Sorry, that makes no sense.

Here is how they made that machine:

IDK, I’m here on Lemmy basically as a refugee from Reddit, but the federation angle doesn’t seem to help much from what I can tell. Look at how fast Bluesky overtook Mastodon. Anyway, anyone putting up new fanfic servers without understanding the politics and drama behind the existing ones is probably in for some pain. There used to be a saying “you’re looking for a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem”.

Yes I use lemmy.ml sometimes, but stay mostly on .world by inertia. It doesn’t make much difference. It does matter where the communities are. c/vegan is big and active and it’s on .world. The catfood incident there didn’t affect me directly (I’m not a subscriber) but it affected all the participants, many of whom are on other servers. So it’s not enough for users to move from .world. Communities would have to move or split as well. The federation model is that .world exports its censorship to every server that federates with it.

In fact, community fragmentation is already a huge fediverse fail even without censorship causing even more fragmentation.

This false equivalency pains me to my core. I don’t really have anything to say about the rest of your comment, but ffs can people stop with this nonsense take? You’re implying that the difference between centralized corporate authoritarianism and decentralized grassroots democracy is negligible.

It might very well be that the corporate censors are worse human beings than the Lemmy censors. That is completely independent of which platform experiences more censorship. It’s literally against the Lemmy World terms of service to discuss unsanctioned brands of cat food without supplying scientific sources. That nailed Lemmy’s coffin shut for me. There is nothing like that on Reddit. It’s ok, I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me.

If you really think this and don’t think Lemmy will get better then you should be using Reddit instead of Lemmy.

I explained that Reddit is better for most people, though there is a fringe minority that chooses Lemmy for various idiosyncratic reasons. I’m part of that minority and so are you, ok? That doesn’t make the rest of the world likely to migrate here.

Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media

It’s also a failure at being like Usenet, which was far less centralized than Lemmy. I’m unfamiliar with Beehaw.

@Teknevra, you’ve posted a number of ideas like this which seem based on the premise that all it would take to make them happen is writing the software and keeping the servers running. In fact those are really the easy parts.

Any above-ground platform involving user to user payments (Patreon, Paypal etc.) has to devote a ton of energy into anti-fraud, anti-money-laundering, trade in illegal goods, etc. AO3 isn’t just file hosting for fanfiction, it’s explicitly political in that it aims to give a safe space for works that would be banned on other platforms due to subject matter that draws disapproval. That takes a lot of ideological commitment and some level of moderation, legal backing, etc. Pulling non-fediverse sites into the fediverse when they desire to run their own walled gardens for whatever reasons is another set of battles to fight. So in each case, the obstacles to your idea involve conflicts between humans, not just lack of the right software.

Why do you find the fediverse so great anyway? Lemmy is basically a failure IMHO. Instead of having one giant jerk censoring things like on Reddit, there are instead dozens of little petty ones wanting to defederate from other instances. Reddit is mostly a superior experience for users, with just a few of us fringe types staying on Lemmy because of priorities that almost nobody else cares about. Mastodon gained some popularity when Twitter became an intolerable hellhole, but Bluesky ended up recapturing a lot of those departing users.

I appreciate your good intentions and willingness to help out with various annoying situations, but I think it’s important to stay clear-headed about exactly what you are trying to do.

Why would you want that? What is the attraction? “Federate all the things” isn’t really an answer. Why would authors or readers prefer it over AO3?

It’s not on trillions of devices, just billions. But e.g. a typical android phone has 1000s of sqlite db’s for different purposes.

Thomas Jefferson was before my time but was supposed to also be pretty good.

Yeah I don’t understand how that could have gone unnoticed til 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNKWbdXPS04

All grocery stores around here have no eggs, I think due to H5N1.

If you mean a shared server for book comments, Open Library (openlibrary.org) was supposed to be that, though it never gained so much popularity.

Fossify gallery, FreeOTP, Markor text editor, and maybe Jami if I can get it to work on other phones. FreeOTP might have been late 2023 when I got my current phone, but close enough. I’m not sure whether I used Termux before that, on my old phone. Oh yes, Flash Alert, I’m surprised if that isn’t standard in Android. It flashes the camera led when the phone rings. That makes it much easier to find the phone if you’re not sure where it is, and it is face down. It would be great if it also flashed the screen.

I know that woot sells lots of older models of phones and they always mention when it is a Verizon phone with a locked boot loader. IDK if you get a price break for those.

I’m actually thinking of buying a sim locked phone (those are incredibly cheap up front, since they then expect to sell you an overpriced mobile plan) and using it without a sim (wifi only) as a secondary device for various purposes. I don’t know if this idea works though.

It’s difficult to know that for sure, which is why (e.g.) the US government wants to make sure that there is domestic chip manufacture with a completely controlled supply chain to make hardware for classified communications. It can help to consider the difference between targeted surveillance (spending millions to tap the President’s phone, to get big juicy national secrets) and dragnet surveillance (tapping everybody’s phone so that you can have dirt on Joe Schmoe if he does something interesting later, even if he is of no particular interest right now). Hardware backdoors would be used mostly for targeted surveillance.

Stuff like VPN’s and encrypted apps can be of considerable help against dragnet surveillance, which is what the civil privacy community mostly cares about. If you think you might be a subject of targeted surveillance, you have to be much more paranoid. Not just hardware backdoors in your computer, but suspicious white vans on your street, microphones in your flower pots, FBI agents under your bed, the whole bit.

There are some countermeasures you can take against hardware backdoors (electromagnetically isolate a computer from the network and transfer data from it by floppy disc or similar) but basically you’re in a different world if you’re dealing with this.

You mght like the book “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson (older editions free online and still very good: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/book.html and scroll down). It goes into this stuff, has lots of good overviews even if you gloss over the technical parts, and will generally help you see clearly in the topic.

OMG don’t.

Yes of course, it’s not only ok, but it’s important. Even when studying theory. You get to understand theory by solving problems about how the theory works. Problems aren’t just about formulas but also about reasoning.