JRaccoon

I have had this blog post about SDRs (Software Defined Radio) bookmarked for a couple of years now:

https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/

Apparently the basic models only cost around 30-50 dollars. I’ve been thinking about getting one, but I haven’t had the time to dive into it yet.

I was going to agree to disagree, but I couldn’t resist biting one more time because the link you posted turned out to be really interesting, but probably not for the reasons you were expecting… It’s past midnight where I live and I have work tomorrow so I’ll keep this one short.

Two things. First, just a reminder that like I wrote in my last message, I’m not arguing for any instance to re-federate Hexbear or Lemmygrad. It’s clear even just from reading this thread that most users don’t want to see them, and that’s actually a perfectly valid reason to maintain the status quo. But at this point it’s also pretty clear that ideological reasons and personal opinions are part of why those instances are so widely defederated and we are lying to ourselves if we insist otherwise.

Second, let me prove it by using your alt’s post you linked. I’ll be really frank here as you seem like someone who won’t take it personally. It’s obvious you feel very strongly about this matter, you’re good with words, and you’re not scared to influence others to adapt your ideals. Your post on discuss.online is honestly very well written if that was your goal. It’s manipulative, but not in instantly obvious way. It’s a textbook case actually: (All quotes below are directly from the post)

• Starts with an appeal to fear (“…we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us…”)
• Overgeneralization from anecdote (“…Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here…”)
• Poisoning the well (“…at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith…”)
• Appeal to social proof (“…Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated…”)
• Loaded language (“…troll instance…”, “…flooding over here…”)
• False consensus (“…most of us…”)
• Shifting the burden of proof (“…the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?..”)
• Flattery (“…Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices…”, “…you are doing a fantastic job of being admins…”)
• Strategic concessions (“…That one I understand may be more problematic…”)

I could go on, but it’s late and I’m tired…

Then add what looks like a mountain of evidence, but is mostly a handful of trolls and douchebags, something you can find from almost any larger instance. Most people aren’t going to dig through the “evidence”, and just like that, discuss.online defederated Hexbear. It’s not my place to comment on the decision itself, especially since it doesn’t affect me. I’m just pointing what happened there.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your point of view in such detail. It’s not every day that a Lemmy comment makes me really think or maybe even change my opinion a bit :)

I actually agree with almost everything you wrote. If I were unlucky enough to be friends with both Russia and Ukraine, then sure, that game night would be very unlikely to happen. For science tho, I decided to check what the hell people on Hexbear and Lemmygrad are actually discussing to make everyone and their dog want to block them. Judging by the first two pages of recent threads on both, they seem like generally nice people who I disagree with politically very much, but could still imagine spending a fun evening with without anyone getting murdered. And at most game nights I’ve attended, politics is one of the banned discussion topics anyway xD

Lemme be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing for suddenly reversing the defederation of those two instances. That’s not an argument I’m qualified to make, first of all because I don’t know the full history we have with them. What I’m trying to ask is whether we’re absolutely sure all these defederation decisions are solely based on provable facts and past behavior, rather than some instance admins simply disliking how certain people think and deciding they know better than their users what they should or shouldn’t see. Just like the Tesseract dev recently were exposed trying to do. Because if it’s the latter, then it’s a very dangerous road we are on.

My own experience is that in 3+ years on Lemmy, I don’t remember having a single bad interaction with someone from Hexbear, for example. That’s why I’m so surprised to find so many instances defederating them. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s bad experiences, but I think everyone should ask themselves whether they actually had those experiences themselves or have only heard about them from others?

Also worth adding, I fully understand I’m using a free service (although I do make a small monthly donation to my instance) and no instance is obligated to provide a platform for any content they don’t want to. As you said, anyone can host an instance and freely choose who to federate with. But if we cannot trust the admins of these large, well-known, and promoted (e.g. join-lemmy.org) instances to make decisions based on the common good of their users rather than their own personal opinions, then the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers. And that’s something to be plenty sad about.

Btw, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own instance just for myself. But wouldn’t it be really hard to discover new communities that way? To my understanding, an instance only receives posts and comments from communities that someone on that instance is already subscribed to?

Yeah, I get your argument, and obviously it’s good to have instances with different federation policies. It’s just that when big instances like the ones in this chart start swinging the defederation hammer around, I worry that some (or many) users end up disconnected from users and communities without ever realizing it or agreeing with the decision.

Have you ever tried to organize a fun game night with friends but two of them just can’t get along, ruining the whole thing? That’s kinda the feeling I get from this.

I think the main issue is that this isn’t communicated clearly. Most people joining a random instance listed on join-lemmy.org won’t know what defederation means and they have no way of knowing that by choosing that particular instance they’ll be cut off from a certain number of other users.

Kinda eye-opening, thx for making the chart. I hadn’t realized it had gotten this bad. In my opinion, defederation should only ever be used to combat spam, not because of ideological differences or disputes between individuals.

One of the most common tips for people looking to switch over from Reddit has been that the instance you choose doesn’t really matter. But it clearly does. Choose the “wrong” instance and you may suddenly find yourself cut off from a sizable portion of other users because someone else decided they know better than you what you should and shouldn’t see.

I’m lucky to be on an instance that has “only” defederated one instance in this chart (lemmygrad.ml). I don’t really follow the drama around here, so I have no idea why that instance is banned. All I see is that there are 558 active users I’ll never be able to interact with just because someone I don’t personally know (my instance admin) made that decision at some point.

Wasn’t there just a big drama because some app developer built-in their own opinionated blocklist into their app or something? How is this any different?

My point being, why not leave these kinds of drastic decisions to individual users, who can and should block whoever they want, instead of dividing threadiverse into silos at the instance level?

I run Debian on my homelab and manage Ubuntu Servers at work. I haven’t seen any practical differences between the two. Sometimes you might get a bit newer version of something from the Ubuntu repositories than from the Debian ones but not even once has that been an issue and most of stuff I use come from 3rd party repositories anyway.

Probably the fact how I just freaking teleported and somehow I’m still alive

It works great when you log in as a user like you normally would on a Windows pc. But on a server you want it to run as a service, starting automatically in the background and/or being managed by the failover cluster without requiring a user to log in.

The solution back then was to use netplwiz autologon. Obviously a hack and bad for security, but fine for a homelab. After googling it now, it looks like some other “solutions” are documented in the GitHub issue about this.

Asking out of curiosity: is there a specific reason you’re running Windows on your server? I used to do the same on my home servers because that’s what we used to have at work, and I wanted to learn and test some stuff. But it was a difficult road, to put it mildly. Simple things, like getting Docker autostart on boot seemed almost impossible. At some point I just gave up and switched to Linux.