Salamander

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  • 31 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.

    If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.



  • Thank you for the positivity 💚 I wholeheartedly agree!

    Drama and negativity drives engagement, and this form of engagement can easily trigger a feedback loop in which negativity keeps piling on and voices of support are practically muted.

    We are participating in an open source project that has some very ambitious goals. Things can be messy, mistakes happen, there are risks, and people have many different opinions and moods. Heated discussions can be a healthy part of the process. But, once the dust is allowed to settle for a bit, it is good to remember that we are humans and that we are here because we have some shared goals.

    I think the majority of people around here are kind and have a positive outlook, but perhaps it is more motivating to speak out when we have negative comments than positive ones. So, thank you for taking the time to write this positive message!










  • I wouldn’t use this language myself because I am not ready to defend that it is reasonable to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in this context.

    I think that they might be referring to Article 1, and possibly 5.

    If this is their interpretation, then calling someone a worthless piece of trash is also a violation. You are talking to another human being as if they have less dignity, and you are treating them in a cruel and degrading manner.



  • I would like to make a list at some point with several community integrations and ask my instance’s users whether they would like some of them installed into the instance. This application will definitely go on that list! I do need to take into consideration how many resources each of the apps consume, to make sure I don’t bloat my server. But this one seems quite light. Is it?




  • No, there is no API to get the votes (https://join-lemmy.org/api/). If my understanding is correct, now that I upvoted your comment my instance will push that information. I’m not sure whether it pushes it to dandroid.app first or to all instances, saying basically “Sal@mander.xyz upvoted https://dandroid.app/comment/441785”, and so every instance that has that comment can save my user ID in the “upvote” list of that comment, and that upvote is counted.

    If only the vote direction was federated, then it would be very easy for me to spam the message “Upvote https://dandroid.app/comment/441785”. I would not even need to create an instance for that, I just need to speak ActivityPub. And it would be more difficult to detect that I am doing that, because the database would only hold the vote count.

    I don’t think there is a way to ask an instance to reveal this list. You can only get it by directly querying the database if you have access to it. This is why if you fetch an older post or comment, it will arrive with a single or zero votes.


  • There is definitely a probability to deal with a non reliable instance admin, but not less than with any other social media, and in principle they collect even less data

    Yeah. You can see the cookies that are stored by a site by right-clicking on the site, going to “inspect”, and the clicking “Storage”. By default, the only cookie that Lemmy has is an jwt cookie used to authenticate your user.

    You are not asked for a phone number to be here. Providing an e-mail is often optional and even discouraged by some instances. When you want to send a private message through the site you get a message discouraging from doing that and encouraging to try to use an encrypted chat application instead, such as matrix.

    The original Lemmy instance (lemmy.ml) is a community for FOSS and Privacy enthusiasts. What is asks from a user and what it does with the data is what it needs to be functional. Lemmy lets you take any proactive step that you would like to take to protect your privacy - use a VPN or Tor, use safe passwords, use a unique identity, and don’t provide any personal information. There are no built-in features to block you or discourage you from doing that. Lemmy never asks for your location, nor does it keep any logs of what content you visit, nor does it try to run any analytics on you. But even if that is not enough for you, the fediverse doesn’t lock you out, you can set up an instance or even create a new program to interact and communicate only precisely what you want to communicate via activity pub.


  • The votes themselves are the federated action.

    If you fetch an old post, your instance will not see the previous voters. After that, whenever a user votes the instance will get the message “User X@instance upvoted/downvoted post Y” and the vote will be added to the database with the voter’s user ID and counted.

    This has a practical function. If you don’t keep a list specifying who voted for what, it would be much easier to fake votes from one instance to another by simply communicating the message “Downvote post Y”. With the current method it is still possible to create a lot of fake accounts and mass-vote, but at least you can get a better insight when looking at the database if the votes are associated with accounts with no activity from a single instance.

    There are some federated platforms that will show who likes / dislikes something. I know that friendica used to do this - I have not checked if it still does. So it is not only admins who can see this, this is is basically open information in the fediverse.