I’m not sure how it works but it may still conform to standards (just not conventional norms). E.g. consider eduroam which is common in EU schools. You need a special app for eduroam but it’s possibly combining various authentication standards with wi-fi standards. Before using eduroam I skimmed through all 1000+ SLOC of the bash script before deciding to trust it. I was revolted that I had to inspect all that code just to safely connect to campus wi-fi with confidence.

That said, I have no idea how wifi4eu works. It could be similar to eduroam and perhaps a FOSS app will eventually emerge. But until then, all we get is an all-rights-reserved copyrighted black box and no specs (AFAIK). So yes, it’s a shit show of exclusivity and privacy surrender nonetheless.

Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.

Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations -- without rules. Under capitalism.

The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.

We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.

tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?

Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

good, thanks!

Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?

It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice.. not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.

Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site -- which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.

(edit) I found a tarball on the releases page.

I just need to work out exactly what the effect of the user-configured node block is. In principle, if an LW user replies to either my thread or one of my comments in someone else’s thread, I would still want to see their comments and I would still want a notification. But I would want all LW-hosted threads to be hidden in timelines and search results.

On one occasion I commented in an LW-hosted thread without realising it. Then I later blocked the community that thread was in (forgetting about my past comment). Then at one point I discovered someone replied to me and I did not get the notification. That scenario should be quite rare but I wonder how it would pan out with the node-wide blocking option.

Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.

I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.

Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.

I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.

I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

Suppose an instance has these users:

• Victor who uses a VPN
• Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
• Terry who uses a Tor
• Norm who uses the normal clearnet
• Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to [!travelpics@exclusivenode.com](/c/travelpics@exclusivenode.com). Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

• when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
• when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

tl;dr:

• Lemmy ← shit show for years
• (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
• piefed ← never heard of it

I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.

mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.

The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.

Cloudflare filters lacking

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)