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 :)

  • 9 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 5th, 2023
  • Otter@lemmy.catoFediverse@lemmy.world•some feedback about Lemmy/PieFed from Reddit usersEnglish
    18·
    3 days ago

    I’ve tried both [Lemmy and PieFed], and the UX is […]

    That’s excluding the horrible lack of contrast most frontends use, which makes […]

    IMO both of the UIs are going to feel weird and limited to someone coming from Reddit / Instagram etc. I find that custom front ends like Photon are a lot better for newcomers.

    I know Lemmy is working on a completely new frontend.

    Fediverse feels slower, but not in a good way. More of a ‘if I don’t use this for a week, I’ll see new things’. If I log in after 2 or 3 days, I’ll scroll for 10 minutes and see the stuff I saw last time.

    I have a constant flow of new content, and see something new every time I open it (which is often, after years of having that muscle memory from reddit).

    I’m subscribed to a lot of communities + using scaled sort

    I also want nsfw stuff now and then. I hate how censored the internet has become, at least with reddit if I want to see a bit of porn, I can.

    This one was weird to me. I remember seeing complaints that reddit has been banning and shutting down its NSFW side, while it’s accessible here.

    I tried twice to join those forums within the Fediverse and I can’t get past the captcha test. The fact that you need approval to validate your access doesn’t seem designed to encourage you to recommend it.

    I want Lemmy to support HCaptcha

    Past that, most people are ok with applications once you explain why they’re necessary.

    Also a lot of social media platforms started out as invite only as marketing strategy lol

  • Otter@lemmy.catoFediverse@lemmy.world•Kagi now has a Fediverse Forums search toggleEnglish
    81·
    4 days ago

    YouTube started with a lot of angel funding, which is why it eventually monetized in the way that it has

    YouTube began as an angel-funded enterprise working from a makeshift office in a garage. In November 2005, venture firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million,[20] and Roelof Botha (a partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal) joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia and Artis Capital Management invested an additional $8 million in the company, which had experienced significant growth in its first few months.

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

  • Otter@lemmy.catoFediverse@lemmy.world•FediDB: A New EraEnglish
    5·
    8 days ago

    Looks great! Is the best way to submit bugs by DM or email?

    I noticed the following issues when trying to sign in and add an instance with my accounts on Lemmy and Piefed instances (lemmy.ca/u/otter and piefed.ca/u/otter specifically):

    Logging in

    Signing in with the profile-description (bio) code works on both Lemmy and PieFed, but logging in with a DM does not work for either.

    On Lemmy, I get the error message

    We could not deliver a message to that account. Check the handle, or use another way to sign in.

    Meanwhile on Piefed, FediDB says that it sent the code, but it fails silently since I never receive a message on the account. I looked into adding fedidb.com as a trusted instance from the admin side, but I don’t think that’s the issue since there are no entries for fedidb.com there at all.

    I know it should be possible to receive DMs from non-threadiverse instances since Canvas used that for auth. If it helps, here is the source code for that project:

    I think they do it by sending the DM as both a Mastodon style note and as a Lemmy style chat message (link to code)

    // around line 144
   const outbox = [
      await message.build(fedify.Note),
      await message.build(fedify.ChatMessage),
    ].map((obj) => apub.prepareObject(obj, ts));

    Admin verification

    This one fails for both.

    On Lemmy I suspect it is looking at the wrong endpoint since I get this:

    Could not reach the server to confirm your admin status.

    Meanwhile on Piefed, I see the following message despite using an admin account that shows up in /api/alpha/site

    Your account is not an admin or the contact account of this server.

    I haven’t tried the other methods yet :)

  • Otter@lemmy.catoFediverse@lemmy.world•Hello from a small new instanceEnglish
    5·
    11 days ago

    That’s very cool, and I appreciate the thought that you’ve put into this, including the naming.

    How does the embedding side change as it scales up? (Storage costs and performance). Brainstorming based on your description, I assume the embedding process is the most resource intensive, and lookups are basically free? If so, would the limit be how fast it can process all new posts?

    I wonder if it would be helpful to run a threadiverse search service like this, which other instances can plug in to. Theres no strong reason for everyone to run their own, since they can just filter out any results that a particular instance has blocked or banned. In our case, we wouldn’t want to replicate that work across the few instances that we run.

  • Otter@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Finally escaping Windows, ironically thanks to AIEnglish
    13·
    11 days ago

    I suspect that LLMs do pretty well with troubleshooting Linux thanks to those manuals and old forum posts. After using them to troubleshoot Linux based devices, I tried the same thing on Windows and it struggled to figure out what commands to run.

    Windows is a mess to configure and troubleshoot, even with the help of LLMs. Microsoft could have spent their investment trying to fix that, but I don’t think they have.

    “Copilot can troubleshoot your computer” could have been a selling point, but they’d have to admit that windows 11 is a buggy mess

  • Otter@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•To protect immigrant students, a college told Flock to remove its cameras. The company refused.English
    35·
    16 days ago

    I was going to suggest covering them up, as a legal way to turn them off without physically dismantling, since they’re technically not college property. But that’s exactly what the campus staff did and Flock kept coming to uncover them? Lol wtf

    I’d bet if this was a larger college/university, they wouldn’t have pulled something like this.

    Something good did come out of this. It is a concrete example of how the company will behave if you sign a contract with them. Public officials and administrators will be more likely to care if they risk losing their power like this. It also makes it clear that you’re not paying Flock to “help” your own region, you’re doing it to help people in other regions.

    Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement.

    College officials reached out again in December 2025 and said they would pay for the remaining five months of the contract — they just wanted the cameras taken down.

    “We never received a response back from Flock,” Heinrich said.

    That’s when things got weird. Heinrich said Elgin Community College staff began to cover the cameras using black trash bags and zip ties so that they would not be able to capture footage. But workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings.

    This strange dance continued, Heinrich said, until Elgin Community College’s contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company uninstalled the cameras for good.