Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

For people who’ve used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don’t know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they’re not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

I’d prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

Not my experience. A few examples:

• No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

I’m not sure how that goes against what I said. That’s mostly people disliking the admins.

• Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

• Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn’t an active community elsewhere.

New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.

A lot of this bootstrapping stuff comes back to the ‘trusting trust’ attack. You could write a compiler that adds some malicious code to programs it compiles. But the thing is, it could also insert it’s own malicious code when compiling a compiler. So you look at your code, and the code of your compiler, and everything looks fine, but the exploit is still there. Someone wrote an example in rust.

Theoretically there could also be bugs that propagate this way. So to fully trust your code is doing what you think it is, you’d need a chain of compilers back to hand coded assembly.

The main thing is that TinyCC has already been bootstrapped.

Check out this page on bootstrappable.org. Basically they start with a 200 something byte binary (hex0) that can act as an assembler, then using a bunch of layers of tools and compilers you can bootstrap a whole system. I think they use stage0 to build M2-Planet, use that to build GNU Mes, and use that to build TinyCC.

So a project like this fits neatly into that bootstrapping path. It could be done other ways, but starting from a fairly complete C compiler makes it a lot easier than building an entire path from scratch.

If you’re looking for more sources for your site, Wikimedia Commons has a page with lists of sources for freely licensed media, sorted by content type. The photography list in particular is really long, and sorted into categories.

Cladistically dolphins are a type of toothed whale. They’re more closely related to species like sperm whales than toothed whales and baleen whales are to each other.

There’s still tons of people who will judge you for having children without getting married. A lot of religious groups still consider it a moral failure. And even if it was completely accepted now, it still became an insult in the first place because of that stigma, and you’d still be using it within that historical context. You can’t reclaim a slur by continuing to use it as an insult and ignoring where it comes from.

As an example, I’ve seen pretty many people use slurs for Romani people as a term for getting scammed or cheated. Usually they didn’t know the origin of the term, and didn’t mean any harm by it. They had heard it being used and assumed it was just another word. But you don’t just accept the definition these people have in their heads as an alternate definition, disconnected from the original. It has the meaning it does based on bigoted stereotypes, and by using it they’re still spreading that, even if they aren’t hateful themselves.

It usually implies it’s weird in an old-fasioned way though.

I’ve had it freeze up on me several times, where I had to reset the app to get it working again. It works most of the time, but I wouldn’t recommend it yet for general use.

Hacker’s Keyboard hasn’t had a real release in about 5 years, so it can be slightly buggy.

Unexpected Keyboard is pretty good. It’s got the complete keyboard layout available including stuff like Control and Function keys, so I think it’s an acceptable replacement. It uses swipes to type other keys, which I’m not sure if I prefer, but it works well enough. I set the swipe distance higher because I would accidentally swipe from time to time.

If you check “I’m an advanced user” in the settings, then hit the “More” button in the dropdown a few times it’ll show the more advanced interface that lets you choose which third party domains to allow. It doesn’t work quite the same since it blocks both content and scripts per site, but I find it good enough for my usage.

edit: You can technically block just scripts per 3rd party site, but it involves manually editing the content type for your rules in the settings. It’s not part of the main interface, so I never bother using it.

https://github.com/dessant/buster

UBlock Origin will block content within Firefox, and do a better job at it than AdAway. AdAway tries to block ads on the whole phone, including embeded ads in a lot of apps. But unless you root your phone, you can’t run AdAway and a VPN at the same time.

There’s a lot on PeerTube. You can search on sepiasearch.org and filter the results by license. fedi.video has a bunch of uploaded PD/CC videos.

There’s nothing quite perfect, so I still use ddg the most often. They do pull in most of their results from bing, but they also have their own crawler and use a bunch of other search engines as sources. At least they only send the search query to microsoft, so it’s better for privacy than searching directly on google or bing.

SearXNG is an open source meta search engine that compiles results from other search engines.

Marginalia and Clew are a couple of open source search engines that focus on only indexing smaller, independent, or non-commercial sites.

A lot of sites have their own search engines built in, so I’ll often search directly on sites like Wikipedia or Lemmy.

There’s a good overview of various search engines in this blog post.

Most philosophers think free will and determinism are compatible.

The creator of pixelfed is working on a tiktok alternative loops, although for now it’s in private beta.

For a starting point that is available now, you could look at Pixeldroid, an open source pixelfed app.

Besides the ones already mentioned:

• The FSF has some channels at https://framatube.org/a/fsf

• There’s a bunch of KDE related channels at https://tube.kockatoo.org

• Blender has several channels at https://video.blender.org

• https://peertube.touhoppai.moe/a/shichimi has Krita tutorials from the creator of the Pepper and Carrot webcomic.

• https://tilvids.com/a/martin_owens from someone who works on Inkscape.

• https://tilvids.com/a/togglejam looks at the science behind fictional games and shows.

• https://diode.zone/c/andrewtropin has a bunch of scheme and guix related videos

• There’s some anarchist channels on https://kolektiva.media like CrimethInc and subMedia.

A couple of gaming related accounts/channels:

• https://subscribeto.me/a/gbryant

• https://peertube.linuxrocks.online/c/boilingsteam

Most aren’t specifically for learners, but you could try:

!learntopaint@lemmy.world

!artshare@lemmy.world

!aip@lemmy.mindoki.com

!art@lemmy.world

!drawing@lemmy.world

!arting@lemmy.ml

!watercolor@lemmy.ml

These don’t have any activity, but are more aimed at learning:

!artistlounge@lemmy.ml

!learnart@lemm.ee

!artfundamentals@lemm.ee

With AI upscaling it fills it in based on the training from other images/videos. So it probably won’t be an alien, but small details common in other videos that looked similar will also show up in the upscaled videos. If an extra flower shows up in a field of grass it’s usually not a big deal, but for some things like faces or symbols small details can really change the way people interpret it.