
I don't think engaging with people emotionally is the correct way to engage especially over a text medium. I think the only real productive discussion that can be had without devolving into a screaming and name calling is rational and logical. I find that emotional arguments and weaponised empathy get deployed on mass instead of rational discussion.
I'm not saying that you should be forced to share a space with such people I simply think that others should not be restricted from having such spaces and engaging freely with people in those spaces.
This is what I'm saying people have been called fascist so long they have become the fascists. Its both sides stripping us of our freedoms and making our lives shit. Its a choice between get fucked or get fucked lite. We are all to distracted fighting a bullshit culture war to realise its just a distraction from the real issues. Funny how the whole culture war thing kicked off just after occupy wall street.
In Australia we have preferential voting so we don't have a 2 party system. We have the liberals who are centre right, we have labor who are centre left, we have the greens who are communists and we have the nationals who are fascists. The nationals never get any seats, liberal and labor trade places as the government every couple years and the greens get a couple seats. This time the greens lost almost all their seats same as the liberals.
It kinda seems like historically, growth has been driven by exoduses from larger platforms. Right now there's not any huge things going on on other platforms that piss people off and make them wanna leave but like, twitter, reddit and meta seem really good at finding shitty thing to do, so I'd kinda expect growth to just pick back up whenever the next outrage happens 🤷♂️
I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It's why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting "kill a cop" or "kill fascists" memes, like this is literally an "advocate violence" platform. I don't expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.
Yeah we do have a lot of people who feel it's more important to demonstrate their anger than to figure out what people could do to improve the problems.
Worse still, a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that whatever makes it most clear they're angry and hurts the people they disagree with the most is actually what's most productive. The anger about the state of things, particularly in the US is entirely valid. The self-justification of behaviours that burn bridges and radicalize more people is not.
If you want to implement any kind of solution you do, necessarily have to have a critical mass of people who agree with you, and you cannot build that by antagonizing anyone who doesn't already share your exact flavour of left wing ideology, and acting in a way that reflects poorly on your ideology to everyone except people who already agree with you
Very rarely is anyone willing to confront that violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs, and that employing it just because you're (justifiably) angry, is almost always detrimental to the exact abouts you're mad about
(Sorry, I know I kinda went off track from exactly what you were talking about, this is just a closely related huge frustration of mine)
violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs,
The people I'm talking about (the worst ones) don't even have an "end." No plan at all. The violence is the end. It's pure stupidity. I see it as the lust for violence, coming up with some politics to justify itself.
I agree. Its very frustrating, as someone who cares deeply about trying to do anything I can to find a future for myself in the increasingly broken status quo the US is devolving into (and has been in for a long time, albiet to a lesser extreme)
But don't you worry, they'll tell themselves the whole while that they're the righteous one for advocating wanton violence. I want off this ride 🙁
Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting “kill a cop” or “kill fascists” memes, like this is literally an “advocate violence” platform
soooo much! Not only is this becoming an "advocate violence" platform, people are getting pissed if they have a post removed for advocating violence. Lemmy will def end up in the news after some crazy shoots up people and they find out he was all over Lemmy being cheered on to shoot billionaires or something.
Who is going to pay for those ads? With what money? There is no single entity here with enough interest in growing the Fediverse, and any grassroots movements that we do have are strictly against commerce.
I run bespoke hosting and services and people are spending less and less each month. Been doing it for 30 years in various ways and forms and 2025 is by far the hardest year to get anyone to part with money. Everybody thinks they should setup something ad laden it to death, make a fortune and retire at 30. Here in the UK you should visit a loc(ish) new website and see the content disappear behind a torrent of ads, clickbait articles, AI videos etc.
That tells us something about where our culture has gone and is going. I feel what you are seeing reflects this. There's a herd mentality driving a lot of norms.
Network effects are incredibly strong. Xitter is now a disinformation and fascist hellhole, and yet people who should know better still refuse to leave. We have the advantage that we're not growth focused, so we can can bide our time. The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually, but there's no telling when the tipping point will happen.
Yet, Bluesky has grown to 35M+ active accounts, even though they started way after us
We have the advantage that we’re not growth focused
This is not an "advantage". This is an excuse we tell ourselves to cope with our failures.
The inevitable enshittification will do its job eventually,
And when it does, the majority of people will go the next shiny "free as in beer", VC-funded siloed platform and we are going to be just another "They don't know" meme.
Not gonna argue with you mate, I know we disagree fundamentally on what the fediverse means. Me and most others never will see eye to eye with you with your capitalist growth-focused approach.
The "most others" here is a heavily self-selected group of people who don't want to compromise on any of their values and treat any effort to grow as a threat.
All of this to say, it's fine if you say "Yes, we are small and I want it that way because if it gets any bigger we will be surrounded by people who do not uphold the same values we do". The problem is that you're arguing "We are only small because of $random_reason (network effects/evil capitalists/not enough funding/etc)", as if "being small" was determined by external factors and not something that you can control.
That's the point of disagreement. I think we can control this and we can bring more people here, but it's just that you don't want to do it if means sacrificing your ideology.
When I say "compromise", I am not saying "sacrifice them completely". I am talking about in terms of Big Fedi vs Small Fedi, regardless on where on the scale you want to stay, there are trade-offs to be made.
As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I could here.
The fediverse, in this case, is an internetwork of social networks. It works a lot like email; you can have an account on one network and follow, message, and react to people (or bots) on other networks. The biggest software tool for making fediverse networks is Mastodon; there are a lot of other Open Source servers for setting up nodes. There are also some proprietary nodes — Meta Threads and Flipboard are two of the biggest.
The following are some clusters of ideas that I think coalesce into “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi”. I haven’t been able to tie them all back to some fundamental principle on either side.
Big Fedi
The “Big Fedi” position is a set of ideas that roughly cluster together. Not everyone who agrees with one or a few of these agrees with them all, but I think they tend to be related.
The fediverse should be big. Real big. Like, everyone on the planet should have an account on the fediverse. It will make the internet better and the world better.
Weshould make choices that help bring the fediverse to new people. Because the fediverse should be big, we should be doing things to make it bigger; in particular, to bring it to more people.
There should be a lot of different account servers. (I’m using “account servers” instead of “instances” or “servers”.) It’s good to have a lot of choice, with a lot of different parameters: software interfaces, financial structure, what have you.
Commercial account servers are welcome. This variety includes commercial services. If they provide the right mix of features and trade-offs that certain people want, it’s good to have them, especially if they have a lot of users.
Moderation can be automated. Shared blocklists, machine learning, and other tools can be used to catch most of the problematic interactions on the fediverse.
Account servers can be big. It doesn’t matter how big they are: 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B people is fine.
The fediverse should have secondary services. In order to grow, we need secondary services, like people-finders, onboarding tools, global search, bridges, and so on.
The individual is central. People should be able to set up their environment how they like, including their social environment. They have the tools to do that. The account server may set some parameters around content or software usage, but otherwise it’s mostly a dumb pipe.
Connections should be person-to-person. The main social connection is through following someone. Building up this follow graph is important.
People I care about should be on the fediverse. I have a life outside the fediverse — friends, family, colleagues, neighbours. My governments, media, celebrities, sports figures, leaders in my industry. It would be good to have more of those people on the fediverse, so I can connect to them.
People should get to make choices about their account server. Everybody has different priorities: privacy, open source, moderation, cost, stability, features. We can all make our own choices about the account server we prefer.
It should be possible to have ad-free account servers. Technically and culturally, we should be able to set these up.
It should be possible to have Open Source account servers. People who prefer free network services should be able to run them and use them.
It should be possible to have algorithm-free account servers. You should be able to just follow things reverse chronologically.
It should be possible to have individually-run account servers. A normal technically-minded person should be able to run their own account server for themself, friends, their household, or even for a larger communty.
Harms that are mostly kept to account servers are up to people on those servers to solve. Good fences make good neighbours. If things become unbearable, people can move servers somewhat frictionlessly.
Affinity groups should stretch beyond account server boundaries. Groups, lists, and other social network features are important and should be fully federated. They should provide a lot of features.
There may be some harm that comes with growth; we can fix it later. We’re going to find problems as we go along. We can deal with them as we come to them.
The fediverse is going to look very different over time. The way things work now are not how they’re going to be 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. Especially as the fediverse grows, different structures and ways of working are going to develop.
Open standards are important. By having public, open standards available through big standards organizations, we gain the buy-in from different account network operators to join the network. We definitely don’t have time to negotiate bilateral agreements; we need solid standards.
Variety in types of account server operators is good. Different people have different needs and tolerances. If we want to have more people, we need to cater to those different needs with different account servers.
Existing organizations can and should provide account servers. Not just existing tech companies; also businesses providing servers for their employees, universities for students, cities or other governments for their citizens.
Existing services, even if they’re bad, will become somewhat better if they have fediverse features. People on those services will get to connect with a variety of new people. They’ll find out about the fediverse, and might move to another account server, or try something else new.
It’s more important to bring good people to the fediverse than keep bad people off it. More people is good, and the people I care about on other networks are also good. There may be some bad people, too, but we’ll manage them.
Small Fedi
Here is a rough cluster of ideas that I’d call “Small Fedi”. Again, not everyone who agrees with one or two of these agrees with all of them.
The fediverse should be safe. Safe from harassment, safe from privacy violations.
Growth is not important. We’ve gotten along this long with a small fediverse. It’s OK how it is, so growth is not important. Growth is a capitalist mindset.
People who aren’t on the fediverse don’t matter as much as people who are. Their needs, at least. When discussing the future of the fediverse, we don’t need to talk about people on other networks much at all.
If people want to get on the fediverse, they can join an existing account server. We don’t need to bring new account servers to the fediverse; there are a lot already. People who really care about getting on the fediverse can join an existing account server, or set up their own. If they’re not willing to do this, they’re probably not that interested in the fediverse, so why should we bother trying to connect to them?
If growth could cause harm, we either should fix the problem before growing, or we shouldn’t grow. We should examine opportunities carefully, but by default we should say no.
Commercial account servers are discouraged. Most commercial services do harm. Even if they’re on the fediverse, they’re going to try to do harm to make more money. So, they should be avoided as much as possible.
Secondary services can cause harm and should be severely limited if allowed at all. People search and content search can be used for privacy invasion or harassment. Shared blocklists can be manipulated to cause echo chambers. Machine learning can be biased. Onboarding services favour big account servers. They should be discouraged or, preferably, closed.
The account server is central. Moderation decisions, cultural decisions, account decisions, most social decisions should happen at the account server level.
Account servers are the primary affinity group. You should find an account server that feels like home. Any other groups are less important.
Feeds like “fediverse” and “local” are important. There is a public community of account servers that your account server connects to, and the public feed from that community is important. You might use it more often than your home feed. Your local feed is also important, because your account server is a group you belong to.
Moderation should be primarily by hand. The courage and wisdom necessary to make most moderation decisions can only be managed by hand. Automated tools can be manipulated.
Account servers must be small. Human moderators can only do so much work, so the account servers they moderate can only be so big.
The fediverse works just about right right now, and shouldn’t change. There’s a good reason for how everything works, and it’s fine. People who want to change the way things work just don’t get it.
It’s not important that people from my real life are on the fediverse, and it’s kind of discouraged. The account server is the most important affinity group, then the larger “fediverse”. That’s enough; other people are needed or welcome. People who I know who aren’t on the fediverse don’t care about fediverse stuff, so they’d get bored here, anyway.
It is highly discouraged to have ad-supported account servers. Even if they only show ads to their own users, they are causing harm. In particular, they’re showing our content next to ads, or using our content to develop ad algorithms. Either way, harm goes beyond the server border.
It is highly discouraged to have proprietary account servers. They just can’t be trusted with their own users’ data. Also, they’re going to get some of our data, just through federation, and who knows what they’ll do with it.
It is highly discouraged to have algorithmic timelines. Anyone having these causes problems. If you want one, you just don’t get it.
Open standards are less important than making things work the way we want them. In particular, fiddling with standards to keep people safe, and to discourage particular account server structure, is an OK thing to do.
Most existing institutions have proved themselves untrustworthy and should not provide account servers. Name any particular part of civil society, and I can come up with an example of at least one bad practice they have.
Harms that happen on one account server are a problem for every account server. Server blocks, personal blocks, and protocol boundaries aren’t enough to isolate problems to their account server of origin. Secondary or tertiary effects can happen and cause harm.
Existing services, if they’re bad, will make the fediverse worse. Bad practices, bad content, bad members will cause problems for everyone on the fediverse.
It’s more important to keep bad people off the fediverse than to bring good people to it. Bad people can be really horrible. There aren’t actually that many good people on bad services, and if they really wanted to connect with us, they’d find another way.
Where do I land?
I’m mostly a Big Fedi person; I did the work on the fediverse that I’ve done in order to bring it to everyone on the planet. I don’t think people should have to pass a test to be allowed on the fediverse.
That said, I respect that harm can come from new technical decisions and new network connections. As someone deeply involved in the standards around ActivityPub and the fediverse, I’d like to make sure that we give people the tools they need to avoid harm — and stay out of the way when they use them. I very much like the Small Fedi suspicion of new services and account servers, and careful consideration of the possibilities.
I’d like to find ways to mitigate the problems of so many people on proprietary social networks being unconnected to the fediverse, but still centre the safety of existing fedizens. I don’t have an easy answer to how this can work, though.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far. Also, an acknowledgment: I borrowed the term “Small Fedi” without permission from Erin Kissane’s great piece on Untangling Threads. I’m also using it differently, stretching it out, which admittedly is an ingrateful thing with something you borrow. I hope it is not ruined by the time I return it.
Another acknowledgment: this framing is loosely based on the worse is better series of essays by Richard Gabriel. His lists of ideas are much shorter, more cohesive, and more algorithmic.
As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact s…
I mean everyone already has platforms they're largely comfortable with and fediverse platforms are less accessible, smaller, and usually clones of existing formats. The primary place we compete is on not being total dogshit, so when people can forget that their comfortable platforms are dogshit, it doesn't surprise me that people wouldn't be going out of their way to venture out into a new unfamiliar thing, with a different culture and much smaller userbase 🤷♂️
I'm happy to be here regardless of whether we're growing personally. In spite of Lemmy's challenges I enjoy it here, and that's enough for me.
I’m happy to be here regardless of whether we’re growing personally. In spite of Lemmy’s challenges I enjoy it here, and that’s enough for me.
I think this is a fine attitude if you are an user who just wants to enjoy a "slow web" kind of experience, but as someone aware of all the ill effects of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, I wish we were more ambituous and aimed for a bigger slice of user share.
I am broadly in favor of growing the Fediverse, but I am also of the belief that most of the ways that people think that should be done, are potentially more counter productive than productive
For users, most people think of growing Lemmy as evangelizing. Personally I think that's almost always experienced as preachy and antagonistic. The real work of making the fediverse competive is the developers maintainers and hosters, and if we as users want the fediverse to grow I think the biggest thing we can do is be a part of making this a good place to be.
Its by creating a culture that when people show up and try things out on a whim, they decide to stay. It certainly helps for people to hear about the Fediverse, but if that's a accomplished through means that make people frustrated and hostile towards us, I think we've accomplished more harm than good.
I deeply miss the thriving small niche communities of reddit, and us not being able to sustain that is 100% down to not having enough users, but I see participating in a way that makes it worth being here as the biggest thing I can do to support the fediverse
My biggest frustration is that I sincerely believe that I had built like 80% of the tools needed to solve the onboarding issues:
Onboarding by signing up via Reddit OAuth on fediverser.network, so anyone had one single place to visit and "migrate"
A website with a curated list of recommended communities, so that they would have content available as soon as they signed up.
15+ topic-specific instances, so that people could become familiar with the concept of federation, without having to be overwhelmed by the initial choices and/or being forced to understand the "politics" of each instance
The "Community Ambassador" feature, to help people to organize and source content from different places and help them bootstrap their communities.
These things are all right there. There was no single admin interested in implementing it. Everyone was just looking at their own few thousand users and never got together to think "how can we get from 50k to 5 million?"
I can certainly see why that would be frustrating. I'm surprised I'd not heard of your project before- does it have a name or a github? If it does and I see folks talking about how we can improve onboarding or grow the fediverse it'd be nice to be able to mention it to them
I think I'm subbed to fedibridge- have you posted about it there? I feel like admins may be kinda swamped and it might need traction with users who want to see things grow in order to cut through the noise and have it be a significant enough priority for any admins. There may also be an issue of them knowing that making onboarding from reddit significantly easier, if successful might mean putting a lot more strain on themselves and their instance
That has been my impression of present dynamics and historical data, too - boom-bust-cycles of either some other platform fucking up or there being curiosity from some synergetic effect, then the initial wave breaking over time - but usually also leaving behind at least more (genuinely active) users than before the wave. For Lemmy, one can definitely see some reduction in activity, I think - not dramatically, but I do think it's noticeable if you spend a lot of time here. E.g. unlike during the last Exodus, I see more of "the same users" than before. There's still enough content, it does not feel dead by a long shot, and who knows when the next wave may hit.
That wave-like character makes it hard to estimate organic growth too, at times. The mass influx of users dying off over weeks will give shrinking numbers there, even if some users from organic growth who are more likely to stay and be active than "mass exodus users" may still join there. Also, users moving in between MBin/PieFed/Lemmy will fudge numbers, but they are essentially in the same ecosystem.
We had some nice steady growth up until some months back, probably partially driven by dissatisfaction with Reddit rallying behind Trump and further enshittification of it. But predictably the lions share of users just accepted the new normal as the inertia of leaving is just too high to overcome. For another exodus event there needs to be a bigger shock to the system, probably something like turning off old.reddit.
I've spent the a good part of last year working on Fediverser. The tools to lower the barrier of migration and to get people out of Reddit were built. To me, it feels like it's the users and admins here that were not interested in pushing that as a goal.
It definitely will happen. I've already noticed I'm sometimes getting weird "your IP is blocked" warnings when using old.reddit. They go away after a refresh but it wouldn't surprise me if they're trying to get people to stop using it.
Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We're all getting sick of it.
Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.
(Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually)
I think rather we'll see more software popping up and diversifying the ecosystem. Then you can pick whichever you prefer. Which is the whole point of the fediverse. I'm currently working on my own implementation. Might take a long while before any alpha version as I'm super busy but I try to do at least a bit of work on it every day.
As a general comment, I suggest everyone interested in making the Fediverse grow to join those two communities - !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com is about promoting the Threadiverse on other platforms (usually Reddit) - !fedigrow@lemmy.zip is about growing communities on the platform
Nobody likes to shout into the void. The second one helps finding people to help you grow your communities.
I just wish there wasn't so much sectarianism on fedi. Or maybe it's a good thing that this kind of social dynamic is possible in online world. I don't really know. What I do know is that it's rather annoying to see the instance admin being labeled as reactionary because someone dug up something from five years ago and decided to start a FUD campaing.
Just from a quick look at fediverse.observer/, it looks like the Fediverse is mostly steady at 1-1.25 million monthly users (give or take) over the past two years with a slight decreasing trend. I think there are some reasons for this that are not entirely in our control.
There seems to be a global sentiment of disconnecting from social media and the internet in general. So, I wouldn't be surprised if ever platform is seeing a decaying user base. Anecdotally, among the people I see in real life, there is a general sense of exhaustion with online spaces. Whether it's from corporate-own, enshittified platforms to even places on the Fediverse, the people with whom I interact tend to find the entire thing hollow. They've trimmed down to one or two platforms (if that). In fact, I've even started to get that way. In the past, if someone were wrong and arguing against a point I made, I'd engage, especially if it's in something that I have expertise. Now, why bother? There's no use arguing; people have little interest in admitting fault or engaging in good faith (again anecdotally). That said, I'll concede that the Fediverse is a bit better on that front, but not by much.
Then there's the alternative nature of the Fediverse. It's been rehashed over and over about how "difficult" it is to get on and use. It's not actually that hard, but the barrier to entry is an extra step. That small extra step frightens people away from even joining. The only time that barrier gets broken is when a "legacy" social media platform does something anti-user. Then there is a refugee wave that comes in and goes out leading to a modest durable increase in users. Recently, there just hasn't been a major controversy on a major platform that leads people here.
Now, my final thought on this is to ask: Is a small and steady-ish population (despite modest decay) actually bad? In my view, I don't think it is. Being smaller and with a smallish barrier to entry means that we exclude a sizable number of the low-effort population. So, there's less (no zero) slop here. Plus, discussions, when had in good faith, can be much deeper and less filled with stupid low-effort jokes. Overall, I'm not too concerned with the number of people on the Fediverse. Growth isn't necessarily the best thing. Even so, with the way most mainstream platforms are going, it's inevitable that they will do something stupid that drives more people to the Fediverse at least for a time.
TL;DR: The monthly population is mostly steady with a modest decay. Most social media is likely seeing similar trends. I don't think the smaller userbase is that bad of a thing.
I definitely get burnt out on it faster when half my front page is meta posts. I don't have time to curate, I just want to see content that isn't about itself.
According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people's apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there's a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it's grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can't say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it's federated in pretense only, there isn't another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn't stopped growing. It hasn't exploded but we're not complaining about where we are, are we.
I browse lemmy exclusively, as a result of distaste for corporatization. Personally I have no reason to leave and I doubt I will anytime soon. I don't have any particular niches that I'm a part of, so the only thing that would cause me to leave is if the feed dried up. I usually open lemmy in the morning and scroll All - top 12h. I get an hour or so of scrolling before I reach posts with sub-10 votes. And that's all I really need. I'll be here until I can't do that anymore.
That's an interesting question. I don't think the advantages of the fediverse are part of any zeitgeist so are not attracting new and diverse users other than maybe through places like Flipboard and maybe Ghost. The future of social media is certainly going to remain fragmented and the fediverse fragments itself by default anyway. I do think that how people use social media is changing; people are tired of overuse to some extent. Does the fediverse have a future? I think it'll remain its own niche as corporate offerings come and go. Increased Interest may come from an unexpected growth in a specialism that is federated. I think my idealism for what the fediverse could achieve is now muted as I probably no longer have faith in open networks as the cultures are way too different so I probably now see the fediverse less through the email analogy and more through the linux analogy. If fedi plods on refining itself in its own slow way (volunteers and no money make for slow progress) then who know the next time a corp offering destroys itself and people search for a less awful and exploitative environment then it might just win out in the long term though I'm not entirely convinced about that. Does that mean i'm off to corporate networks. Not really. I'd rather just stop altogether than fall down that rabbit hole again.
I have enjoyed this discussion but some of my UK peers have added that the fediverse in general (like most social media to be fair) when it is new seems to "american" for them. Bluesky suffers from this criticism as well. This puts a lot of UK users off. Heck even threads is described by many as too us focused right now (see the I'm in the UK is anybody else posts on threads)
All the meta products, reddit, old fashioned forums... plenty of things. Discourse (pah) tik tok. Different but have way more users. I'm genuinely curious how they get so little traffic in this day and age against other methods. And yes, I know I'm asking on Lemmy, but I'm new here, and I still cannot fathom why they are so quiet
All the meta products, reddit, old fashioned forums… plenty of things. Discourse (pah) tik tok. Different but have way more users
Aren't all of those US focused?
I’m genuinely curious how they get so little traffic in this day and age against other methods. And yes, I know I’m asking on Lemmy, but I’m new here, and I still cannot fathom why they are so quiet
nope they have plenty of UK focused things. Run by a US corp of course, but plenty of local content. I welcome the debate, but for the majority of people not in the fediverse ecosystem, the numbers just look awful and that is a massive reason they don't either look here, or stay. Herd mentality is strong. Most of them are in no way shape or form techy either
That's really interesting. Australian here, and I've remarked several times how the userbase of the fediverse isn't dominated by American voices like most other social media platforms I've used.
It's an interesting perspective. Historically the fediverse was more European; Mastodon is based in Germany and initially got a lot of traction in France, NLNet has contributed a lot of the funding, and there's historically more adoption by European governmental organizations than US. But these days a lot of the energy is being driven by corporate interests (Flipboard, Wordpress, Meta, Ghost) which are primarily American (Ghost being the only exception), so that's leading to a change of dynamics. Distressing, especially given what's going on here in the US!
Kiwi here, originally European so I get content in two languages and from people with some interests in similar. Good percentage of local and international stuff generally keeps me happy. (Not too concerned/glad about overall numbers - there's no continuous growth on a finite planet)
It doesn't, but stalling is different than just sitting roughly the same. I am talking about my experience, with my peers and clients... most of whom have just upped and left
Also British, trying (somewhat failing) to avoid more of the political stuff and that seems to be most of the national specific stuff that gets posted.
There is something in that, plus the internet in general seems to be getting dumbed down a lot. Fedi also seems very much a place full of extreme views which for a lot of people is just a turn off. As a bloke seeing loads of content that is obviously sexual is also something I thought we'd seen the last of...
There is something in that, plus the internet in general seems to be getting dumbed down a lot. Fedi also seems very much a place full of extreme views which for a lot of people is just a turn off. As a bloke seeing loads of content that is obviously sexual is also something I thought we'd seen the last of...
Hey now, that guy is perfectly capable of being a reactionary piece of shit on his own! This kind of thing is entirely in line with what he already thinks.
and don't you think what he thinks was shaped by his self-proclaimed 170+ visits to the US to meet with industry giants and politians to further his own political agenda?
Depends on the topic. Economic and foreign policy sure, and he most likely got pointers on how to actually put his views into action, but the guy voted in favor of letting husbands rape their wives in 1997. Telling him to hate on LGBT+ is like kicking in an open door.
Only proof of its existence I can find is here, apparently it was formerly dubbed by Happy TV, which seemed to be a channel for airing childrens TV shows. I don't actually know if it's lost or not but I can't find it anywhere.
I'd say this is lost, while I can seemingly find other languages pretty easily, the Serbian dub specifically I've come up empty for as well
It's fairly common for a specific language of multi-language release content to be missing. Especially when it's outside of the mainstream languages like English, Spanish, Japanese etc.
Exynos 5400 modem Pixels (Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, Pixel 9 Pro Fold): temporarily disable hardened_malloc and hardware memory tagging for shared_modem_platform executable due to an upstream write-after-free bug
Launcher: fix upstream bug causing a crash for the interface to add lockscreen widgets (currently a tablet only feature until Android 16 QPR1)
Changes in version 138.0.7204.63.0:
update to Chromium 138.0.7204.63
A full list of changes from the previous release (version 138.0.7204.45.2) is available through the Git commit log between the...
backport upstream port of Local Network Checks site settings to Android to provide per-site control with a prompt when sites try to use it instead of the status quo where Vanadium enforces Local Network Checks for the browser with only a global toggle for disabling it
This update is available to GrapheneOS users via our app repository and will also be bundled into the next OS release. Vanadium isn't yet officially available for users outside GrapheneOS, although we plan to do that eventually. It won't be able to provide the WebView outside GrapheneOS and will have missing hardening and other features.
Privacy and security enhanced releases of Chromium for GrapheneOS. Vanadium provides the WebView and standard user-facing browser on GrapheneOS. It depends on hardening in other GrapheneOS reposito...
This is the initial official release of GrapheneOS based on Android 16 after the June 10th release of Android 16. Device support for Pixels was removed from the Android Open Source Project for Android 16 and had to be reimplemented which is why it took so much longer than usual. Please join our testing chat room if you're interesting in testing this experimental release. We'll be making a series of releases this week to fix several known issues and other issues.
full Android 16 port with all GrapheneOS features available (we previously shipped some parts of Android 16 backported to Android 15 QPR2 to provide the 2025-06-05 and then 2025-07-01 Pixel patch level)
migrate to using adevtool to handle a much larger portion of device support since the Android Open Source Project no longer includes device support for Pixels
adevtool: add new arcslib infrastructure for extracting resource overlays from the stock Pixel OS
adevtool: use fixed build number and build date for state regeneration to reduce diffs
don't disable external ports at boot on debug builds for internal development for debugging early boot failures
Call it something like greentext or confessions or something. Anyone posting is automatically set to Anonymous with no link whatsoever to the original account for admin or users to track or in the logs/activity pub etc. Like the person will not get replies, notifications on their account for the post, or the ability to reply as Anon. Simply streamline creation of a throw away account using the existing credentials of an existing account for post access and to give automod a chance to act. Maybe bar new accounts or below a certain threshold of engagement.
One could make a community named "Anon Posting" or something, lock it so only a mod can post, and then make the sole mod a bot that would post anything it got via DM (probably after automoding, rate limiting, etc) to said community.
I do think it's a good idea for the bot to keep a log in case it gets abused for sufficiently evil purposes. One could add some extra functionality to the bot that would give identifying information about the poster to instance admins on demand (via DM), but I think instance admins would have pretty easy access to all DMs made to the bot, along with identifying information anyway. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that.)
Also, the bot could totally delete its logs and with them the identities of all posters after a while. Maybe a month?
And, of course, this wouldn't be ironclad anonymity. But it would keep identities secret from anyone but the bot maintainer and instance admins.
Yeah, sounds like a pretty cool concept. Not volunteering to write such a bot (at least any time soon) or anything, but I support it.
I bet you could create a system that runs someone user and domain thru a hash to produce a different alphanumeric value. Display that value instead of user@domain. So not exactly like 4chan, in that everyone has a user. But a username that is isolated from rest of fediverse. That would allow for 'confessions' type posts to not be linked to a standard account. And preserve ability of mods to ban the racists and trolls. I'm not coder. But it seems possible.
I keep seeing people go to the effort of creating a throwaway account to say or post stuff they want or need to externalize on the threadiverse. I'm willing to bet that for every person that goes to that much effort, there are likely somewhere between 10-100 people that lack an outlet and motivation to do the same. Greentext is just a mutual pretext on my part for genuinely caring about people under pressure right now and in need of an outlet in a way that is not really well supported by the fediverse or activity pub.
We are small enough here that regular names and people can hold meaning in familiarity and memorable history. Kind words and social interaction anonymously from these may hold considerably more value and meaning within this social dynamic that is not afforded elsewhere.
Aha, I see. So you mean there should be a community for anonymous posts. I think it's not inherently supported with ActivityPub. But I guess someone could create a bot that all posts went through. However for very obvious reasons the community would need to be moderated VERY efficiently.
Yeah, I'm kinda volunteering for the mod part. In truth I think it would take the respective instance admin setting up such a thing specifically. Like create a throwaway or something so that the actual user is not propagated to other admin or the full activity pub feed being transported. The one instance admin would know and have the ability to filter or block, but that information would never escape the one server. As a mod I would be blind to actual potential bad actors and only filter at the liberal community and comments level. So basically a normal community that replaces the OP name with Anon, and never shares the real ID with anyone.
I can write a bot that would be capable of doing such a thing if you would like. I don't have time to dev for free but if u wanna pay for me to make such a bot then I'd be happy to do so. U do get a 20% discount if the code is published under an AGPL licence.
“I think that AI and generative AI specifically is the most transformative technology of our lifetime, which is saying a lot, given that we have had the internet,” he told CNBC.
Please don't report on project made by a litteral nazi. It's going to crash and burn on it's own and isn't worth it for anywone.
And before some morron talk about accesibility, first I'm disabled and use the screen reader, second go listen to any other disabled person using linux : they don't want X11 they want a better accesibility API in wayland.
It's not like the developer gives a damn about accessibility, I wouldn't be surprised if regressions happen and he just doesn't fix them. If he cared about disabled people, he wouldn't be anti-vax.
Wildtype’s cultivated salmon is available in a single Portland restaurant, but has plans to expand now that it’s received a “no questions” letter from the FDA.
PhD student Job Garcia was tackled by agents, arrested and held in detention after filming an immigration raid at Home Depot, according to the legal group MALDEF.
WILMINGTON, Del. — AmeriStarRail, which for some time has been proposing privately owned and operated passenger service on the Northeast Corridor, has gone in a new direction with its latest proposal — literally and figuratively.
Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen AI NPUs, AMD software engineers today posted patches for review on the 'amd-ai-engine' accelerator driver
We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, calle...
‘The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership,’ Panel 2, Speaker 8Dr. Steven Hassan- Undue influence expert- Fielding fellow on soci...
Maybe try recognizing that most people actually have very real, legitimate grievances which have been completely swept under the rug by assholes all too eager to avoid responsibility by painting those asking the questions as brainwashed.
Or continue condescending to the entire world so you never have to break the pretty illusions you've painted for yourself, and keep lamenting how the entire world is turning against you.
It's not, the needles or whatever are way to consistent, even in the darker areas. AI would have fucked all that up
Also, it's a basement well window, I have one of these as well. So OP would be standing on the side of the window in his house and the pinecone is on the other side in the fire escape well
Think of it like looking into a really big terrarium
Abdel Qader Sabbah, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and Jeremy Scahill Jun 30, 2025
The outdoor cafe became a scene of carnage: all broken concrete and shredded wood, bodies strewn on the ground, plastic chairs torn apart, and blood soaked on the floor. A large crater in the ground in the cafe showed the missile impact. At al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, fresh corpses in body bags were lined up outside."
Abdel Qader Sabbah, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and Jeremy Scahill Jun 30, 2025
The outdoor cafe became a scene of carnage: all broken concrete and shredded wood, bodies strewn on the ground, plastic chairs torn apart, and blood soaked on the floor. A large crater in the ground in the cafe showed the missile impact. At al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, fresh corpses in body bags were lined up outside."
The Trump administration has lifted export license requirements for chip design software sales in China, as Washington and Beijing implement a trade deal for both countries to ease recent restrictions on critical technologies.
Lol yea, because constantly spreading Russian propaganda like Ukraine being a Nazi regime or NK actually being really good and definitely not a brutal dictatorship is totally healthy for the Fediverse LMAO
We just threw $7 billion onto Trump’s poker table—the expected five-year haul from the DST —simply to keep playing a rigged game with no clear end. What was gained here?
The money these companies earn from online ad revenues—and by selling our personal data (including our search habits)—is virtually untaxed. This is because, like many multinational companies, Google, Meta, Amazon, Airbnb and other online platforms can register their global profits in low-tax jurisdictions.
While U.S. officials in the Democratic and Republican parties accuse the DST of discriminating against U.S. firms—“to stifle American innovation,” according to Commerce Secretary Lutnick today—the tax would have applied to firms of any nationality, and only on revenues above $20 million.
Trade watchers have always suspected Canada was holding on to the DST mainly for negotiating purposes. It was something generally positive for Canada that could nonetheless plausibly be negotiated away for some meaningful purpose, perhaps in the planned six-year review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) that replaced NAFTA under the first Trump presidency. Prime Minister Carney admitted this was the plan in a press scrum today (June 30).
The Canadian government, in playing that card early, has depleted Canada’s digital sovereignty and federal revenues, for no apparent reason other than to keep Trump sweet. In doing so, we will undermine efforts in Europe and elsewhere to develop national digital services taxes in the absence of a viable international alternative.
Worse than that, the Canadian government has legitimated Trump’s pointless and highly destructive trade warfare at a possible turning point.
A lot doesn’t sit right about the Carney government’s capitulation to U.S. president Trump on the stillborn Digital Services Tax (DST), which would have taxed the largely untaxed revenues of tech companies like Google and Meta that operate in the Can…
We should have just increased GST a small amount across the board instead of creating a tax that had such a concentrated impact on businesses from the country that is our largest trading partner. There are these things that Canada does to protect industry or raise funds, but there are consequences for the quite convoluted way we go about it. VATs are a normal thing around the world, but we engineer these weird solutions to try to hide our protectionism. For example instead of raising taxes and subsidizing the news media as a public good, we made (certain) Silicon Valley companies pay (certain) publishers for linking to them. Facebook then said it just won’t link to them and now there’s no news on Facebook. This was a backfire. Instead of GST we could have taxed lots of things, fiber internet plans, advertising or digital services across the board, many people warned against the Trudeau era bills, they caused a rift with Biden too, and we’ve now lost the game of chicken and wasted 4 years on something we had to tear up.
Some of Ukraine’s allies are shifting their focus elsewhere just as the war-battered nation struggles with a fresh volley of missile and drone attacks in its fourth summer of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
All the negatives listed here seem to include a workaround, and the first is basically just restating that the language sucks. The language is the only real turn off for me.
but if you're a developer or systems engineer who sees your OS as a critical part of your toolkit—one that should be as reliable and version-controlled as your code—then the tough road of NixOS is absolutely worth it.
Is the value added benefit to other systems with regards to the cost really worth it? Btw, I love home manager because it is easy to use (I haven't had problems so far).
The ZLUDA open-source effort that started off a half-decade ago as a drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs and then for several years was funded by AMD as a CUDA implementation for Radeon GPUs atop ROCm and then open-sourced but then reverted ha…
ON MAY 26, Alberta announced that it was entering the book-banning business. “Multiple books found in some school libraries show extremely graphic and age-inappropriate content,” warned a government press release. To save Alberta’s children from this material, the government promised to act: first, by inviting Albertans to provide feedback on what is “acceptable for school library collections,” and second, by setting province-wide standards that every school board will be required to implement before classes resume in the fall.
When The Tyee pointed out that three of the four targeted books featured LGBTQ+ narratives, Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides shot back: “The fact that our actions of protecting young students from seeing porn, child molestation, self-harm and other sexual material in school libraries are being labelled as anti-LGBTQ is frankly irresponsible.”
Book banners can always be counted upon to deny that label while simultaneously invoking children’s innocence to justify the very censorship they disavow. “This isn’t about banning books,” Premier Danielle Smith posted on X. “It’s about protecting kids from graphic, sexually explicit content that has no place in a classroom.” (None of the books appear to have been part of any classroom curriculum, nor were students compelled to read them.)
I'm not gonna lie, guys, neither say the opposite: there are people who play in their phones, I bet you do, so do I. I'm curious to know what do you play in your phones, what kind of "phone gamer" are you. Remember PDAs? The only games that things had were mineswipper, solitaire, chess, sudoku among others. All those are games that perfectly use the touch capabilities of its device, but now, we have more process capacity, and we still have one touch screen (I know, you can touch many points of the screen at the same time). I've always seen the screen of my phone as a one big button, so, I can't play any game that needs more than one touch to be played. I do limit my catalogue of games to those mentioned above, and I really like them. I love sudoku.
A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
Heeby deeby what about the various ways to build fhs environments in nix. My largest complaint is actually that the nix ecosystem has disjointed, incomplete, and incorrect documentation. You can get through it, but it's often best to try reading the code in nixpkgs when things aren't working like the docs say. I've been getting by for a few years now and I don't really even know the nix language, I really should put the time in to learn it but I will when I need to.
I'm very happy with how much nixos just works and doesn't let me break the whole os just because I want to try the latest version of blender 😅
@Sunshine More likely to cause them than to stop them, at least lightning. It is largely the movement of water droplets that build up the static charge that leads to a lightning discharge. Causing to rain could help the forest fires after they've started, but cloud seeding won't reduce lightning.
A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
This is a well-written post. I agree that “friction” involved with small changes and incompatibility with some Linux binaries are significant downsides. I think NixOS makes a lot of sense for development environments, but it’s not my preference for a personal device
I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.
The biggest downside to containers vs. Nix for me is that Nix can produce binaries for Linux and macOS, whereas docker only helps with Linux unless you can perform literal magic to cross-compile your project on Linux for macOS.
Containers also don't give you reproducible environments, and Nix does.
That said, Nix documentation is ass, so I usually end up going with containers because they require far less suffering to get working because writing a containerfile is much easier than guessing how to hobble together a Nix flake with a mostly undocumented language.
You absolutely do. If you build a container and publish it you will pull down that exact thing every time. How is that not "reproducibility"?
You no what though? Scratch that - who gives a fuck? Bit-for-bit reproducibility takes far more effort than it's worth anyway. Even NixOS isn't completely reproducible. It's a false goal.
For dev environments, repeatable is okay.
It's well more than good enough you mean.
If you want actually reproducible binaries that you can ship, Nix is better fit for that purpose.
I'm not quite sure why you fetishise a bit-for-bit over semantic equivalence. Doesn't it turn "it works on my machine" into "it works on my machine as long as it has this sha: ... "?
I'm not quite sure why you think pointing out someone's confidently incorrect claim that containers do give you reproducible environments means that I fetishsize anything?
But if you genuinely want to know why reproducibility is valuable, take a look at reproducible-builds.org/.
I was quite happy to see that Debian and Arch have both made great strides into making tooling that enables reproducible packages in recent times. It's probable that, because of efforts like this, creating reproducible builds will become easier/possible on most Linux environments, including traditional container workflows.
For now though, Nix Flakes are much better at enabling reproducible builds of your software than traditional containers, if you can suffer through Nix not being documented very well. This article covers some more details on different build systems and compares them with Nix Flakes if you want more concrete examples.
FWIW, I think that containers are awesome, and using them for dev environments and CI tooling solves a lot of very real problems ("it works on my machine", cheap and easy cross-compilation for Linux systems, basic sandboxing, etc.) for people. I use containers for a lot of those reasons. But if I need to make something reproducible, there are better tools for the job.
I'm always on the go, swapping PCs, travelling for medical reasons. Buy, sell, trade hardware. Nix allows me to boot into my system as if I never left with a simple hardware config update script. Rock solid consistency.
Is your hardware always the exact same? Because if it isn't, then I'm sure you have to do modifications to your config file. And at that point you night as well just use a regular distro instead.
So what the main hassle of switching is that you have to run your hardware file to update for your new hardware, then inside your Nix config rarely will I ever have to edit things (maybe UUIDS if totally new machine fresh nix install/but I usually ssd swap for ease of transition and speed, or even clonezilla multiple drives and use as needed) even drivers for example. I've got auto scripts setup to run that will automatically pull any drivers or updates from the base system nix update to any drivers.
There's really only two files you ever have to touch that I've used. Nix hardware, nix config. Once hardware is updated for which system you on you'll never touch that until you boot a new machine with different hardware. If you setup nix how it's supposed to be. Nix config is your master file. A single backup of that and when setup correctly. I can boot like I never left my machine. I'm talking librewolf still has my accounts open and logged in. VPN works. It's all seamless damn near.
You have to learn to play within nixos sandbox meaning understand what your capable of doing and do it all inside config. With a few auto scripts, and 3 or 4 common commands on desktop page for whatever you wanna do and its terminal and memory hands off. I've what I call dumb Monkey commented my entire config and its in order if boot process from power on machine to boot, etc to shutdown.
A regular distro still poses many many more challenges when hardware swapping. You have different files to remember fstab, etc etc which can lead to mental memory load and system clutter if you didn't build and maintain a perfect system from the beginning with stuff like files, sym links, all sorts if tweaks you've made over time.
So I switched to nix to mitigate those things. Now I've made a master config file copy, auto updates, backups, etc is all automated in the background now. All contained in my nix config. It's supremely stable. Mental load is zero. Fills my use case. Immutable.
You have nothing to lose and only to gain. Pick any desktop environment and setup to your liking. I came from windows, to mint, to full custom nix all my apps, browsers, luks, apparmour, firejail, the whole stack.
I've tried live boots of many other distributions but this is the cleanest, leanest, most manageable of them all. My only true concern is project lasting long-term. For now. Aside from not having GUFW. I'm happy. I think there's just a lot if misinfo and lack of hands on use from most people or incorrectly setup systems to utilize how nix should be ran. I think that should iron out over time.
You can manage multiple machines with a single Nix configuration git repository and modularize the configuration as much as you want. You can have a config with a desktop environment that you skip on servers, override individual variables for a specific host or do whatever you want. You can even remote deploy it all with a simple nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host" and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).
Loved nixOS but couldn't install PIA VPN gui and disliked the workarounds. Also doing .net dev was more awkward than I liked so went back to Arch and wrote some scripts to install all the packages I want instead. Love the idea of nixOS though.
I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.
Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.
I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use. For example, I love KDE, but they really don't do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.
I think you over complicating your view here. I daily nix. Your not carrying a bunch if dot files. You have one. A single nix. Config. That's it. It's not big, long, messy, what so ever. I have mine commented by section from boot order to auto updates and backups. Your talking about 150 lines of extremely short and almost self explanatory code. I came from mint having never used nix. I figured it out doing a custom luks install and the whole custom build from scratch in no time.
Your diff issue is overblown. The edits you make are small and you cannot get lost in multiple configs unless your doing entire system writes which you would never do. I use a dead light weight diff GUI or terminal. This has to be one if the cleanest, maintenance free distros I have ever used.
It doesn't seem you have truly driven Nix with this take. No program writes directly to your config, even if there was say your temp scenario you reboot and temps would wipe away like you never did them unless you rebuild nix config. Most of your concerns would fall away once you really drove nix to see how it functions.
Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say "dotfiles", I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don't have to deal with the dotfiles myself.
I've used nixos exclusively lately. It's been awesome. No system scatter, clutter. It'd immutable. There's very slight driver hassle (you don't have GUI for drivers so a simple terminal command fetches everything you need.) in cinnamon. I came from mint. I have all basic commands in executable files on desktop for ease of hassle. It's not about rebuilding the system. Its about being hands off. Next to zero maintenance because not much in your system gets altered. I went for a full custom install from terminal. The only thing I personally miss being GUI is a firewall like UFW or GUFW.
Overall its more rock solid and workable than likely every distro I have ever tried. The feature set is nice, easy rollbacks, fucking cake backups. All you have to know is your entire system lives on one small editable file called nix. Configuration. Keep it in a micro SD or USB or any backup and it's as if you never left. Any changes you want you simply tweak in the config then reboot. If it breaks then select your previous gen number on boot and your exactly where you was before.
I diff my edits and keep copies, run auto backups, and more. It's so hands off that I haven't found a better replacement yet. My single biggest concern is long-term viability in the project.
This is a good example of what people consistently overlook/misunderstand, when it comes to Nix.
Obviously you can remount a /home, or just pull the dotfiles from a personal repo, but the strength of Nix is also in that I can re-create my entire config exactly how it is defined. If i were to setup a machine completely from scratch, with a mature enough config, it will get me from 0 to my exact desktop completely unattended.
But there are also many more advantages to it, at least in my eyes. Let's take trying/tweaking new packages as an example. Yesterday I pulled an old repo for an Outer Wilds mod. The thing needs a dev environment, and a mod manager for the actual game. A nix shell got me both, I finished my work, and when I exit out of fish, both are gone, just as I wanted them to be.
Another good example would be partial os updates. I've used Arch for almost 9 years before switching to Nix, and pretty much a top3 Arch rule is not doing partial updates, or partial rollbacks. In case of a breakage, I would have to manually redownload an older version of a tarball, pacman -U the package, and then hope i'm not cooked. In the case of gcc incompatibilities, it can quickly become a massive pain in the ass. My nix flake would never experience this problem, because I already have two different scenarios available - either i build based on an older lockfile from my git repo, or I create an overlay for a specific input I need, so that it still pulls what it needs, and doesn't interfere with the rest of my system
You only have one machine? I benefit from sharing configs between the laptop and the desktop. They are not the same, but I can easily copy paste a complex service I defined in my desktop to do the same thing on my laptop
I have a desktop, laptop, and a few VMs and servery things. Dotfile manager (yadm, which is a git wrapper) to sync personal settings, everything else I just do manually. The system-level configs are either different enough that standardizing them isn’t very helpful, or no more complicated than installing packages and activating services.
Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I'll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.
But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn't happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it's just not for non-technical Linux users.
Untrue. I came from windows, to Linux mint, then now I daily nix. I'm an average person who prefers to be terminal hands off. I did a full custom install from my mint setup to nix, apps, luks, the entire swap and booted as if I never left basically. I faltered a few times and had to select previous generations in my boot menu but honestly it'd because somehow I fucked up my UUIDs. The learning curve is there but let me assure you it's minimal in terms of linux, and it's dead stable because nothing changes without you doing it. In 1000 years it should still be running Unadultered.
Meanwhile me as a barbarian installing Debian and copying my ~/.bashrc file (and a few others) if not just remounting /home/ in the new installation every few years.
Skipped to the "ugly" part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?
I think a bigger problem is that it's hard to find "best practices" because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.
Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it's a struggle when it comes to doing things like "how do I change the source of a package", "how do I compose two modules together" and "how do I add a repo to a flake so it's visible in my config". Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they're taking about.
I always aim at packages and issued inside my nix config cuts all this hassle out atleast for me.. Ive got everything pretty meticulously commented and in order of boot process and in general running step by step order. I'm pretty sure I dumb monkey could figure out how it runs. I came from windows then mint then nix. To give you an idea of my PC knowledge. I think the whole point if nix is to keep the system contained and not scattered. I see many posters mentioning system scatter on nix as an issue and I have no idea how theu managed to complicate one if the simplest systems I've ever used as far as clean, tidy, goes.
I've been stuck on Nix for two weeks because I thought it would be a good idea to put a distro I had never used but that wouldn't break on my backup laptop in case my main one ever broke. I just couldn't force myself to install debian, not that I have anything against debian, it's just... kinda boring, while Nix seemed very interesting. IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME I SWEAR.
Guess what happened... I broke Arch. Then I reinstalled and the next day the laptop broke. Then the next day I tried to get my data back and the hard drive broke. So, backup laptop with Nix for two weeks...
I really really really like the declarative stuff. Installing packages through config files is so nice I'll never lose track of what I've installed ever again 🥰 🥰 🥰 I was already using a git repo for all my config files + GNU Stow to symlink everything to its proper place, so adding the .nix configs to that setup was very easy.
Having a clean system on rebuild is great. No more clutter left everywhere that I don't know about, no more half broken stuff left lying around.
But... - It's not Arch. Not Nix's fault, but I kept hearing that it would be "like Arch but declarative"... and it's really not 😑 Everything seems over-complicated vs as simple as possible. - I absolutely hate the language. - What's with those error messages from hell??? - And speaking of hell, every language that can't just use indentations like YAML instead of cluttering the code with {} and [] and () should have been relegated to the darkest pit of hell 20 years ago. But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea) - Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it's unfair since it's not trying to be a rolling release... but... but...) - Where are the source packages? Is that an Arch only thing? I liked having packages that automatically use the latest git commit without needing to manually install from source and manually reinstall each time I want an update like a medieval peasant... 😭 - Nix packages are weird. Even someone who's terrible at coding like me can read Arch PKGBUILDS... I miss you Arch 😢 - Apps not working because of paths that don't exist on Nix... what do you mean I need to patch the package myself? 😭 But at least there's steam-run, great preserver of what's left of my sanity. - ~~Can't wrap my head around installing some stuff like VSCode extensions (the advice I got was "don't bother just do it imperatively...)~~ (Edit: Finally figured it out!!!) - Wiki is often sparse on info and not very helpful if you don't already know what you are doing (and I clearly don't 😅) - Hidden configs. Some stuff works on its own like pipewire even though I haven't installed or configured it (I went with a minimal install that just gave me a tty then build from there, no DE), and how it's already configured is not in the default config files. It's very confusing not knowing why some stuff works and how it's configured by default.
But it's kinda growing on me. Like mold. Or cancer. Brain cancer.
Yes it's a headache if you don't have a clue what you're doing and suck at coding like me, but the good parts might make the headache worth it depending on what you want of your distro. A week ago I couldn't wait to get a new laptop to reinstall Arch, but now I'm actually wondering if I should keep trying Nix... OH GOD HAVE I CAUGHT THE NIX BRAIN CANCER? 😭
I'm just seeing your comment after I recommended Guix, that I could read and understand Guile Scheme is what made me hop away from NixOS, the nixlang is an ungrokable mess
I'm not a fan of nested parenthesis... but aside from that I don't know much about the language, is it more convenient? Does it also suffer from the error messages from hell problem?
Guix is a distribution of the GNU operating system.
Guix is technology that respects the freedom of computer users.
You are free to run the system for any purpose, study how it
works, improve it, and share it with the whole world.
That is something you can't quite escape in Nix either. While it doesn't use parenthesis like a Lisp, the nature of the language and the depths of the sets you are dealing with still makes you end up getting a lot of this at the end of your files:
];
};
};
};
}
Having one } too many or too few is a pretty common issue with Nix and feels very similar to Lisp, even when the rest of the language is quite different.
While some people love putting Lisp in everything, I really don't get it. Guix is far uglier than Nix in the language department. Scheme is not a configuration language and thus has none of the nice things that Nix has (multi-line string handling, defaults, lazy evaluation, inline expression, etc.), instead you get multiple levels of macro spaghetti. Furthermore, Guix forces you to turn everything into Scheme, where you can just use plain Bash in your Nix build steps, in Guix that is all Scheme.
I had spent a lot of years with Scheme before starting with Guix and then spend quite a few years with that, but even after all that switching to Nix just felt so much better instantly. Instead of trying to hack a DSL onto of Scheme you just get a language that's actually build for the task.
But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it’s unfair since it’s not trying to be a rolling release… but… but…)
Sure, some packages are outdated. But in terms of percentage of up-to-date packages, it's (AFAIK) the best out of any distro repo. And that's perhaps even more impressive of a feat when realizing it also sports the biggest repo. For actual stats: repology.org/repositories/stat…
Wait how does Nix Unstable have a better score than the AUR? With four times less maintainers? That's really impressive, especially considering how much more simple Arch packages are to make.
Nix has more up to date packages than most distros have packages in total. There's a bot that goes around updating them automatically if they are from github. Maybe there's an issue with your package?
It's reproducible, so random updates are a no-no. You can however just dump the Git URL in your flake.nix inputs and then override the src of the package with that. The source gets updated when you do nix flake update next time. Something like this:
Finally managed to enable VSCode extensions without doing it imperatively or using home manager I'm so happy I could cry 😭 😭 😭
It actually wasn't even that bad, I'm just terrible at understanding documentation I guess
(vscode-with-extensions.override {
vscodeExtensions = with vscode-extensions; [
bodil.blueprint-gtk # Gtk Bluprint language support
ms-vscode.makefile-tools # Makefile language support
bbenoist.nix # Nix language support
ms-python.python # Python language support
naumovs.color-highlight # Color Highlight
ms-azuretools.vscode-docker # Docker
donjayamanne.githistory # Git History
seatonjiang.gitmoji-vscode # Gitmoji
];
})
with ansible, you are responsible for making sure that executing the described steps in the described order leads to the desired result
with nix, you describe what you want your system to look like, and then figuring out how to get there is nix's problem (or rather, is obvious to nix thanks to nixpkgs)
It's missing the fact that the nix store can be huge, even if garbage collected regularly. This prevents me from using nix on my Ubuntu laptop with limited HDD space.
I really feel compelled to share that I actually really fucking love nix. I've never felt so confident that my computer would turn on no problem. It was hard and it was rewarding.
Idk I guess I haven't had it for long but once I got my dotfiles the way I like I just stopped messing with it.
I haven't had any issues thus far. But I have not used a lot of appimages. Usually I can find everything in nixpkgs, and those that I didn't all worked with appimages.
Let me disagree there, the language is trivial. It's just JSON-lookalike with expressions, with a lot of nice touches that make using it much easier than all the alternatives (e.g. sane multi-line string handling, lazy evaluation, default values, powerful key/value sets, etc.). The only real stumbling for me when first encountering it was realizing that functions can only take a single argument (which can be a key/value set) and that functions are literally just : (e.g. (a: a + 5) 6 => 11). That's easily missed if you just look at a file without reading the documentation.
The thing that makes it hard is just the complexity of the actual package collection, your configuration contains literally your whole system, and it's not always obvious where to find the thing you need, since sometimes it's a plain package, sometimes it is a services.foobar.enable = true and sometimes you have to fiddle with override or other package specific things. Knowing that search.nixos.org/ exists is half the battle here.
There is also the lack of static typing that can lead to rather verbose error messages, but it's not like many other configuration formats have that either.
There are a few gnarly things about Nix, even for someone who's familiar with Haskell (the most similar language to Nix that's even close to mainstream).
Dynamic typing (you mention this briefly). Some people like the extra flexibility that dynamic typing gives, but there's a tradeoff: more errors. The thing is, due to NixOS's complicated structure, the traceback for an evaluation error might not give you any information about where the cause is (indeed, the traceback might not include a single line of your own code!). This makes errors unusually costly in NixOS specifically, so any language feature that causes more runtime errors automatically has a worse impact than it would in a more "normal" language.
The "standard library" (builtins) is extremely sparse. You basically have to depend on at least nixpkgs-lib if you want to get any real work done.
No real data abstraction mechanisms. No ADTs, no nominal types. The only composite types are attrsets and lists. The usual way to encode a custom type is as an attrset with a _type field or some such.
While we're at it, very limited pattern-matching.
Clunky list literal syntax: no commas between list elements. I can't tell you the number of times I've forgotten to surround list elements in parentheses.
Can anyone remember the rules for escaping ${ or ''? I have to look them up every time.
I really want to like Nix. The idea of declaratively defining my entire system sounds great. I can manage it with Git and even have multiple machines all look the same. I can define my partititioning once and magically get a btrfs disk working. Wow!
But I find the language confusing no matter how many times people say it's easy. I have a lot of experience with other programming languages so maybe it just doesn't mesh. It also gives terrible error messages that are hard for me to understand. And Nixpkgs is unpredictable for what version I'm going to get. One of the services I installed ended up being a release candidate version which was a surprise. What if I don't want the latest version of Docker? How do I pin it? Do I have to duplicate part of Nixpkgs? It just feels like a monorepo where everybody has to be on the same versions. Why on earth do the Nix language docs start by introducing math expressions instead of here is a simple self contained thing that installs one program. Here's how you configure it. Here's how you expand. Why does the dependency graph seem to pull in so many unnecessary dependencies? For example, I tried to build a minimal Docker image (which Nix looks to be a very good fit for), but I couldn't figure out how to strip out dependencies that likely were only used during build for a dependency.
I still like the idea and have managed to get my server defined entirely with NixOS which is very cool, but I can't recommend this to my tech friends because if I'm confused they will be more so.
I have not used Nix, so I may not know what I am talking about.
That said, I have been using Chimera Linux which uses the APK package manager. It works by maintaining a single file in /etc/apk/world that specifies all the packages the user wants on the system. This is used to calculate dependencies and install packages. When you “add” and “del” packages, all it is really doing is adding and removing from this list. If you remove a package, it will remove all the dependencies too unless they appear in the “world” file.
If you do not specify a version number for a package, you get the latest. But you can pin versions of you want.
If you copy the world file from one system to another, you get the same set of installed packages.
So, if I use git to backup my world file, maybe a couple of other entries in /etc, and the dot files in my home directory, I have pretty much everything I need to completely recreate my system.
Is it really worth all the extra complexity of Nix?
Generally true, but the ones out at our city park have totally rusted out underneath. Nobody's been pissing on them, they're just exposed to the weather.
If I remember later today, I might take a photo of the pair of water fountains at our park. The top stainless steel side looks perfectly fine, but the metal panel underneath both of them is totally rusted out. I'm pretty sure they disabled/disconnected both of them.
Not sure where I might post the photo though, guess I might post under Nowhere Else To Post.. 🤷
QUEENSLAND - Swimmers at a busy Nova Scotia beach were forced out of the water for two hours after a fin was spotted offshore.
The director of the Nova Scotia Lifeguard Service says a fin — possibly of a shark — was spotted in the swimmer's area of Queensland beach, about 50 kilometres west of Halifax.
Paul D'Eon says the lifeguard service has no way to confirm there was a shark, but says when a fin is spotted close to the beach the policy is to order swimmers out of the water.
The veteran lifeguard manager says the potential shark sighting was the first this season at any of the province's 21 ocean beaches, where lifeguards have been on duty for the past five days.
D'Eon says that last year there were three or four sightings of fins over the summer.
The director says that in his 51-year career there's never been a shark attack at one of the beaches while lifeguards were on duty.
Indeed. While most of the time a fin sighting would be harmless, that area is within territory covered by great white sharks. In 2021 a woman swimming at Margaree Island was bitten by a great white that likely mistook her for a seal.
As waters warm, mako and great white sharks have been spending more time close to shore over the past decade.
Just like with any animal at the top of the food chain, it’s better to use caution than to tempt statistics.
On Friday, Liberal MPP Adil Shamji published a letter which indicated the data of some 200,000 patients using Ontario Health atHome had been compromised in March.
Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues working on enhancements to Mesa's Zink driver for OpenGL implemented over the Vulkan API
So they’re copying Dave and Busters by trying to become what they should have stayed to begin with.
Not gonna work. Dave and Busters is terrible.
But get some cool animatronic shows, .25 cent arcade games from the 80s- 90s, maybe even a few amusement center rides like the old Scandia centers had (go karts, suspended rides, bumper boats, mini golf). THAT would be worthwhile.
It'll work. Millennial nostalgia is a cash cow. There are multiple arcade bars in my area that seem to do pretty well.
...actually, rereading the article, I don't see that they'll serve alcohol. Or food at all, for that matter. And it looks like they're building them out of empty mall tenancies.
I go to a local arcade bar all the time (hubs loves Stepmaniax), I see tons of parents taking their kids there. There's usually people in the bar area if you don't go at like, 11 am. It honestly seems like a great business plan, new and classic arcade games, catered to both children and their parents simultaneously?
Prior to the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPUs from Intel there was the DG1 graphics processor that served primarily as the initial developer vehicle for facilitating Intel's modern discrete GPU push
Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen AI NPUs, AMD software engineers today posted patches for review on the 'amd-ai-engine' accelerator driver
Some time ago, Linus Torvalds made a throwaway comment that sent ripples through the Linux world. Was it perhaps time to abandon support for the now-ancient Intel 486? Developers had already abando…
Intel tried to make Itanium which was incompatible with x86 in order to become a monopoly, but AMD extended x86 with x64. AMD won in the end due to adoption, their first chip was the original Athlon64, which came shortly after the pentium 4 and the ghz wars.
Back in 2003, I was qualified for a lousy $28 a month in Food Stamps, as long as I came in twice a week for their work program.
It cost more for the gasoline to make it to their work program than the benefits offered. It's cheaper to sit on my ass than to qualify for SNAP. And that was way before the orange man.
@cm0002 You know there is the "safety net" and then there is the "I don't want to work net", and way too many people are on the latter and the country is suffering for it.
NOTE: The original title was "Artificial intelligence-assisted detection[...]", so I modified it to be more specific.
Background:
Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is highly curable when diagnosed early. However, the nasopharynx’s obscure anatomical position and the similarity of local imaging manifestations with those of other nasopharyngeal diseases often lead to diagnostic challenges, resulting in delayed or missed diagnoses. Our aim was to develop a deep learning algorithm to enhance an otolaryngologist’s diagnostic capabilities by differentiating between nasopharyngeal carcinoma, benign hyperplasia, and normal nasopharynx during endoscopic examination.
Findings
Endoscopic images used in the internal study (Jan 1, 2017, to Jan 31, 2023) were from 15 521 individuals (9033 [58·2%] men and 6488 [41·8%] women; mean age 47·6 years [IQR 38·4–56·8]). Images from 945 participants (538 [56·9%] men and 407 [43·1%] women; mean age 45·2 years [IQR 35·2– 55·2]) were used in the external validation. STND in the internal dataset discriminated normal nasopharynx images from abnormalities (benign hyperplasia and nasopharyngeal carcinoma) with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0·99 (95% CI 0·99–0·99) and malignant images (ie, nasopharyngeal carcinoma) from non-malignant images (ie, benign hyperplasia and normal nasopharynx) with an AUC of 0·99 (95% CI 0·98–0·99). In the external validation, the system had an AUC for the detection of nasopharyngeal carcinoma of 0·95 (95% CI 0·94–0·96), a sensitivity of 91·6% (95% CI 89·3–93·5), and a specificity of 86·1% (95% CI 84·1–87·9). In the multireader, multicase study, the artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted strategy enhanced otolaryngologists’ diagnostic accuracy by 7·9%, increasing from 83·4% (95% CI 80·1–86·7, without AI assistance) to 91·2% (95% CI 88·6–93·9, with AI assistance; p<0·0001) for primary care otolaryngologists. Reading time per image decreased with the aid of the AI model (mean 5·0 s [SD 2·5] vs 6·7 s [6·0] without the model; p=0·034).
(emphasis mine)
Interpretation
Our deep learning system has shown significant clinical potential for the practical application of nasopharyngeal carcinoma diagnosis through endoscopic images in real-world settings. The system offers substantial benefits for adoption in primary hospitals, aiming to enhance specificity, avoid additional biopsies, and reduce missed diagnoses.
Israel has insisted it won't give up its aim of defeating Hamas in Gaza, while Hamas said it would only free the remaining hostages after the war ends.
The Logitech Options+ offline installer enables users as well as ITDMs to install the software to computers that do not have access to the internet (or are on an air-gapped network). It shares all ...
Jorge Castro presented at CentOS Showcase.bootc has transformed how we can consume operating systems.Where does this leave the "enterprise workstation"? Ther...
If he/she want to compare performance, they should do some benchmark instead. If he/she want to compare efficiency, they should count the power cost in different situations. Just see the GPU/CPU usage is meaningless from all views.
Despite reporting over 4,400 confirmed cases of mpox as of 27 June 2025, Sierra Leone has performed genomic characterization on only approximately 2.5% of these cases (108 sequences), representing a significant limitation in understanding viral evolution and informing targeted public health interventions. Currently, these genomic data are deposited in international repositories such as Pathoplexus, GISAID, and NCBI Virus; however, the disparity between outbreak detection and genomic data generation hampers real-time surveillance efforts.
The week-long workshop employed a multidisciplinary, hands-on approach combining didactic instruction, practical exercises, and group data analysis. The curriculum included:
Day 1: Introduction to genomic surveillance principles, sequencing technologies, and foundational bioinformatics tools such as Linux and Conda environments.
Day 2: Emphasis on sequencing data quality control (FastQC, MultiQC), read trimming (Fastp, Hostile), and genome assembly techniques utilizing reference-based (BWA, Cutadapt) and de novo (SPAdes) approaches.
Day 3: Variant detection and analysis (SAMtools, FreeBayes, Snippy), consensus sequence generation (Bcftools), and genome annotation (SnpEff, VEP).
Day 4: Phylogenetic analysis, clade classification (Nextclade, Nextstrain), and visualization using platforms such as GISAID, Pathoplexus, NCBI Virus, Microreact, iTOL, and Galaxy.
Day 5: Integration of all components through a case study simulating mpox outbreak response, culminating in data interpretation and strategic planning.
Walter Oguta, WHO AFRO EPI Analytics Specialist and the Lead Bioinformatics Trainer, underscored the practical value of the training, stating, “Translating genomic data into actionable public health strategies is the ultimate goal. Our aim was to equip participants with both technical proficiency and confidence to utilize these tools effectively.”
Freetown, Sierra Leone - In a strategic initiative aimed at enhancing mpox outbreak response and genomic surveillance capacity, the Central Public Health Reference Laboratory (CPHRL) in Freetown hosted the mpox Genomics and Bioinformatics training wo…
The Fediverse Passport would be the central account for all users on the Fediverse.
How it would work
a. Upon signing up for the a platform on the Fediverse the user would be redirected to the "Create your Passport" You would create your unique username. Once signed up you would then have an account on every platform connected to the Fediverse.
b. If someone friends/follows you on one platform they would automatically follow you on all platforms. Insuring that communities and friends could stay connected across platforms.
c. The passport for the user would show your feed on all platforms and allow you to selected which platform you want to see your feed from, also allowing you to directly search your content so you could find a post for whatever reason you need.
d. For the subscriber it would show them your feed and allow them to easily find your content.
e. Tons of customization options including the ability to monetize and or set a subscription fee for the video, blogging, and other "arts" platforms.
Safe Guards
You would be allowed to set your privacy setting to, Public, Subscribers Only, Approve Subscribers, Mutual Friends only, Private (Requires link)
Benefit
Would allow stream less interaction across the whole Fediverse and really get it going. No more having to create a different account on each platform and now you can claim an identity and keep track of your communities, also each site would directly help "advertise" the others.
A passport in the way described here doesn't need to be centralised. Your profile could link to your other profiles through metadata, rather than a centralised system.
It's not a matter of how ones profile would be accessed, but how it would be created in the first place snd how it would be managed.
Necessarily, those who implement the creation of accounts have control over how they're created, who is allowed to create them and how they will be handled after creation.
Any scheme to establish one "central" (your own term) account for the entire fediverse will necessarily be managed by one "central" service, which means one "central" authority over account creation and management
And no, a central account doesn't require a central service, it just requires amendments to the protocols to allow for a decentralised identity. Nostr, bluesky, etc all work that way. Nostr is full of nazis and bitcoin bros, and bluesky is effectively centralised in other ways, but both of them do have a genuinely decentralised single identity system.
There are a few ways of doing it. A single account on the first platform, and then signing up to remote platforms with that account. A system of trust that allows a user to verify that other remote accounts are genuinely also them. Combine it with platforms that recognise content posted from other accounts/platforms that belong to the same person, and let them edit the "remote" content locally and federate it out again etc.
So you don't end up with a centralised identity, but rather, the ability to manage your identity from whichever instance you happen to be signed in to as if it were created locally on that instance.
And further - the establishment of a single, fediverse-wide account for each user would make it far too easy for those so inclined to silence anyone they wanted merely by banning their one and only account.
It could have several even as many as 100 different people with part of the key to access the center point for the passports so that any decisions would have to be unanimous and would keep things purely being monitored for technological updates.
Unless what you are describing involves some type of Decentralized Identifier, let's please stay away from any solution that depends on a single point of failure.
I am not quite sure how this works - where is my "passport" created? On a centralized platform? What if I want to have different accounts on different instances?
Ideally on a platform similar to Gmail in its decentralized nature but connected to the fediverse and accessable through the main fediverse website as well.
We could allow for duplicate username with a unique 10 digit code identifier allowing you to adjust your privacy settings for each platform.
I like the concept, but personally I see the decentralised nature of the Fediverse as a benefit rather than a hindrance, and moving all identity functionality to a centralised system would create more problems than it solves.
Suddenly you'll have a single point of failure for the entire Fediverse. A very appetising target for hackers and DDOS attacks.
An alternative that's in the spirit of your idea would be to allow for auth delegation, i.e. if you sign in with an Activitypub ID rather than a plain username, redirect to that instance to sign in then redirect back to the instance you started from, auth token in hand.
The nice thing about this approach is it's basically just OAuth 2. It's familiar, simple to implement and built in to a lot of web frameworks already. The only extra step would be advertising the server's auth URL via the nodeinfo endpoint, which is fairly trivial to do.
It's like everyone forgot about open ID but also having accounts tied to the an instance is not the problem with good export and import. Communities are what we need to have abstraction on just like IRC if I go to @games i should see threads from all instances on the network. Just like everyone in an IRC network can talk in the same channel even though they connect on different IRC servers.
What Fediverse could use was some kind of equivalent of Linktree. "Here's my personal accounts on Fediverse. Here's some related to my projects. Here's some other random links."
Because currently I'm like "maybe check out my Mastodon profile, it has links" - it works, kinda, but I'm not sure it's the best solution. For example, you could include support for this in the fedi software, so once you specify where your link page is, it'd pull the links and show them on your profile.
...I know, this would be too beautiful for this world and it'd get run over by spammers. But for glorious few days we'd have sensible Fediverse profiles! Think about it!
There is also KeyOxide with solves part of it via cryptographic verification and I believe some fediverse platforms already support it: codeberg.org/keyoxide
I have never found someone that can say what exactly is wrong with my broken neck and back. It doesn't even matter to me any more. I simply can't hold posture for more than half an hour at a time, and am always in pain at noise and light sensitive levels. No one seems to know what to do with me. Like I don't care, cause me harm under supervision and watch how I fall apart. It is blatantly obvious to anyone that actually watches me do anything physical. I REALLY want to do stuff and will throw myself into anything, but my body just fails me. It is as real as lifting weights in a gym to the point of failure. If I push way past my limits I will fail in a similar extraordinarily painful way that can take months to recover from. I did it once when a friend visited. I was on the floor of a Yard House bar flopping like a fish in tears. MRI shows nothing. It doesn't matter how hard I push in advance to try and hurt myself thinking it will show up in the scan. The pain goes away entirely when lying flat. The time it takes to calibrate before the scan is enough for all of the discomfort to fade until I am upright again. There is no apparent way to monetize this with a scalpel. What god do I need to sacrifice to?
Do you still condemn me to hell's hounds of social security limbo oh great authority? ~/s~
So in the US, the rules are quite frankly stupid. This is not an official post btw, just my own observations. I want to say before all this, I'm so sorry you're dealing with that.
We're required to make all our determinations according to what's called the POMS, available here: secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf…
In short, and unfortunately it's vastly more complicated than this, but it can take a long time before I even see your claim, and if you're under 50 it's really hard to be allowed on benefits. You basically need to be mentally unwell enough you can't sustain a normal work week in an unskilled job, or you literally can't stand up for 2 hours in a day and imaging and physical exams demonstrate that. We need to have a Medically Determined Impairment before we can assign any limitations to you, meaning if your MRI shows nothing and your doctors can't figure out what's wrong, essentially I can't allow you unless other specific criteria are met. All decisions that aren't allowances require a SSA doctor to sign off, so I can't make an entirely independent judgement that someone is not disabled. There's also Federal Quality Assurance, who will return claims if they disagree with the outcome, and they have a quota to meet.
It's all completely fucked to be honest. My best advice is be honest with your adjudicator about everything, especially your address, and appeal up to the level of an administrative law judge if denied, because they have a lot more leeway than we do in allowing people.
My drum room is her nap room. I have to let her know I'm gonna play whenever I do, so she'll leave and I can shut the door, minimize the noise to the rest of the house. She's naked or Donald Ducking it at all times, so every time I want to play I get an eyefull of her chocolate Cheerio before I can start
I think there's a ton of benefit to getting a teacher, personally. They can guide your learning and provide advice on form and technique a lot easier than trying to figure it out with like, YouTube videos. If you're unsure whether it's for you and wanna get started before investing in a kit though, you can go a long way with a good practice pad, a pair of sticks, and a copy of Buddy Rich's Modern Interpretation of Snare Drum Rudiments
Things don't change very often tbh. Most of the Mental Health Listings were updated in 2017 I wanna say, but if someone doesn't meet those criteria I don't believe the other rules have been updated in quite some time.
Mental health is considered in terms of its functional impact on whether you're capable of holding a job. There's basically four areas under consideration: your ability to undo and remember tasks and instructions, things like that; your ability to maintain concentration; your ability to interact with other people; and your ability to adapt to changes and manage yourself.
There's a lot of jobs available in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles that you can theoretically perform even with some significant mental health impairments though. And keep in mind, this is pretty simplified, but that's the general principle.
Depends on my mood somewhat, but I definitely have a sweet tooth. I try to be good and only keep healthy sweet snacks like apples and sugar snap peas in the house, but I definitely fold to some peanut butter granola or gummy candies or something like that
Most families in the Gaza Strip are surviving on one meal a day and one-third go entire days without eating as a result of Israel’s continued bombardment of the enclave, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and partners.
These controllers were all working on SteamOS before as far as I know, so I'm interested to see what this changes. My understanding is that previously their controllers just show up as generic xbox controllers, and now they will be properly recognized. We'll see if this has any other benefits like custom bindings for back buttons and things like that.
My former cat Lilly sits on the couch, watching as the iron flakes take on various forms as they rain down onto the magnet and she gently taps the glass while yhe tilts her head and then her body.
The governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan have a unified message after recent meetings - federal inference in provincial resource development must stop.
Given recent policy moves by Carney's government, I do not actually trust them to not play ball with these lunatics.
If Carney concedes even one of these, especially in the name of "nation building", I'm going full Quebec sovereignist. The Liberals are all about draping themselves up with the flag, and defining what is and what isn't "un-Canadian". If they align with these wackos, it's over. I don't care for these wackos' Canada.
I don't trust Carney to not start placating these wackos in the name of "nation building". And if he does and these suicidal policies are draped with the maple leaf and called "nation building", what incentive do I have to not look for some other nation building project, par exemple un projet de nation fondé sur la hydroélectricité?
A new $1.2 billion investment into Calgary’s visitor economy is setting records, with a pending 69 and 62 storey tower block from Truman Homes and Louson.
I studied in Montreal and I left the country a long time ago. Yet I still pay close attention to Canadian politics. Because I really want to see Canada improve.
How can I say this without offending anyone?
I feel I can speak my mind bluntly precisely because I am a foreigner.
Brutal truth
Many Alberta politicians act like absolute cunts.
Alberta is one of the Jewels of Canada. It was named after Princess Louise Alberta, the favorite daughter of Queen Victoria, it's a province that was blessed with great beauty and enormous ressources.
One of the responsibility of having enormous natural ressources is managing sustainably to ensure the next generations can live in a good environment.
In 1974, the New York Times reported the province has SO MUCH money it doesn't know what to do with it:
ALBERTA FLOODED WITH OIL REVENUE
At time when most governments at every level, are struggling hard to stay solvent, Alberta, which produces 83 per cent of Canada'' oil, has more money than it knows what to do with.
Yet all I hear is constant whining, whining, whining. Why? What the hell is going on?
According to Statistics Canada, under Justin Trudeau, Alberta reached the highest oil production levels in modern history. In fact, Justin Trudeau opened a brand new pipeline:
For the fourth consecutive year, production of crude oil and equivalent products reached a record high, up 4.3% from 2023 to 298.8 million cubic metres in 2024.
The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion began operation in May 2024, providing Alberta crude oil with increased access to Pacific Ocean terminals and markets abroad.
Despite this, all I keep hearing from Alberta politicians is how evil Justin oppressed/raped/humiliated ordinary Albertans. This is insane.
Alberta politicians just keep whining about environmental rules. If they want their constituents to have cancer because of heavy metals from fracking and mining, if they want Alberta lakes and rivers polluted by plastics, it's horrible, but it's their choice.
The core issue is these Alberta corrupt politicians seem determined to blow up the planet, claiming there is no alternative. Fort McMurray burned the fuck down. Jasper burned the fuck down. But clearly the Alberta political leaders learned nothing from it.
Alberta has produced many great artists, historians, authors, scientists. They gave Canada many great figures. I hope that one day, people take back their province from these crooks. They deserve better than their current dumbass leaders. I believe Alberta should aim to be like mini-Norway.
Norwegians heavily tax oil and don't let filthy rich Oil CEOs get away with murder. Norway has an investment fund to support the next generations. But they are extremely environmentally conscious. Norway invests heavily in electric cars, public transit, and takes strong measures against plastic pollution. It would be very sad if Albertan leaders led their province to become like so many ressource-rich failed states
For the fourth consecutive year, production of crude oil and equivalent products reached a record high, up 4.3% from 2023 to 298.8 million cubic metres in 2024.
kent_eh
in reply to Otter • • •Started off watching the Blue Jays beat the Yankees (who better to beat on Canada day!)
Made homemade poutine for the family for supper.
Walked to the neighborhood Canada day block party. A teenage band was playing Tragically Hip songs when I arrived.
Later made myself a Ceaser (sadly, no celery - couldn't find any that wasn't US grown), and watched some TV with the wife.
All in all, a good day.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot
in reply to kent_eh • • •