Lemmy’s design is more akin to an aggregator than forum-software was. Old forum’s were also voyeuristic, but they tended towards discussion on one topic (though every one I used also had a dedicated section for “off-topic” discussion).

As already written, multiple accounts on one instance can be perceived as malicious activity by administrators whilst that may not at all be the intent of the user. A mechanism for creating sub-identities from one administrative-identity would ease the administrative burden whilst flagging no ill-intent by that user.

This discussion is also about the overarching effect of surveillance-capitalism and its desire for real-identities being attached to digital-communications and how that affects free-software projects.

If I meet someone and start a discussion with them I do not have access to everything that person had said before. That’s the reality of in-person discussions. I do think it’s bizarre that the inverse should be strived for with online-discussions.

Let’s state plainly: the title is false. I use lemmy; you’re using lemmy; the other commentators are using lemmy.

There’s a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while–and economists probably have a term for it of which I’m ignorant of–that is that free software fails in capitalist market economies. I expect that statement to create a knee-jerk reaction. The truth is free-software is everywhere and as computers become ever more embedded into our economies free-software’s presence will only grow exponentially. It’s often the foundation for computerised economies.

Free-software enthusiasts understand that its become endemic to the economy. However businesses and consumers still ignore it even when it might be prudent to select or fund free-software. To ignore it seems contradictory to a lot of ideals. A capitalist business should use free-software as the monetary cost is zero: it’s a free product. Revolutionary organisations should adopt free-software is it aligns with their ideologies. Yet we know they don’t. These actors are acting irrationally.

Free-software lacks something that is a prerequisite to participate in an economy: capital. It has no money to propagandise itself. To phrase it another way: it has no money to buy ads. Without ads it doesn’t exist to entities who do have capital.

In Australia Reddit brought ad-space inside shopping-centers. Commercial software has revenues from which a portion can be spent on advertising and its through this advertising that growth can occur. The reason why lemmy has a small user-base is because it has no revenue streams. It’s an economic sink.

If we were to imagine that the user-pool was to dramatically increase what would actually occur? I imagine many instances would be overwhelmed with traffic, knocking them offline. For those that remain a lot of traffic would be perceived as spam. There is no revenue stream that’s attached to that user-base. If there was you would–absolutely!–see lemmy’s user-base increase as there would be a profit incentive: more users would equate to more profit. The current reality is that more users equates to more debts.

The market for ‘internet-forums’ has already consolidated into the big-players we know of. Maybe someone could take lemmy’s code and usurp the established vendors. That behaviour is already underway now; it’s why we have a multitude of lemmy instances. Maybe the next titan of ‘internet-communities’ will be running a lemmy stack. Not all operators are hosting lemmy with ideology/charity being at the fore. Some site operators are asking themselves, “how can I monetise this?”

From my perspective the issue isn’t why people don’t use lemmy, it’s why is hosting so expensive? The prerequisites to self-hosting (whether it be for personal use or for an established group or organisation) are costly. One has to pay rent on a DNS, static-IP, hardware and data connections. These prerequisites are commercial in nature and are priced as if every buyer has a revenue stream from which these rents are payed from.

If an individual/group wants independence and decides to self-host they’re taking on these rents that have been priced at commercial rates. Those are the monetary hurdles. There’s an intellectual hurdle too: a group needs to have members that know how to administer and maintain servers. The prerequisites are rather burdensome. It should then not come as a surprise that a group of young people who play video-games with each other elect to have their community on discord, or whatever commercial-entity takes on the economic and intellectual burdens. These commercial entities hide the complex nature of computer systems and the economic relationships that exist. In exchange they’re chasing speculative profits. They have revenue coming in from which they can apportion to advertising and paid programmers. They have the incentives to grow.

In December 2018, Discord announced it had raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.

Lemmy is reactionary software. It pines for the day’s of webmaster superiority… Where a webmaster ruled a personal fiefdom and brought and sold other fiefdoms. Users should be able to host and maintain servers for themselves and their communities. Economic rents and knowledge-specialisation are high hurdles to overcome. If they are overcome they’ll find a wasteland where users have already been captured by existing market players—not only that! They’ll exist side-by-side commercial vendors that pay to have their software blasted from every ad outlet they can afford. The enthusiast or ideologue has sparse capital to attract new users away from their existing ‘digital-home’ whilst the current players have enormous war-chests and if non-economic forces somehow push new-users towards them (e.g. something ‘viral’) they have insufficient economic resources to accommodate them.

I would advocate for technology like GNUnet, i2p and hyphanet (GNUnet being my personal favorite). Software such as those abolish the major economic-rents that would otherwise be required for the ‘clearnet’. (DNS rents are unjustifiable and I would like to direct readers to the OpenNIC project.) However the intellectual burden is increased.

I would like to take a jab at the idea that Reddit (or whatever third-party is used) takes ownership of a community and their user-generated content. They certainly do, but the community leaders voluntarily gave it up. They also neglected their responsibilities. There’s no reason why users couldn’t have a local-mirror of their community even if it is hosted on a third-party platform. That would negate the reality of a third-party purge and therefore the ‘destruction’ of their community. These communities are irresponsible with irresponsible users. How does one make an irresponsible user responsible? I don’t think it can be done.

Most governments are fascists. They want what Google is working towards: a certified device. Once you have a platform that the majority owns and is certified you can start rolling out more fascist policies, like identity verification for asinine things. The American courts failed a long time ago in regards to software with Microsoft. You could make cases against Google decades ago, but literally no one cares for some reason.

But at what cost?

Is there really a point to this? Similar time-frame as you. Old CPUs are pretty much trash. It works. No one would buy it though. Applying thermal-paste would do what? Make it run a bit cooler? I don’t even monitor the temperature… I’m writing from a place of ignorance. I do think things should be properly maintained; I just hadn’t thought of reapplying thermal-paste before.

It must be stated: Google is malicious! The language used here and elsewhere conceals the fact that: a) Google is a for-profit company with no morals (they work with militaries and surveillance-agencies to kill); b) they operate in a monopolistic manner; c) they’re eroding control of your personal-property.

This is just another move by Google to consolidate control over the AOSP. It doesn’t matter that this convoluted sequence can temporarily ‘bypass’ Google’s wishes–in fact I would state this is clearly worse. Removing the ability to install non-Google-endorsed software on your own private-property could be illegal. This is perhaps the only thing they could do to prevent lawsuits, only they’ve made it so asininely convoluted that only 0.01% will actually complete the process that it should be illegal monopolistic behaviour. American courts have absolutely failed everyone by allowing this rampant malicious behaviour to be the norm in American-software.

Google’s Android already created friction for installing software outside their ecosystem. There is no justification for this behaviour. It cannot be defended. Stop following their market-speak. This is belligerent and malicious behaviour!

To put a finer point on this: Google is charging a recurring fee to anyone who wants to distribute software to phones–Android-phones. If you have a need to distribute software to your organisation’s mobile-computers you now need to pay a recurring fee to Google, or… jump on one foot, spin around, touch the ground and hope Google doesn’t bully you further. Oh, and you have to do this dance personally for all 438 mobile-computers you manage. The absurdity of the situation is appalling! The fact you have users defending–and that is what these sort of responses are doing: defending one of the most profitable companies in existence–“oh, just do the dance now so it won’t inconvenience you later”.

The “escape hatch” is down that corridor, to the left, left, right, left, left, up, right & behind the book-case; take the stairs up, down five flights; depart at Washington D.C. and on arrival you’ll see a button. Press it. It might not do anything.

–Google

I’ve been interested in tracking my own sleep too. I wonder how useful these commercial products are in producing data that is correct. They come from technology companies who primarily want to collect data, as much data as possible. They’re not at all interested in providing their users with an honest interpretation of anything. A lot of them probably don’t even have the expertise to interpret whatever they’ve gathered.

I’ve been involved in sleep studies in the past and none of them involved using a smart-watch or other commercial wearable. They used electrodes (?) that were stuck to my body and fed into a computer. What data was being collected and how to properly interpret that data is beyond me.

Making a DIY device is probably feasible, but again, I wouldn’t have a clue on how to interpret the data gathered. I don’t think it’d be too complicated though.

Tools built specifically to monitor one signal are probably better than a generalized thing, such as a smartwatch, from a company that produces surveillance equipment for marketing purposes.

You glossed over the fact that it came from Israel’s intelligence-community. Its design is woeful–that’s the protocol, regardless of client or server implementation. The project reeks of a state-backed program to get ahead of the increasing desire for encryption in everyday communications. Yet encryption has always been an after thought within that program. All those bridges to funnel different protocols into the program.