but the way they handled it fucking sucks

That’s about the only legit gripe I’ve heard, and I can understand, but it doesn’t bother me too much (even if LW was my main - I only have a mod alt there I use for reports) . FWIW, they walked it back for further discussion, but I can see where they came from by acting first and announcing it later.

I abhor the inter-instance politics, and can certainly recognize that LW’s size makes it a target for blowback, but when the admins of one instance are all “murder murder murder” and explicitly point to the LW admin team as people they think should be murdered, can you really blame them?

Any time I hear Minerva without that K-Rock intro, it just sounds wrong to me lol. That, and the “That was new Deftones. Minerva is the name of that song” at the end.

Yeah, I think so.

Man, why is sharing a 10 second mp3 so hard? lol. This or a shorter version without the “world premiere” part is what I was recalling:

https://tube.dubvee.org/w/gC3pchZNmSTeZxX2V2fqrK

I was surprised that so many songs in my collection weren’t actually supposed to start out “schhhhhhhh K-Rock (k-rock)” lol

What’s the opposite of a black flag, and how are instances expected to hoist one?

I’m grumbled about LW’s size, but that was more along the lines of the spirit of the Fediverse / decentralization. Their whole argument of LW using their size to push other instances around is completely absurd. Like, WTF is LW supposed to even do if they don’t want to platform the kind of violent rhetoric that comes from any of the (and I cannot say this with a straight face) Fediverse Anarchist Flotilla members? Every time LW does anything to try to bring order or sanity or a modicum of health and safety to their instance, that’s the argument that always gets thrown around from others. It’s completely asinine and, quite frankly, tired.

And it’s not just over one user. It’s about the kind of extremist culture that comes from the very top of two of the three instances mentioned (which also have a ~90% overlap in admins). None of the other admins have a problem with calling for murder / circle-jerking over who deserves to be murdered and have been defending the “one user” vigorously if not outright engaging in the same rhetoric themselves.

Given that one side of this feud is all “violence, violence, murder” and the other side is like “nah, we don’t want to platform that”, it’s pretty hard to see what the, lol “Flotilla” is doing as anything other than trying to DARVO the situation and play the victim.

A line has to be drawn somewhere, and my only gripe with LW’s actions is that they didn’t happen sooner.

[email protected] is my pet community. Basically an oldies station for Millennials.

Technically, yes. But colloquially, when we’re talking about “analytics” we mean embedded 3rd party trackers that feed to Google or another outside entity. Those are embedded much deeper in the application and track things much more invasively such as how long you hover over certain links, how you move your cursor around the screen, your viewport size, browser fingerprinting, and more.

The analytics I’m utilizing and referring to here are passive in that they’re collected anyway as part of the standard logging that happens when you access the webserver which is also part of our basic security posture. They’re not as granular or invasive but can still give you useful information about what parts of your site people use the most, how many clicks it takes a visitor to get from the homepage to where they want to be (by following the IP, URI, and seeing where that ends), how many visitors the site gets per day/week/month/etc, and such.

Logging is standard practice if you give even the slightest damn about security (read: you should), so I don’t see it as a problem. It’s what you use those logs for, how long they’re retained, and whether you sell them off.

So as long as you’re only using them for security auditing and website analytics and don’t keep them forever and don’t plan to sell them to data brokers, there’s really nothing to fret over. A good place to disclose how you use the logs, how long you retain them, and what is logged is in the site’s privacy policy.

I do the occasional website for local businesses, and I never add any analytics code/trackers. One: they rarely ever ask. And two: the one time someone did ask for it, they never once logged into it or asked for trends. Three: I’d prefer not to unless they demand it.

However, since I’m actually hosting the website for them, I can get decent heat maps from the access logs since they have the IP (which can be roughly geo-located), which URI’s are accessed (and those map to pages, and pages map to products/services), how often those are accessed, which page linked them to it or if they came directly to it (by checking the referrer header), which are most accessed (by count of the URI in the logs), and whether they’re accessing the site from desktop or mobile (via the user agent header). That can also be combined with any data from their “Contact us” form.

One reason they’ve probably never asked for it is because I provide a quarterly report for them using that passive data, and they seem happy with it.

[Hits bong] Over water, a boat going too fast becomes a plane and a plane going too slow becomes a boat.

I don’t even like the few phones I had with the headphone jack on the top.

This would be a good post for [email protected] as long as you expand on why you think that.

Sad but true. Matches everything I’ve seen and complained about over the last ~3 years. It looked so promising at first and then…turned into everything you just said. Lol, we should compare block/ban lists sometime - there’s probably a LOT of overlap. Are you at doomprepper.com by chance?

Honestly, the Fediverse needs a schism if it’s going to survive beyond being a haven for people that are too toxic to be platformed anywhere else. Not so much a split based on ideology but on pushing the extremist, antisocial, violent, troll people to the fringe instances so the sane people might actually stick around.

I thought we might be seeing the first steps of that with LW taking a stand against .nexus, but they’ve since re-fedded and I’m not at all confident they’re going to cut off dbzer0 and nexus which are two of the worst widely federated instances for platforming violent crazies (grad and hexbear are worse but they’re pretty widely blocked, and .ml is sadly too big for most instances to cut off).

It’s totally possible to block and ban and defederate enough to make this a nice place, but it’s a LOT of never-ending, thankless work as I’m sure you’ve noticed. The problem is few admins want to actually do that (and some are part of the problem), so the default experience for someone who isn’t a crazy, violent antisocial extremist nutjob (i.e. most people) makes them want to nope out immediately.

If someone finds themselves having daydreams about murdering “the elites” or whatever, it’s time to get off social media and go take a walk outside.

Preferably to a psychiatrist who enjoys a challenge.

Is there a community about Matrix on Lemmy?

[email protected]

Is Matrix technically part of the fediverse?

I would say no. It doesn’t use ActivityPub and is its own thing. It’s federated in that indepedent Matrix servers can talk to each other (like email or Nextcloud). So while email would be considered a federated service, it’s not considered part of the fediverse. At most, it’s like a 2nd cousin.

Who is the developer/team and do they have an active presence on the fediverse?

Matrix.org foundation (https://matrix.org/) and not sure. Maybe some of the individual contributors do, but I don’t know any off the top of my head

Bedroom eyes, you say?

This made me dig into my profile uploads where I put Gowron eyes on everything, lol

Well damn. Just seeing this. I basically walked away for the same reasons a year ago, though mine’s still online because I got talked into keeping Tesseract alive and needed an instance I could test against. You were one of the original Rexodous instances and probably helped me many times in the group chat getting mine up and going in the early days.

My instance is pretty well curated to get rid of the propaganda, violent rhetoric, and other undesirable aspects, so if you wanna pop in, you’re free to sign up on mine (hell, I’d even let you be an admin). And since it’s my own test instance (more or less anyway), if you wanna keep playing around with some of your fedi tools, you’re welcome to. If not, and you never wanna see the place ever again, believe me, I totally get that.

Regardless, thanks for trying to build something better with us and sorry it didn’t work out. I share the same frustrations you’re expressing here.

This. So much this. I don’t know why it’s so tolerated so widely here, and I hate that it’s becoming normalized. You nailed it: normal people do not behave or talk like that.

People abusing rules that go unenforced

Can say that at least some of that is due to a lot of communities getting created during the initial 2023 Rexodous, abandoned shortly after, and picked up later by new mods. They often don’t change the community sidebar info. Suggestion there is to reach out to the mods (polite DM or even a meta post in the community) asking that the specific rule be enforced or removed.

To a lesser but still important degree, there’s nuances to the interpretation of every rule. As an example, I’ve removed many posts in this community that have the exact same title as this post. The difference is those were not-at-all thinly veiled rants about getting modded or banned from another community/instance (rule 5) where this one is describing specific aspects of the platform.

mods removing posts/banning users only when they take offense

Mods are people, people are fallible. Beats an overaggressive modbot, though. Also keep in mind mods put up with a lot of shit you don’t see (abusive DMs, persistent trolls, absurd conspiracy theories and rumor mongering over in YPTB, rules lawyers who come within one Planck unit of the spirit of every rule just because they can, etc). We also don’t get paid, and it’s a neverending job where you’re severely outnumbered and outgunned. Often, if you sincerely apologize and express regret they’ll reconsider. You’d be surprised how far a genuine apology will get you. And I don’t mean some phony-baloney “sorry I said the quiet part out loud” apology but actually realizing you fucked up and owning it.

users (and even mods) fighting each other over instances like rival gangs

I’m going to assume this is related to the recent LW defed announcement, and I’m not touching that with a 10 foot pole other than say “about time”.

communities propped up by single users

That’s something you can help with. Unless it’s a mods only community, which I don’t think is what you’re referring to, then you can absolutely tag in and contribute. I’m guilty of lurking, especially lately as I’ve been super busy with work, but used to try to post content to random communities to help grow them.

There are some good faith users of course, but it seems the vast majority just want to be in a safe space echo chamber and talk shit about each other.

Honestly, just try to notice which users those are and block them. Seriously, don’t be afraid. Blocks are free and cut out so much of the immature bullshit around here. The comment sections on news/politics articles here (from my perspective) has gone from a raging dumpster fire of echo chamber circle jerking to a ghost town because I’ve just blocked so many people who do nothing but comment low effort knee-jerk reactionary garbage. The plus side is the actual insightful comments really stand out that way.

The point is, to a large degree, the experience here is what you make of it. Don’t be afraid to curate your experience, and don’t give into FOMO just because you’ve blocked a lot of communities, users, and instances

[Deleted]

I stand by what I originally said. It wasn’t inflammatory, but don’t have enough fucks to give to deal with the inevitable replies.