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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m generally not a big fan of big social media like e.g. Facebook where you might have many thousands of followers, purposefully grow the numbers, etc. I personally think these things are an everyday evil. Yes, it’s a bit melodramatic 🙂but that’s how I feel. Reddit, and now Lemmy are about as far as I like to go with it.

    So the isolation of geo-local-only federation is a feature. The feature, actually. I want an entire social media platform that isn’t capable of focusing on single accounts. Where you are near guaranteed to interact with your local community only. Where it would take a dramatic effort for a single actor to influence global opinions. I want a social media platform that isn’t so easy to manipulate. I could go on and on.


  • After reading your responses, it seems like we’re describing two different methods of building this system.

    Your ideas seems to depend on having many instances for various regions, where all instances are federated with each other. So my local instance somewhere in the US would still be federated with for example, an instance in Germany. But the content I receive would be heavily focused on “nearby” content. Interesting

    My ideas are based on an important difference. An instance for my town would only federate with instances for the surrounding towns. Maybe one or two more “hops” away. So sharing content between my local instance and one in Germany would be impossible. Content on my local instance would only be accessible to users in nearby instances. Local content enforced by local federation.


  • I spent several weeks thinking about this exact idea.

    Federation is cool. You could set up each instance to only federate with instances for nearby towns and cities. Maybe a “2 district” radius. Users would only see content for their local communities. Local news stays local. Local government could officially participate if they wish. People you talk to are actually neighbors you might see in person. Larger regions like counties, states, provinces, or even countries, could also have dedicated instances and federate similarly. I think this is the big appeal and it sounds awesome!

    There are a few problems 🙂

    First is a little bit of confusion with posting. Let’s say that I see a post about a cool new restaurant in my town. I share it with a friend who lives a few towns away and that’s outside the “federation radius”. I can’t share the post with that friend very easily. Maybe the tools could be enhanced to make this viable?

    Second is a matter of privacy. How do you know that new accounts belong to people associated with the geographic location of each instance? If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused. If you do validate, then users need to supply some real info! Home address, ID, etc. that’s a big deal for users and instance admins.

    Third. What happens if you move? Do you have to abandon your old account and start over? Again, the system itself can be developed further to solve this. But that’ll take time and money.

    Next is the operating costs. You would need to build thousands of instances to build this system up. And each one would have to be tied to a geographic region. You need new features to handle signups this way. You have the simple cost of running these servers. You probably need a lot of staff to manage it all. This is an expensive platform for one party to run. Alternatively…

    It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right? The operational costs go way down if anyone can run their own instance. But how do you enforce the rules of federating with instances for geographically nearby locations? I don’t see a reasonable way to solve this one.

    I could probably keep listing issues. But these are the big ones IMO. If you solve these, the system is viable and could be amazing.



  • I agree in full!

    I’ve thought quite a bit about corporate funding of the fediverse. The only possibility good way that I currently see is if there’s a not-for-profit acting as a middle man to dispense the funds. And that not-for-profit can’t voice opinions on how the fediverse is developed. Even this is wishful thinking.

    I’ve actually given thought to creating this non-for-profit but I don’t really know how to get started or get attention for significant donations.



  • I recently dug into this because I accidentally trashed my wife’s OS which was encrypted with bitlocker. PITA btw and I couldn’t beat the encryption

    Bitlocker encryption key hash is stored in 2 possible places. First is an unencrypted segment of the encrypted drive. This is bad because it’s pretty easy to read that hash and then decrypt the drive. The second place is on a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) which is a chip on the motherboard. This is better because it’s much more difficult to hack. It can be done but requires soldering on extra hardware to sniff the hash while the machine boots up. Might even be destructive… I’m not sure.

    Either way a motivated attacker can decrypt the drive if they have physical access. For my personal machines, I wouldn’t care about this level of scrutiny at all.

    Anyways you can see if any open source solutions support TPM.





  • Lodra@programming.devtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlOpen source keyboard for iOS?
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    6 months ago

    While the other responses so far have good info, none has offered a useful answer. Yes, apple collects data, but thankfully don’t sell it to the world. Buying a new phone isn’t a trivial expense so some of us are stuck for a bit. As a fellow IOS user (for now), I too would like to hear some more options.

    The best I’ve found so far is Typewise. They claim to be private and secure but it’s closed source so so knows. Apple gets to review their code when submitting to the app store which says that Typewise collects some data but none of it is linked to the user. It’s freemium. Unfortunately, I don’t like their keyboard. Swipe typing is my personal requirement🙂






  • Well I guess I can offer a dissenting opinion on this one. YouTube video links are fine on Lemmy? I like watching a short video or two each day?

    Yes, YouTube sucks for privacy. So I don’t have an account and use Firefox Focus to be anonymous. I do wish there were better alternatives to YouTube.

    I don’t like ads and that includes people advertising a channel. But I haven’t personally seen this happen much on Lemmy. Maybe not all. I guess I don’t see why it needs to be banned.

    Anyone else seeing things this way? Or am I missing something?

    Edit:

    I’ve thought about it more. I think I was indeed missing something. Is the complaint referring to all the posts that contain nothing but a YouTube link?

    If that’s the case, I guess it’s a valid complaint. Doesn’t really bother me though. I just scroll on by the posts that don’t interest me