• 1 Post
  • 216 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
cake
Cake day: September 14th, 2025

help-circle
  • I’ve used them happily from a policy standpoint, but in past months, they’ve had some real load problems, where the instances has been unresponsive. I’m pretty sure that a lot of it is due to scraper-bots pulling material for AI training — I understand that this has been a serious problem for the Web as a whole, and particularly for forum sites, including the Threadiverse, and is why many Threadiverse instances have stopped allowing anonymous login in past months. Lemmy.today was a holdout, but finally also disabled anonymous login. However, I just tried it today and while it seemed fine for a while, I also saw an unresponsive episode, so I don’t know if they may still have other load issues to iron out.




  • The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it.

    We already declared that with the advent of photoshop.

    I think that this is “video” as in “moving images”. Photoshop isn’t a fantastic tool for fabricating video (though, given enough time and expense, I suppose that it’d be theoretically possible to do it, frame-by-frame). In the past, the limitations of software have made it much harder to doctor up — not impossible, as Hollywood creates imaginary worlds, but much harder, more expensive, and requiring more expertise — to falsify a video of someone than a single still image of them.

    I don’t think that this is the “end of truth”. There was a world before photography and audio recordings. We had ways of dealing with that. Like, we’d have reputable organizations whose role it was to send someone to various events to attest to them, and place their reputation at stake. We can, if need be, return to that.

    And it may very well be that we can create new forms of recording that are more-difficult to falsify. A while back, to help deal with widespread printing technology making counterfeiting easier, we rolled out holographic images, for example.

    I can imagine an Internet-connected camera — as on a cell phone — that sends a hash of the image to a trusted server and obtains a timestamped, cryptographic signature. That doesn’t stop before-the-fact forgeries, but it does deal with things that are fabricated after-the-fact, stuff like this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist_guy


  • If you want a more-politically-censored environment, I guess you could try beehaw.org. They tend to enforce positivity and restrict some political stuff and are into creating a “safe space”.

    We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful.

    It’s not really what I’m looking for in a home instance, and there’s a limited amount of activity there, but I’ll give that they seem to have a userbase that seems less suicidally-depressed than some other home instances on the Threadiverse. Note that they have defederated from lemmy.world, as they don’t feel that it fits with their policies, so you’ll have more-limited access to content than on most home instances. Also, I remember seeing that they were considering moving to some non-Lemmy platform (Pleroma? Can’t remember), so if you specifically want Lemmy, that might not work for you if they do such a move.

    EDIT: If you take your requirements literally, I think that you’re going to have a hard time finding an existing instance that will fulfill all of them. Beehaw.org might be closer, but it’s just not going to get you that far. Like, you said that you want an instance with no libertarians. I lean right-libertarian, so any instance that I could use would already be violating your requirements. I think that such an instance would probably need to require users to up-front state their political views at registration time so that that information would be available, disallow users with banned political views from access, and only federate with a small, whitelisted set of instances. The closest thing to that, where I think you have admin-level policing of political views, is probably on the tankie-oriented instances, and you’ve also said that you object to tankies.

    You could set up an instance yourself and only federate with a carefully-curated set of instances that have similar instance and federation rules. But that’s also going to obviously seriously limit the content available. Maybe hit !newcommunities@lemmy.world and try to promote it to any like-minded users.



  • That depends on how you define the web

    Wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

    The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ⓘ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.[1]

    gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:

    https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/

    Gopher is a well-known information access protocol that predates the World Wide Web, developed at the University of Minnesota during the early 1990s. What is Gopher? (Gopher-hosted, via the Public Proxy)

    This proxy is for Gopher resources only – using it to access websites won’t work and is logged!



  • How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer?

    Gopher predated the Web.

    I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I’m not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with <em></em>, <a href=""></a>, and <h1></h1> anymore, for example.





  • Further complicating this, the Threadiverse also has “display names” for communities — something which I think is probably a mistake — and one has to know how to get the actual name for the bang-syntax link. For example, the display name here is “New Communities”, but the actual community name is “newcommunities”.

    I’d like standard bang syntax to be able to link to a post and comment as well in a home-instance-agnostic fashion. That doesn’t exist today, and we can’t really do it today without Mbin, Lemmy, and PieFed adding support.