7heo

Thanks for digging and reporting on this, but I'm gonna take a break with my phone (the main way I interact with Lemmy), since it is such a steaming pile of shit.

I'll try to find a way to use Lemmy on a proper OS without using the horrendous web interface (hopefully there are cool clients out there), and then I'll see. 👋

Oof.

"Religion for yourself" in the age of internet of called "personal belief". So, the term "religion" now only means, like it or not, "institutionalized religion".

This is 100% caused by the fact that people "identify" as Y (not using X as a variable, as it is now a fucking confusing buzzword), and are subsequently grouped together in "echo rooms" by various platforms algorithms. This happened so overwhelmingly that in less than a decade, it redefined the default behavior of people, online, and you will now see people automatically seeking those echo rooms. Even on Lemmy, where people are literally seeking instances that will validate their own beliefs, and block those they do not share.

TL;DR: stay away from trustpilot, they are anything but trustworthy. The EU federation really has to provide such platform, and not rely on a private corporation, if they want to promote trust in the EU. In the meanwhile, we should really get a review website aggregator, to spot the inconsistencies.

If I learned anything recently is that trustpilot is essentially an online "private security" firm at best, and an online "protection business" at worst, where they abuse their market dominant position, and wait for users to post damaging (however truthful) reviews of a business to then "offer" said business an opportunity to "manage and display"[^1] their reviews (what is there to manage about reviews third parties left of your business, aside from removing them?) for a modest sum starting from 250E a month, more than doubling for every tier, and going to undisclosed amounts, for the "enterprise" offer.

However they will also do nothing against fake positive reviews (as evidenced by the sheer amount of different websites offering them), and you can buy several dozen online for around 250E (or see here).

I discovered all this recently after seeing concerning patterns and doing tests (with the means available to me). In the process of doing said tests, I discovered a very well rated (essentially 5 out of 5) company (that I won't name), that straight up lies about their entire offer, and merely sublets (without disclosing it) the offer of a much larger, and much, much cheaper company; all the while offering broken basic features.

[^1]: taken from their website:

Manage reviews for stores and branches

Stand out in local search as you manage and display content on each of your sites

Well, as in let's say instance A is federated to B, B federated to C, A blacklisted C.

So, clearly, A isn't getting data about C. It will drop it on ingress (I expect).

But, will C have access to the exact same data about A, through B, that it would have access to from A if not blocked by A?

I'm actually curious to know if federated instances share the data of their federated instances... if so, there is a proper reason to be actually alarmed, as ACLs would essentially be cosmetic only.

I hope the "published" column is the time at which that user downvoted you and not the time at which you posted the original content... there is less than 2s in between some.

No budget was stated, and I'm not gonna assume you don't want a "good piece of hardware" because you looked at something 2 orders of magnitude cheaper. If I had the cash, I would definitely get one (or more!) of those bad boys, and would run all my infra on them... I might however in such case still look at an additional SBC just for plugging to the IPMI interfaces and turn the machines on and off at will.

No. A simple website won't help, it needs to be a Lemmy instance. Moreover, it needs to be a federated one.

And then, that "invisible" data being available to other admins, is a problem with federation, not with Lemmy.

Now, there could very well be efforts made to make the cleartext data of each instance users available only to the admins of that instance (and only share aggregated data with other instances), but that would also require a lot more consideration wrt mutual instance trust in the network.

Right now, since votes and other actions are public (to the federated instances admins anyway), it is doable to detect and assert foul play. The downside of this is that it allows abusers to malevolently collect data and do the same bad things that you are so certain the alternatives to Lemmy don't do (yeah, as if).

If the instances shared only aggregated data with one another, it would be much harder for abusive small instance owners to spy on any user on the network (still possible, but it would essentially would be as hard as for anyone else, as it would involve heuristics and lots of intelligence, to interpolate the missing information); but it would also be much harder for legit admins trying to enforce moderation to inspect what happened on federated instances. They would have to take those instance's admins at their words.

As an additional note: that "invisible" data that other platforms allegedly don't share, is for sale. That's what surveillance capitalism is all about... At least with Lemmy, the barrier of entry to get our data is "federation", not "money".

Edit: ~~WTF bro, a day and a half before writing this wrong comment I'm answering to, you wrote a properly worded, technically correct (top level) comment... Were you half asleep on this one??~~

Edit 2: nah, the reason why your other comment was technically correct and properly worded is that you stole it (would have been so easy to give credit...) SMH. 😮‍💨

Edit 3: So I checked your comment history (after seeing that other comment of yours about the user that mass downvoted you, I was legit curious how bad it could have been), you seem technically knowledgeable, and also educated. Thus, I reiterate, this specific comment, what gives!?

Edit 4: lol at your edit. 😶‍🌫️

Supermicro latest H13 servers are good pieces of hardware. They also can run jellyfin. For optimal longevity, I recommend a Supermicro AS -2025HS-TNR fit with 2 9654, 12 dimms of 64GB DDR5, and 12 20TB HDDs.

So that would be my pick, with the stated requirements.