Another traveler of the wireways.

  • 5 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • But isopropyl alcohol and enough elbow grease will get it off, if it’s just a coating on plastic.

    Do beware, however, that you may want to dilute the alcohol to some degree, or simply use a lower concentration form of it. Too strong and it may eat at the underlying plastic just as much as the coating and ruin it.

    unrelated

    are you getting a cut from kagi for writing that instead of search? gimme the deets on that deal if so! 😛


  • If the Otterbox case had a rubberized coating on it to try to improve grip, and with it being 6 years old, there’s a possibility it’s the culprit. You could try ditching the case for a little while, and/or getting a new case and swapping them out, clean the surfaces again and see if you feel the stickiness again after handling your phone and other stuff.

    However, often with those rubberized coatings, the degradation (when severe enough to feel sticky) is more immediately apparent and you’d be more apt to avoid touching anything else afterward. Also in my experience I don’t recall it transferring to other surfaces much, but then again when I dealt with it I noticed ASAP and cleaned my hands right away.






  • How do you stay in the know about this kind of stuff? I’m curious about all the cool stuff out there I wouldn’t even know I’m curious to find.

    I was going to mention YaCy as well if nobody else was, so I can chip in to this somewhat. My method is to keep wondering and researching. In this case it was a matter of being interested in alternative search engines and different applications of peer to peer/decentralized technologies that led me to finding this.

    So from this you might go: take something you’re even passingly interested in, try to find more information about it, and follow whatever tangential trails it leads to. With rare exceptions, there are good chances someone out there on the internet will also have had some interest in whatever it is, asked about it, and written about it.

    Also be willing to make throwaway accounts to get into the walled gardens for whatever info might be buried away there and, if you think others may be interested, share it outside of those spaces.



  • […] but the profitable parts (algorithmic indexer and the app view with advertisements) are very much still in the hands of BlueSky the company.

    Yeah, we’ll have to see if/when they fully enable third parties to run their own indexers and app views to see how committed they are to all this, and even then as the thread you linked indicates, there would remain many questionable architectural problems to AuthTransfer.



  • I came away from reading over the AuthTransfer protocol and its handling of moderation/enabling users with a very major sense of, “We outsource almost everything!”

    As L. Rhodes writes:

    […] One effect of ATproto’s structure is to multiply the number of administrative relationships for which each user must decide for themselves—often on little to no information—who deserves their trust. The complexity of its infrastructures seems like it would sometimes make it difficult to assess when that trust has been betrayed, and by whom.

    So Bluesky may redistribute some technical power from host admins to users, but it also gives them much more to navigate. It makes their need for power more desperate, and I’m not at all sure that the power trickling down to them through those other layers of infrastructure will be sufficient to the need. No doubt many will compensate by sticking to the parts of the network operated by Bluesky itself—apparent choice, de facto lock-in.




  • Ideally these communities would be prevented from appearing in the “Trending Communities” list or local/global feeds unless someone other than the owner was subscribed to them, but wouldn’t be private in the sense that no-one could see them. Just they wouldn’t get wide distribution.

    This raises a distinct but interesting additional feature request that might complement “private” or exclusive communities, as well as others that might like to prepare a community before promoting it: a hidden or unlisted setting for communities.

    That would enable what you mention here, preventing their appearance from trending, and perhaps also user profile/data areas (i.e. if one can indirectly view others’ subscriptions, this might offer a way to obfuscate/hide that from others besides admins).



  • Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from on this. Personally I’m not a fan of Active as the default, yet I also don’t know what might be preferable to others. With that being the case, I thought it might help to highlight some ways to work with it in the meantime, especially given the outside perspective.

    For those here, I think it’s probably good to advise them to consider trying different sort methods till they find one that suits their preferences if they find themselves annoyed by the defaults, which has been happening for awhile already anyway.


  • I should elaborate a little, while I think commenting is important under Active sort for helping surface posts, I also think it is being balanced out by the vote scores. For a post to be surfaced you’ll want it to be both valued (upvoted) and commented on, then if you’re hoping for it to remain visible for awhile, you’ll want to see fairly steady commenting (that’s part of why you can see posts from days ago lingering around under Active, I think).

    I’ve not really noticed too many situations of flamebait style posts doing this, as I suspect they’re generally downvoted…Aside from the beating-a-dead-horse sort of posts that, despite receiving the usual, “Ugh this again” sort of comments, seem to otherwise be valued by some lurking voters.




  • Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.

    Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, “Did you read the pins you fucking noob?” mentality. It’s very much the old forum kneejerk response of, “Did you read the rules/stickied posts?” simply in a different context. As you note though, you’ll find assholes in any communication medium.

    Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that’s also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server’s more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord’s inbox/mentions can be.


  • Some speculation on my part:

    1. There are other higher priority items for the developers.
    2. It’s open to abuse, even with restrictions, and a restricted guest account may create a bad impression if the restrictions are poorly communicated (and considering some basic features of Lemmy as-is struggle with being communicated, this is a high probability).
    3. Larger/more active servers/communities (depending on implementation) may simply disable the feature altogether or further limit it due to 2.

    Despite what @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml says, 3 (or variations on it) has become more common across some larger/more active Discord servers simply because communities understandably don’t want to deal with drop-in trolls or raids, meaning some of them go so far as to temporarily limit or add small hurdles for people even with accounts.

    You can of course still find many Discord servers that don’t, which is among the reasons it remains so popular, but it’s not as sure of a thing as it was in the past.