Skull giver

I’m not so sure. The DMA says they have to allow others to have access to the same platform features they have access to. That means Apple can opt into either no longer doing data collection in their app store, or they have to allow third party app stores to do the same kind of tracking Apple does.

They could’ve chosen to simply stop tracking users, but allowing third party app stores to track users is clearly more profitable. Plus, they get to spread FUD about the big evil EU forcing them to let other companies do the shady stuff they do!

On the other hand, this only applies to app stores, and practically nobody installs third party app stores, and even then the app stores are generally not that interested in this kind of tracking. It’s a big nothingburger caused by Apple’s laziness and their hostility to fair competition.

RedMi have reliability and quality issues

I’ve never heard Redmi being much worse than other brands in terms of reliability and quality. I don’t like the software, though, but luckily many of those phones are popular with the custom ROM scene.

The Samsung I was referring to is the A25, 200€ on Amazon, and the A09, 109€.

Fair enough. Still, I refuse to accept the constant upwards spiral in phone pricing, and I don’t consider €350+ phones entry level. The Pixel 7a and A55 still costs €375 for me and I refuse to pay that for a supposed entry level phone that’s already being replaced with a newer model. That’s mid-range for me.

Having to buy the entry range device, which last longer and provide a worse experiences, probably doesn’t compensate getting a jack.

I guess, but as with all things commercial, this change was market driven. I doubt it was for practical reasons, but if people would’ve bought flagships with headphone jacks during the transition, I don’t think Samsung would’ve killed them off. I think people in general prefer cheaper and easier water resistance with a slightly larger battery over a headphone jack.

The loud majority who does care can protest the change by buying from other brands that do sport headphone jacks.

I’ve switched to Bluetooth for almost all audio, on desktop and mobile. I don’t own anything that’s limited by Bluetooth in terms of audio quality. I usually carry the little USB C to 3.5mm dongle with me, but I can’t remember when I last used it.

A Dutch tech website published an article about phones and headphone jacks recently. The conclusion seems to be that the expensive phones lack the headphone jack, and that’s what the media and (Dutch/Belgian) consumers are focused on. Availability brands, models and prices will vary in your region, of course, but at least here there doesn’t seem to be a lack of headphone jack phones.

In your opening post, you list three large brands already. There’s also HMD/Nokia, which also includes a headphone jack in most of their phones. You also call out the entry range Samsung phones (though I really wouldn’t call $500 phones “entry range”). It seems like you’re forgetting a third possibility: not everyone is buying flagship phones.

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Novo Nordisk is a major contributor to the Danish economy (like that time it practically saved Denmark from a recession, growing the GDP while the rest of Europe slipped into a recession). This single company makes up about 5% of the entire Danish economy.

I doubt this company has received more public funding than it brought back into the Danish treasury. Its weight loss drug is basically transferring money from the US economy over to the Danish economy.

Of course, this is of no solace to the Americans that are paying these high prices, but the country that this company does most of its research in is more than happy to rake in the dollars.

IRC is text only.

More recent alternatives such as XMPP and Matrix have voice extensions, but their clients aren’t as good as Discord’s.

This may be a good chance for Element to gain popularity, at least if they can release some gamer-targeting features.

However, Discord is not profitable despite their massive amounts of revenue. You can’t use a platform for free and expect it to remain free forever, unless it’s run by volunteers like many Fediverse servers are (and even those risk collapsing if they gain any form of popularity, because they don’t have teams of dedicated network administrators to keep up with growth or optimise for server cost).

Pay for the services you use, especially if those services include high-bandwidth features like streaming or hosting media. If you don’t, these companies will find a way to make a profit out of you, or disappear completely.

It shouldn’t be too hard to work around that by either using dev tools to force the installation or by simply modifying the app to bump the required version number. It sucks that installing unmaintained apps is going to be more of a pain, but it’s far from impossible. Android’s internal backwards compatibility for this stuff is quite good.

I have never seen a phone that made me think “I wish there was an ear shattering speaker on the back of this”.

Anyone got a clue about the use case for this? Is it just a way for obnoxious people to save on their Bluetooth speakers?

Doing manual curl calls is hardly an alternative for proper GUI, but the way the article is written makes it look like there’s nothing you can do when someone uploads an image to your server. That just isn’t true.

Server administrator can delete media, either by extracting the user delete token from the database or by using the privileged API. That’s not an alternative to a proper moderation API but it’s also not the “uploading is a black box that glues the files to your server” that people pretend it is.

And to be honest, if you’re going to run a server like this and don’t know how to do these tasks, I’m not sure if hosting a publicly accessible service is such a good idea. Not because this stuff is common knowledge, but because web services are complex and come with all kinds of ethical and legal implications that you need to know how to handle. We don’t want the Fediverse to become like email, where 99% of IP-addresses are blocked because it was so easy to just leave an ancient piece of software running with no real understanding of the abuse it could cause, whether that’s an SMTP server or an open MissKey server (see: the Japanese spam wave).

In my opinion, Lemmy’s lack of moderator tooling is a serious deficiency that puts it squarely behind Mastodon and a bunch of other Fediverse tools. However, there’s no way you only discover this stuff months later. The sad fact is that Lemmy is one of the better Threadiverse server implementations despite its many glaring issues.

What I’m seeing around Lemmy is a lot of complaining about priorities but not a lot of community action. Mastodon had the Glitch fork, Kbin had Mbin, but nobody bothered to fork Lemmy to fix the issues they care about. Instead, it’s all about “the two lead devs need to focus on what I find important”. Suggestions to work on the project and fix the issues are deflected by things like “I don’t have time/don’t know Rust”, which are perfectly valid reasons not to help, but also don’t make your problem the devs’ problem. There’s a real sense of entitlement coming from these blog posts for a platform whose top 4 contribution statistics look like this:

I too have too little time to fix the issues I have with Lemmy, but I accept that instead of assuming the issues I’m facing need to be prioritised. If Lemmy’s priorities are that starkly different from mine, I’ll need to migrate to something else. I don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t appear on the roadmap for the next release.

Lemmy should have better mod tools, and they’re coming eventually. I’ll just wait for the devs to get around to implementing them.

Images aren’t federated through ActivityPub so I don’t really see how deleting media is supposed to work. Best you can do is delete media for deleted posts.

The API call for deleting media already exists. It’s actually used in the comment compose screen (you can click the “click here to delete” popup after uploading media). So all you need to do with this info is send a POST request to the existing API endpoint.

I don’t think the Lemmy database uses triggers on media uploads at all, I don’t think Diesel support those well?

It’s a basic curl command, that shouldn’t be “arcane” if you’re setting up a server.

We’ll get our delete screen eventually. It’s already a work in progress. If you’re desperate for the functionality, you can merge the PR and build the server already.

The comment I’m responding directly references beehawists.

Of course others will benefit, but specifically for beehaw this isn’t very relevant.

Beehaw isn’t updating their Lemmy install anyway, so it’s not like adding new features for Beehaw users would solve anything.

Clicking delete on one server does not magically delete content on other servers, federation needs to happen first and there’s usually a queue for that. If the delete command hasn’t reached remote servers yet, those servers will receive upvotes, downvotes, reactions, you name it. Your local server will likely refuse most of those, but other servers who have a copy of your comment will have a differing local state until the delete request makes it over. If your server, or the remote server, is slow for a while, federation can take minutes to hours to complete.

Not only that, I can restore your deleted comment/post on my server and start commenting on it. My comments will only show up locally on my server, but funky deletion behaviour is just one of the ways Lemmy and centralised platforms differ.

On most servers, the post table is a lot smaller than the comment table, so even on your local server the delete button may take a moment to work, though I wouldn’t expect that to take too much time.

I’m not sure why your deleted stuff is still collecting votes, I think the server should be refusing those. Maybe there’s a bug somewhere?

Deletions shouldn’t be difficult because of the schema. For instance, this query: select display_name, ('https://your.lemmy.host/pictrs/image/' || pictrs_alias) as image_url, pictrs_delete_token from image_upload iu inner join local_user u on u.id = iu.local_user_id inner join person p on p.id = u.person_id; will list all media, with the display name of the user who uploaded them, and the token that can be used to delete the image. Obviously, this needs a where u.id = ? parameter to only expose the list to the right user, but adding a “delete old media” page really shouldn’t be that hard. It’ll require time, though, and with one of the two devs taking parental leave soon, I don’t think there’s that much dev time for a while.

The pieces are almost in place, they just need an API endpoint and some UI work.

users can’t delete images

Not until the next major release of Lemmy, unless you click the delete button before the image gets posted, or if your app stores the delete token (there is at least one Android app that does this)

admins can’t delete images

They can, if they read the manual. Mods can’t, but instance admins can.

Can you explain that? Why wouldn’t Calyx collaborate with Graphene? I don’t use either so I don’t know how or what those projects are doing different.

Lemmy has been using whitelist based federation right up until people started moving over from Reddit, so it’s not exactly a new approach.

With new domains costing anywhere between $3 and nothing at all, setting up thousands of spam servers isn’t that difficult or expensive. There’s already a tool that’s designed to allow bypassing blocks automatically by simply feeding it a second domain. If spammers actually cared about the Fediverse, they’d be all over it in no time.

But the big danger right now is that free, open servers, big or small, don’t have much in the way of verification or hot prevention. Some instances don’t have any protection at all (which the Japanese spam wave abused), others are using basic CAPTCHAs that copilot will happily solve for you. On centralised services this problem can be fixed temporarily by using technologies like strict device attestation (rip Linux/custom ROM/super cheap phone users), but in a decentralised environment this won’t work. Then there are the many, many servers that never received patches, and still have the Mastodon account takeover vulnerability, for instance.

Small servers will have to prove themselves to the servers they want to federate with, or abuse will be too easy.

I don’t think temporary blocks are a solution. Right now, the attacks focused on tiny servers with one or a couple of users, but with the rise of AI I don’t think the bigger servers will be able to stop dedicated spammers. Right now the spam wave is over, mostly because a few of the Japanese kids got arrested/had their parents find out. Right up until the very end, Lemmy and Mastodon were full of spam.

I don’t want this recentralisation to happen, but I think the Fediverse will end up like email: strict, often arbitrary spam prevention systems that make running your own very difficult. After all, email is the original federated digital network, and it’s absolutely full of stupid restrictions and spam. ActivityPub may have signatures to authenticate users, something that even DKIM still lacks, but the “short message + picture” nature of most Fediverse content make it very difficult to write good spam detection rules for. Maybe someone will create some kind of AI solution, who knows, but I expect deliverability to become as problematic as with email, or maybe even worse.

I can’t think of a good solution here. Our best bet may he hoping that people won’t be too dickish, or to keep the Fediverse out of the mainstream so all the spammers go to Threads and Bluesky first.

These companies collect investment money from either investors or other parts of the company that do make money. They give away their product for free to create a user base, and figure out proper monetization later.

When the economy takes a dive and borrowing money costs money again (for years, banks had negative interests for huge loans, which means they paid you to take their money) the funds of venture capitalists suddenly dry up and companies like Netflix and Uber suddenly need to raise prices

Nine figure salaries are nothing compared to how much training AI costs. The same goes for most services, to be honest.

I don’t get where the entitlement comes from, to be honest. Why should companies keep giving away shit for free? They’re neither governments nor charities. These companies are flushing billions down the drain giving away free stuff to get marker share and attract more money they can put into free services, until they can grow no more. That’s unsustainable and impossible to compete with fairly.

It’s good for the internet to cost money. If customers need to pay for the stuff they’re using, we maintain the possibility for fair competition. Without competition, billionaires and hedge funds control the internet. If you demand everything to come for free, you’re only playing into Google’s/Facebook’s/Microsoft’s/Apple’s hands.