Apart from not being that interesting for now, the first line of defence for most is manually-approved sign ups, as far as I can tell.

When the Fediverse grows, I think that weeding out accounts that post slop will be the “easy” part; the hardest part will be to identify the silent bot accounts that do nothing but upvote.

Licensing terms only govern the legal aspects, not social and moral aspects.

And not to forget: FUTO is evil.

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Keep organizing and slowly things will get better

Not to forget: FUTO is evil.

The video he apparently got sued for.

And here a follow-up video where he repeats the trick on a freshly delivered lock (cause the company was whining about allegedly foul play).

Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.

You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you’re going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

That’s a really good idea, I will from now on inspect disused garments for parts that one can use for patches

Anyone know some good offers for nice (nerdy) patches? There are nice embroidered patches on Etsy, but at 7 USD per patch they’re a bit expensive for everyday repairing (let alone extensive projects like a GNU/Linux-themed biker’s vest).

I think the general term for this is “domain sniping” or “catching”. From this, I also found this paid service, catches.io; can’t tell if it or dropcatch is better. They both only charge you when they are successful in catching the domain for you, which is good.

In general, I second the notion that one probably can’t get around paying for a professional, paid service, since one is up against professionalized scoopers (godaddy and the like), who have put a lot of optimization (down to the placing of their servers) into trying to get an edge over legitimate buyers and competing scoopers.

If you don’t yet have a USB adapter for using NVMe SSDs over USB-3 ports, I’d suggest to buy such a thing first, since they not just make for a simple yet (decently) fast storage expansion solution, but are very useful in all sorts of situations.

Like I said: it can be gamed to some degree, but what system can’t?

Besides finding better ways to positively recognize bots, we also need to invent ways that make it quicker to realize “false alarm, this user is actually legit”.

For example, users should have an option to pin posts and comments to their profile, and I suggest to provide at least two different ‘tabs’ for this in the public profile: One tab just for the usual “posts and comments you would like the world to see”, but another tab for “some recent, complex interactions between you and other (established) users that in your eyes prove quite well you’re not a bot”. The purpose is simply to save others, worried that you could be a bot, some time of going through your posts in search of signs for humanity. Yes, this can be gamed to some degree (what can’t?). However, at a technical level, the feature is little more than a copy of the “pin” feature that would be very nice to have anyways, so we can get an appreciable improvement in our ability to tell users from bots for very little programming effort.

Came here to point to this.

Also, if outside noise is preventing one from keeping the windows open over night, get custom-fitted silicone earplugs.

What hardware do you currently use and what software do you intend to run on the new machine? And what’s your budget situation?

In any case, I would always recommend to buy used or refurbished hardware. Even if it’s not necessary financially, it’s better for the environment.

That’s very cool indeed – although I dread the moment he starts talking to his followers about Lemmy.

Thank you, that’s interesting and good to know. At least it’s probably a good idea to not increment/decrement properties in very small steps (like 2% at a time) on a regular basis. I suspect the 5% steps I’m using for brightness should be fine, but I’ll implement some shortcuts that go in bigger steps just to be sure.