Btw, I think it’s pretty much accepted fact that smartphones do spy on everyone. It’s the main business model of any big tech company. Google, Meta… They definitely have algorithms to tailor their targeted ads to someones personal profile. And per default they look at what you’re doing online all day. Keep track of your location if they can… The one thing that’s unclear is whether they use the microphone and also listen to your offline conversations. My main point being: Listening in with the microphone isn’t that far off. If you feel uncomfortable with that, you might want to re-consider a few other things as well.

With the scientific method and anecdotal evidence: kind of never. It’s illegitimate to draw that conclusion, this way.

You got to dig down to the facts. Or we can just tell the fact that a lot of people feel that way. And I mean “confirmation bias” is a very good explanation. We also have thousands of people believe in esoterics, homeopathy etc. The mechanics of psychology are well-understood. And it’s kind of the reason why we invented science in the first place. Because we found things aren’t always as they seem. And there are a lot of dynamics to factor in.

If we want to get to the truth, we have to do a proper study. I’m not an expert on this, so I don’t know if we got to that, yet. I know people have demonstrated this is technically possible. But as far as I’m aware people have also taken apart a few of the major apps like Facebook etc, logged the traffic and couldn’t find anything that uses microphone data to do targeted advertising.

Conclusion: It’s either not there, or we missed it.

Difficult to judge. Could be confirmation bias, as well. Meaning you got ads for flight befores. But you were not paying attention to them at that point. Which changed after your session and now you think these are connected. (Or you looked something up about that location and that kicked it off.)

These are the usual findings in the rare cases people are able to trace it back and they write some article or podcast about it. Mainly confirmation bias. And once you interact with one ad that got you taken aback, you’re trapped.

Doesn’t rule out other possibilities, though. I guess what I’m trying to say is, this counts more as anecdotal evidence. And we have plenty stories like this. It’s not enough to infer anything. More a reminder to investigate some more.

And yes, it’s good practice to keep your phone someplace else when you’re having protected/confidential conversations. Smartphones are very complex and they certainly have the potential to spy on you. In fact we know a lot of the apps and computer code is meant to analzye your behaviour and transfer that information to third parties.

I agree like 80%. I think with the tools, it is how it is. They don’t necessarily owe you anything. I did some renovations lately, and realized (again) that choosing the right tool and method might be essential. We wasted hours and hours in some cases doing some amateur work. And after asking someone how to do it properly, or getting a recommendation to rent the professional tool instead of bothering with the consumer-grade power tools, something that would have taken days, got done in one morning. Same applies to computers in my experience. I learned how to use some tools that just make things a lot easier. Sometimes they automate a boring task. Or make me 100x as fast. And it doesn’t really help to complain I was not aware of it’s existence. That’s how it is. You can’t know everything. You’ll have to make ends meet with some amateur work then. Or somehow become aware of how to change things to your advantage.

And things like being locked in, or being invested in something can be problematic with software. Sure you don’t want to begin all over after you invested effort and labor into one solution. Or learned something for a long time and now you have to switch to something else. I believe that’s one of the main reasons why people stick with Microsoft Windows. Despite it not being particularly great. Ultimately that’s your choice. Either you put in the effort, re-learn a few things and adapt your workflow. And that’s somehow worth it to you and you’ll start to benefit from it after a while… Or you don’t do it.

But all of this is very abstract. And just from the user’s perspective. My point mostly applies if you’re the user and faced with a fixed situation which you can not change. Of course that does not apply to the software developers. They should listen to the requests of their users and implement features unless there is a specific reason not to do it. And that’s where I completely agree with you. It would be great if the software was capable and had a lot of features. I mean there are some limitations in practice, you need someone to invest time to implement it. And feature creep kills projects, you can’t add everything… But I think Lemmy could really benefit from some more useful features. And I don’t see a reason why they should reject them without a specific technical reason.

Maybe the correct course of action is to file a feature request with the Lemmy project. I hope they’ll implement it. And if they don’t, I think it boils down to what I lined out. You’d either be okay without your feature and keep using Lemmy, or you really want it and discard some of the other requirements and have a look at other software.

I’m not sure about that argument. I mean there are right and wrong tools for a job. There are people constantly trying to drive in a screw with a hammer. They might be better off with a screwdriver. We could also devise a multitool, or not do it. Ultimately, if just the right tool is in front of you, you’d better have a specific reason why not to use it… I can see one general abstract argument, and that’s competition is good or more general or featureful tools are good.

Not having server-side platforms is a very interesting argument. I mean most users are using smartphone apps anyways… I don’t know why we bother with translating everything twice and doing that many server-side things. ActivityPub with it’s concept of inboxes and outboxes is kind of designed to run with a minimal server and do most logic and rendering client-side anyways. We’d need to take care not to fragment the platform into many incompatible pieces… But we could do a lot of things inside of an app instead of on some intermediary server.

It’s not the same, but I’ve seen people create a community for that. As a workaround. You can call it like your username and link it in your bio.

Well, the usual way I’ve seen people deal with this is either open up the case and leave the extra drives dangling to the side, or just lay them on the bottom of the case (or on top) and don’t move it any more.

That works. Though, if you want to imitate that… Pay attention to the temperature of the harddisks. There is no air circulation if you just lay them flat on the floor and they might take damage from getting too warm.

But you can’t really beat the price of that solution. 25 bucks for a SATA card and some old shoe rack with holes in the shelves, and you’re set. Ready to accomodate 4 more harddisks.

Large drives. 1-2TB are dysproportionally expensive, you need an expensive mainboard to connect a bunch of them. More drives means more failures…

Okay. I’m not sure because you have quite some ideas, and you get quite some interesting feedback. But you don’t seem to engage with any of the discussions you’re starting. Plus it’s really a mixed bag. Some ideas are good. Some have already been tried. And some seem very far-fetched to me. How would you for example integrate Mastodon and the VR metaverse? Input 500 character toots with a gamepad? Or what’s your idea?

Try https://vircadia.com/

Btw are you writing these posts yourself or are we just talking to ChatGPT here?

About half a terabyte per month. My router doesn’t write the logs to disk so I don’t have any detailed statistics.

I’d agree. And LW isn’t a particularly nice place anyways. It’s just the biggest. And if our core features aren’t important to us, we might as well send users to any arbitrary place. That doesn’t need to be Lemmy.

I thought I did something wrong and it was just me… Alright, take Flarum then, that seems to work on a Raspberry Pi. Or NodeBB if that’s still a thing… Why is Discourse so heavy and at the same time that popular?

Right, good point. You’d better move to a different planet then, that’d change your surname and replaces the implant with a different one. You can stay at the bar though. Or you build your own planet / theme park with blackjack and hookers…

Edit: And by the way OP: I’ve had some success with these modern AI image generators. If you want to come up with some concept art or placeholder images, you might want to check out these AI tools and let them draw some planets. That might not be 100% what you’re looking for, but it should be enough to get you started.

I guess that would work. It’s kind of like you’re on Mos Eisley in the cantina bar. But you’re from planet B and the person you’re talking to is from planet C. Respectively, you’re talking to a bunch of random people from all kinds of corners of the universe. And there are several bars. Some bars look the same (franchise?) but are on different planets.

Since the “forums” came up several times: I’d agree. In this case you’d choose something like Discourse or Flarum. Those are non-federated forums. And they offer some nice features, Lemmy doesn’t have. A lot of Free Software projects use Discourse. It’s more lightweight, has proven to be robust, it offers moderation features that are tailored to the use case, better ways to organize posts, you can mark correct answers, integrate itinto other services and do 50 other things plus install plugins. It’s just better and easier to do it that way. And that’s why people do it.

Hmmh, what’s their current platform fee? I’d say somewhere between 0% to 5% sounds alright. Depending on what kinds of features they offer. The minimum is probably somewhere around what Stripe takes. If you want to offer credit card payments and convenience…

I suppose you can write your bitcoin address into your bio and that’s already possible. Otherwise, it’d need some form of plugin to be supported. And how many people own bitcoins and have a wallet with lightning installed on the device they’re using for social media and are willing to donate here and there?

I think we all know micropayment, donation are nice things to have. But it’s really hard to become a payment provider. When handling money for other people, you’ll face fraud, disputes. You need to do proper accounting. you’re liable. You need to register a company, do taxes, handle international things, you need a legal department, customer service etc. That’s why we rely on Liberapay, KoFi, Patreon and all the predecessors and sucessors. They’re companies / legal entities who can handle that.

(And I’m not sure how this would even work. I mean I can’t share (federate) your real name, address and credit card number with a few hundred different fediverse admins… So it’d need to be a central service anyways. Pretty much like the ones we already have.)

Yeah, I think the Fediverse would benefit massively from that. And with onboarding etc, there are quite some low hanging fruit, which would be easy to tackle. And I think some of the complexity of federation could be abstracted away with a different cross-post mechanism and a different way communities are handled. It’s not super easy to program that, there are a lot of consequences to consider… But with the right approach that could be made easier for the user.

I’m not sure if I like gamification. But a few tooltips here and there wouldn’t hurt.