They only have to make an example of a few to discourage the rest.

The only real safety is with the instances hosted and run in locations difficult for American companies to pursue legal action

Yeah, but at the same time it’s kinda good for people to be able to see the kind of shit they’re posting for themselves.

It is propaganda, but it’s not good propaganda, and that’s what the community fact checking thing is meant to counter, imo.

Even if that was true, which it isn’t, a company should reflect the beliefs of its employees and community.

If it’s an official govt agency I think it makes sense for them to be allowed on communications platforms and to be verified, so that people can see what they’re saying and know that it’s an official statement.

Then people can see the post and make their own judgements about it, knowing it’s an official agency statement.
Having twitter style factcheck for blatant misinformation is also important for this, though.

I think that tech companies taking a stand on what their employees and/or users believe in is a reasonable thing.

Idk what the employees of bluesky believe, but I’m fairly familiar with the bay area tech scene and I think that there is a decent chance that the employees would like to take a stand by not providing services to ICE.

That being said, idk if simply allowing them to have an account is providing services. I think it’s probably better to have govt agencies have verified accounts so people know when things are official statements, even if you disagree with the agency.

What you’re looking for is probably something like certificate authentication, or mTLS. It exists, but it’s kind of a pain to set up on client devices so it’s not very common.

What’s more common and easier to set up and is nearly the same thing, is passkey authentication. Same in-flight security characteristics, but you typically need to pass a simple challenge for your device to unlock it.

There are a bunch of self-hosted auth options for both

I wanna try matrix, but it’s crazy to me that no clients, even the official clients, support all the features. It really makes me hesitate lol

Im not sure how these stats are collected, I assume that they query each server for its to make the chart, rather than query every server every day and copy the results.

If they’re really copying the results, then you’re absolutely correct that temporary instances outrages would cause those correlated downward blips, but I’m surprised to hear you wouldn’t just be able to query servers to get this data on demand.
But then again if a server went permanently offline you’d lose that data forever. Hmmm

A statistician explain to me why these graphs seem correlated beyond general trend? They both seem to have localized events on the same day, but given their different timescales that doesn’t seem like it should be possible.

I raised the same concern on the other post too, but idk enough about statistics to for sure say something seems fishy.

But they should be offset. Monthly MAU departures shouldn’t reflect in half-year until 5 months later. And half-year departures shouldn’t influence the MAU at all.

The fact that they line up to they day strikes me as very suspicious.
But I’m not a statistician

Right, that’s why I suggest providing both an opinionated option and an opinionated option. Like a “recommended” section and a “full list” section.

Let people without contest and who don’t care to learn the context in advance use an opinionated picker, but don’t withhold from people who want to dig in.

But it turns out I misunderstood the example that was given - those instances aren’t shown because they simply aren’t piefed instances.

Ah I misunderstood your example, I thought you were saying instances were intentionally excluded from the picker rather than “instances that don’t support this platform don’t appear”.

I’m not going to opine on what constitutes a “real” leftist apart from saying that left/right dichotomy really doesn’t describe reality well.

https://join-lemmy.org/instances will send you to places like hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, whereas https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser literally never will.

Honestly I think this is a problem. I don’t think the instance picker should be so opinionated that it blocks (legal) instances. I want extremist to be directed away from the normie and moderate instances. I prefer to clearly characterize instances and let people pick their own, while also providing opinion for people who don’t care or lack understanding.

Although this is clearly a point of preference, and I can see why some people would prefer the opposite to possibly prevent the radicalization of a moderate.

this site

This isn’t a site. It’s a collection of sites (instances).
If there is an instance that doesn’t tolerate your kind of speech, then choose another instance that does.

Be aware that two of the largest hardcore left-leaning instances (hexbear, ml) have been widely defederated (instance-blocked), so it’s not fair to say that this only happens to right leaning or centrist ideas.

The beauty (and point) of Lemmy and fediverse is that if you feel like you’re being censored, you can join or make an instance of like-minded people, while still having access to the other area if you want it.
Lemmy is uncensorable, but doesn’t force people to listen to you.

It seems strange that these two curves so closely match eachother in shape.

When 6month active users drop that means 6 months ago a user stopped using the platform.
When monthly active users drop that means a month ago a user stopped using the platform.
So this would suggest that there is a correlation between user attrition 6 months ago and last month.

Thank you!

This is almost exactly my motivation when I recently started my homelab journey. A bit of privacy, but what pushed me over the edge is that I was supporting these anti-social corporations with my money or data, when they went fully mask-off.

I’ve been going through a similar journey, and I’ll tell you want I did:

I ended up just getting a low-end 2 bay Synology NAS, because it is cheap, and easy to set up shares and backups, and 12tb mirrored is all I needed. I was too intimidated by the prospect of configuring trueNAS correctly, and Synology walked back their requirement of using their own branded drives.

If you want open source NAS software, then TrueNAS and OpenMediaVault are the main options. Truenas has the better pedigree afaict, but it has pretty significant requirements that mean you’ll need expensive hardware. In the end, I decided it was way more than what I needed, I wanted my NAS to be purely a NAS, and I’d do my server/cluster on different hardware.
I almost got a HexOS NAS (fork of trueNAS SCALE with a front-end written by a bunch of ex-unraid folks to be much easier to configure and admin), but it’s still beta and I didn’t wanna wait a few months for GA, and also it has the same requirements as trueNAS, so it’d be expensive and you also have to pay for a license.

If you go with a traditional OTS NAS, then you probably want raid 1 for a 2 bay or raid 5 if you have 4+ bays.
If you get something like truenas that uses ZFS then you want raidz1 (which is like raid5 with one parity disk). Current there are limitations with raiz if you wanna expand it later, but HexOS folks are sponsoring a ZFS feature called Any RAID, to make expanding raidz more flexible, which will presumably make it’s way to all ZFS NASes when it is finished.

I’m pretty early in my self-hosting journey, but so far I have a 2 bay Synology with cloud backup and a couple of shared volumes, a rasppi 5 running home assistant, a beelink ser5 running Ubuntu server for portainer, and a cheap VPS for pangolin.

That also isn’t meaningfully contributing to the conversation.

But I know your purpose here is to derail the conversation, and this thread is accomplishing that goal, so I’ll end it here:

You’re not engaging in honest discussion, you’re trying to muddy the water because you support Russia.

This isn’t about the USA and this isn’t about china.

The way you’re intentionally trying to derail the conversation, and the age of your account, leave me pretty suspicious that you’re just a Russian bot farm account.

You didn’t answer my question, you just repeated yourself.

Am I speaking to a real person or a bot?