TiffyBelle

@TiffyBelle@feddit.uk

Mastodon: mastodonapp.uk/@TiffyBelle

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

TiffyBelle,

Really? Much ado about nothing, it seems. Just seems you’re looking for drama.

Don’t like the admins of your instance? Don’t want to use an instance that may federate with Threads? Use a different one/host your own, which it seems you’ve said you’re going to do. That’s the beauty of the fediverse; you’re not behold to any instance owners you don’t wish to be. =)

TiffyBelle,

Ethics aside, this is still good commentary on privacy and on who you should trust with your supposedly “private” communications.

Private discussions, search histories, etc. can be quite incriminating even for those entirely innocent. People should be mindful of the services they’re using and how long they’re storing such sensitive data for. Privacy is important.

TiffyBelle,

Bit confused about the question, but assuming you mean Windows… it looks nothing like it.

It just looks like GNOME2, lol.

TiffyBelle,

Pretty much any store-brand toothpaste is probably going to be a lot cheaper than “branded” products, and will have the required amount of fluoride within it to keep your teeth healthy which is far and away the most important ingredient in any toothpaste. The entire toothpaste industry is mostly all marketing.

TiffyBelle,

Hopefully in future this is built in to the software. Ideally you’d be able to download a JSON/XML file from your settings page for your settings/subscribed communities then upload them to a different instance similar to how it works with Piped instances, for example.

TiffyBelle,

It’s worth noting that the “trees planted” counter is basically an estimate as to how much ad revenue on average is generated from a user based on their number of searches. If you block ads at all, you’re probably not contributing to their revenue at all, thus planting nothing.

I like the idea, but don’t see it as worth sacrificing privacy or allowing ads. Tossing a few bucks every now and then to a charity might be a better option for some.

TiffyBelle,

Because there are search engines out there who don’t commit your IP/search terms to disk at all for any length of time. Search engines like Startpage, Brave Search, and DDG. Users of those would be sacrificing privacy to use Ecosia.

The money used to plant trees also comes from somewhere, namely advertising. It’s fair to assume most web-based advertisers are privacy-hostile and once you click ads served to you from Ecosia to actually generate them revenue, you are then directed to the advertiser’s site and subject to their privacy policy, which is likely a lot more loose. Allowing Ecosia’s ads through your filters is sacrificing privacy.

The Privacy Policy you linked also talks vaguely about working with and providing “metadata” and such to “third party providers” for a variety of uses, with apparently optional “personalization” and whatnot.

I don’t think their privacy policy is a complete disaster when you compare it to mainstream search engines like Google or Bing directly, which they go to great lengths to point out in their own policy with the “hey, we’re not as bad as the other guy!” rhetoric. But there are more private search options out there, hence my earlier post’s allusion to sacrificing privacy.

TiffyBelle,

I really enjoy darkly-compact on desktop. The name’s a bit weird since it actually uses up more space, but it’s aesthetically pleasing to me and I don’t like everything crunched up centrally.

What does defederating from Meta's Threads.net actually accomplish?

Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a...

TiffyBelle,

A sense of pride and accomplishment?

Roundcat, to random
Roundcat avatar

Tired of seeing the same stuff on lemmy's/kbin's front page? Want to encourage growth in smaller communities? Browse by new for a good time. Be sure to upvote and boost.

TiffyBelle,

Not sure if Kbin has the same filtering options as Lemmy, but the “Top Hour” etc. filters can be pretty useful to see top content on a sliding scale of time which will filter out the older stuff:

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/1fb05e86-73dd-4a1f-8fcf-b0a78600af29.png

The algorithms that sort by “Hot” since the 0.18.x release of Lemmy seem to be doing a way better job of showing timely content now though; much better than earlier versions in my experience.

TiffyBelle,

It feels very much the same type of people who were mostly hanging around the early Internet; BBS and IRC, etc. before “the general population” caught on and flooded the space.

TiffyBelle,

Nice! The new “darkly-compact” theme that came with the update too looks great on desktop.

TiffyBelle,

I personally don’t see them as any different than any other large instance and should be treated precisely as such: default federate until they give reason to defederate with them, which should be based on concerns of content/moderation and the like.

Meta is a privacy-hostile company and for that reason I’d certainly not wish to sign up with their service. With that said, the only data they’d be seeing from other instances is what people put out there in the public domain anyway and nothing is stopping them from obtaining that data if they truly wanted it without having to create their own instance to do so.

With that said, I love the fact that individual instance admins have the choice to federate or not and that’s the beauty of the fediverse. There’s going to be some instances that defederate instantly and that’s okay, much like there is going to be instances who take an approach similar to what I think should happen. As a user, I’ll have the choice to use whichever instance suits my philosophy and that’s awesome.

Additionally, to be honest I don’t really think Threads federating is even that relevant for platforms like Lemmy. Threads is a microblogging platform and Lemmy is a link aggregation system. To even post to Lemmy in the first place, federated Threads users will have to explicitly go out of their way to direct their status posts to a Lemmy community. How many people on Threads are realistically going to do that? It’s awkward and most people wouldn’t even know there’s a wider “fediverse” being more used to centralized services like Meta. People already don’t do this particularly often from Mastodon instances which are federated.

The whole thing is a storm in a teacup as far as Lemmy is concerned. It’s a more relevant discussion for Mastodon instances, tbh.

TiffyBelle,

People outside the sphere of knowledge about the fediverse who I’ve tried to introduce to Lemmy have been quite confused for sure. They’re used to centralized platforms like reddit, so even the concept of having to choose which instance they sign up on and comprehending that they can interact with content on other instances from their instance is super foreign to them. It also isn’t very clear how to subscribe to communities that aren’t on their instance (once they’ve got their head around the fact they can), although sites like Lemmyverse help a ton with discovery. But even visiting a 3rd party site to find communities is confusing.

People who don’t think Lemmy is confusing are only seeing it from their position of knowledge and assuming concepts they already understand are “easy” or “common sense” when to most they’re anything but.

OC The fediverse is a privacy nightmare (blog.bloonface.com)

ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the fediverse (including Mastodon – same caveats as the first two times, will be used interchangeably, deal with it) is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely...

TiffyBelle,

I’m not sure this blog post is the “ah-ha!” revelation you think it is.

If you’re posting something, you’re choosing to put that out there on the public internet which should henceforth be considered “public.” This isn’t a privacy violation unless you choose to make it one by violating your own privacy by oversharing sensitive information.

This has been the case online since time immemorial. Once something’s out there, consider it non-retractable. This isn’t specific to the Fediverse/ActivityPub. Even in centralized forums/reddit the things you post were cached by web archive/scraped by unscrupulous sites/used to train AI, etc. even if you tried to delete them from the source server. “Deletion” has never truly been a thing on the internet, which is precisely why people should really consider what they post. Heck, there were specific sites dedicated to showing which comments were “deleted” from reddit in full.

I don’t consider any of these things “privacy violations.” A privacy violation would be if the email address you signed up to your instance with was being broadcast to other servers in the open. What you choose to put out there is up to you and the inherent danger with interacting with any form of social media.

TiffyBelle, (edited )

There are literally warnings when you try to DM someone on Fediverse apps that say it should not be treated as a secure medium:

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/10c7c4f1-22c8-48ac-9eb0-600d2cbbd74a.png

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/17e0957b-84e3-43de-b67e-1b14e64cb990.png

Even on traditional centralized platforms I’ve never treated DMs as “private.” Anything not end-to-end encrypted cannot be considered private and never has been able to be. Once again, these aren’t exclusive issues to the Fediverse.

With that said, I do see it as important to draw attention to these types of things. Users should absolutely know not to share sensitive information via DM, or make the mistake of considering them a secure medium on any platform, centralized or not.

TiffyBelle,

Stop mocking the missing Titan submersible for being piloted with a video game controller. Submersibles are more reliable when the devices used in them are kept simple, marine scientist says.

This is an interesting article that makes some good points. Why re-invent the wheel and potentially make something unnecessarily complicated and less reliable when simple items with simple electronics often have less that could go wrong?

TiffyBelle,

"They're spezzing it up."

Kinda has a nice ring to it.

TiffyBelle,

I personally enjoy Joplin as my FOSS note-taking app.

TiffyBelle,

Heard rumors she was going to Arsenal. This is a big loss for a Man Utd team that has made some good strides forward last season. Can't help but feel they should have done more to keep her at the club.

TiffyBelle,

Ohh, good trailer. Definitely adding this to my watch list!

sort by "New", updates instantly all the time?

I'm still playing around getting my bearings here, trying to explore this still-growing federation. I've tried browsing by "New" on both mobile and desktop a couple of times, but on desktop it's almost unsuable. Any time there's a new post, the INSTANT it goes up my feed updates, and scrolls down. Sometimes it's one post,...

TiffyBelle,

In Mastodon there's an option to keep a "live refresh" of the federated feed, or a static one that only updates when you refresh. For Mastodon timelines, live updates seem to make sense. In a system like Lemmy? Not so much, imo. I hope we get an option to turn live updating off. It'd probably help with server load too.

TiffyBelle,

Appreciate the sane take on defederation. Outside of the legally problematic stuff that most regular users wouldn't want to be exposed to anyway, problematic political opinions and whatnot are often subjective and as a user I'm perfectly capable of avoiding the things I don't want to read myself without a bubble-wrapped echo chamber being enforced by admins.

TiffyBelle,

I think your points about frustration are valid, particularly at this time when there's a lot of reddit refugees. That said, it's Beehaw's choice what they're willing to put up with. I think defederation with entire instances is a very extreme response to their issues, but ultimately it's their choice.

I think with the admins' mentality over there, they will probably end up with a very large defederation block list. For that reason, it is probably for the best if Lemmy's most active communities were NOT hosted there. People should put the energy into building up other communities so the platform more broadly isn't reliant on extremely moderated instances like Beehaw.

Major communities should be on instances that welcome a wide range of views that are also willing to have a robust and diverse admin team to handle issues, imo. That would be the healthiest solution overall. Beehaw choosing to defederate now is a blessing in disguise; it's an early statement proving that instance is an unsuitable host for any community looking to be home to a broad-reaching and diverse member base.

TiffyBelle,

I'd argue it's perfect timing. Better that users across the broader fediverse know now that supporting Beehaw communities and helping them to grow with content won't be in the best interests of the fediverse more broadly, and to put their time and effort into communities hosted elsewhere before they'd grown even larger.

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