I’ve not fetched subtitles in a while but back when I did, I recall all the websites hosting them were extremely protectionist… more so than any other category of content on the web.

Of course the fix is to have torrents for the subtitle collections, perhaps by language.

Hopefully he asks you to audit a tool you might enjoy using or contributing to.

Sounds good.. will be interesting to see if @scratchandgame@lemmy.ml takes you up on the offer!

@loudWaterHombre@lemmy.dbzer0.com or @loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com can audit for you.

Seriously, that’s what you’re missing. Bob the non-coder can trust Microsoft not to plant spyware in MS products, or Bob can trust some portion of the public (limited to ~8 billion people) to audit the code. It’s easier to trust the public than it is to trust a corporation. It’s not just about quantity of eyes, but having eyes that are more aligned with your interests.

I’m not sure what you mean by constitution. Are you talking about a mission statement or statement of values?

These are some dictionary defs:

• a set of basic laws or principles for a country that describe the rights and duties of its citizens and the way in which it is governed
• a set of basic rules and principles for an organization that control how it operates
• your general physical condition, health, and strength
• the form or structure of something, or the way in which it is organized

In business when a company is created (constituted) by someone, they create a company constitution which declares how the business will operate and what its trade is. If you’re in the plumbing business, you would say your company is for profit and you would list the activities of plumbing and maybe selling plumbing supplies. Your company is then legally bound by that constitution. You would (e.g.) be allowed to buy sulfuric acid because plumbers have a legit use for that. But you could not use that company to go into the PC repair business, at least not without changing the company constitution. And if you update the company constitution to be a PC repair business, you would no longer be able to buy sulfuric acid. These concepts may be state-specific. When a small shop is selling a bizarre unrelated mix of things, it likely means something is dodgy with their constitution.. what business did they say they were in? The corporate constitution mechanism is somewhat supposed to mitigate shops selling sex toys, car parts, and pizzas all in the same place. It’s not always well enforced in my area.

Most people are aware of gov constitutions so I won’t go into that.. it essentially encapsulates an abstraction of the highest values of the land and gives direction and purpose.

There is also personal constitution. That is, if a person has a strong moral constitution they not only have values but they adhere to them. Vegans would be an example of those with a strong constitution (to the extent they strictly practice the vegan lifestyle).

I’m using the term loosely in the threadiverse sense. Perhaps along the lines of the 4th bullet. I intend for a node with a constitution to mean that the node owner has declared a purpose. It could be topic-focused, or region focused, or culture focused, or a way of thinking, a theme, etc.. some kind of comprehensible direction. But what we see are mostly nodes listed in the lemmyverse.net catalog with no specific purpose or structure.. just “general purpose” yet small at the same time.

What I wrote is orthogonal to whether an instance is isolated. Whether it’s federated or not is a separate discussion. How you are finding the instances would be interesting though. Where did you go to find the topic-specific instances?

Sure but that’s a lot of cost and effort to just add one drop to the ocean, which does not make a significant difference on the overall problem. We can get better leverage on the problem by encouraging tens of existing instances to get a constitution. I think to some extent that can be accomplished with directory services that are designed to address the problem. Forking #LemmyExplorer may be a way to steer things in a better direction.

Consider as well the enshitification of the web (Cloudflare exclusivity, CAPTCHAs, popups, huge cookie agreement forms, trackers like FB like buttons, etc). Creating one good website does not even begin to make a dent on the problem. It has to be fixed at a higher level, like in search engines.

Which git repo is used to host the article doesn’t matter. That project is mirrored on ½ dozen other repos. Did you follow the links of the citations? The article is well cited but sometimes the links go stale (or become cloudflared). If you had trouble reaching the cited sources plz let me know & I'll get the author to fix it. Or you can file a bug report in the issues tab.

W.r.t CSAM, CF is pro-CSAM. When a CF customer was hosting CSAM, a whistleblower informed Cloudflare. Instead of taking action against the CSAM host, CF doxxed the ID of the whistleblower to the CSAM host admin, who then published the ID details so the users would retaliate against the whistleblower. (more details)

There is no way to “disable” cloudflare if an instance has chosen to use it. It will sit between you and the server for all traffic.

Some people use CF DNS and keep the CF proxy disabled by default. They set it to only switch on the CF proxy if the load reaches an unmanageable level. This keeps the mitm off most of the time. But users who are wise to CF will still avoid the site because it still carries the risk of a spontaneous & unpredictable mitm.

I see federation is even bringing some good posts to the instance itself, nice to see.

My workflow is to start at lemmyverse.net, do a community search (philosophy in this case), and ignore all the results ending in lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and lemm.ee. That’s what brought me here.. having no idea what I would step into.

*removed externally hosted image*

To get back to the actual post though yeah I find it really irritating to no end how much I am basically obligated, especially by my school, to use certain products or services in order to be able to live my life. Yes obviously I think we should get rid of all private enterprise because capitalism sucks

That might work but it’s the nuclear option. It’s like a asked “help me kill this chicken”, and ½ dozen guys show up armed to the bone and use a human-mounted helicopter machine gun like Arnie used in Predator. I have to clarify: I intended to eat the chicken, not paint the forest with it. My bad for not being more clear.

One thing I think your post kind of misses though is that this isn’t really an issue about the ‘right to be offline’. That’s certainly one aspect of it, but ultimately these same issues apply elsewhere in life as well.

There has been a right to be online movement underway, which is largely to get broadband out to rural areas. I generally agree with that movement & not leaving people behind. The problem is, the right to be online movement will likely be so successful that a “#digitalTransformation” (like Europe is pushing down people’s throats) will go as far as forcing everyone online. This is actually happening already. In Europe there are a lot of public services which were once available to everyone but now the government excludes offline people. So the right to be online must be coupled with/offset by a simultaneous right to be offline.

And to be clear, I’m not personally opposed to doing things online. But most technologists are doing a shitty job. If a Google #reCAPTCHA is put in my face, I demand an alternative path and if that means paying for a stamp, I will. I would personally cherry-pick and use the right to be offline as an escape from technology done poorly while still interacting with online services done well (however rare that is). For other folks (like elderly people), they may really want to be wholly 100% offline. I don’t, but those people are on my side nonetheless.

For example, I might find that I am obligated to buy a car or a bicycle from a private company in order to be able get to my offline appointment for a public service.

That’s really out of scope. You can draw the scope how you want but you’re basically asking for a right to live as far from a gov office as you want, and you want the gov to schlep your ass back and forth. It’s a really tenuous stretch to relate that to a right to be offline. Though a simple right to be offline would remedy your problem nonetheless. That is, if you are offline the gov could not force you to use their website, but they could satisfy offliners by offering snail-mail service and/or over-the-counter service. That’s good enough. If it’s too far to walk to the office, it’s your own problem. If you choose to live in some remote part of Alaska only reachable by a bush plane, the consequences of that decision are on you & it would be unreasonable for the gov to send a bush plane to fetch you (matters of survival aside).

the state itself relies on private enterprise to carry out its own public functions

It’s not inherently a problem that the gov uses private enterprise. E.g. the courts have bathrooms and those bathrooms have toilet paper. I would find it a silly extreme to draw a hard line and say the gov must produce its own toilet paper, for example, in order to be freely separate from the private sector.

But in some cases indeed the outsourcing is reckless. Such as when the US gov outsourced flight services to Lockheed Martin who was then caught asleep at the wheel (not responding to air traffic safety radio calls).

So I’m okay with private sector toilet paper, but not enthusiastic about the private sector doing tasks that need safety or privacy.

To address these two points:

1. a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
2. the right to be offline

Both are impossible to achieve under the capitalist mode of production.

I don’t think so. But perhaps you are thinking of them as absolute rights. None of the rights we have today are absolute rights AFAIK. The two rights above could be protected at least to the extent that they don’t interfere with other rights under capitalism.

Just as capital monopolizes our time in the workplace, it monopolizes our time outside of it. The majority of our interactions inside and outside the workplace, are subjected to “the private market”.

The private market in that context is optional in most of the world as I know it. You don’t have to work for someone else under the umbrella of a private company. If you want, you can work in the public sector directly for the gov, or you can scrap employment entirely and do the off-grid survivalist Henry David Thoreau thing.

If you want to get rid of this, you have to rid yourself of the private capitalist market economy itself.

I don’t think so. I’m not trying to stop Alice from working for Bob. Live and let live. We need not scrap capitalism entirely just to have alternatives. Alternatives can coexist.

Sure, you can log off, you can refuse to have a cell phone, you can refuse all the things which your are subjected to, but you will effectively be barred from participation in society as such. You can’t see the ebooks needed to go to school, you will have difficulty accessing banking services, etc…

When you say being offline bars someone from participation in society, that’s too abstract & overly generalized. If company X demands that I have a mobile phone (e.g. Twitter demands I share my GSM number which they verify via SMS), I can scrap both. It sounds like your complaint is that they are bundled - that I cannot use Twitter without a phone. That’s unfortunate but I would not go as far as to force all capitalist players to support customers who want to opt out of the rest of capitalism. For me it’s good enough¹ that I can reject Twitter and mobile phones both together.

The only problem I’m fixated on is when a public service forces me to gave a mobile phone or Facebook account. Fixing that problem does not require scrapping capitalism entirely. It merely requires a right to be offline and a right to be free from the private sector. If these rights were to exist & I were to invoke those rights in the Danish university, it would not require ending capitalism. It would just require the school to give RSA tokens as a 2FA alternative.

Footnote 1: I’m neglecting the separate problem that elected gov officials are exclusively microblog-reachable on Twitter. But I address that at the end.

Boycotts accomplish almost nothing, and are far harder to organize than many people think.

Some people think a boycott is necessarily organized with some kind of goal or expected impact. That is not at all what I meant. I have hundreds of boycotts going right now just by myself personally. 1-person boycotts. These are not to take down a company. My goal with my unorganized solo boycotts is to simply ensure that I am not part of the problem myself. And to that extent the goals are accomplished. I should have a right to boycott regardless of whether the boycott brings down the company. It is in fact the boycotter who decides what the goal is.

You may think a 1-person boycott is weak. But consider this: I was the only student who boycotted Facebook. All the other students, staff, and the school itself all used Facebook. But because I had my 1-person boycott, everyone in the school was forced to step outside of Facebook if they wanted to reach me. I abandoned the school shortly after entry, but I could have (or should have been able to) stay & argue that the school was denying me a right to public education by imposing Facebook. I missed announcements of official school seminars & events by not being in Facebook. You can fix that problem by making school comms in-house. You need not scrap all of capitalism.

Let’s say you boycott twitter and it goes bankrupt. Twitter2 will just do the same thing under a different name. Unless it becomes a public utility, it will be in private hands and exist to extract profit. The only way out of these problems is out of capitalism.

The only problem with Twitter under the thesis of my OP is that elected public reps are exclusively microblog-reachable on Twitter. And worse, Twitter is exclusive. But that could also be fixed by installing a “freedom from the private sector marketplace” in parallel with free speech (1A in the US), which would then force gov reps into the fedi. We don’t need the impossibly giant leap of making Twitter’s existence impossible; we just need some public/private separation. Schools and gov reps & other people working in the capacity of their public duty should be forced onto gov-operated fedi servers so they are reachable by the public. I wouldn’t give a shit if they still had Twitter accounts for personal use only. Live and let live while serving the /whole/ public.

I appreciate all your references. I’ll have to check them out.

So I have to ask why was this post which asked what is a decent client for Debian removed (per rule #3):

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1681507

while at the same time this “What's the best Android/iPhone app for Lemmy?” is not removed? Is it because the moderator created this thread & thus /above the law/, in effect?

I have had no choice but to try Firefox because (for years) #Lemmy has been wholly broken on Ungoogled Chromium. And for me the FF-Lemmy UX is terrible.

Younger generations have no baseline for comparison because they were raised in GUI browsers. My baseline is IRC, gopher, usenet, emacs, lynx, mutt, bitlbee, toot (TUI + CLI), gnu screen, & piles of scripts on 15+ y.o. hardware, etc. So [bart simpson’s grandpa’s voice] all you young whipper-snappers chained to your GUIs with JavaScript, mice, labor-intensive clicking around have a very different reality and baseline of what’s good. Us older folks struggle to find tools that don’t rely on a mouse & which avoid all the #darkPatterns & bugginess of the modern day web.

(edit) and wtf there are apparently several phone apps for the fedi. I just don’t get how people can like the small screens, small keyboards, and speech-to-text that causes embarrassments.

The bigger problem is not even the mouse-dependent UI.. it’s that browser clients have no practical HDD access apart from cookie storage. Rightly so, but I should have a local copy of things I write because my hard drive has better uptime & availability than any cloud service could have. When censorship strikes msgs are destroyed without backups. And (at least in the case of Mastodon), even the admins cannot recover posts they’ve deleted even if they want to. Wholly trusting a server to keep your records is a bad idea. So a browser can never by suitable for blogging/microblogging, at least certainly not without an archive download option that can be triggered by a cron job.