phase_change

I’m a guy approaching 60, so I’ll start by saying my perception may be wrong. That could be because the protest songs from the late 60’s and early 70’s weren’t the songs I heard live on the radio but because they were the successful ones that got replayed. More likely, it’s because music is much more fractured than what I was exposed to on the radio growing up. Thus, today, I’m simply not exposed to the same type of protest songs that still exist.

Whatever the reason, I feel that the zeitgeist of protest music is very different from the first decade of my life compared to the last.

I’m curious to know why. My conspiratorial thoughts say that it’s down to the money behind music promotion being very different over those intervening decades, but I suspect it’s much more nuanced.

So, why are there fewer protest songs? Alternatively, why I am not aware of recent ones?

Ok, this is not going to be a well formulated question, because the concerns behind it are nebulous in my own head.

Some assumptions I have, that clearly inform the question that follows: I believe commercial, state, and others have sophisticated methods of influencing what I see on social media and thus, in part, what I think. I also believe that someone more willing to believe in the types of conspiratorial beliefs I’ve just expressed are more likely to be manipulated by information they’re exposed to. And, yes, I fully appreciate the irony of those beliefs.

My child is adult enough that belief patterns I encourage are very unlikely to become deep patterns. That is, I’d have to work to indoctinate my son, and he’d actively resist if my indoctrination was outside of societal norms.

He didn’t grow up exposed to the social media I suspect children do now.

How does a parent inoculate a child to the influence of social media without also creating a mindset willing to believe in a nebulous “them” that controls things—a mindset, I believe, that makes a person more likely to be controlled?

So, I’ve been self-hosting for decades, but on physical hardware. I’ve had things like MythTV and an asterisk voip system, but those have been abandoned for years. I’ve got a web server, but it’s serving static content that’s only viewed by bots and attackers.

My mail server, that’s been active for more than two decades is still in active use.

All of this makes me weird in the self-hosted community.

About a month ago, I put in a beefy system for virtualization with the intent to start branching out the self hosting. I primarily considered Proxmox and xcp-ng. I went with xcp-ng, primarily because it seems to have more enterprise features. I’m early enough in my exploration that switching isn’t a problem.

For those of you more advanced in a home-lab hypervisor, what did you go with and why? Right now, I’m pretty agnostic. I’m comfortable with xcp-ng but have no problems switching. I’m particularly interested in opinions that have a particularly negative view of one or the other, so long as you explain why.

It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.

I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.

Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.

I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.

I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.

I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.

I signed up and am currently logged in via an iPad. I wanted to browse and post on a computer. I’ve tried multiple browsers and incognito modes. With all of them, when signing into sh.itjust.works, I get nothing but the spinning button after clicking login.

I’m not sure if it’s some capacity issue, or if Lemmy doesn’t allow the same user logged in via multiple browsers.

I’m a bit scared to logout and see if that’s the case.

Anyone have any insight?

So, in thinking about how bad actors might manipulate Lemmy, I have some questions.

In this scenario, I’m an entity that wants to influence social media, a government, a corporation, a collection of dedicated degenerates—pick your boojum. I see this growing Lemmy thing. I figure it’s not a serious threat, but if I’m wrong, I’d like to be placed to influence things via what people see. I want to be able to upvote or downvote posts.

If I’ve got a decent budget, I’d spin up a bunch of new Lemmy instances and encourage signups when there’s this mad rush from Reddit. I’d want as many real users as I can get. I’d also create a bunch of sock puppet accounts on all of my instances. I’d probably have some of them post and comment.

If Lemmy attains critical mass, I’d be able to use those sock puppets to upvote/downvote posts I want to influence.

I (now the OP, not the hypothetical bad actor) imagine this is hard to defend against. I also imagine federation is all or nothing. That is, either you federate everything from a server or you federate nothing.

Are their granular federation options, like allowing post federation but ignoring upvote/downvote federation?

Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.

I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?

Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?

Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?

I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.

I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?

Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?