OpenStars

We are more than just Lemmy now - there's Kbin, its fork Mbin, and others like it that are integrating Mastodon into the mix as well.

Maybe Fedizen?

Yeah but it's the software that told it to do it.

Even if they were correct, the maner of their interactions makes them wrong, especially the hostility.

Also, being a liberal in America is somewhat similar to being a conservative in Europe, I am told - i.e., "leftist" is a term relative to one's local surrounding environment. Maybe one day I will become more leftist, although ironically all the leftist comments here are making me start to lean the opposite direction (it would be different if someone explained the positions, rather than simply dunked on everyone who does not share them - groupthink is not a valid way to arrive at Truth, especially when applied in the format of bullying behaviors to outsiders rather than merely acceptance of the in-crowd).

I honestly don't think we're there yet.

Remember, something like more than half of all people still don't use an ad-blocker - some people want ads, or at least want that they provide money to keep the service going, and similarly with selling user data (to the extent that people bother to think about it at all).

Never underestimate the level of entitlement thinking on behalf of new users - like, "Which instance do I join? Wait, I have to choose!? Nvm, I'm out already." (and for Mastodon, this has much greater implications than for Lemmy)

Also, one single reply to a comment in chapotraphouse on hexbear.net, followed by a second reply somewhere on Lemmy.ml, almost made me turn away from social media entirely, thinking that this place was fast becoming not really all that different than Reddit after all - I mean, these are leftists, aka liberals, these are/must be my people, right, R-R-RIGHT!?

The Fediverse is not for the uninitiated, and requires significant setup work to even be pleasant much less enjoyable, depending on where you go and the users' innate level of insensitivity.

Though you and many others are working tirelessly to make it better by offering great content - thanks!:-)

These seem all over the place - or maybe it is just this article that is not explaining it well?

For starters, "smartphones" aren't the only SIM-carrying devices that can access the internet and install apps - dumbphones can do the former and tablets can do both, which you wouldn't even be able to visibly see someone using, if it is in their bag and they use something like a watch interface to it. Laptops too...

The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (Safe) for Kids act addresses algorithmic feeds. It would require social media platforms to provide minors with a default chronological feed composed of accounts they have chosen to follow rather than algorithmically suggested ones.

Ngl, that sounds awesome - and not even just for kids! But immediately after that the article continues:

The bill would also mandate that parents have more wide-reaching controls like the ability to block access to night-time notifications.

Isn't this already built-in to various OS's, so why put the onus onto the app itself?

Electronic devices like calculators have been a staple inside schools for half a century at least, and poor people who cannot afford one of every type of device will generally opt for one device that can install many different types of apps - so to now ban these apps, b/c they might be used in a certain particular manner... while simultaneously NOT stopping school shootings, it blows my mind.

"Political theater" is the phrase that comes to mind. Another phrase is "No child left behind", given how the parents seem to be against these policies, but the State has deemed that it knows better(TM).

Then again, perhaps it has a real purpose in mind after all, as a law designed to extract money out of big tech companies as fees pile up?

What a time to be alive.

If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.

But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.

Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible... and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P

Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).

Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.

Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.

Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?

The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.

Kbin: Not anymore, at least last I checked. I have an old account there that I left behind due to the enormous amount of technical glitches it kept having, and checking in on it recently (maybe last week?), not one of my comments has even a single downvote there - even older ones. iirc the "reduces" tab was still present, just entirely empty. (I was looking for a particular comment, but then while there noticed the effect was much wider.) Edit: I took another look, and I the only downvotes I see are from kbin itself (example post), so it seems to not be federating downvotes from outside of itself.

In the past when it did used to work, it also would not show downvotes from instances that it had server-wise defederated with, although someone can still get downvotes from personally blocking an instance, on a Lemmy server running v0.19.3 or greater, that the server itself had not server-wise defederated with. So there was always a very large gap there.

The reason I thought of this all was due to the OP title: e.g. someone could mass-downvote things on the Fediverse to attempt to control the conversation by de-emphasizing things that they did not personally agree with, but outside of moderator or admin reporting that offers a degree of trust behind it. Obviously that is its intended purpose, but I mean maliciously subverting that like have 10 accounts and log into all of them to influence a post.

About once a week lately I keep blocking some spammer accounts that randomly shill products or videos throughout the Fediverse, rather than wait for an admin to do it, but if an account(s) was more subtle and merely downvoted, then I doubt such a thing would even be noticed?

I should add that I respect some people's decisions if they want to be on a server that doesn't even record or reveal downvotes - that's fine bc it's their choice. But otherwise it is basically public knowledge, except as you say you need to fire up an instance of your own to view them, and then protect that instance from intrusion efforts even if you use it for nothing else (or possibly there is some API call, but I doubt that knowledge would be so easy to find, and for one thing it would have to access a database that has sent out past updates, not merely listen for new ones unless it had been running prior to the downvote event).

Anyway, I hoped people would see this post, and it seems that is happening, so this time the downvotes did not detail any conversation about the topic (with many tens-fold greater up- than down-votes), but if there had been sufficient number of downvotes delivered quickly enough... then how many of us would have even seen this, sorting Subscribed or All by Hot? So it points to a liability in the Fediverse, which at some point, someone somewhere is going to exploit.

Who would downvote something like this, without leaving a comment to explain why!?

Sometimes I wish I could see that info, in rare circumstances like this.

Culture constantly evolves - e.g. "the matrix" used to mean one thing, then after the film starring Keanu Reeves it now means something else.

Also AI itself used to mean one thing, as in general intelligence like a robot slave that has never performed a task before, but you tell it to become a maid and it teaches itself and becomes one just like a human would, but now the term has been coopted to mean the product of a training procedure. The managers at Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, ChatGPT, etc. don't seem to mind or care about this bastardization of the terminology, as they borrow its power (from the movies and books and other works that have used "AI" in the former sense) while only paying lip service to actually putting in the effort to construct it.

And even with its greatly reduced formulation in the sense of an LLM, they still don't bother to train even that all that well - e.g. feeding it Reddit data that was intentionally corrupted as a result of Huffman's having greatly offended and stolen the communities from the same mods who originally built them. Yes they stole the terms, yes they are using it improperly - but what is anyone going to do about it? Words only have meaning by the consent of those who use them.

And if you are interested, I think you are fighting a losing battle bc of the way you are approaching it. Instead of acknowledging that others "know" the subject differently, and gently offering a nice perspective that they perhaps had not considered before - who isn't interested in historical tidbits about topics of interest, when presented in a captivating manner? - you instead came on strong, saying that everyone else is wrong except you, who has the secret knowledge. I know, it's true, but who cares? If your goal was to inform people, then do you think you succeeded? At least, I think you could have succeeded with a much wider audience. Ofc your words, so your call to do whatever you want with them, but I thought I would offer this perspective at least.

They’re not hallucinations. People are getting very sloppy with terminology.

This sounds like a temper tantrum, you blaming everyone else for how you feel about the matter. Again, right or wrong, doesn't it sound like that to you now that I've pointed that out? Well, again, it's your choice to think about that or not, but I did want to offer in case it may help:-).

Probably not about computers per se - like the Greatest generation knew a lot more about horses than the average person today - and similarly we know more about the things that have mattered to us over the course of our lifetimes.

What would get weird for us is if when we are retirement age - ofc we cannot ever retire, bc capitalism - and someone talks about the new horglesplort based on alien vibrations which are computer-generated from the 11th dimension of string theory and we are all like "wut!?"

fr fr no cap skibidi toilet rizz teabag

That said, humanity seems to not only have slowed down the accretion of new knowledge but actually gone backwards - children today won't live as long as boomers did, and e.g. despite being on mobile devices all day long, most don't have the foggiest clue of how computing works as in programming or even binary. So we will likely be confused in the opposite way as in "why can't you understand this?"