- 535 Posts
- 688 Comments
8·24 hours agobecause these politicians know extremely little about the Internet
I started participating in online communities in the 2000s. The “social media” we had back then was web forums, organized by topics and sorted chronologically. I was young enough at the time that it is now permanently stored in my brain that that is the normal way the Internet should be like, and everything popularized since then (recommendation algorithms, the idea that we should follow people instead of topics, even the idea that websites shouldn’t be specific to certain topics) is a deviation from normalcy.
I know, rationally, that those deviations from normalcy are now the new normal (even the fediverse is “only” an attempt to improve further on that, not a move toward the Internet of the 2000s), but there is still a part of my brain that doesn’t accept this.
But I very strongly suspect that those politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, who are now trying to regulate the Internet, never posted anything to a traditional web forum, or edited a wiki, or anything like that. To them, “social media” became a thing (at all!) in around 2008 to 2010 when they created Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to communicate with their voters. (Reality check: social media has been a thing since, at the latest, the 1980s, when Usenet was invented.)
If they don’t know that the Internet is not Facebook, then it’s unsurprising when they regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, so that all that will be left is Facebook. Sad times we are living in.
2·1 day agoI don’t know if that’s true if they don’t publish a list of that. I certainly wouldn’t know how.
Yes. I have seen comments before from obscure instances that didn’t seem to be open to the public. It wouldn’t really make much technical sense to prevent that.
this, and also: what exactly is the question?!
If the Lemmy instance isn’t public anyway, then it seems like its federation list doesn’t have to be public either, so other instance admins would have no way of knowing what such an instance federates with.
7·1 day agoapparently you cared enough to write a comment about it
28·3 days agoHopefully. I am already on both sites (though on reddit I hardly ever start new threads and only use it on desktop) and would love getting opportunities to talk about all the topics here that I currently talk about only on reddit.
It is so incredible. I used to think the main threat to a free and open Internet was copyright. Then in the mid-2010s the talking points against it shifted to misinformation and hate speech.
Now it’s age verification? How did we get here?
6·4 days agoWhy does any military, anywhere, allow any software on its devices that it doesn’t have the source code for, including ability to compile and modify it?! Disabling “advertising trackers” is a small first step, yeah…
6·5 days agoHuh I guess that really makes me think
I’ve been playing Cities: Skylines for more than ten years and never noticed it had a homelessness mechanic.
13·6 days agoAfter your edit, it is slightly clearer what you are asking. But this is still a matter of desktop environment more than distro.
8·8 days agoI don’t use iOS, but have read that there are apps for it too. On Android there is something called StreetComplete that is specifically aimed at beginners.
Probably the easiest thing to do on mobile is to add or update nodes describing POIs. For example if a store or restaurant or post box or trash can is missing on the map, you can add that. You can use OsmAnd or, I think, also CoMaps for that.
OSM mapping can be very fun, I started doing it more than half my life ago. :D Not just defibrillators, but lots of other things too!
14·8 days agoThis is a meaningless metric: lots of people probably got it from sources they have no way of tracking (e.g. distro repos), others may be crawlers, etc. etc.
Has there ever been any intelligent thought coming from Australian governments/politicians/authorities that has anything to do with technology? Just wondering because isn’t this the same country where a leading politician once said that the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only laws that apply in Australia are those of Australia…
Hint: Something like this can only be enforced if you ban smart glasses on which the user can install any software they like (e.g. free and open source software). And if you go down that route, what is stopping governments from doing the same thing to other computers too?
Me too. It even supports connecting to SFTP servers (maybe needs an extension).
People who genuinely think Germans cannot be funny should check out Otto Waalkes.
Then you simply missed a few news stories:
This is why countries need constitutions that limit what laws governments are allowed to pass. This is approximately the prototype of something governments just shouldn’t be allowed to ever do.