Really great tool, thanks! A few questions…

In the commands, will {instance} always be rss.ponder.cat?

Is the full process:

1. create account on rss.ponder cat
2. create community using new account
3. send message to add rss feed(s)

Or do you make the communities and then we add feeds to them?

Does each message need to have only one command?

Every situation is so different that you really need professional advice.

We’re working on it :)

I miss real scrollbars. Good chonky ones. Also corners you can grab n drag.

I don’t miss the terrible alignment and lack of padding, however. Goddam.

Half of them use their real name. Also a lot of them are sharing links to content they’ve posted using their personal FB account or whatever. They don’t even try to have any opsec because they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.

All this talk of encryption and sopenas is mostly pointless - all the police need to do is join any of the Telegram channels and see the evidence for themselves, like in this case - https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350438242/man-who-wanted-build-gallows-hear-jacinda-arderns-neck-snap-guilty-threats-kill

No doubt there are private channels but there’s absolutely no shortage of criminal stuff happening out in the open.

Lemmy communities and Mastodon profiles both produce a RSS feed of posts. I’m sure there is a RSS-to-email service that would do the trick.

You could try to find an open source project to contribute to? That’ll get give you a nice big codebase to grapple with.

There is no universally good investment - it all depends on your priorities, risk appetite and timeframe.

Middle Eastern money

Something tells me the Saudis don’t want AI for the betterment of all humanity.

Could be the human rights abuses, dunno.

10 thousand people marching would make world headlines.

No, it wouldn’t. Protest is totally normalized now, it’s just a pressure release valve that helps keep the status quo running.

Here is a protest that happened today - https://cloudisland.nz/@simplicitarian/113212289035494255

Apparently it involved between 20,000 to 30,000 people - https://cloudisland.nz/@simplicitarian/113212686270895144

It will not be mentioned in any big news media outside of New Zealand.

I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:

fostering genuine connection
protecting privacy and enforcing consent
championing accessibility

I think she’s obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There’s certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they’re constructed I don’t feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.

It’s hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that’s a value tho - diversity.

There’s a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it’s best, this is a “people before economy” value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.

The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?

…and yet, here we are talking about climate change. If they’d instead organized a protest of 10,000 people marching for hours it wouldn’t have been international news and we wouldn’t be talking about climate change.

Context https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-remove-non-profit-control-give-sam-altman-equity-sources-say-2024-09-25/

The only issue is controlling Alex Jones. He’s too batshit to ever work under anyone and without him most of the value evaporates.

So now it’s up to rich people to decide if Alex Jones gets to stay on the air. Will asshole rich people who want him to continue buy it or will some nice rich people buy it to shut him down?

I look forward to cutting a pizza like that and then trying to convince others to let me have the biggest slice. Or seeming magnanimous by giving them the biggest.

Although, the distribution of the toppings is not equal throughout the pizza - on the edges there is a lot more crust.

Hi Jerry,

All good questions which reveal holes in our documentation! Quite a lot of the contents of .env are optional.

1. There is no S3 support yet. You might not need it though - after almost 1 year of operation piefed.social only has 14 GB of media saved. I’ve put a bit of thought into how to minimize disk usage with good results.

2. Yes if you leave BOUNCE_ADDRESS empty it’ll go back to the sender instead.

3. It’s configured in the .env file. You need an IMAP email inbox somewhere, which is outside of piefed’s scope to provide. The BOUNCE_* stuff is for logging into that inbox, which you won’t need to provide if not using BOUNCE_ADDRESS.

4. Yes, set MODE=‘production’, case sensitive. AFAIK anything other than ‘development’ will cause production mode to be used.

5. That’s used to connect to https://sentry.io for debugging purposes. You won’t need that.

6. MAIL_ERRORS=True will cause piefed to send you an email whenever a bug occurs. I don’t recommend using this unless you’re doing development work. You also need to have MAIL_* all set up nicely for it to work - it needs a SMTP server to connect to.

I’m guessing it’s a PeerTube thing. It started happening to me after I scrolled past a few dozen videos which makes me think it’s a rate limit with a misleading error message.

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/6457

There is one community with lots of .mp4 videos - https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]. These seem way way more efficient than YouTube so I haven’t seen the need to get too clever with lazy loading those, although it’s doable if necessary.

Yes I put a bit of effort into the multiple-video issue, with low powered devices in mind.

The biggest win on that front was lazy-loading the YouTube embeds. Also I found that Chrome can handle quite a lot of videos at once while Firefox gets overwhelmed pretty easily. In my testing with Chrome on my 2012 Macbook https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] performed okaaay. The tab used only 90 MB of RAM, surprisingly.

Videos in communities are only loaded if running on AC power and the way that is detected is using a fairly recent browser API that is only provided by Chrome (and derivatives). I’m not simply using loading="lazy" on the <iframe>, I’m using JS to add extra logic to do with the battery. Browsers that don’t have the battery API (Safari, Firefox, 10 year old Chrome) load an image instead. Even Chrome will use an image instead if running on battery power (e.g. on a phone that is not charging).

I think I’ve been pretty conservative in this regard.