cstine @ cstine @lemmy.uncomfortable.business

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2 yr. ago

This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: 'it's not ready!' and 'who will provide support?' and 'it's too hard for people to figure out!' and 'how can you make money if it's free?' and so on.

Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it's eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor... it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you're a clickbait "journalist" on corpo-owned media.

The IBM name, build quality, warranty and whole nobody-got-fired-buying-IBM helped, but don't undersell 80 column text mode: if you wanted to do Real Business Stuff, 40 column just didn't cut it, which wrote off a LOT of the cheaper competition. CP/M machines could be 80 column, but they also weren't required to as there was no default terminal expectation. You'd end up with close-but-not-quites pretty often, even on the upper-end of the price scale.

And yes, the Apple II had 80 column mode, but again, it wasn't exactly the cheaper option.

IBM entered the market at exactly the right time, with the right machine, with the right features, at a price that wasn't incredibly outside of reality and sold an awful lot of them.

The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.

Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?

Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.

Their whole product looks weird: it just looks like you can pay extra money to ensure you get the same exit IP every time.

I don't know WHAT the use case is for that, but if people want to give someone money for it, might as well take it.

I'm assuming CGNAT is the problem here? Interesting that they ever even offered a port-forwarding option since that'd be the first time I have heard of that.

The constant politics argument is tiring. Do you know the politics of the guy who made your favorite game? What about the guy who made your text editor? Or your browser? Or the software in your microwave? Or grew your food? Or the guy who made that song you like? What about the owner of the last convenience store you bought your mtdew from?

Even if the commentary is coming from an honest point of view and not just shitty astroturfing (and it very much isn't), it doesn't matter. If you don't like it, use an instance that's not run by them and who cares.

I'm configured to point the cloudflare tunnel -> nginx container in the lemmy stack -> nginx.config provided by the devs reverse proxies the rest of it.

I didn't have to make any changes from 0.17.4 to 0.18.0 beyond updating my docker compose to the new version; tunnel config stayed the same, nginx config was the same, and the docker compose network config was the same.

It's just a shining example of how MBA-brain has infested tech spaces, possibly irreparably.

Tech is driven by the up-or-out, billion-users-or-death, monopoly-or-bankruptcy mentality to the point that it's leaked from investors to management to average employees and, shockingly, most of the fediverse is tech or tech-adjacent types so it's not really surprising that this mentality is extremely prevalent: you go with what you know, and if you're in tech it's growth growth growth.

Regardless of if, say, Lemmy ends up with 10 million MAUs or 10,000 MAUs, or 1,000 MAUs, the measure of success is NOT how many users, but if the users who ARE there find value and worth in what exists. If you've got 1,000 happy users sharing ideas and conversing meaningfully then congrats! you created immense value, just uh, no money.

Yes, yes they do. I know several people who feel the insufferable need to loudly announce that fun can commence because they're now here, and that fun should stop, because they're now leaving.

....I really really try to avoid them.

I was trying to be a little kinder, but yeah, that's my general opinion.

It's one reason I like code that's actually owned by a foundation/organization that has all that pesky oversight and meetings and politicking because it makes things MUCH harder to be unilaterally sold out from under their users: it DOES happen, but it's not just writing a check to one guy and hey presto next week your shit is broken/infested with malware/vanishes without a trace.

They have their own problems and require funding to actually operate as intended, but it's at least a layer between the 'I made this' meme and the users of the software.

Came here to say this. Open source isn’t a noble crusade, and developers are not monks with vows of poverty.

Until we get unlimited gay space communism, people will always take the money and avoiding that truth and acting shocked when they do at least listen to the people with unlimited money will always lead to disappointment.

I'm not a Postgres expert but a quick look at the pgsql limits looks like it's 4 billion by default, which uh, makes sense if it's a 32 bit limit.

Soooo 5 million users would need to make.... 800 posts? ish? I mean, certainly doable if nobody caught it was happening until it was well into it.

Wait wait, Oracle took someone's stuff and did a lazy half-assed job of slapping Larry's name on it and then shipped it as a product they then sell seven-figure support contracts on?

Well, I do declare.

I think that's likely to cover common uses outside of just 'for the lulz'.

The for the lulz resonates a lot with me - though I know that a decade of dealing with a lot of these types assuredly biases me to at least some degree - because it's easy enough to do what they're doing now AFTER you figure out how you're going to monetize it and signups this aggressive and so widespread doesn't really make sense to me.

In my experience with content moderation/fraud/abuse work, I found that you'd often have a very slow trickle of accounts sign up over weeks/months/and, in one situation, years, and THEN they'd all break bad and you'd have entire servers and instances all light on fire at once and result in a mess that'll take a very long time to clean up.

If you have 5,000 users that signed up all at once you can literally just delete all those rows from the database and probably not impact too many real people vs. if you have 5,000 users sign up over 6 months then you have the data dispersed in good data and now have much more of an involved spelunking expedition to embark on. I also found that it was typically done in waves as well, so you can't do a single clean and go 'well all the accounts that weren't doing thing must be okay' because eh, maybe not.

And, also, there's a lot of hand-wringing about developer and instance politics from various blog posts, "news" sources, the fediverse, traditional social media and so on from all sides of the spectrum, and while I'd never claim to be a centrist or even remotely moderate, the more embedded in one extreme or another you find yourself you can start justifying doing all sorts of stupid shit, and a DDoS (which, quelle surprise is ongoing right now) is SO trivial to do when there's not a whole lot of preventative measures in place that don't require a bunch of squabbling internet humans to cooperate and work together to block signups, clean up the mess that's already there, and work with each other on mitigation tools that do things everyone agrees with.

It's always about following the money for spammers/malware/etc. authors: there's (usually) a commercial incentive they're pushing towards.

The bot is evolving and adapting to countermeasures and becoming "smarter" which means some human somewhere is investing time and effort in doing this, which means there's some incentive.

That said, I doubt it's strictly commercial because the Lemmy user base is really small and probably not worth much because if you're here you're most certainly not on the area of the bell curve that'll fall for the usual spambot commercialization double-your-money/fake reviews/affiliate link/astroturfing approaches.

I'd wager it's more about the ability to be disruptive than the ability to extract money from the users you can target, so like, your average 16-year-old internet trolls.

Because you can't make thousands of spambots on your own instance because as you noted it'd take about 5 minutes to defederate and thus remove all the bots.

You want to put a handful on every server you can, because then your bots have to be manually rooted out by individual admins, or the federation between instances gets so broken there's no value in the platform.

And for standing up more instances, you have to bear the cost of running the servers yourself, which isn't prohibitive, but more than using bots via stolen/infected proxies (and shit like Hola that gives you a "free vpn" at the cost of your computer becoming an exit node they then resell).

Also, I'm suspicious that it's not 'spam bots' in the traditional sense since what's the point of making thousands of bots but then barely using them to spam anyone? My tinfoil hat makes me think this is a little more complicated, though I have zero evidence other than my native paranoia.

Oh, no, it is absolute: if you say and do nothing, then at best, you're allowing the harm they cause to happen, and at worse reinforcing their behavior.

So yes, if you have racist friends and you sit silently then yes, you're a racist supporter.

Depends. Do you just keep your silence or do you call them out when they're being shitty?

Read the bill and while not a lawyer, it's pretty clearly targeted at big corporations; two specific bits which likely make it non-applicable:

• (a) applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to specific factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses
• (d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;

Lemmy instances don't have a bargaining power imbalance (or, really, ANY power to bargain at all), and the CRTC would have to list you as a 'news intermediary' for it to apply.