I find myself wondering just how complicated TVS could actually be before it’s no longer possible to hijack the display signal that’s fed to the display

Unlike with cars, TVS seem simple enough that a sufficiently motivated novice could modify a cheap TV to circumvent these bullshit features. If they ever started requiring internet connections to start or use these, i think enough people would be bothered by it that there would probably be a secondary market of modified hardware

As with most enshitifications, the question will ultimately be one of complacency of the average consumer.

I dont see how the second cert that goes to the site is useful if it isnt still associated with the first, but I also wouldnt trust the state to abide by an untraceable standard to begin with because identifying individuals by their accounts is in their interest.

I get where the enthusiasm for cryptography is coming from, but I think it’s misplaced.

A state issuing a cert file has to be able to verify that it goes to the intended person. The state would have to know the ID of the person they’re issuing it to, otherwise it wouldn’t function as intended. Similar to blockchain wallets - they are anonymous all the way up to the point of fiat exchange, where most state actors can still end up ID’ing wallet owners.

Even if you try obscuring that information via encryption, it still gets signed by a ‘trusted’ authority at the end of the chain.

Even in theory this is a shit idea.

The problem is that it’s stored outside of your control and accessible without your consent. This system addresses those issues.

Sorry, I just don’t agree with this, either. It isn’t just that it’s a third party, it’s that verification necessarily ties your device to your personal identity at all. No matter how you store the actual identity data, there needs to be an identifier associated with every device/account. I’d be fine if the OS just asked for my age and didn’t verify it with my state-issued ID - but if there’s any cross-checking involved that’s a dealbreaker.

If there were any possibility that a state actor had interest in identifying my personal identity of this account, and there was a record that pointed to my name, SSN, or other unique personal identifiers, i’d be absolutely fucked. There are really good reasons not to want social media accounts tied to real, verifiable identities - even if you think social media should be limited to adults (i’m not on willing to concede this, for what it’s worth).

It doesn’t matter if the data is stored on your local device - if it’s being verified by a state authority at all, that’s a huge problem.

The problem isnt just that the third party can abuse their access to your information, it’s that it is digitally stored and certifiable at all

The most secure data providers in the world have all basically had data breaches by now - including the IRS and US government. There is no party that can guarantee data security, even if they themselves are benevolent.

And for what purpose are we willing to gut privacy online? So it’s marginally more difficult for minors to obtain porn?

GTFO. De-anonymization has always been the goal, not ‘protecting the children’.

Have Lemmy mods approached Rimu at all?

He chose to fork his own code rather than work with them - I think the better question is why he hasnt vetted his changes with the existing codebase better, or why he cant be bothered.

It is what it is. Mbin also existed before Piefed.

Mbin isn’t nearly as egregious as piefed in the way they introduce breaking changes to the network.

You’re assuming some hand has been offered that has been slapped away by Rimu

I’m not assuming anything, it’s been stated repeatedly. Rimu could implement his preferred features in ways that don’t degrade the health of the network but chooses not to.

you know as well as I do three instances of note are heavy defederated (hilariouschaos being the third incase you were wondering)

I’m not sure what relevance that has, but you can count those instances on a hand missing two fingers (i’d note that dbzer0 does not defederate from 2 of the three that I assume you’re referring to, nor would I advocate for it). It would be interesting for someone to map out just how much of the fediverse is effectively being defederated for piefed servers with large user block lists - i imagine it’s quite a large chunk, especially when the most popular users to block are the ones producing the most activity. The larger those servers grow, the bigger those holes will become.

If a hypothetical lemmy-alternative existed, regardless of why, it could still cause disruption in all kinds of ways if there’s a fundamental design contradiction ethos

Which is why it’s important for users to reject attempts at splitting the network into different codebases in the firstplace.

That piefed and many of its users reject working with lemmy devs on principle over political grievance doesn’t change or justify the fact that they are destroying the democratic nature of the federated network they’re taking advantage of.

This doesn’t bother me that much primarily because defederation differences can cause this anyway

Which is why defederation is a last resort and usually requires some democratic discussion as an instance. Same with instance-banning users - that ability is limited to admins, which means users can hold them accountable if there’s abuse. It’s a reason why i consider users who go out of their way to foment division against other instances or users over petty disagreements to be caustic and unwelcome, but are at least still working within a decentralized and democratic framework. When any user has the ability to create the same kind of holes in the network, all accountability vanishes and it starts to look like swiss-cheese.

How could Piefed make this disparity of blocking philosophy mesh with Lemmys here?

Without forcing every server to adopt the same blocking system universally? It can’t. What it’s doing now is functionally no different than if they hid replies on the user front end for users blocking others outside the home instance, except instead of doing this non-destructively (and preserving data pairety across instances), they’ve decided to blow huge holes in the federation service that are no longer mirrored on the other instances.

If the piefed method of handling blocking is to make it impossible for all users in every instance incapable of replying to a user who has blocked them, then every server would need to adopt the same method universally. Piefed has every right to hide content from their users that their users have chosen to block, but doing so by rejecting that content for the whole server while the rest of the network carries on ends up creating shadow forums on every instance.

rimu may still have made his own reddit clone or someone else may have - which would handle things very differently

That would be preferable to the ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ path that they are currently on.

It doesn’t. On Piefed […] But Lemmy obviously doesn’t work like that.

Yes, that’s exactly what i’m pointing to. Rather than implementing this in a way that’s non-destructive and transparent, they’ve created an asymmetry by dropping comments entirely. They could render comments based on block-checks and not create this problem, but instead they chose to say ‘fuck the lemmy instances’ and create hundreds of holes in the federated activity out of seemingly nothing but spite.

What do you mean “made clear”? Has Piefed refused help or support from other developers?

Not “other developers” generally, “the other developers”. I’m speaking specifically of the already existing lemmy codebase. Piefed was created as an alternative to lemmy - at least in part - because of disagreements over the developer’s political views. It wasn’t because lemmy was poorly written, it was because a couple of developers decided they wanted to fork the project into their own that they could manage independently from lemmy.

Yea, see this is what I mean by ‘petty vindictive development’.

None of this speaks well of the project and risks undermining the entire federated network.

The Piefed system of blocking is more aligned with how most other sites do blocking

I don’t know any other site that allows blocked users to reply to the blocking user but deletes the reply on the backend server for everyone on it.

But regardless - that decision was made unilaterally by piefed and corrupts the federation of the rest of the network. Huge holes of mis-matched comment threads are being created everywhere because piefed chose to implement a destructive blocking system rather than a front-end filter, or by working with the other implementations on a solution that doesn’t misalign data across the network.

I understand that you agree with how piefed restricts certain content - my point is that the way piefed has implemented those features corrupts the integrity of the entire network. They’ve made it clear that they have no interest in collaborating with the other developers, even if it means creating incompatibilities between the integrations to the point of functional defederation.

“Move fast and break stuff” isn’t something anyone should be aspiring to.

I’m not collaborating with a developer who has it out for the platform I’m working to improve. If he wants to fix the shit he broke, he can.

That’s admin and community dependent - an admin or community can take that reputation metric and use it to automate moderation. There is/was an entire community whose whole gimmick was auto-banning users from every instance for activity across the entire federated network. But beyond that, piefed already drops content instance-wide for as little as a single user blocking another.

if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id): log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier') return None

The codebase is riddled with shit like this.

I mean, I disagree, but that’s my own preference.

Ranking/sorting/filtering systems should always be up-front and user-configurable, and their implementation should be instance-agnostic. Hiding it in the code is definitely the worst part of this, but far from the only problem.

Is there any indication to users interacting with those instances that their content is being limited by metrics that may or may not be visible to them, and by rules that may or may not be documented anywhere but the piefed codebase?

These are wildly hostile features to anyone not using piefed, and it’s feeling a bit like that’s the point.

There’s nothing in the code that I can see that indicates that any of the penalties are undone by turning off the filter - but that’s kind of the point. They’ve introduced a new metric that thumbs the scale of content visibility that’s hard-coded and inscrutable to everyone but those with knowledge of the codebase, and that makes the entire project and the devs who made those choices un-trustable.

Is there a version of their reputation system that’s less objectionable? Sure. But it would need to be exceedingly transparent with clear documentation on how to configure, alter, and revert if there’s a mistake made. But there’s nothing here that indicates the devs of piefed are willing or capable of transparency or even just clear documentation.

This is like hiding changes in a 500 page TOS - is everyone who is impacted by this code going to know to look at this thread any time a new way of fucking with user reputation calcs is introduced?

Absolutely not.

That isn’t true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it’s happening.

None of this is presented to users - that’s the definition of opaque. They’ve shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.

All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.

It’s one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it’s another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion to users and other federated server admins.

Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that’s perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don’t hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.

It certainly makes it seem like the devs have an axe to grind, and don’t care how their careless decisions effect the rest of the network.