Mara

No, I don’t think it removes duplicate images.

Right now: 0.3GB per user per month. This number is probably much higher for other instances because I don’t keep copies of federated images anymore and I’ve been compressing images early on.

This doesn’t include bandwidth and backups.

I managed to bring down ani.social’s monthly costs to only ~14 USD when converted (which includes everything except backups). With 165 monthly users, that comes to around ~0.08 USD with a lot of accomodation.

Lemmy is efficient in resources except in storage (database and images) which grows infinitely. Unless you’re purging older posts and images, it keeps growing (very slowly).

I made it a small badge so people wouldn’t have to feel obligated to donate. But yes, the entire instance has been community funded already thanks to generous one-time and monthly donations!

Oops, I misunderstood how it works. You can add subdomains as your handle.

I thought subdomains were people using PDS. So I don’t know anyone running a PDS. I might try running one just to see what it’s like and actually learn the network.

But here’s an example of @user.domain.com: https://bsky.app/profile/tomoshika.voms.net

I don’t think they’re using a PDS though. In fact, it’s really hard to tell who’s using a PDS or not. I’m not sure what the effect of this is in community-building and I wonder if control over the network is really decentralized. This is really… confusing.

Anyway, the PDS is a lot more complicated than I thought: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/category/advanced-guides

The users with PDS use something like @user.domain.com. Users with just @domain.com are under Bluesky IIRC.

How was the concept first explained to you, or when did it click?

I don’t remember. We had classes throughout elementary school that taught us how to use computers. I learned how to read the news and use email from my mom. I learned how to play games like Silkroad and StarCraft from my dad. I don’t remember who taught me how to watch videos on YouTube. It kind of felt natural I guess.

Do you understand how insane it is to have the aggregate of all human knowledge — the only comparable thing once being a physical library or university — one search away? That it’s absolutely insane you can engage in a real-time conversation with someone on the opposite side of the world? That you can find niche communities in an instant?

No, not really. I never thougt about it that way until I was much older.

Were your parents super strict about internet usage? How quickly did you find workarounds?

Very strict. I could only use the internet if it was for school work during the week days. But during the weekends, I was free to use it however I wanted.

There were no workarounds until high school when I was free to play games and surf the web as much as I wanted any day of the week.

People have suggested making a portal/quiz for instance signups, but that adds to the barrier. There are also problems like how in-depth and inclusive it should be. It reminds me of Linux distro pickers that often suggest weird niche distros.

There are already big/default instances in the Fediverse though but there are people who actively discourage this. Maybe Mastodon just had a bad start and Bluesky learned from that. I wonder if Bluesky’s PDS will be like Fediverse instances though. Many Fediverse instances are built around shared interests but the PDS just looks like a glorified handle.

Personally, I think the Fediverse discourse should shift to designing social media with decentralization in mind rather than mimicking mainstream social media with a “decentralized twist”. I don’t think the Fediverse will ever be as big as Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be. It just needs to be sustainable enough to keep new conversations going.

Doesn’t answer the question but maybe it’s worth sharing anyway.

Maybe my Gmail account. I made it to play Club Penguin. I still use it when signing up for things.

I have some old forum accounts but I don’t use them anymore. I also had a Minecraft account from before the Mojang and Microsoft migrations. That’s gone now. :(

My League of Legends and Steam accounts are old too.

Win/Super key

I find that pretty safe.

Yup, the Hideaki Anno movie! I think it’s one of the greatest movies I’ve seen. There’s a chapter of the book called Sexography that discusses the movie very well. It kind of helped me understand the issue a bit more.

I haven’t seen Ritual yet but it’s on my watch list!

• Perfect Blue
• The End of Evangelion
• Love & Pop

Bypassing paywalled articles.

There’s old movies there, too.

“Sans Soleil” by Chris Marker.

It’s a documentary that only uses “stock footage” and a woman reading letters. It’s about time and memory and other philosophical stuff.

I also really like the tunnels feature. It makes self hosting at home easy for those under NAT/CGNAT or whatever it was called.

The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter)

This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here.

0.19.4 provides a way to see uploaded images (although not the best) but this version was only recently released so I can see where the frustration is coming from especially since the CSAM attacks happened nearly a year ago. At the time, I had to make a copy of pictrs, view everything on a file manager, and manually remove those images. People can still upload images without anyone seeing it however.

It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with.

This was fixed in 0.19.3 (released 7 months ago) where you can disable image “caching”. This has solved storage costs for us together with pictrs’ image processing.

plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery

It’s unfortunate that we need this. Not everybody has the resources to run fedisafety nor does everyone live in USA where they can use Cloudflare’s CSAM scanner. I think a good way to deal with the issue is to have images that are not public, not be stored (or have no private images at all). This way images can be easily reported.

Overall, I understand the frustration and to some degree I also feel the same but I also limit my expectations considering the nature of the project.

Qwant isn’t available in a lot of countries though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant