Lemm.ee: It’s the Switzerland of the fediverse. ;)

The Operations Team are a stand-up group. Their focus is on delivering stability.

You’ll basically get access to all content (and all “features”, like up-vote and down-vote - I’m looking at you beehaw).

What I’ve heard from other people is that they want automagic curated content… so you won’t find that a lemm.ee, but for me - I’m happy to find the content that’s meaningful to me.

I’ve got a similar set up and everything works. So, I can confirm that your assumptions are sound.

My solution is kubernetes based, so I use cert-Manager to issue/create the Let’s Encrypt (using DNS as the verification mechanism), when gets fed into a Traefik Reverse Proxy. Traefik is running on a non-standard port, which I can access from the outside world.

I’d suggest tearing your current system down and verify everything is configured correctly.

For example :

• Take a look at the SSL cert. Is it generated properly?
• Look at the reverse proxy. Is it using the proper SSL cert and is it properly formatted? (I’ve found curl - -verbose - - insecure https://... to be helpful)
• Maybe add a static file (ie: robots.txt) to nginx. This would allow you to see if the problem is between the outside world and nginx or between nginx and your service.
• You can also use the “snake oil” cert, in a pinch. It’s an insecure SSL cert, but it would allow you to confirm that your nginx is properly configured and it would confirm that the issue is with the Lets Encrypt cert (or that process/payload).

… and not to rob you of this experience, but you might want to look into Cloudflare Tunnels. It allows you to run services within your network, but are exposed/accessible directly from Cloudflare. It’s entirely secure (actually more so than your proposed system) and you don’t need to mess around with SSL.

So, to solve the problem of the left not voting them, they are moving further to the right.

I humbly disagree. This seems to be an overly simplified view.

The origins of “the far left” (as I understood it) was basically promoting heavy government involvement. For example, breaking up monopolies, many government subsidied programs for it’s people, which in turn needs higher taxes for it people (so the rich get taxed more, the poor get taxed less).

The origins of “the far right” was the polar opposite. No government involvement. Companies will do “what’s right” in order to compete for profit, less tax on it people, as there are fewer government processes/programs (because people have more personal wealth and can afford the programs that are relevant for them).

“the center” was in the middle of these two extremes. The understanding is that there needs to be some government involvement to prevent companies from going unchecked, not all people have equal chances in life resulting in some people needing more/less government assistance, ect. Yet, also acknowledging that the Stalin form of socialism fights against the basic human desire to “work to make their lives better” and companies (when left to their own devices) cannot be absolutely trusted to do “what’s right” for society.

The problem with the DNC and the 2024 election is that the media has perverted what “the far left” aka Democrats and “the far right” aka Republicans (and this has been going on for years).

Based on your line of “left vs right”, I’d argue that the Republican party is “close to” my definition of “the far right” (fascism aside). Yet, the Democratic Party is actually closer to “the far right” than they are “the far left”. I’d even go so far as to say, that the Democratic Party is far “right of center”.

So, yeah, I totally support moving the DNC towards the center, because it’ll (finally) make the Democratic Party closer to their “far left” ideals.

Roku is horrible. I bought a Roku Soundbar (speakers) for my TV and for reasons unknown, I had to (temporarily) hook it up to the internet to “activate” and download the firmware.

It’s such a horrible glimpse of the consumers future.

In addition, you can force your cellphone to GSM/2G (ie: super slow internet).

Depending on what your TV does when it “activates”, if it just needs to “activate/register” - it should be fine. If it needs to “update/upgrade/add a bunch of crapware” - Your internet will be so slow, you can turn it off before it’s finished (note: there is a slim chance that, this could also put your TV in a broken state - if it does, simply do a factory reset and try again)

Oh, I absolutely agree. Licensing is where the big difference is at, but that makes sense though, as ARM and RISC-V are both RISC based processors.

It’s loosely akin to comparing AMD vs Intel. Of course, you cannot pop-out an RISC-V and replace it with an ARM. However, the PCB’s should contain all the same parts, meaning they’ll have both have a similar price.

Unlike Intel/AMD, which you’d need extra capacitor, heat sinks, whatever - to help it handle all that extra power those CISC processors need (which results in heat).

Yeah, but RISC-V also costs 1/10th the price of a Pi.

I don’t want PCs to be like smartphones. I don’t want locked bootloaders.

I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but since Microsoft made TPM mandatory for Windows 11+, locked down bootloader are on their way.

Basically, TPM allows (Windows) software to validate/verify the integrity of the OS and hardware. This also (could) include the bootloader/bios if Microsoft chooses to do so.

TPM is the equivalent of attestation on Android, which is the exact reason why your Banking App won’t work on your rooted/custom Android Phone.

That being said, we should embrace ARM. X86/AMD has 30+ years worth of “history” baked into each ( CISC) chip. This complexity is why your PC draws soooo much power and generates soooo much heat.

This is loosely related to “online experience” (as you’ve covered most of the “tech tips”) :

When choosing a movie don’t watch the trailers, instead (blindly) watch what’s popular. (obviously, if you’re into niche genres - this won’t work.)

I’ve found Trackt is a good place to understand recent trends (and it just shows film posters). Then I’ll go to IMDB, maybe read the summary, but I always read the first/popular user review and decide if it’s worth my time and money.

The first/popular user review usually doesn’t contain spoilers.

Since I’ve actively avoided trailers and spoilers, my enjoyment for films has nearly doubled - even for “bad movies” (I probably wouldn’t have watched otherwise). It’s such a shame that a 2 minute trailer often shows many/most of the highlights of the film.

Windows Mixed Reality (ie: Windows VR) was deprecated and removed from Windows 11.

So, if you have a WMR VR Set, you’re going to be stuck with Windows 10 (or an even lesser supported Version of windows 11 - v 23H2).

It really sucks, given the price point I’ve throughly enjoying my Odyssey+. I’ve had it for 4 years, but now I’d need to decide if I dual boot (which sucks) or see if another VR headset reaches my price point (which is also dumb, because I don’t find the O+ to be “that bad”).

I think OP is referring to the fact that bad actors, who are exploiting facets of SEO (rather then providing “meaningful” content), use to need to programically generate content (pre-AI/LLM).

For a real reader, it was obvious (at a quick glance) this was meaningless garbage. As they would often be large walls of text that didn’t make sense, or just lists of random key words.

With LLM/AI, they’re still walls of text and random key words, but now they grammatically/structurally correct and require no real effort to generate. Unfortunately, it means that the reader actually need to invest time in reading it. You’ll also notice a growing trend in articles (especially in “compare X vs Y” type articles), the same content is recycled and rephrased to “pad” the article and give it a higher SEO ranking.

There has to be a better way to keep the strengths of federating without partitioning the community smaller and smaller until there is no community left.

Can you imagine Lemmy with a similar amount of Reddit users? Anytime you’d post, you’d have to replicate it between X number of instances (for visibility). Conversations would be fragemented and duplicated, votes would be duplicated. To me this almost sounds like “work”…

There has to be something better.

For example, instead of “every instance is an island”. Meaning the current hierarchy is “instance” - > “community” - > “post” - > “threads”. We could instead have “community (ie: asklemmy)” - > “post (ie: this post)” - > “instance (Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, etc)” - > “threads (this comment)”.

From a technical perspective, it would mean that each instance would replicate the community names and posts. Which is already beginning done (this post is a perfect example), but as long as each instance would share a unique identifier to associate the two communities/posts as “the same thing” (and this could simply be the hash of the community /post name). Everything else would be UX. Each instance would take ownership of the copy of the community and post, which means they could moderate it according to their standards.

I fixed the link. For some reason the Lemmy Client (Voyager) keeps generating ‘.ml’ links (even though I’m on Lemm.ee)

This whole identical thread really confused Voyager, I thought I was seeing double.

Off-topic: Lemmy really needs better crosspost functionality.

Lemmy is a small group of people, let’s not divide it further by having the exact same conversation in two (or more) places.

edit: Fixed the link.

Begins?!? Docker Inc was waist deep in enshittification the moment they started rate limiting docker hub, which was nearly 3 or 4 years ago.

This is just another step towards the deep end. Companies that could easily move away from docker hub, did so years ago. The companies that remain struggle to leave and will continue to pay.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Actually, with enough interactions from different people (ie: enough data points) Lemmy should be able to determine if a comment brings value to the conversation (either positive or negative) or if it’s noise that should be ignored (and prioritized lower).

If you have 4 comments:

1. Has 100 upvotes (in total)
2. Another has 100 downvote (in total)
3. Another has 50 upvotes and 50 downvote (100 in total with a 0 sum)
4. The last was a new comment with 0 votes.

It’s obvious that 1 and 3 are providing more to the conversation than 2. 4 is a bit of an outlier, but probably provides more value than 2.

Regarding 3: The challenge would be that there’s a low chance that there will be such a wide margin of upvotes/downvotes. Due to the hive mind, the voting will probably look like 30 upvotes and 130 downvotes. So, there would need to be a weight accordingly, so those fewer upvotes had a greater impact (in terms of sorting and scoring comments)

Reddit has a “sort by controversial” algorithm that seems to be missing from Lemmy (or maybe it’s hidden in the “what’s hot" - I haven’t looked at the code).

It would be awesome (and resource intensive) if Lemmy could provide the federated instances with custom sorting algorithms. It would allow federated instances to be unique, provide some playful competition, and given the open source nature of Lemmy - I’m sure these algorithms would be open sourced, which would improve the entire Lemmy ecosystem as a whole.

Innevitably whatever public transportation you use the route will end up in the ghetteo.

This is a mindset that many people in the U.S. will need to get over before the “quality” of public transport improves: that busses, trains, subways are for “the poor”.

I’ve been on the subways in New York and busses and trains elsewhere in the States. They’re gross. Especially, compared to most of Europe (Italy, Denmark, Germany, etc). In Asia, they’re also a clean. The mindset in Asia and Europe is “this is what people (not just the poor) take to get from point A to point B”. There aren’t school busses, the kids just take the same city bus/train/subway that all the other people take to get to work.

I’ve spent 45 minutes in the States on my daily commute staring at (and riding on) the bumper of the car in front of me. I’ve also spent 45 minutes, in Europe, peacefully riding the subway to work. I’m able to surf the web, watch a video, relax. I definitely enjoy/recommend the later experience.

Herbie?

One of your questions I didn’t see answered:

And after doing my research I found out americans file taxes every year. I haven’t done it the last 18 years of working. Should I just not file?

You have two choices:

1. Full Disclosure : you tell the IRS, you haven’t filled and ask them to help you rectify the situation. This could mean penalties and fines for filing late or based on your situation, they might let is slide (as it was an honest oversight). Once you’ve gone through this, then your back in the IRS’ good graces (assuming you still file your taxes and fbar annually)

2. A “stealth” disclosure : (there’s a better name but I forgot was it’s called) basically, you just start to file your 2023 taxes and pretend that nothing has happened during the last 18 years… if you do this for the next 5 years (or 7 years?) and the IRS does not say anything, then you’re back in the IRS good graces (they can only penalize you for x number of years) . But if the IRS decides to contact you, then they could throw the book at you (more than if you went with option 1).

Ultimately, it’s a gamble with a risk. However, if you’ve recently learned of your citizenship and got a passport. I think it’s quite plausible to get some lienency, both for the full disclosure and the stealth disclosure.

Well… there is also Eritrea, a small country in West Africa.

The U. S. Taxes is based on the country you’re living in. If there are double taxation treaties between the two countries (ie: Europe and the U. S.), then the IRS would tax you on the amount you’ve earned over a certain limit (it was 100k usd, but I think was increased). Meaning, if you earned 110k usd, you’d be taxes on the 10k. If you earn less then 100k, you’d pay no U. S. Taxes.

If there isn’t a treaty, which is often the case in countries that tax their citizens less than the U. S. , then you’d basically be charged taxes in the U. S. (based on your worldwide income) minus whatever you paid the country you’re living in.