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lemmy.ml is still up as of right now. Possibly they contracted a subscription to the domain name to keep it up. They had to do something to retain it otherwise the site would be unreachable. If lemmy.ml does have to change names it will be a hassle since I’ve got a good number of community subscriptions there.
This wouldn’t happen to an instance with a regularly subscribed domain name. Problem is the .ml domains were free and the associated country decided to claim them back. The risk of using a free top level domain is something that should have been considered. I don’t think it’s worth the risk versus the cost savings considering how difficult it is to migrate a Lemmy instance.
Thanks for that, was concerned about keeping my subscription to that community. Keep us posted and let us know where you end up so I can change over my community subscription.
Anyway I think the lesson learned here is don’t use free TLDs. Lemmy is not at all designed to deal with domain name changes.
Go instance shopping. Yeah you’re creating accounts on instances you may not use, but creating an account for a test drive is acceptable I think. I tried five instances before I found one I liked. My runner up I use as a backup in case my primary goes down for some reason.
First I narrowed down candidates to those that are regionally close to me. You can sort instance location by going to https://the-federation.info/platform/73. Further down the page you’ll see a listing of all nodes (instances). You click on the location header to sort them by country.
Then you want to look at user numbers. Too big and the instance could have overload issues. Too small and the instance may not be well established and reliable. So medium on the user counts.
Then I did a “ping” on ones that looked good to see how they do on network response.
Once I found good candidates, I created an account on each and gave it a test drive. You can see who won for me.
Nothing to hide until a person has something to hide. An attitude of “I don’t have anything to hide” may catch up to a person. No one knows what the future holds. One day they might start tracking private information a person does not want tracked, for example financial or medical data. So better to put the fence up now than try to put it up during a stampede.
Personally I keep my data private with a reasonable amount of effort. I try to keep a small internet footprint and there’s stuff I won’t do for the sake of privacy. Going some years back the only social media I engaged in was Reddit until coming here to Lemmy. These are anonymous mediums. It blows my mind that so many people are willing to completely splay out their lives non-anonymously on social media.
I have a couple really old games you can’t even pirate because they’re just not around anymore. They’re PC games and still run well on my version of Windows so I’ll hang on to them as long as that’s the case. Even so there’s always going to be a consideration for supporting hardware and software. It can get tricky as things forge ahead and old games fall into obsolescence.
I don’t think it will. People generally don’t let facts get in the way of their beliefs. I mean look at some of these wild ideologies people believe to be truth. Some ideologies obviously can’t be factual, but people believe them as such anyway. Then they use circular logic to justify them. They’ll just circle their way out of the fact other intelligent life exists.
I think it’s like the discovery of exoplanets, scientists were pretty sure they existed and already believed they existed in numbers, but when it was proven to be true, there wasn’t a whole lot of philosophical change in culture because of it. Though it did narrow down one of the Drake variables for the existence of intelligent life.
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
I think it depends on what you mean by safe. Do you mean privacy of personal data or protection against malicious software?
If you mean safe in terms of malicious software, probably Android is safer since there’s more vetting with respect to software installation. On Windows the simple act of downloading and opening an exe file can install malicious software. Most Android apps are installed through the store where programs are vetted. It’s possible to sideload stuff on Android (download and install an apk), but most people don’t go to the trouble. It’s not enabled by default and it’s not a trivial process to do it.
If you’re talking in terms of securing private data, I’d say Windows because there’s more control over the data programs can access. Android programs have a lot of access to data on your phone by default and you have to specifically disable it. Windows programs don’t have access by default and you have specifically enable it.
If you want to go full paranoid with respect to telemetry, it’s much easier to do that with Windows since you have easy access to low level configuration settings through regedit, also the group policy editor. In other words you can configure a Windows machine to disallow any telemetry and MS even provides a guide for it in their online technical documents.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
Good for you lemmy.world, congrats!
BTW, lemmy.world is #1 in the node sort by total users at the-federation.info
Now the trick is to keep the instance running well with that crazy high user load.
A link to an instance is always going to be absolute so you just type the name of the instance. Most of the time the editor links it, but it still doesn’t understand some of the domain names, for example lemm.ee links but lemmy.world does not. If the editor fails to link you can prefix the name with https://, for example https://lemmy.world
The link fixer bot shows how to link a community for Lemmy, but it’s different for kbin. The problem is if you use an absolute link to a community, you redirect the user away from their instance. The [email protected] format makes links relative so you stay on your own instance. Now we have the bot and it will post a fix, but better not to call the bot. Just do it right from the start.
There’s still the problem of how to do a relative link for a post. If someone knows I’d like to see that. At this point all post links are absolute and direct you away from your instance.
I’m going to have a go at explaining how to use Lemmy in a simple way.
You only need one good instance to access all of Lemmy, but it can be nice to have an alternate in case the primary goes offline for some reason. For best network performance try instances in your region. You can sort instances by country here; https://the-federation.info/platform/73 When you find one that works well for you, make it your regular login instance.
Once you find a home instance, go to lemmyverse.net/communities to find communities of interest. Copy the link on lemmyverse by clicking on it (i.e. [email protected]) then paste into the search box on the communities page in Lemmy. Click on the listing from the search results then select the Subscribe button. It may show “Pending” for a short time then turn to “Joined”. If it doesn’t change right away don’t worry about it. You’re in even though it may look stuck.
The front page view defaults to Local, you don’t want that. Go to your profile settings and set the view to “Subscribed” (you could use “All”, but your front page will have a ton of junk you don’t want to see).
That’s it, you’re ready to use Lemmy. Of course this is for desktop browser. I’m not familiar with the Liftoff mobile app for Lemmy so I don’t have directions for that.
Additional; there’s other things to know about such as federation which involves blocked and linked instances, but to start just avoid communities on beehaw.org since that instance is one known to block other legit instances. If there is a community on beehaw.org you really want to interact with, you have to check your login instance is not blocked there. There’s a procedure for that, but I’ll spare you the information overload.
Okay, hope that helps and enjoy!
I’ve been here since mid June and have made 264 posts,
I have almost 300 comments over three weeks now. I actually had Lemmy bookmarked for some time, but started participating after giving Reddit the punt. That’s way higher post frequency than before. Yeah it’s great feeling like you can say reasonable stuff without coming under attack.
That would be very cool to print a new car, but realistically it’s cheaper to buy one if you consider the cost of your time and materials. I mean you have to render all the parts and assemble the thing. Then there’s parts like wiring harnesses you still have to make by hand. Still how awesome would that be drive a car you made yourself.
As far as I know, generally you can register a home built car in the USA, but it varies by state. Different states have different regulations. Typically you just have to jump through some inspection hoops. Not too long ago I converted a couple off-road motorcycles to street legal in Nevada and it wasn’t difficult. Though in states like New York and California a gas powered car may have additional smog regs impossible to get past. A lot easier for an electric one, no smog regs.
As far as the copying, you would only be infringing on any patents or trademarks that may exist. Those are regional and I don’t believe they apply to personal use. Even if they did, I doubt any car maker is going after someone who makes a personal copy of their car. Now if you tried to produce and sell copies, that could get you a lot of attention. But even then it depends where you’re doing it. In China they mass produce exact copies of popular western cars even down to the trademarks, but they don’t export them and China doesn’t care so there’s nothing to stop them.
It would be convenient to have a Fediverse wide login, but it would carry too much baggage in terms of overhead and security. They’d have to carry the whole of the user database across all of the Fediverse, not really feasible. Then there’s security concerns over sensitive data like email and passwords. So probably not something that could ever happen.
A sync feature between instances might be do-able. Could be handy. I have a couple instances where I’d like to sync community subscriptions.
The recent patches to World made a huge difference.
I’m on lemm.ee and the admin there is running on the latest release candidates right now. Night and day difference for me since getting past 0.18.0, but also I’m on desktop browser. I don’t know how many of us there are compared to mobile users, but I think most people just want a good mobile app. Make sure you send them to a good instance. If they get on a janky one they’ll think it represents the whole thing. Otherwise no need to explain the whole centralized/decentralized thing, probably just confuse the average person.
The easiest thing to do is download and install a repack, but there is some comfort in knowing you’re using the original game files. I remove the DRM on all the games I keep on my drive and most of those are from legitimate sources. I’ve jumped through a few hoops to manually remove DRM before.
It’s not like days of old were you only needed to replace the game’s exe file. You have to look at the protection on each game to see what needs to be done. I’m not familiar with that particular game so I don’t know what kind of DRM it uses, but you should be able to find out with some searching.
There’s no set procedure in removing DRM manually, games can vary quite a bit. Some Steam games have several layers of DRM, such as the Steam client, then 3rd party protection, then in-house protection. On the other hand, some Steam games use only the Steam client where all you need is an emulator.
Sometimes there is an easy way to manually remove DRM, sometimes there is not. You may or may not need a Steam emulator which removes the need for the Steam client to be running. Then you may or may not need a crack exe. Sometimes you can find those crack exe files stand-alone on gamecopyworld. Another place you can find stand-alone crack exe files is on cs.rin.ru. You may even need to download a whole pirate copy of a game to extract the crack exe out of it. Worst case the game uses some kind of hard DRM like Denuvo that requires multiple cracked files if the game is even cracked at all.
There’s no matrix to show generally who’s blocked or linked, some smart web developer might create something like that, but for now you have to look at each instance individually through the Instances link bottom of page.
Unfortunately they made an ill advised change to the instances page in this latest version of Lemmy. Before it presented linked instances on the left and blocked instances on the right. Now it’s one giant column separated only by an obscure header. That’s making it difficult to to see if an instance is blocked or linked on a page search. I hope they don’t leave it like that.
The only reasonable explanation is to destroy it and eliminate future competition. Zuckerberg himself said it’s better to buy a company than compete with it. He can’t buy the Fediverse because it’s FOSS and community driven, but it’s vulnerable to “embrace, extent, extinguish”. There’s nothing built in to keep that from happening.
I normally use isopropyl alcohol, it’s actually a common use for it and you can find anhydrous isopropyl specifically for that purpose;
Example; https://www.amazon.com/MG-Chemicals-Isopropyl-Alcohol-Cleaner/dp/B078C8JYVV/ref=sr_1_1
Anhydrous isopropyl cleans rosin flux quite well, but you can add an extra step of using electical contatact cleaner.
Example; https://www.amazon.com/CRC-Industries-Inc-Electronic-Cleaner/dp/B00WJ9J5T2/ref=sr_1_21
Technically it’s not since any corporate entity could set up an instance and join the Fediverse, there’s nothing to stop them. However they could get blacklisted by other instances for whatever reason. For example if Meta were to set up a giant server and plop it on the fediverse, all the admins could collectively say screw those guys and defederate them across the whole thing.
So in that sense there’s no one corporation that could take control. The community is and always will be collectively in control. The philosophy of the Fediverse is FOSS so if a corporate entity tried to monetize an instance, other admins would be pretty quick to block it.
If you host your own instance you are your own admin. That gives you personal control over content and settings. However, you need to pay for a domain name and you need a 24/7 server so there’s some expense involved. Then there’s maintenance like software updates and user needs if you take them on.
I think most admins take on an instance simply to contribute in building the Fediverse and create something to take some pride in. You get some clout in the community for doing that.
Only instances with a “.ml” at the end of the name may or may not be affected. Lemmy is a collection of instances so the loss of a few will not cripple the whole thing. Content over the whole is not greatly affected.
If your home log-in instance is one that’s affected, you’ll have to find a new one. You’ll know right away because the instance will be unreachable. Not a big deal, last time I looked there was over 1200 instances to chose from.
Another consideration is any communities living on an affected instance may have issues. All communities are common to Lemmy, but each originates from a particular instance. We’ve not yet seen a major instance go down so I don’t know how Lemmy deals with communities getting orphaned like that.