promotes gambling to kids

Yeah, no.

I assume you’re talking about Counterstrike skins, but CS:GO and CS:2 are both rated M in the US, and 18+ in the EU. Team Fortress 2 is M in the US, and 15-18 in the EU AFAICT. That in no way is “marketing to children,” and parents can absolutely limit their kids’ access to things like the Steam marketplace even if they allow their kids to play those games.

I hate microtransactions of all kinds, but Valve is by far nowhere near the worst offender here. Fortnite is rated T and had a PEGI 12, along with a bunch of merch at stores like Target (Fortnite branded nerf guns and whatnot). I could point to a ton of other games actually marketed to kids with MTX. The main difference is Valve allows Counterstrike skins to be traded, which IMO is better than just having to be stuck with a skin you don’t like and being able to buy the ones directly that you do want (least unethical version of loot boxes IMO).

That said, I refuse to let my kids play any game with MTX, and I think other parents should as well. But if this is your biggest criticism of Valve, then I guess your argument is pretty weak.

I don’t think that’s a given, I just think we haven’t found a good solution yet. I’m working on one such solution, where moderation is personalized to the individual user. I think this should be good enough to hide most of the slop, while outliving any BDFL. It’ll probably fail, but hopefully it helps someone else come up with a better implementation that won’t.

Is it more expensive than storage? My understanding was that nuclear was cheaper long-term, but I honestly don’t know. I think we need both, but I could be convinced that nuclear is obsolete with some real-life numbers.

Yeah, I have a lot of priorities before that headset…

Hey, take what you can get.

1. don’t break stuff
2. upgrade to microOS from Leap, without violating step 1
3. reduce the physical footprint of my server (currently in a massive case, would like to go to mini-ITX)

My city is also planning to roll out fiber, so upgrading my network may become a priority if that happens. My current ISP is limited to 100mbps, but I should be able to get 10gbit once they hook me up (though I’ll probably stop well short of that).

Yeah, name squatting could be an issue, depending on if they rely on ENS or if it’s merely an option. The whitepaper claims communities are merely a public key someone controls, and the name is supplementary, so you could conceivably have duplicate communities. So in theory, squatting wouldn’t be a major issue, but discovery could be (i.e. if ENS is used for discovery, then it’s de-facto authoritative).

I haven’t looked at the implementation, just the website and whitepaper, so I don’t know the specifics. But in theory it looks to have many of the same problems Lemmy has, with the major difference being reducing hosting costs and some dox protection.

Oh, I think the approach is problematic, I just don’t think ENS is a major concern here. I don’t think you need DNS/ENS for this kind of service, nor do you need any form of blockchain.

My point is a blockchain DNS system isn’t significantly worse than the current system, where we already see a ton of similar abuse. The proper solution, IMO, is to avoid the need for DNS at all.

Exactly. I grew up in WA, USA, and power was always quite cheap due to how much comes from hydro. Now I’m in Utah, and it’s only cheap because we use coal and natural gas (and produce a ton of the latter), though we’re replacing a lot of that w/ solar (turns out deserts get lots of sun) and prices are remaining pretty low.

Renewable energy will certainly look different in each region. I don’t know what would work best for Germany since I don’t know the geography very well, but comparing Norway to Germany isn’t going to be a productive conversation.

Sure, but Munich is south of the 49th parallel. I’m not sure how amenable it is to solar down there, but surely there are some areas that would work, no?

That’s an incredible amount of wind power.

Exactly. Both numbers are interesting, because electricity will likely be scaled up in the same proportions. If we’re comparing countries, we should use total energy, but if we’re just looking at progress within a country, looking at electricity generation is totally valid.

Yeah, what’s up with that? Nuclear works well for France, so why did it fall out of favor in Germany?

It’s not perfect, but it does a fantastic job at providing a base load alternative to batteries, which could significantly reduce rollout costs if they had existing plants. It’s probably not worth switching now, unless they have some dormant plants that could be fired up quickly (like we’re doing in the US).

You could do the same with DNS, nothing is stopping you from registering a similar domain name and doing the exact same thing. ENS doesn’t change anything with the attack, it merely exchanges registrars for a block chain.

domain name system

What do you need moderation for that for? All a domain name service needs is some kind of reputable link between two things (e.g. domain name and IP), and Plebbit seems to be using it to reserve community names (so name -> public key, or maybe the other way, I haven’t looked into it). The reputation comes from the blockchain, which dramatically increases the barrier for an attacker to change an entry. Instead of a central authority, you have a group of individuals (ETH is based on proof-of-stake now, and I assume ENS is as well) who verify claims before it becomes part of the blockchain.

To me, it’s the least problematic part of it, I’m more concerned about communities having owners, and thus communities can die if the owner decides to stop hosting it or decides to dramatically change the rules (or moderators, etc). One of the major points of decentralization is to remove the power of individuals to change/break things, and Plebbit doesn’t do that. The most problematic part, IMO, is ties to cryptocurrency, which seems to be its profit motive, so the moment it takes off, the creator gets rich (because they hold a ton of PLEB token), and that doesn’t bode well for the long-term viability of the project.

That said, we’ll see how it works out. I think it has some interesting ideas, and I’m all for alternatives to the established players in the social media space.

Sure, but I hope you can see the potential for knee-jerk reactions polluting otherwise relevant reviews, no?

Given that the reviews are already low, I’m guessing a lot of users noticed that the coupons weren’t the best available before the news broke. That’s exactly what I would expect, and having a bunch of people regurgitating things like “Honey are hucksters screwing content creators” doesn’t say much about the quality of the service to end-users and is simply a reaction to the news without any further research (how can the average user validate those claims?).

no one can remove anything.

They have a concept of moderators, which are chosen by community owners and have the power to remove content within the communities they moderate.

At least that’s what the whitepaper says, I don’t know what the actual implementation does.

From reading the whitepaper, you basically replace instance admins with community admins, and your P2P peers will cache some of the content so you don’t hit the community admin all the time. Benefits:

• lower hosting costs - you only need to pay for storage for your community, plus some transfer as comments/posts get updated on your “instance”
• risk is limited to whatever communities someone is hosting, not an entire instance
• user accounts aren’t centralized, so if a community goes down, you still have your user account
• some protection against doxxing IP addresses, whereas w/ Lemmy you need to trust your instance admins

Other differences:

• moderation is selected by the community admin, there are no instance admins
• trust mechanisms (captcha and whatnot) is managed at the community level, since there is no instance level

Potential downsides:

• no ActivityPub, so it won’t interact w/ the fediverse whatsoever
• affiliated w/ their own crypto token, and has ties to Ethereum NFTs and whatnot
• lots of different interfaces (4chan clone, Reddit clone, etc), which could cause distraction for devs
• uses public-key addressing instead of content addressing, so it could be slow (they propose a mitigation)

I think it’s a step in the right direction in some areas, but ultimately there’s just a bit too much association w/ cryptocurrencies for it to really be a long-lasting service. We’ll see though, maybe my fears are unwarranted.

unmoderatable free-for-all

I read through the whitepaper, and it has moderators similar to Reddit/Lemmy. Basically, whoever creates the community (subplebbit) is the owner/admin (they like to say “adminless,” but each community has an admin), and they can select moderators, who can do moderation tasks like deleting posts.

So it should have the same benefits and problems as Reddit since it’ll all come down to the moderation team the admin selects.

If you think of it like Lemmy, but instead of instance admins you have community admins, you’ll be more right than wrong.

On an unrelated topic, I’m working on my own P2P Reddit clone that doesn’t have centralized moderation, but instead relies on a Web of Trust system to handle moderation, but instead of binary trust, it’s fractional (i.e. you can trust someone 10%, someone else 20%, and posts will be filtered accordingly). In fact, trust isn’t manually handled, it’s handled based on how similarly you act vs others (i.e. you both upvote/downvote similarly, flag posts similarly, etc), and I’m deciding whether making this based on community makes sense (i.e. you trust user A on community X, but not on community Y).

Just because moderation doesn’t look similar to what you’re familiar with doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. We’ll see if Plebbit works out, but I’m still going to try my own approach and see if that works. Oh, and my approach doesn’t have a blockchain, crypto currency, or really any way to monetize it FWIW.