Max-P

For the most part, this happens because those programs check if stdout is a pseudo-terminal (pty) and automatically disable color output because if you’re doing say ls -l and try to parse it, you’ll have all the ANSI escape sequences mixed in, so for safety and predictability they disable color.

It is unfortunately a per-program thing. It is possible to fake it using script or unbuffer according to https://stackoverflow.com/a/32981392

Looks like socat can also be used for that: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/157463

On TikTok you often read comments and stuff, it’s very impractical to constantly rotate the screen and a good chunk of it is just people talking where the horizontal space would be wasted anyway. You get used to it and it makes sense there specifically. It’s just not the same kind of content.

Doubt. I expect them to gradually shift the algorithm to push more and more MAGA until it’s just as trashy as Twitter.

I bet the new algorithm will be pushing push far right content to everyone just like Twitter and Meta, this was a stunt to silence the leftists.

Here’s a snapshot of the evil propaganda they’re so afraid of: https://www.max-p.me/p/2025/rednote/rednote-snapshot.mp4

Their daily life looks just like ours, similar hobbies including cars and guns and tanks and cat ears.

I’d be surprised, unless they somehow managed to train 9 year olds into tricking americans into teaching them english on a live call all basically overnight, at the scale of several thousands of them. If that’s chinese propaganda then man they sure have heartwarming propaganda. I’m sure there’s inherent bias due to culture, it’s still China. But I doubt they were prepared for this at all.

It also was never really picked with the intent to switch, the meme was to just download it and browse it a bit so it goes at the top of the downloads chart and beats Meta. The happy accident is the part where people browsed it and figured it’s pretty nice on there and turned the whole thing into a mass scale cultural exchange.

The irony in all that is I haven’t found anything sketchy in it yet. On Android they’re not asking any non-standard permissions, much less than TikTok or even YouTube both of which ask for accessing connected biometric/fitness devices. REDnote asks for the device’s ad ID. All the sensitive ones are runtime permissions it doesn’t ask until you ask for it like access the camera to post a video. I’m sure they track everything you do in-app like everyone else, but nothing that gives me the ick having installed. Facebook Messenger in comparison wants full access to telephony and SMS services, your contacts, start background service on boot, bluetooth and NFC. I haven’t pulled out WireShark yet but from a basic Android permission perspective it doesn’t have access to much of anything to begin with.

It’s literally just a random chinese app intended for mainland China, and that’s kind of what sticks about it: it’s just not really that evil. There’s no ads, no influencers, no celebrities, those are all bannable offenses even. It’s just… kinda nice and nobody expected that at all.

1: is lemmy good for macro blogging? Like how you’d use something like Tumblr or the like.

Lemmy is a lot closer to Reddit, and is centered communities, not people. I think you’d have a better experience on one of the microblogging platforms for that use case.

2: when you create a community for yourself and post in it, does it reach other people or is it only if they actively search for it? Is it common here to create a community just for yourself to post blogs and the like? Can you even do that?

That’s a big “it depends” as some instances have bots to go subscribe to every community and pull it all in. Lemmy only federates content to instances that have at least one subscriber to the community, so discoverability would be a problem.

3: how does the federation thing work exactly? I’m from an instance that has downvotes disabled, so what happens when someone tries to downvote me?

You just don’t see them and they’re not counted in the score displayed to you. They’re still added up in the back end unless you post to a community with downvotes disabled, in this case then they’re discarded entirely. But since this community is on lemmy.ml and that one accepts downvotes, then they work as you’d expect. You still won’t see them on your side.

4: is lemmy safe from AI scrapping or nah? Is this platform good for artists compared to something like mastodon, twitter, or bluesky?

No, far from it. Everything is visible publicly, and when it’s public there’s little to do to stop AI scraping.

5: is there search engine crawling on lemmy? Are all posts on here possible to show up in search engines or nah? How do things work on that front?

Yes. I don’t even need to crawl Lemmy to index it, all the other instances are willingly sending it to me in real time. I have a copy of everything my instance has seen.

6: how’s development? Is lemmy going to continue to build and improve or are things gonna stay as they are for the foreseeable future?

Only the developers can comment but it seems slow but steady.

7: how privacy friendly and secure is lemmy really? I’m guessing a lot better then reddit, but just curious.

Zero, none. There is zero privacy on Lemmy because the fediverse is inherently public. I can see who voted what, I could see the entire edit history of a given post or comment, I could store all deleted posts and comments, the data is all on my server should I want to do anything with it.

So your privacy will depend solely on your OpSec: don’t share personally identifiable information or anything.

8: are there normal people or communities here? From what I’m seeing all of lemmy seems primarily focused on politics and tech, am not seeing much beyond that.

Those do drown pretty much everything else, but you can look at Lemmy Explorer and find communities you like and subscribe to them, and then browse by subscriptions. The default feed is basically a firehose of literally everything going in every community at once.

Some people also opt to just block the communities they’re not interested in such that all that’s left is interesting ones so you don’t miss anything.

As someone that admins hundreds of MySQL at work, I’d go with PostgreSQL.

To talk to the people much more than just navigating the app, they want to meaningfully engage and be accessible to the chinese people because it’s their app meant for actual chinese people.

It’s not even to go for a TikTok clone, it’s more to do with the avoidance of Meta products because they’re following Twitter and allowing toxicity and constantly pushing ads and influencers and MAGA. Someone decided hey it would be funny if we just installed an actual Chinese app just out of spite since we’re effectively getting censored anyway so getting censored on a chinese app to blow it all up would be funny. It was supposed to be a meme.

Turns out the chinese people on there were mostly excited to get so much attention and an opportunity to talk with americans. Loads of kids there practicing their english, and people felt so welcomed they’re trying to learn the language and everything’s subtitled in chinese+english because they want to communicate back and make their content accessible to them out of respect. There’s plenty of content there to teach chinese to the newcomers too. Bunch decided to stay because it’s just pretty nice since the lack of politics and “sensitive” topics it’s a very positive and welcoming platform for once.

The whole thing is a completely accidental cultural exchange on a massive scale, and a very rare case where americans and chinese people kind of can talk directly like that. Both sides gets to peek at the other’s lifestyle and bond over common things instead of hating on eachother. They aren’t learning chinese to use the app, they’re learning it to communicate and exchange with the people. The chinese government seems unconcerned and welcoming as an extra fuck you to the US.

The algorithm is surprisingly not really biased nor pushing propaganda. It’s happily suggesting me openly queer content (with a lack of hate comments and americans being called out for their hateful comments), they have gun content, they have a car scene, they have their thirst traps (with respectful comments), it’s really not all that different than us and not the propaganda machine the US is so concerned about. It kind of leans more left than TikTok if anything, which makes the ban even more questionable.

7 days currently, 30 days on the previous boot. I had to open it up to install extra drives.

I’m witnessing it firsthand, conservatives with a long history of being conservative on TikTok, spending a couple hours talking to chinese citizens and coming back completely shocked they have eggs for the equivalent of less than a dollar here, and massive family sized grocery hauls for like 50 bucks. People that thought their entire life chinese people work 80 hours week in dirty factories and basically slave labour, and they get on there and see average office workers ordering and showing their DoorDash equivalent like it’s the price of a coffee.

You don’t have to be a tankie to see why the government is worried. At minimum hundreds of thousands of americans are seeing chinese people living in (or appear to be living in) much better conditions than they do, and it’s making a lot of them rethink their life especially gen-z. That’s a huge threat to the US stability whether it’s clever chinese propaganda or not, or even whether you think it’s a good thing or not.

The national security threat in question is americans accessing Chinese content and figuring out the commies have everything they thought voting Trump would give them.

They didn’t even believe the CCP propaganda there and we’re just coming in being like “yeah it’s actually worse than that”. At this point it’s worth it for them to just… let it be because we’re giving them better than their own propaganda.

The “threat” is americans daring going a bit more left than even the democrats. It’s not about China, it’s about controlling and owning social media to control the narrative.

The same as already happens on lemmy.ml 😂

Also shockingly getting more gun content than I ever did on TikTok and YouTube, turns out they kinda like guns too minus the shooting schools part.

Yep, the sentiment is overwhelmingly what’s so bad about China having our data when Meta does exactly the same if not worse. There’s literal memes about skipping the middleman and sending it directly to China.

Quite a bunch are also learning mandarin to integrate better with them and a lot of chatter about how the divide is entitely made up by the government. The governments are fighting but the people on both sides are nice.

Some culture shock for americans is families in China can actually afford to stock up on food without going broke. Like, a lot of americans are seeing through the US propaganda for the first time.

They might not have free speech there and the guidelines are pretty strict, but one glaring thing is it’s just a good experience there. No arguing, no shitty political takes. The lack of constant negativity and fighting is a breath of fresh air compared to what the american social medias are pushing non-stop because it’s clicks and views and ad money.

I think it’s all a good thing: diversification of social media platforms so you get different perspectives and cultures. We get to see first hand what life really is over there and the reverse as well. And the likelyhood that both the US and China pressure social medias to silence the same discourse is pretty small. You can make fun of Trump and Musk all day there and you won’t mysteriously get burried by the algorithn because Elon pulled some strings to quiet it down. The good stuff has a tendency of being on the other side of borders.

You know the government fucked up big time when thousands of americans are fleeing to Chinese apps and learning the language and all.

It’s not federated identity, it’s federated content.

Your instance can in theory access all the content including Mastodon, but there’s some software incompatibilities preventing that from quite working right because the way Lemmy does things is quite different than how Mastodon and other microblogging services do.

Ultimately we need to prepare for a future where the majority of jobs have been automated and need a way to keep the economy going. Everyone being employed full time is just something that is not sustainable on the long term as technology progresses. We’ll eventually need UBI because otherwise all the money will be transferred to nearly fully automated companies controlling basically everything. We just won’t be able to keep everyone employed without creating a massive amount of bullshit jobs nobody really wants to do. The better way is UBI and people going into research or creative works, and aim higher like space travel.

We’re not quite ready yet and people are way too invested in capitalism for this to work just yet. But it will become a necessity eventually. It’s not just affecting IT, it’s affecting all sectors: we can basically 3D print houses now, we’re not far off automating farming either. We will reach a point where most of society has been automated, we can feed everyone effortlessly.

Damn that’s a lot of bandwidth

Because the government wants the data collection. They just want it to be an american company so they get a copy of it all.