Discuss. (But plz, it’s only interesting to hear from folks who have some healthy degree of contempt for exclusive corporate walled-gardens and the technofeudal system the fedi is designed to escape.)

And note that links can come into existence that are openly universally accessible and then later become part of a walled-garden... and then later be open again. For example, youtube. And a website can become jailed in Cloudflare but then be open again at the flip of a switch. So a good solution would be a toggle of sorts.

When an arrogant presumptuous dick dumps hot-headed uncivil drivel into a relatively apolitical thread about plumbing technology and reduces the quality of the discussion to a Trump vs. $someone style shitshow of threadcrap, the tools given to the moderator are:

• remove the comment (chainsaw)
• ban the user from the community (sledge hammer)

Where are the refined sophisticated tools?

When it comes to nannying children, we don’t give teachers a baseball bat. It’s the wrong tool. We are forced into a dilemma: either let the garbage float, or censor. This encourages moderators to be tyrants and too many choose that route. Moderators often censor civil ideas purely because they want to control the narrative (not the quality).

I want to do quality control, not narrative control. I oppose the tyranny of censorship in all but the most vile cases of bullying or spam. The modlog does not give enough transparency. If I wholly remove that asshole’s comment, then I become an asshole too.

He is on-topic. Just poor quality drivel that contributes nothing of value. Normally voting should solve this. X number of down votes causes the comment to be folded out of view, but not censored. It would rightfully keep the comment accessible to people who want to pick through the garbage and expand the low quality posts.

Why voting fails:

• tiny community means there can never be enough down votes to fold a comment.
• votes have no meaning. Bob votes emotionally and down votes every idea he dislikes, while Alice down votes off-topic or uncivil comments, regardless of agreement.

Solutions:

I’m not trying to strongly prescribe a fix in particular, but have some ideas to brainstorm:

• Mods get the option to simply fold a shitty comment when the msg is still on-topic and slightly better quality than spam. This should come with a one-line field (perhaps mandatory) where the mod must rationalise the action (e.g. “folded for uncivil rant with no useful contribution to the technical information sought”).
• A warning counter. Mods can send a warning to a user in connection with a comment. This is already possible but requires moderators to have an unhuman memory. A warning should not just be like any DM.. it should be tracked and counted. Mods should see a counter next to participants indicating how many warnings they have received and a page to view them all, so as to aid in decisions on whether to ban a user from a community.
• Moderator votes should be heavier than user votes. Perhaps an ability to choose how many votes they want to cast on a particular comment to have an effect like folding. Of course this should be transparent so it’s clear that X number of votes were cast by a mod. Rationale:
  • mods have better awareness of the purpose and rules of the community
  • mods are stakeholders with more investment into the success of a community than users
• Moderators could control the weight of other user’s votes. When 6 people upvote an uncivil post and only 2 people down vote it, it renders voting as a tool impotent and in fact harm inducing. Lousy/malicious voters have no consequences for harmful voting and thus no incentive to use voting as an effective tool for good. A curator should be able to adjust voting weight accordingly. E.g. take an action on a particular poll that results in a weight adjustment (positive or negative) on the users who voted a particular direction. The effect would be to cause voters to prioritize civil quality above whether they simply like/dislike an idea, so that votes actually take on a universal meaning. Which of course then makes voting an effective tool for folding poor quality content (as it was originally intended).
• (edit) Ability for a moderator to remove a voting option. If a comment is uncivil, allowing upvotes is only detrimental. So a moderator should be able to narrow the ballot to either down vote or neutral. And perhaps the contrary as well (like some beehaw is instance-wide). And perhaps the option to neutralise voting on a specific comment.

If you open a PDF document in the browser (thus in pdf.js) and click the down arrow (↓) to save it locally, it redownloads the document instead of simply saving it from the cache. If you lose network connectivity or disconnect then try to save the PDF locally for later viewing, the browser reports connection issues when there was no need for the network.

Tor Browser (Firefox based) does not have this problem.

An important part of the Youtube content is the transcript at the bottom of the video description. There are some 3rd-party sites that collect and share the YT transcripts separately but then the naive admins put the service in Cloudflare’s walled garden, which is worse than YT itself and purpose-defeating to a large extent. (exceptionally this service is CF-free, but it says “Transcript is disabled on this video” in my test: https://youtubetranscript.io)

Invidious should be picking up the slack here.

And Lemmy could do better by automatically fetching the transcript of youtube/invidious links and include it, perhaps spoiler style like this.

There are some very slow nodes (like Beehaw) where the server is apparently so overworked it cannot render a login form most of the time. The browser times out waiting. In the rare moments that there is a login opportunity, about ½ the time the login fails with a 2 second popup saying “incorrect login credentials”.

It’s quite terrible because obviously users would assume their account has been deleted --- because that’s how most online services work. Admins do not generally give warnings or say why an account is deleted. They just hit the delete button. Like Marvin in Office Space who was not told he was laid off.. they just “fixed the payroll glitch”. This is generally how communication works on communication platforms.. admins just pull the plug.

So because of how people learn that their account is deleted, users cannot distinguish a purposeful account removal from a faulty server. If you have a Beehaw account and you are told “incorrect login credentials”, don’t believe it. Keep trying. Eventually you’ll get in.

In the stock Lemmy web client there is apparently no mechanism for users to fetch their history of posts. The settings page gives only a way to download settings. This contrasts with Mastodon where users can grab an archive of everything they have posted which is still stored on the server.

Or am I missing something?

IIUC, there is no GDPR issue here because no data is personal (because all Lemmy accounts are anonymous). But if a Lemmy server were to hypothetically require users to identify themselves with first+last name, then the admin would have a substantial manual burden to comply with GDPR Art.20 requests. Correct?

These environment variables designate a parameter that holds the value of a HTTP proxy:

• http_proxy
• https_proxy
• HTTP_PROXY
• HTTPS_PROXY

It’s a convention, but the name “HTTP proxy” can only imply HTTP proxy, not a SOCKS proxy. The golang¹ standard libraries expect the above HTTP proxy parameters to specify a SOCKS proxy. How embarrassing is that? So any Go app that offers a proxy feature replicates getting the proxy kind backwards. Such as hydroxide, which requires passing a SOCKS proxy as a HTTP proxy.

¹ “Go” is such a shitty unsearchable name for a language. It’s no surprise that the developers of the language infra itself struggle with the nuances of natural language. HTTP≠SOCKS. And IIUC, this language is a product of Google. WTF. It’s the kind of amateurish screwup you would expect to come from some teenager’s mom’s basement, not a fortune 500 company among the world’s biggest tech giants.

(edit)
It’s a bit amusing and simultaneously disasappointing that reporting bugs and suggesting enhancements to Google’s language requires using Microsoft’s platform:

https://github.com/golang/proposal#the-proposal-process

FOSS developers: plz avoid Golang - it’s a shit show.