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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • AFAIK it’s a system to let Linux software bundle all of it’s dependencies up with it so it just works in a self contained way that doesn’t care about what else is and isn’t installed.

    Advantages is that they are more reliable and user friendly than traditional approaches to Linux software installation.

    Disadvantages are that they have bigger footprints where you might have the same dependencies I dependently installed for each app rather than as a single installation that they all utilise and that they need to be updated individually (as part of the flatpak.) IE if basically every app uses the same dependency and it turns out to have a huge security hole, under normal Linux software the developer would patch it, you’d update it and the hole would be filled. With Flatpaks you need each individual Flatpak developer to update the version used by their Flatpak and for you to update all those Flatpaks before the hole is plugged. I think I remember they run in some kind of sandbox to mitigate this though.






  • I suspect that all the not Linus people were already working towards publishing a response like this to the Gamer’s Nexus video when Linus ran off wildcarding again and they then decided to rush out a video so they could clearly state that Linus’s response only represented Linus’s knee-jerk response and was not supported by or representative of LTT/LMG’s take. So… It really really sucks that they responded to a situation created by them rushing and being sloppy by rushing and being sloppy but it may well be that if Linus had been kept under control they wouldn’t have and keeping Linus under control seems to be a big part of their strategy going forwards. I guess my point is it’s too early to judge whether the shift in internal power dynamics at LTT/LMG, refocusing their priorities and reducing their rate of output will actually solve the issues or not.


  • I think I heard that (and the jokes about the CFO being the “sponsor”) had been trimmed out of the video (which I haven’t checked.) The first time I saw it (just about an hour after posting) it was still included and you could still see the value that Billet labs was giving for their prototype was still unblurred and there was a comment from the head of labs about how they were going to post some sort of transparency video behind a paywall (on Floatplane.) When I rewatched later that day (to show someone) they had blurred out the value, they still had the jokes about selling stuff. I’m not honestly sure if they still had the thing about the plan for the paywalled transparency video. Later I saw a short reaction video to the drama that claimed all of those elements had now been removed from the LTT video.




  • It certainly does pose an issue from that perspective but I’m not sure any more than websites in general. It’s not actually that hard to rip off a website’s design and so it’s quite common to see phishing scams of that nature. In some sense it’s less likely to happen with people impersonating a Lemmy instance simply because actually setting up and running one is more work than impersonating just a regular website.

    Yes, someone could create an instance called “officiallemmyinstancedotcom” and pretend to be the one single official lemmy to try to trap people searching for Lemmy not entirely knowing what it is, but I don’t think the fact that people already think places like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world are synonymous with Lemmy is a prerequisite for someone doing that. If anything, people who mistakenly think one of those two is the only “real” Lemmy are probably less likely to be taken in by a malicious one.

    Still…

    Providing clearer on site messaging to help avoid this sort of confusion sounds like something a good UX designer could perhaps assist the Lemmy FOSS project with?



  • Yeah no problem. It gets confusing because Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon and the other big one I currently forget the name of are all their own set of software that people use to make their own instances with that can all talk to each other across the different instances and platforms but also, many of the big instances use the name of the software they use as part of their own name. ie mastodon.cloud (which is how you are presumably accessing this conversation) is a Mastodon instance (or whatever term is used for the Mastodon equivalent of a lemmy instance) but it is not Mastodon itself, just one example of Mastodon in action. Similarly in Lemmy-land you have major instances called beehaw.org (a Lemmy instance that my account is on and through which I am interacting with this post), lemmy.ml (which is the instance this post is actually on and is the oldest Lemmy instance run by the people who started the FOSS Lemmy project) and lemmy.world (the biggest Lemmy instance.) All three of those instances are run by entirely different people for different purposes and they all intercommunicate (to some degree, I think maybe beehaw.org currently is defederated from lemmy.world due to the challenges of moderating users from a large open instance in line with beehaw’s goals), they are all Lemmy instances but none of them are actually the Lemmy FOSS itself. However, people often think that either lemmy.ml or lemmy.world is exactly synonymous with Lemmy or that beehaw.org is a seperate thing.

    Really imo all the Fediverse stuff should have set a standard that would require consistent clear naming across all instances (IE, perhaps they could all be required to have an actual name independent of the name of the underlying technology and then also include what they actually are, ie beehaw-lemmy.org, beehaw-mastodon.org etc) but we’re well past that point now I think.






  • Yeah, while I understand that there was a loss of customisation and that naturally the existing username tended towards people who likes the older style, I personally absolutely hated it to the point that I just couldn’t get into Reddit at all until the update. It also doesn’t really seem odd to me for a website to update it’s UI once in a while (tbh, I’d be turned off by one that doesn’t. Even the best UI today is still relatively speaking from the bronze age of UX design. If the best we have today is the best we can do I’ll be sorely disappointed.)