A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things, too.

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • I’d say this is unlikely to work out. It mainly combines the downsides of two approaches. The centralization will make it less free and diverse and gives power to few people, while the decentralization adds unnecesary complexity. Since at that point it’s mainly one large instance, but that has to send out loads of network traffic to very few people at other places to keep them in the loop. At that point, why not make it 100% centralized? That’d make programming and maintainance way easier.


  • Uh, idk. There’s also a list detailing that: https://join.piefed.social/features/

    It’s a different software, connecting you with the same communities and people. Just has slightly different features, a bit more control here and there, a few perks, has a different design philosophy and is written in an entirely different programming language, which affects participation, maintainability, resource usage… You can see how it looks for example on https://piefed.social/ I always struggle to describe the detailed differences, because there are a lot of them and it has a lot to do with what’s important to you and what you’re used to. It’s a bit like describing how a banana tastes IMO. You better have a look yourself.





  • Hmmh, I don’t think it’s even elitism in this case. Feels to me like something else. But I’m the wrong person to ask, since I do not share that opinion.

    I think your proposal with default subscriptions (or whatever it is exactly) is a solid idea, though. In fact, I’ve heard some people scroll through the “All” feed here on Lemmy and subsequently block the things they’re not interested in. I’d say that’s about the same direction. And I mean why not? We also have sorting by popular, and things are popular for a reason. So we might as well subscribe new users to the 10 most popular communities.

    It’s a bit more complicated than just that, we’d have to take some care not to entirely destroy diversity and pour some cement over the whole thing, or we end up with a small echo chamber of just lemmy.world and AskLemmy and NoStupidQuestions… But I guess there might be some solution in beween the extremes. And things might change due to the size of the platform. An “All” feed might still be useful at our current size, but might prove to become infeasable once we grow.



  • What I’ve seen many times is people stating the opinion that we don’t need to grow. We’re not some big commercial platform and we don’t need to satisfy some investors. Growth will come naturally. Or it won’t.

    My opinion is, judging by the numbers… We aren’t growing for quite some time now, so Lemmy will most likely stay what it is. I’d love if it were a super attractive place, though. And everybody would like to join.

    Sane defaults are always a good idea. I’m a bit split on the “minimal effort” though. Minimal effort is letting some algorithms dictate what to consume, simple truths, and not bothering with complicated stuff like freedom or privacy.

    And what I often see is people trying to solve such problems solely by technical means. And I think that’s not even half of it. We mainly need a nice and welcoming atmosphere, nice and interesting people, good content…



  • Agreed. I think it’s important to manage the learning curve somehow. One big barrier in front isn’t ideal, and I think (if possible) we should flatten out the curve and allow users to learn bit by bit, and later on, while actually using it. That’s also way more fun and hands-down.

    I like PieFed as well. I think it shows that PieFed often times wants to make an effort to do the right thing. Pay attention to what people need, try to remove obstacles, give moderators what they need, and generally foster good behaviour and bake that into the design if possible. It often feels (to me) like things aren’t just an afterthought, but laid out in a way that make sense.

    And yes, onboarding is a bit difficult. There are still some low-hanging fruits left, IMO it could be way easier, especially on Lemmy. And even with things like manual account approval, we still get spam on the platform. So I’m not even sure if that’s the correct tool. I don’t think it’s a big concern, though. People can usually wait for the amount of time it takes, if their motivation is genuine. We might want to re-evaluate this though, I’m not sure if anyone has done some statistics on whether it really adds to anything, because it certainly is a mild annoyance.


  • Thanks anyways. I guess it’s just a hard problem to tackle. With freedom comes the freedom to abuse it. And yes, the internet has been designed to be very agnostic about what it’ll get used for. I think it’s a super impressive invention. And it’s very successful if we measure that by looking at how omnipresent it is now. And I’m even more impressed if I look at the age of the protocols and the design that powers the foundation of it, to this date. A lot of it has been adopted around 50 years ago. And the particular design choices scale so well, they pretty much still power an entirely different world 50 years later. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to do a substantially better job at something… But yeah, that doesn’t take away from other things and consequences. I’m often a fan of the analogy with tools. The internet is a tool, and very much like a hammer that can be used to help build a house, or tear it down… It’s not exactly the tool’s fault for what it gets used for. I’m now getting really out of line for this community, so I’ll try to make it short: I think abstraction is a very elemental design choice and what makes the internet great. The lower layers transport arbitrary stuff and that’s what allowed us to build phones, watch TV over it… Things nobody envisioned half a century ago. We’d completely cripple it in that regard, by removing that abstraction between the layers. And that’s what makes me think it can’t be the internet (as in the transport layers) where we bake ethics into. It has to happen at the top, where things get applied and the individual platforms and services reside.

    I’m sorry, it’s way more complicated than that and more a topic for a long essay, and lots of it wouldn’t be very “casual” to read, as you said. I don’t think it’s a sad story, though. It’s just one taking place in the real world, where things are intertwined, have consequence and things often turn out in a way no-one anticipated. It’s just complex and the world is a varied place. And this is highly political. I agree.


  • Yeah, that just depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Depending on what kind of AI workload you have, you can scale it across 4 GPUs. Or it’ll become super slow if it needs to transfer a lot of data between these GPUs. And depending on what kinds of maths is involved, a Pascal generation GPU might be perfectly fine, or it’ll lack support for some of the operations involved. So yes, of course you can build that rig. Whether it’s going to be useful in your scenario is a different question. But I’d argue, if you need 96GB of VRAM for more than just the sake of it, you should be able to tell… I’ve seen people discuss these rigs with several P40 or similar, on Reddit and in some forums and Github discussions of the software involved. You might just have to do some research and find out if your AI inference framework and the model does well on specific hardware.


  • I share your opinion. They seem to have clarified a few things, though. Their license states what kind of reuse is allowed. You need to read it thoroughly. For example you can study the code or adapt it for personal hobby projects, if it’s non-commercial and you add the required statements… But I think it’s completely unappealing to use GrayJay or contribute to the project. It’s not Free Software, so you don’t get much in return. They tell you you should send pull requests, but as far as I can see there is no way of logging in to their GitLab. So you somehow need to hunt down their GitHub mirror, and file something there, in the hopes someone is going to read it amongst the hundreds and hundreds of open bugreports… And their phrasing and use of the term “open source” is just annoying and bound to confuse people. I’m not sure what Louis Rossman is doing these days, but when they launched it, he was making videos with lots of outright false claims about the licensing. A lot of that hasn’t been ideal. I’ve sent them some comments back in 2023. But they never replied directly. I believe they took notice of the discussion and promised to step up their game concerning their community. But I don’t think they’re doing a particularly good job. And I suspect they lack a deeper understanding of what Free Software is, what it’s about and good at, how to foster a community that’s not just alike what you get on Youtube as a creator.

    But I’m not mad at them. As long as they keep Louis’ promise of not prosecuting any individual for getting confused by their mixed signals. They seem to be mildly successful with whoever their target audience is. Guess I’m just not a part of that. But I have NewPipe/Tubular, my browser with the proper Ad-blocking in place, so I can live a comfortable life without GrayJay.