Do not disassemble.

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

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  • It’s mostly true, but not entirely. The data “on the internet” has to live somewhere. For instance, when you DM someone on a social media network-- would you consider that private? I assure you the content of those messages can be read by the website’s admin-users.

    If you’re hosting your own non-social web service (like, personal cloud storage or something), then that is arguably private for you, but if you let someone else also use it, then it is not private for them, because you can almost certainly see their file content, having access to the server directly.

    Encryption can throw all of this off; a service like Signal is private-- the admin-users of Signal can’t see your messages. Generally speaking any service that warns you that all your data will be lost if you forget your password is probably private. If they can recover your data, they have access to your data.

    Edit: Better word choices.


  • What’s bad faith about my argument? There’s only two options: You believe what you typed and that it’s impossible to make this mistake, or that you were using hyperbole, and you acknowledge that it is possible to make this mistake. These two options are both mutually exclusive and binary-- there can be no other stances. (and notably you haven’t actually clarified which one you believe.)

    I didn’t make you choose to defend a poorly thought out stance. That’s on you.


  • I appreciate the additional information, however, a link found in the codeberg link you provided leads to this comment from earnest:

    The up arrow is the equivalent of a boost on Mastodon, adding to favorites is represented by a star. The down arrow is equivalent to the Dislike button on Lemmy and Friendica, Mastodon probably doesn’t have an equivalent (Dislike will be federated this week). Compared to Lemmy, it works a little differently, as the up arrow there is the equivalent of a favorite.

    The comment activity can be checked by expanding the “more” menu and selecting “activity”

    This seems to imply that downvotes (reduces) are federated. (And notably, upvotes are now “stars” “boosts” are, uh, “boosts”; this was changed since the linked comment was made)

    Or am I totally missing something? That’s always and option.


  • A fallacy is just pointing out that your argument isn’t likely to arrive at the truth. As I explained, your “I met a dumb person and so all arguments against this are dumb” stance isn’t useful, even if we agree you’re not just making that all up.

    I asked for clarification. Is that your stance? That it’s fundamentally impossible that someone could accidentally send a SMS in Signal while thinking it is secured? I’m going to assume that you don’t believe it’s fundamentally impossible, so that mean your real stance is that if that happens and someone gets sent to jail or worse, that’s a small price to pay for your convenience of not having to *checks notes* switch between two apps.

    Do you see how your lack of perspective might be leading you to make a poor argument?


  • I literally was not confined to this thread, which is blatantly obvious if you know how context works.

    Making up an argument no one in the discussion has made is called the “Strawman Fallacy”. Why should anyone in this thread care that you talked to someone (allegedly) that was so dense that they made a bad argument that you got frustrated with?

    If it’s too hard for some people to pay attention to what they’re doing and use a tool correctly

    Ah, so much hyperbole. If I’m successfully stripping all of it away, is seems that your argument is that it is impossible (P=0) to accidentally send an SMS message in Signal, thinking it was a secure message. Is that really your stance? Admittedly, there was a lot of hyperbole so I might have missed the actual point. Please correct me if I’m wrong.


  • he thought it would be better for the user experience

    Is this articulated somewhere because I was under the impression that everything was federated, and this plays right into the point. Why should this be up to the devs? Or, perhaps better worded, what information does the “ActivityPub” label actually tell an end user, right now? Seemingly nothing at all, from a functional standpoint. It’s possible for two ActivityPub-labeled implementations to be completely incompatible, right? Does that sound good for users?

    I just can’t think of a devastating real world example.

    Why is this your chosen metric? Wouldn’t “this might make the users confused” be a better metric?

    The extinguish step is a bit unclear to me.

    Once they’re the de facto standard they abandon it altogether and the users, who care little about the nuts and bolts of this, get frustrated and make an account on Threads (using your example).

    It’s worth keeping in mind that we’re not talking about normal software. A hypothetical technically perfect solution is still a failure if there isn’t a critical mass of users to make it “social”.



  • Last time I checked downvotes in kbin are not federated at all, by design. Lemmy users cannot boost content at all as far as I’m aware, and it’s not holding them back. Developers are completely capable of looking to past implementations and make informed decisions about interoperability in whatever way they see best fit

    As I understand it, this is the exact complaint from the blog post. This is great for devs; it’s not great for users. I am referencing this part:

    Putting the ActivityPub logo on a project’s website and writing “we support ActivityPub” announcement posts makes technically versed people very happy, and people supporting open standards will read them with shining eyes. However, there is a secondary effect: these announcements carry over something to non-technical users as well. It tells users that this piece of software is compatible with other pieces of software that carry the same logo. But it is not. In another recent discussion, when someone asked me why diaspora* does not support ActivityPub yet, I claimed the project has two options here, which has a direct impact to how we can explain the compatibility with users on other networks:

    1. Sorry, Alice, Bob is using software that is not compatible with us, so you can’t communicate with Bob here.
    2. Yes, you can communicate with Bob, but since he is using ExampleNet, please be aware that Bob will not receive your photo albums and will be unable to interact with those. Carol will see your photos, though, but unfortunately, she will not be able to see your geo-location updates. Moreover, because of technical limitations, Dan can comment on your posts, but we cannot make sure that Carol and Bob see those, because we cannot redistribute Dan’s comments.

    I, perhaps foolishly, assumed that ActivityPub was more structured than it actually is. Though, to be fair, as you point out, this is an older blog post, so there’s some chance that things have improved on that front-- I admit I’m no expert on ActivityPub-- but notably, “there are only a few different implementations, so it’s easy to dig around and make your new implementation compatible” isn’t an improvement. It doesn’t scale. It’s practically begging for the now infamous EEE to happen to it, because whatever is the most popular implementation sort of becomes the standard.


  • You literally made up an argument no one made in this thread.

    The fact of the matter is that it is unwise to have both secure and insecure messaging side-by-side. Depending on where you live, this could translate to a simple mistake resulting in imprisonment or worse. It’s very important that a “secure messaging app” only allow secure messaging.

    You, like myself, probably live in an area where accidentally sending a message critical of the government over an insecure message would not have any tangible consequences, so perhaps you’re weighing the convenience as more important due to lack of perspective.












  • VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It’s Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

    To be fair, I don’t have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.