Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn’t encounter any new major bugs.

My ChatGPT, on the other hand, was not as helpful.

Bonus Bing AI result below.

SDF offers far more than just this Lemmy instance. You should poke around https://sdf.org/ and see what other things may be of interest to you. Other social networking things are found under Social in the top menu. Also, there is aNONradio, information of which is a bit hidden I think. They can be found at this link and more info is also at this other link.

That’s right, there is nothing wrong with what they (Beehaw) are doing. Some people find it desirable and join them due to that, others find it detracting and do not join, and even more people don’t care one way or the other. People join instances for all sorts of reasons and variety helps create interesting choices.

I just mentioned what Beehaw was notable for doing in recent history since you were curious. Their actions did generate “a bit of buzz” on the Internet so people kind of associate them for the actions that they have taken.

I have no idea what’s going on at beehaw.

Specifically answering this thought…

Beehaw is the “Aspiring to be(e) a safe, friendly and diverse place.” More information is available on their site at https://beehaw.org/ but below is a summary as far as I know it.

Quoting from their main page on the right side…

We’re a collective of individuals upset with the way social media has been traditionally governed. A severe lack of moderation has led to major platforms like Facebook to turn into political machinery focused on disinformation campaigns as a way to make profit off of users.

That policy is reflected on how that instance operates. They are known to be an instance that has defederated with a very large amount of other instances due to policies that those instances have as well as other things such as allowing anyone to register for an account without account approval first. (A listing is at this link and the instances they are block are under the Bl column.)

The defederating from a place because it has open registrations means that Beehaw defederated from the largest Lemmy instances due to that (referring to lemmy.world). The concern is that open registration may let undesirable people register and they do not want to federate with an instance that would condone that. If they kept the federation intact, any users “openly registering” over there could just participate on Beehaw. Beehaw prefers that their participants are vetted by someone first.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/66921

As such, Beehaw’s policy is to have a more isolated instance where they only interoperate with instances which are compatible with their overall mission statement. Some users prefer that and seek them out specifically for that. Other users are turned off by such things and find other instances to host their account.

Fortunately, you are able to create an account with whatever instance you want and migrate over to that new instance. Unfortunately, your account information cannot migrate over there (since Lemmy does not support that). Still, you should have account on an instance where you feel the most comfortable and then you can subscribe to communities across the Fediverse that interest you (assuming, of course, that your instance is not blocking them or is being blocked by them).

AI coming up with sayings of that type is something already being done ( https://inspirobot.me/ ). Youtube reaction videos exist referring to that site (like “Ai Generates Hilarious Motivational Posters” by jacksepticeye).

This seems like a rather new situation. The Github links below seem to mention that other instances were also suffering problems.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/1897

It appears like a fix was only made available about an hour ago.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895#issuecomment-1629219976

On SSH, you should be able to type in uinfo to see information about yourself and groups to also see a bit of information. Both should let you know if you paid for an upgrade or not because they would mention something about ARPA.

When paying for an upgraded account, they needed to know your SSH username in order to give that account increased permissions. If that was not done then they likely need to know information from you so that they can associate the payment with the correct account.

It has been mentioned at the link below that there is an email address where you can reach out and mention membership issues. It may take a bit of time for a reply though.

https://sdf.org/?faq%3FBASICS%3F12

Windows 11 is supported longer and will receive patches for longer than Windows 10. In fact, I believe Windows 10 is only supported for a few more years. To ensure that you do not have an unpatched (therefore insecure) operating system on the internet, you will either migrate to a newer version of Windows or to a different operating system eventually.

That all being said, Windows 11 was commonly referred to as being faster than Windows 10 on the same hardware. The largest gripes are that Windows 11 has very strict system requirements (therefore not officially working on most computers) and that Windows 11 has a different user interface (taking away some things people like). Windows 10 or 11 are operating systems which basically need to be installed on an SSD so be sure to consider upgrading to that if you have not done so already.

I’m pretty sure that an upgrade to Windows 11 can be reverted and you can go back to Windows 10 if necessary. Still, I would back up any valuable data before experimenting.

On the Linux side of the world, Steam can be installed on Linux and devices such as the Steam Deck exist. Depending on what games you play on your gaming PC, Linux could be an option.

The differences between Windows 10 and Linux are greater than the differences between Windows 10 and Windows 11. In other words, Windows 11 may be a bit better or worse (depending on your opinion) but it isn’t majorly better or worse.

Information about the shell access part of SDF is at their website ( https://sdf.org/ ). The Join page explains a bit more as well as how to upgrade your membership to a different level.

https://sdf.org/?join

Basically, you can register for a free shell account. You can opt to pay for lifetime ARPA access ($36 paid once) to get access to developer type programs. The MetaARPA level ($ 36 a year) gives you even more things.

Software that is accessible at certain membership levels can be shown after logging in to your terminal by typing in software and following the on screen directions. You can pipe the command over to grep to learn that git only shows up at the ARPA level. As far as I know, you need to be ARPA or higher to access git. Regardless, you need to be ARPA to access compilers like gcc so you may want to upgrade anyway.

Notably, I am at the ARPA level and I can run the git command without any issues.

What may help in the future is that you have access to the bboard command. There you can post help messages to the HELPDESK board which may receive a faster response.

http://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial – This explains how to use bboard.

When I was graduating from college, I realized that I would soon lose terminal access to their main server. I wanted a place to store my old programming bits and bobs that I could still SSH into. I found the SDF back then and it served that purpose well. At that point, I learned of bboard and I like to read that from time to time (although I have never posted to it).

(For those not in the know, bboard is described at https://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial )

SDF is notable to me because it a shell account plus more things. This elevates it past any computer I can just set up with any Linux distro. The “more things” is what keeps me checking back and what makes SDF special to me.