pitninja

I would highly recommend the recent Freakonomics Radio series about whaling. It’s Episodes 549-551 and the bonus episode from 2023-08-06. If you’re firmly against killing any living creature (or at least sentient creatures), I highly doubt it will change your mind (and I don’t think that it should or that it tries to), but I also think it is really fascinating learning about the history of the whaling industry and hearing the perspective of a modern whaler in the bonus episode. Putting aside the obvious ethical issues with killing sentient creatures, it’s interesting to consider things like whether there’s a sustainable level of whaling, what a sustainable quota would look like, and how much we’re in competition with certain whale species for harvesting fish as food for our own species. I personally appreciated how unbiased Freakonomics tried to be in their discussion of the topic.

Tell me you’re Gen Z or Alpha without telling me you’re Gen Z or Alpha.

Ah, dang, yeah if you don’t have admin rights on your server I’m not sure there’s anything you can do manually 🫤

Are these bridge puppet users from 3rd party chat services? If so, I don’t know if it would mess anything up, but you might be able to edit those users in Synapse admin (assuming you have that set up). You might even be able to change avatars that way. I’d try it with a contact you don’t care about accidentally breaking first.

And make America pay for it! That’d make me laugh every time I think about it for now and forever after Donald Trump tried to get Mexico to pay for his dumb fucking wall.

For sure, hands are generally getting better, but they are still a persistent problem. Mostly you need a prompter who isn’t lazy and is actually looking at the outputs.

It’s the leaning tower of cheeza!

On a serious note, that was probably not a great way to go and I feel bad for the family.

If you want to learn a little bit more about Lemmy, this docs page on join-lemmy.org is a pretty good primer.

No worries! The Fediverse is a different world with unfamiliar terminology and we’ve all been there.

I think maybe you are confusing instances with communities? Instances are the servers you sign up your account on like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml whereas communities like asklemmy are hosted on an instance. I think there’s universal agreement that growing communities is generally a good thing because it leads to more content and discussion. Growing instances on the other hand isn’t super important (indeed there are going to be plenty of people like myself that are going to stick with a single user personal instance and be perfectly happy). I think the person you’re replying to was confused by the wording of your post.

Believe it or not, we’re living in the most peaceful period of human history thus far. I’d recommend the book The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker which talks about how far we’ve come. That said, I see the threat of global warming, lack of fresh water, famine, and energy scarcity becoming threats to the current status quo, though. If we don’t figure some things out as a species, we’re likely in for some turbulent times in the next hundred years.

Presence tracking allows users to see the state (e.g online/offline) of other local and remote users.

Disadvantages include (this list is probably not exhaustive):

• Presence is disabled (as this uses a fair amount of resources)
• It has a tendency to be overloaded occasionally because so many people use it
• You have to play by their rules (not a problem for most users, but it bears mentioning)

You could also join other Matrix servers, especially ones that cater to a particular interest of yours.

If you go with self hosting, running a decent personal Matrix server that is capable of joining large rooms like Matrix HQ is likely going to cost you money and/or time.

Personally, I think it’d be nice if you could self-host just the bridge instances and connect them with beeper yourself, so that the part that isn’t e2e encrypted is running on software you can validate and hardware you control.

I 100% agree this would be a great solution. That’s what I thought this page was going to be at first until I kept reading and realized it’s just a config guide for the Matrix Ansible setup. I wish they didn’t say “self host Beeper” on that page at all because self hosting Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with the Beeper service other than their devs built the bridges that they’re showing you how to set up with Matrix.

I’m not sure where this text is that you’re referring to.

It’s almost not even fair to say they’re merely contributing back to the upstream bridges. Most of the bridges would not exist at all without the Beeper developers.

It’s also kind of funny that the section of their website you quoted still has language that implies you have to pay for Beeper when it’s been free for months at this point. The primary reason to self host Matrix at this point is for privacy and complete control. And self hosting Matrix is only free if you use existing hardware and I would recommend a cloud instance for most people.

Beeper’s server set up is actually a lot more complicated than just standard Synapse at this point. When they say you can “self host Beeper” that’s really not accurate at this point at all. All of their 3rd party chat bridges are dynamically spun up on a per user basis with hungryserv and those servers operate in parallel with a synapse server for Matrix interoperability all behind a roomserv server. Here’s a presentation that one of their lead developers created regarding their new architecture.

Afaik, that isn’t in effect yet, but will become a major factor next year.

As long as they don’t try to mandate that tech companies provide encryption backdoors, have at it.

As long as they didn’t staple the wire or something.