The High Corvid of Progressivity

Chance favors the prepared mind.

~ Louis Pasteur

For Amusement Purposes Only

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Ok, this part is pretty cool:

    Thunderbird Assist will also be available. This experimental feature, developed in collaboration with Flower AI, offers optional artificial intelligence functionalities for users who want them while also addressing privacy concerns head-on. On devices robust enough to handle AI models locally, Thunderbird Assist processes everything on the user’s own machine.

    However, for users on less powerful hardware, the development team has integrated NVIDIA’s confidential computing to keep any remote processing secure. Rest assured, those who prefer to skip AI services can continue using Thunderbird without these extras.

    I’ve been unwilling to touch cloud based AI, much less expose my emails to it as there’s no guarantee of privacy, but being able to run a local model allows you the functionality without the risk. Haven’t used Thunderbird in years, but this is tempting me to give it another shot.





  • Let me put it this way - would you go protest if you weren’t sure anyone else were going?

    The likely answer is no, especially if it’s a protest that would get you arrested.

    Social media isn’t great, but with the full oligarchical takeover of mass media outlets (Sinclair, Fox), it’s become one of the few avenues left for the public to voice (and subsequently act on) dissent.

    This is the overall point I’m trying to make - yes, posting won’t get the job done, but it can help if you do it right. And without people constantly standing up and speaking out about what’s happening, no change is possible.

    Because no one wants to be the only person at a protest, and unless other people know its happening, it’ll be a party of one.





  • We are not reddit

    That’s why I’m here ;)

    Here’s an article on the integration that goes into decent detail. And here’s the git repo, but you should be able to see via your plugin interface. The developer is very responsive and a great guy.

    What I’ve found is that it does enable crossposting, and is a good tool for publishing your content out. Comments do come in if enabled. Subscribing to offsite Mastodon users is very “interesting” however - like being able to see people’s DMs if they’re across servers. There’s also issues with using it with cheaper hosts (Bluehost, I’m looking at you), as certain security settings will disable part or all of the feed.

    To me, it feels good to use if your WP has one user publishing content. If you have other users on the site, it could start getting messy on the backend. Incoming spam is also an issue - Jetpack isn’t set up to scan incoming Fediverse content.


  • I haven’t investigated / tested it yet, but it should be possible. The thing is that Lemmy and Mastodon use different parts of the ActivityPub protocol to publish content, which is why interaction between the two is “interesting”. My guess is that you’ll be able to post and reply to comments and DMs, but it may be difficult to create posts in communities.

    Side note, Mbin combines the Mastodon/Lemmy interpretation of ActivityPub protocols pretty well, so it’s possible, but when I last used it was still pretty fragile, and had stability issues. When the project was kbin, it had a real problem during the CSAM attacks on the Fediverse about two years ago, which led to the biggest instances being defederated and the founder eventually having to abandon the project.




  • It’s because political discussion (and in general most commentary) on Reddit / Meta / Xitter has become overtly censored, and there’s a real concern that it’s tracked - a bad thing in an authoritarian regime barreling towards facism. Those who wish to have real political discourse having been moving away, and lemmy is receiving a lot of that traffic.

    As an example, referring to a list of CEO’s on Reddit as “Luigi’s List” will get you a ban warning for inciting violence.

    This increase in sensitivity to the potential implications of real political speech, coupled with increasingly stringent rules on the parts of the mods and accelerated by the auto-mod bots and AI chat bots, has led to a very restrictive discussion environment on the big social media networks. Even Bluesky, which is left-leaning and possesses the architecture for multiple servers to avoid centralization, is following this pattern.

    Lemmy / Mastodon are attractive because they’re not as restrictive, when you’re posting you’re interacting with real people, and because the mods and admins are humans dealing with a manageable population. And if someone censors you on the server you’re on, you just move to another. More and more folks are realizing this as the enshitification of the big 3 continues.

    Fear not, the memes will live on, but I think that in a very real way, Lemmy’s (and the Fediverse’s) time is upon us, and this is the result. People are using it for real shit because the real shit is upon us, and we need a place where we can freely discuss how to get clear of the incoming shitstorm.


  • This is a core issue with ActivityPub, one that I noticed myself when I started working with it. Unless a server is setup to keep a user’s private marked posts completely off the ActivityPub feed, they’re accessible within it to any script that ignores the opt-out request.

    My personal example was setting up wordpress to interact with a Mastodon instance, and suddenly finding private conversations published from Mastodon to my wordpress site that weren’t visible to me at all on Mastodon.

    Needless to say, that gave me pause about building anything with the protocol until I really understand the access control behind publishing, because even instance owners don’t seem to fully grasp it themselves.