Samuel Proulx

Problem was that I usually only discovered the issue when I went to read the book lol

I never did that, my connection was too slow to want to take up someone’s DCC slot for like a day to get an entire movie. Remember all the frustrating idiots who would share .lit files, but forget to remove the DRM from them?

Ah, good to know. Back in my day, when we had to walk a hundred miles to school in the snow, up hill both ways, IRC was the only place to get ebooks. I’m guessing it’s just the old users clinging on now.

Man, I’m getting flashbacks to my days running omenserve on undernet. I had no idea people were still doing this! How does the content compare to places like Anna’s archive these days?

It’s just as long and incomprehensible as Google’s and Microsoft’s. So I have no idea.

That’s what worries me. When companies get desperate for cash, they tend to do pretty terrible things.

So who are they sending our product browsing data to in order to provide this service? At least I know what Microsoft and Google are doing with my data (nothing good). But Pocket and cloudflare and there VPN provider and whatever other random companies Firefox partners with? Who knows! How do I opt out? Who knows! How secure are these companies? Who knows! At least using Edge or Chrome I only have to hand over my data to one evil corporation, instead of several. Plus I actually get things I want in return (for me: automatic image descriptions, reader mode, read aloud, and AI based page summaries). Nothing I get from the companies Firefox works with are things I even want.

Based on the links you gave, it seems that captions default to off when new servers are created.

Ah, good to know! I don’t use meeting platforms that aren’t accessible by default for everyone. Looks like the problem, at least in Jitsi, is that enable captions defaults to off. It would need to default to on before I could use it.

How many of those support captions?

Yes. I already have to pay for a VPS, for a domain…nothing wrong with paying for an SSL cert. At least I can pick my vendor.

So require paid ssl certificates or something. I just can’t sign on to any system that requires me to establish personal friendships with other instance admins so I can beg them for endorsements. Begging Reddit to improve accessibility didn’t work. I have no interest in a system where my instance now needs to beg other admins for the right to federate. Even email doesn’t work this way.

So what happens to instances who don’t want to participate in a centralized allowlisting project? This is an allow list system, so eventually we just get cut out of federation? I’m still wishing for a centralized deny list, that would keep track of instances blocked by other instances, and block someone once maybe 3 other instances I trust do. That way we can still allow by default, rather than requiring that any admin who wants to set up a new system is required to know another admin who will endorse them. Frankly, I don’t have a personal relationship with even a single other fediverse admin; I wouldn’t want to endorse them, because I just don’t know them, and I’m quite sure they also wouldn’t endorse me. But saying “I trust you to block bad instances most of the time” seems way easier than “I trust you to vet all of your users”.

I really don’t love this. Couldn’t we extend the mastodon blocklist to cover Lemmy somehow? I don’t like automated blocking. I’d much rather find a list of trusted admins, and defederate with whatever 60 percent of them defederate with.

Nope. This is a huge accessibility fail. Any instance that has captcha enabled is locking out anyone even slightly low vision. Everyone should be manually approving all applications. It keeps instances small, and ensures that the fediverse remains distributed. Once we start having a spam problem, we should all just be defederating every instance that offers open registration; make a script to scan for it, and update the blocklist. Nobody should be running that way. If you are, not only are you allowing spam, you’re also probably allowing humans who are engaged in ban evasion and other bad things. All posts and comments that come from your instance are in some small part your responsibility. Be at least vaguely aware of who your users are. If you ban one, and you run open registration, how do you intend to make sure they’re not the user you just banned, signing up with another email address? We’re not big tech, so we don’t have the kinds of tools (IP reputation lists, lists of VPN IP addresses, etc) to fight ban evasion in any kind of automated way.

Getting a decent VPS is pretty cheap. Email is the enormous problem. Even if your VPS provider allows outgoing email, your IP address will be flagged and blocked by all mailservers everywhere for the crime of not being Google or Microsoft, or not having a full-time person working 24/7 to satisfy the people in charge of blacklists. You can pay someone else to send your email, but that’s going to cost you as much or more as the VPS you’re using to host your entire app.

From a Mashable article published at the time, quoting the CEO in his own words:

In an interview, Prince expressed doubt about his decision to remove The Daily Stormer from Cloudflare, and conveyed concern over companies like his own, and their ability to pull a lever, and knock a website offline.

In my opinion, folks should avoid Cloudflare at all costs. They’re free speech maximalists with a history of defending NAZI’s and other terrible people. They only discontinue service to white nationalists when the media attention gets too hot. Then they turn around and let them back in once things have died down.

Also, speaking as a screen reader user, if they think your IP address is suspicious (maybe because you’re using Tor or a VPN), they present an inaccessible captcha and don’t offer work-arounds. Then because the entire website is blocked behind the captcha, screen reader users can’t even get in contact with you to let you know what’s happening.

I also think it is the greater good to let AIs train for free.

I’m not entirely sure about this. Freely available AI’s, sure, maybe. But corporate closed source AI’s that charge per token? I’m not saying no, but I’d love to hear someone justify the thinking behind why this is “the greater good”.

Testing a lemmy instance to see how it might work for the r/blind community. There will be a bunch of accessibility issues fixed in the next release it looks like, so it’s a bit early to judge. Also, it’s pulled me, personally, into the world of being a sysadmin for other people. Now I get to figure out why email doesn’t work and why when you search for a community you need to press search nine times before anything shows and all kinds of other niggles like that before I feel ready to open an instance to the general masses.