I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

  • 5 posts
  • 16 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 5th, 2023
  • I feel that some further refinement is needed. I agree with the sentiment behind the latest version of the rule, but I think it still doesn’t address the recent issues.

    The way I see it, there is a very specific type of post that has started showing up very recently, and is getting lots of downvotes. Users here are justifiably suspicious of the pattern.

    The ones that get downvotes are usually:

    • from new accounts
    • the user makes one post, and at most they only responds to comments in that one post
    • the software uses the help of LLMs, while the post and/or comments are also helped by LLMs
    • the software is made to look “professional”, whether it is the UI, the demo, or the README

    I’m not sure what exactly the end goal is, but I don’t believe the story that they all use where they “had this problem and now want to share their solution”. I’m concerned that there is some other end goal, whether it is link farming, SEO manipulation, LLM search result manipulation, or it’s the setup portion of a cyber attack where questionable code will be added later (if it isn’t already).

    Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts. There are real users that want to post with a new account, such keeping their professional life separate from their main account. It’s also hard to differentiate it based on licenses, because those recent accounts almost always license it as FOSS. I also don’t think it’s fair to exclude all AI assisted code, since it’s very common to have that now.

    Perhaps instead of a rule, we could even try some of the following:

    • To reduce the risk of OpenClaw style bots creating content here: AI is ok for the code and external text (ex. the README), but the post here should be written by a human. It’s not like the post needs to be that long to express why someone should look at it, and it won’t go through that many edits. Translations should be done through traditional translation software.
    • To prevent driveby posts, we could automate a comment on new posts see if a user knows where they are posting. Asking about their favourite threadiverse community, or how long they have been a member here, or even how they learned about the community might separate bots from real users. It works pretty well for our registration applications on lemmy.ca / piefed.ca etc.

    On top of being suspicious, I think it boils down to “projects that have a future” and “projects that don’t have a future”. People in this community want to run software that is likely to stay useful and safe over time, and that’s at the core of why these recent ones are downvoted.

  • Is ambitiousslab@feddit.uk also the author of the blog?

    A blurb about the article is nice and helps to convince people to click on the article, but it isn’t necessary. From what I can tell, ambitiousslab seems to be sharing things that they find interesting and doesn’t follow the pattern of the usual bot spam we deal with

  • Our gut bacteria is vital so are we eating so they can process it for us or are we eating to feed them?

    Commensalism :)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensalism

    Lots of these bacteria probably exist without us. We can’t exist without them but we do make a very nice house where they can live.

    While some bacteria definitely can, there are others that are so adapted to building colonies inside of us that they can’t really survive outside of a mammal or human host. You can carefully create the lab environments to allow for it, but that is against the spirit of the question. My gut says ( ;) ) that anaerobic bacteria that evolved for mucosal colonization are likely to fit into this group.

    Meanwhile it is possible to survive without much of a microbiome, but you end up having trouble with digestion and you are susceptible to infections since the surfaces don’t have any residents and are “available”. Newborns have low microbiome diversity and build it up rapidly after birth, and people on sustained antibiotic treatments tend to lose a lot of their microbiome.

    So they keep us around.

    Here is another fun one, the symbiogenesis theory.

    The mitochondria was likely an independent prokaryote (bacteria) that was taken into eukaryotic (plants / animals / etc) cells.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis

    Even now, the mitochondria has its own genetic material and replicates somewhat independently. So if you went in and removed all of the mitochondria from a cell, it wouldn’t be able to make a new one. That is also why your mitochondria will match the mitochondria from your mother, since the egg cells come with mitochondria while the sperm cells don’t.

  • Would CoMaps be a better recommendation than OSMand?

    For those who are familiar with Ente, how are their apps? I use something different for 2FA and photos, but I need recommendations for people who don’t want to deal with selfhosting and backing up Aegis

  • Network effect is the biggest problem for messaging services, and so I would still push for Signal over the alternatives that are technically better. This guide seems like it is focussed on users who are new to the space

    I agree with the Linux recommendation, but I’d offer CachyOS over pure Arch for newcomers. The limine bootloader gives a lot of peace of mind, since you can tell the user “if you get a bad update, reboot and pick an older option on the first screen”.

  • Thanks!

    A big reason for me is that people can tell who the source is more easily, instead of seeing a generic Yahoo link. If someone is blocking or flagging a particular domain through their app / front-end, then it won’t work for a yahoo link.

    Also while I don’t think Yahoo is doing something illegal, my gut says that these articles are harming the smaller news orgs. When Yahoo/MSN publishes the full article, the user likely doesn’t notice who the actual news org is, likely doesn’t go to the real news orgs website, the news org has a harder time building a brand / reputation, and over time they might become even more dependent on Yahoo to stay afloat. A lot of the time when I look up a story, the yahoo page ranks above the actual original source, and that feels wrong to me

Generalized ‘Threadiverse’ sections

Previously, we had separate guide sections for Lemmy and Piefed, with very few Piefed specific pages. Instead of writing a new set of pages for Piefed, we have generalized most of the Lemmy pages into pages that can be applied to any threadiverse platform. When the page can use additional Piefed specific information or screenshots, we added a “🛠️ Help Needed” card near the top.

This includes the following pages:

Since ‘privacy’ information will be specific to each platform, and there is more of a risk if a user is confused about that information, we are keeping those pages separate. The existing Lemmy page is still up, and there is a work-in-progress page for Piefed that a contributor is working on.

At this time, the moderation, admin, and dev sections are still separate.

  • We will likely generalize the moderation section next, once the example rule templates are ready
  • The admin sections will likely stay separate
  • The future of the dev section is uncertain, and it might be generalized to the fediverse level

Updated ‘Alternative UIs’ page

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/alternative-uis

The entries now follow a consistent format, and are sorted alphabetically after the default UIs. We have also added a summary table that compares all of the alternative UIs.

RSS feeds for announcements

These announcements are intended for users that have accounts on our platforms, or are interested in news about our organization.

You can use it by adding the following link to your RSS feed reader / aggregator: https://fedecan.ca/feed-en.xml

Other changes

Other changes include:

  • Updated the wording on the “Our Platforms” section so that it is clearer for new users: https://fedecan.ca/en/#our-platforms
  • We published a few older announcements to the website. They existed only as Lemmy/Piefed posts in the past: https://fedecan.ca/en/announcements
  • Updated the donation page with a nicer comparison table and option cards. We did not make any changes to the donation options, that will come at a later time: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate
  • We made fixes to the footer responsiveness and style

I got a banner warning today linking to this page. It was announced a while back, but I either didn’t see it or forgot.

We have made the difficult decision to limit the use of LanguageTool’s browser extension to Premium users only. The rise of generative AI has made it more challenging to sustainably monetize our offering. A majority of users use our products for free, and the relatively small percentage of Premium subscribers is all that is subsidizing our continuously increasing server costs. To improve our Premium experience and to sustain our business model, we’ll be making the LanguageTool browser extension available exclusively for paying customers.

The key bit for people who can selfhost:

Yes. If you are a developer, you can still host and run your own instance of LanguageTool’s server. The browser extension will continue to work as it currently does for users who use it with their own server.