Thanks for the feedback… that’s good news considering I recently bought a 2nd-hand NAS that’s 32bit.

For cases where the instance is someone else’s. Instances vanish out of the pure blue sometimes. I’ve lost lots of content that way. Also useful for offline reference for those of us who do not have Internet at home.

I think I can force a new instance to cache a copy of an old post simply by searching for the old post using the URL as a query. That would get a verbatim copy of the post (perhaps along with the whole thread) on the new instance. But of course from there the problem is that the new cached version is still associated to the previous (foreign) community. Without knowing the code, I would speculate that it would just be a matter of changing the community it appears in to a local one in the DB (though it would of course have to be done server side).

Perhaps I should be. But that would only increase the need for a backup app. In fact, a backup app would encourage me to have shorter lived accounts because maintaining an account would no longer be a precondition to accessing my past content. From there, using upload functionality would be optional.

Oof… well, hopefully that was just a bad example. Hopefully a FOSS SQL server exists with the same capability.

Interesting that Lemmy server has no disk access (that in effect, it just uses inter-process communication). Apparently it is possible to query a DB for the available remaining space for wherever that DB lives.

So IMO it is still a Lemmy issue. In the event that Postgres cannot handle the query (which I have not checked), it is still a Lemmy issue because Lemmy should not choose a DB that cannot provide storage info.

That’s not an obstacle. It’s a matter of where to draw the line for switching to read-only mode. A good design would obviously switch to read-only (w.r.t. user ops) when there is still plenty of space for logs.

The good thing about the fediverse is if you don’t like that your admin decided to keep the downvote option you can always move the community to somewhere that does hide the downvote option.

No you do not have that permission. Only local users can form a community on a particular node. What you suggest is a hack as a workaround to flawed software, which only works to the extent that there exists both a node that accepts new users and for which the community topic is aligned with the node’s purpose/constitution.

There are very few public nodes that disable downvotes. We are talking single digits (like <10 nodes fedi-wide). Considering all the other factors in node selection, there could be no options for various given situations.

Also doesn’t it only effect local users? Someone from another instance can still downvote it.

Yes. That’s a good point. Though I wouldn’t say this justifies the limitation.

It would also be possible for a client app to be coded to default to showing down votes based on the settings of the native community settings.

Update

According to my datasets, this is the complete list of Cloudflare-free nodes that have open reg and disable downvotes:

belgae.social “Belgae Social”
crazypeople.online “crazypeople.online”
discover.deltanauten.de “Discover”
discuss.hadan.social “hadan.social”
lemmy.blahaj.zone “Blåhaj Lemmy”
lemmy.casasnow.noho.st “SnowfanLemmy”
lemmy.durstig.online “Personal Lemmy”
lemmy.snoot.tube “lemmy.snoot.tube”
libretechni.ca “LibreTechni.ca”
lt.harding.dev “Voyager App Test”
maga.place “Maga Place”
nsfwaiclub.com “NSFW AI Club”
realbitcoin.cash “Real Bitcoin Cash”
redlemmy.com “Redlemmy”
thevoteplace.nohost.me “VotePlace”
va11halla.bar “VA-11 Hall-A Bar”

Cloudflare is where they are hosting, correct?

CF is not a hosting provider. Wherever the website is hosted, Cloudflare masks that from us, which is another separate problem because we don’t even have enough transparency to know who else is in the loop. If an admin chooses CF as a proxy, then from that decision you can expect them to have no hesitation about licking the boots of Amazon, MS, or Google for hosting service.

CF is a man-in-the-middle who intercepts all traffic. They hold the keys, thus creating a deception with browser padlocks. The browser shows you a padlock which implies that you have a secure tunnel, but in fact the tunnel terminates at Cloudflare where all traffic is seen in the clear. From there, you have no way of knowing if the traffic is fully exposed between Cloudflare and the host.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue here, but wouldn’t any Lemmy instance with any amount of scale necessarily be centralized to some degree? If not Cloudflare, than some other provider would be the point of contention.

Scale is the wrong goal. It’s antithetical to decentralisation. Cloudflare brings the most muscle to the table, and enables an instance to grow disproportionately and out of control. A non-CF node gives some measure of confidence that an instance is not planning to get greedy with accummulating power through disproportionate scale.

I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good,

This is not that sort of scenario. There is neither “good” nor “perfect” with Cloudflare. Just enshitification and harm to netneutrality.

so I’m willing to accept some negatives.

For what? It’s a stupid trade. You elevate tyranny and corporate oppression for what? You cannot even claim to have good uptime (the theoretical selling point of CF) because of how often Cloudflare falls over. Even if Cloudflare would one day eventually sort out its availability issues, it will still be a foolish trade-off.

I think the more important factor is if the instance aligns with my values

Well if using technofeudal bullying fiefdoms like CF aligns with your values, you may be in the right place. For me, if a fedi instance is inside Cloudflare’s walled-garden, I instantly know without further checking that the admins are out of alignment with my values and decentralization principles. It’s a time-saver when short listing prospective nodes to register on. It also helps me shortlist where to post.

That would depend on who you ask. If you’re asking me, centralised nodes are a bad place to be. It’s like choosing to disproportionately concentrate copious power in the hands of a few. But most users have enough engagement greed to follow the crowd and go where most other people are, in order to get the most views, thus feeding into the network effect.

Cloudflare abuses its power, so I will not feed it.

If you don’t mind disproportionate concentrations of power in the hands of very few and don’t mind one US tech fiefdom dictating who gets access to ~35% of all websites in the world, where you are now is perfect.

If you value decentralisation, then I suggest visiting lemmyverse.net. Click the “Tags” button, then in the popup click “hide tags” on the “Cloudflare” row. Then close the filter list [X]. From there, the instances showing are non-Cloudfare instances.

I personally go a little further by cancelling instances that have more than 2 standard deviations above the avg number of users because they are centralised due to size. But that’s not as easy to do. I harvest the datasets and use a script to work that out.

You mean don’t leave /over this fiasco/. Of course, if you support decentralisation then you already avoid both LW and pawb.social, as both are centralised in Cloudflare Inc’s giant privacy-abusing walled-garden.

Until the LW admins do something much more stupid, I strongly vote Nay. If they do, I’m happy to respond accordingly.

LW joined Cloudflare’s centralised walled-garden. Then they abused that bandwith to grow without restraint to be the biggest concentration of network-effect-exploitation in the fedi by orders of magnitude beyond multiple standard deviations above the avg size. Power mongers with absurdely disproportionate influence and control. This alone is cause to ditch LW. It’s like a Facebook within the fedi trying to masquerade as “decentralised”.

pawb.social is also centralised on Cloudflare.

Not at all. But along those lines, it needs to be said that when someone reported child porn to Cloudflare, Cloudflare demanded the identity of the person blowing the whistle. Then Cloudflare took no action other than to furnish the identity of the whistle blower to the CP host admin, who then published the identity so that their users would retaliate against the whistle blower. Then when Matthew Prince was questioned about this, he said the whistle blower should have used a fake name. This basically confirms that Cloudflare cannot be trusted with anything that calls for privacy – when at the same time they have a MitM view of over ⅓ of the worlds web traffic as they hold the SSL keys.

But to answer your question, I suggest:

• https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/cloudflare.md
• https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/18/cloudflare-has-created-the-largest-most-rigidly-exclusive-walled-garden-in-the-world
• https://web.archive.org/web/20240601161454/robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website
• https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/20/comparison-of-the-human-disempowerment-severity-of-3-walled-gardens-facebook-google-and-cloudflare/

Lemmy World and Lemm.ee are both boot licking instances centralised on the exclusive network of Cloudflare, which violates the most basic principles of the fedi’s purpose. LW is also centralised by size alone, so it’s the most notorious adversary among us in an otherwise decentralised free world.

That’s only crazy from the standpoint of normies w/out an infosec background. If you have an infosec background, then you understand and appreciate the principle of least privilege. It is foolish to disclose more information than necessary for a job. You do not need to give up your IP address to obtain a quote for work on your house, so why should you? It’s foolish. Why do you think knowing my IP address is required in order to furnish me a quote for some work? It’s rediculous, of course.

Normies, of course, do not know these basic concepts. They have a naive take on security – that you should only use security if you need it. Smarter people (infosec ppl) rightfully find the opposite - that you should operate securely by default, and demand justification for absence thereof. If I am giving up security and exposing myself more, I need a reason. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not competent with security.

Getting a quote on a renovation job is not a good reason to leave a more secure network for the clearnet.

I happen to have a machine that actually does not work on clearnet. But that’s besides the point. Even if clearnet worked for me, I would not see justification for using it in this circumstance.

Lol. If that’s how science works for you, you are following some shit science. Survey results are notoriously the cheapest and shittiest way of gathering information about the world. Anyone saying that their survey results should supercede the opinion of actual experts in a field shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Anyone saying that a general finding supercedes a specific finding by actual experts in a field shouldn’t be taken seriously. Anyone who proposes disregarding evidence should not be taken seriously, and certainly not more seriously than Dr.Bregman who cites the research in his talks.

Surveys are worth somewhere between jack and fucking shit in science because people can answer differently based on what they had for breakfast this morning.

If you don’t control for that, you’re doing it wrong.

We could easily imagine that the difference exists because modern students are simply more self aware.

We could imagine that, only if you actually study the wording of the survey and first find that it was incompetently worded to ask the questions straight, prima facie, so as to leak to the study subjects what is being studied.

It isn’t an emotional plea. I’m pointing out your biases,

The bias is evident in your emotion. You cannot counter the evidence so you look to attack the person. It’s despirate.

which are leading you to a myopic and closed minded view of the situation.

To be close minded is to disregard the facts. Such as claiming the evidence should be ignored because a survey was used.

You would do better to actually look at the evidence and find specific flaws, rather than rely on broad hand-waving at every level of analysis.

I am hoping that by pointing out that “kids these days don’t have any work ethic” is such a worn out cliche

It’s a worn out strawman. It requires you to misquote me to make an emotional plea.

Are you high? The cost of university is intrinsically linked to students’ economic future.

Plz don’t post when you are drunk. Surely if you were sober you could separate the cost of university from future goals and outlooks. It is in fact extrinsic motivation that is replacing intrinsic motivation.

There is no intrinsic link between the cost of university and the students’economic future. You are conflating cost with attendence. Attendence is intrinsicly linked to the students’economic future. The cost, which may or may not be paid by the student whole or in part, is extrinsic.

If you are staring down the barrel of tens of thousands in student debt, you will be much more concerned about your economic future for entirely rational reasons.

That concern requires being money-centric to begin with.

It is well established science that differences between the generations are largely overstated.

This is hand waving. It’s useless for countering science to the contrary which pinpoints a specific difference. Science does not work like you think it does. Abstract social science does not defeat actual survey results.

What differences remain tend to be driven by environmental factors

Yes, and? This is just assigning blame. It’s fair enough to blame the adults for cultivating the money-centrism in the young. It’s interesting, yet still irrelevant to the thesis.

You, on the other hand, seem to be lumping whole generations together and ascribing the differences to some kind of moral decay. Which, oh my god, is the most “get off my lawn” take ever. Seriously, you are acting the cliche.

The science speaks for itself. This emotional plea against survey results is just a show of desperation. It’s not compelling.

tf are you talking about? Yes, students in university are more concerned about their economic future these days…? This seems like a straightforward fact.

You’ve lost track of your own claim, which was to say that the cost of university is /why/ the survey results are what they are. Now you are talking about economic future, which is more what the survey was getting at – the prioritisation of money post-grad and thereafter.

Humans come with various degrees of intelligence. The short-sighted ones do not have a monopoly on “human nature”. The trait to forecast and make very long-term decisions is very much human. But again, to varying degrees of capability depending on the individual.

Corporations cannot in the slightest be reguarded as “human”. Corps are not natural. They are an artificial construct. They are not a good source for learning about human nature. You have misunderstood the purpose of the corporation. Profitting is literally the job of the corporate machine. They do not destroy the planet due to any sort of human condition. They do so because the corporate constitution is written to profit, not protect the environment.