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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Definitely agree, but your link is protected by cloudflare (yet another centralized service destroying the internet) and therefore I’m unable to get through because I have privacy.resistFingerprinting enabled on my browser so cloudflare is unable to determine I’m human I suppose.

    I despire youtube and it’s monopoly, and I think it get’s an appropriate amount of hate on here and HN, but what confuses me to no end are the people who complain about youtube turn right around and constantly recommend cloudflare. Can someone explain what I am missing?



  • I would have more sympathy for Youtube if 1. it wasn’t the de-facto standard where essentially all video media gets uploaded to (which Youtube itself has done everything in its power to make happen) and 2. the company that owned it didn’t also own the most popular phone OS, most popular search engine, most popular email provider, most popular ad network, most popular maps, most popular online office suite, most popular airline booking, 2nd most popular cloud hosting… The list goes on

    Until a federated solution like peertube gains more traction I have no problem paying content creators directly via patreon, and do everything in my power to not pay Google a dime. Trust me, they can afford it just fine.



  • Can someone explain to me why I keep reading about people having problems plugging in USB A connectors upside down? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Per the spec, the holes always go up. They indicate the correct way to plug in the port. Not only that, but the printed logo on the connector also always goes up.

    The only time this is SLIGHTLY confusing is if you have a desktop tower where the motherboard is essentially mounted sideways, but for that case it just takes an extra second to think which way is “up” from the perspective of the motherboard.

    And before anyone says “who reads the spec?”, it feels like I subconsciously knew this for something like a decade before I even knew what a spec was.






  • I haven’t used any flatpacks, mostly because they don’t seem to have a good solution for running terminal programs. (Also I don’t like that the application developer chooses the permissions to expose rather than the user.

    However, I have been using bubblewrap which is what flatpack uses under the hood to sandbox. This allows me to run both gui and non-gui programs, and I have the control of exposing the minimum required permissions that I’m comfortable giving an untrusted piece of software.


  • I seem to be in the minority here but I personally prefer using $ and # to denote root. I like this because not everyone uses sudo and might not even have it installed.

    That being said, if you already have other commands that are using sudo -u ... to run commands as a different user then it might be best to just be consistent and prefix everything with it, but if there is only a few of those maybe a # cp foo bar && chown www-data bar is an alternative.



  • The way I remember the order is that the parentheses around the link would make grammatical sense outside of markdown (the goal of markdown is to still be fully readable even when looking at the raw source).

    For example if I were posting on a forum that didn’t have markdown support which one of these would make more sense:

    1. You can find that on this lemmy instance (https://lemmy.world).
    2. You can find that on (this lemmy instance) https://lemmy.world.

    Option 2 makes no sense grammatically. Then you just need to use the square brackets (which rarely show up in non-markdown text) to denote the link range.


    Alternatively, if you still have a hard time remembering the order, you can use reference-style links which make it even more readable outside of markdown rendered contexts (note that there are no parentheses in this version, nothing to get confused):

    [Here is a link][1] and [here is another link][2].
    
    [1]: http://example.org
    [2]: http://example.com
    


  • Personally I think Spotify is worth $10 a month.

    While I agree that there aren’t any great self-hosted solutions, more diversity in the music space is important. I refuse to use Spotify, and for me it’s not about price. In fact, if they charged more and actually paid their artists more I would probably hate it less. But overall I mostly refuse to use it for other reasons:

    It couples the company that delivers your music with the app you must use to stream your music. In my opinion these should be separate - perhaps an open protocol that streaming companies can all use and open source clients that can connect to one or many of them?

    Spotify made it clear that they don’t care about Linux users when they killed their Linux client. Yes I know about librespot, it’s only a trivial decision away from Spotify killing it. And unlike Reddit’s API changes, the backlash would be minimal since most people use the official one.

    It strongly relies on network effects to get everyone on the platform and keep them there. As mentioned above, this hurts independent artists because they are forced to publish their music on a platform that doesn’t pay well just because everyone is on that platform. But there are more than just network effects between artists and consumers: Spotify relies on social-network style antipatterns to keep users in their ecosystem. I’ve been told by my friends that I am “difficult” because I don’t use Spotify and they want to share something with me. That is Spotify’s manipulation

    Their official client is electron, I don’t want to have to run a whole browser stack to listen to music. Not to mention the fact that npm is plagued with supply chain problems and unless the Spotify devs manually audit every dependency of every dependency of every dependency any time they add or update one (doubt it), users are one attack away from being compromised.

    When I did briefly use Spotify many years ago I took the time to build up some playlists of music and randomly songs would disappear from the playlists when Spotify lost rights to stream it.


    I personally use Bandcamp for recommendations/discovery, and then purchase music I like to listen to and self-host it with MPD. It works great.

    I’m not saying this is for everyone, obviously streaming has its merits. But in my experience most people self host not because something costs money, but because they have zero control of the actual experience, and they want to avoid the vendor lock-in issue.


  • 418teapot@lemmy.worldtoMatrix@lemmy.mlGood Matrix homeservers?
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    1 year ago

    In my opinion getting on the federated messaging train is far more important than what initial homeserver you start on. Technologies like matrix, mastadon and lemmy suffer from network effects and I personally feel like the biggest hurdle is getting over that initial painful hump of getting yourself and the people you want to communicate with all using the technology.

    Once you are using the platform regularly you’ll have a much better outlook on which homeservers have the users/rooms that you mostly communicate with and you can move there.

    I used matrix.org as a home server for years until recently decided that I wanted to support the decentralization and stood up my own instance for me and my close friends to use.

    I plan on doing the same with lemmy. I just discovered lemmy today. I have always thought reddit-style boards were prime candidates for federating, but didn’t know about this project’s existence. I initially had the same hesitation as you when it came time to choose a lemmy instance, but realized it doesn’t matter. I just ended up choosing lemmy.world for now until I get more acclimated with the space and then will either stay here, move to another server or self-host.