The person isn’t talking about automating being difficult for a hosted website. They’re talking about a third party system that doesn’t give you an easy way to automate, just a web gui for uploading a cert. For example, our WAP interface or our on-premise ERP don’t offer a way to automate. Sure, we could probably create code to automate it and run the risk it breaks after a vendor update. It’s easier to pay for a 12 month cert and do it manually.

As a first book, I think Children of Time is much better than Shards of Earth. I enjoyed both series but would say the third book in each was the weakest. The Final Architecture series had a slightly stronger third entry.

Thanks. Very interesting. I’m not sure I see such a stark contrast pre/post 9-11. However, the idea that the US public’s approach to the post-9-11 conflict would have an influence makes sense and isn’t something I’d ever have considered on my own.

Me too, but I’d put Usenet in there before Slashdot.

The South. Just below Indiana, the middle finger of the South. And I say this as a Hoosier for much of my life.

Yeah, runaway global warming might not happen. Plant monocultures would begin to disappear. New invasive species wouldn’t happen, though existing ones might have a better time for a bit. Major thoroughfares wouldn’t create barriers to migration. Dams might take centuries to collapse, but I think humans going extinct might have one of the biggest impacts.

Upvotes and downvotes.

Right now, I can browse by New on my subscribed communities and see every post since the last time I did that.

I can view or re-view posts and read every response. If the responses are legion, I can play with hot/top and get the meat of the discussion.

Did you notice that last sentence? On the few posts where there are too many responses to view all, I’ll try to get at those that are relevant.

If the Lemmy community grows large enough, I’ll need to do the same for posts. I will no longer be able to regularly view by new and have time to see everything.

So, I’ll need to rely on some sorting method to make certain I see relevant stuff.

Someone with millions of bots that never post have millions of upvotes and downvotes to influence the score used by the sorting algorithm that I’ll use to decide what to read.

But aren’t thumbnails local?

Part of what prompted my question is that I doubt I have the correct worldview because I believe I’m influenced.

No. They can be used in influence campaigns. They can upvote the posts and comments the controllers want you to see and downvote those they don’t.

Spam’s obvious and can be dealt with. Bots altering what shows up in your feed is impossible to combat as an end user.

In some ways, this shows Lemmy is winning. It means Lemmy’s important enough to start trying to influence. It also means we’re about to go through some interesting times.

Yeah, my hope is the small learning curve to join the fediverse means we don’t end up with the bulk of the active posters on reddit.

My fear is that Lemmy is about to see some attacks the fediverse isn’t ready to defend against.

Yeah, Usenet is what my brain mapped Lemmy to. You get your feed and post through your server. You read posts from others on other servers. Each local server decides what feeds it will carry.

Of course, there’s no central hierarchy for the communities like Usenet had.

Thanks. Based on some of the other answers, particularly in https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12511, I know understand better.

I appreciate everyone helping to explain some pretty basic questions in such detail.