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@underscores@kolektiva.social

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wiki-user: underscores

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Mozilla is set up as a non-profit with a for profit company as a subsidiary. The corporate Mozilla handles working on Firefox, mostly using money from Google for setting it as the default search engine. Because of that separation I don’t think they can easily mix those two piles of money together.

    There’s this section from their FAQ:

    Don’t Mozilla products, like Firefox, earn income?

    Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.





  • Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.

    For people who’ve used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don’t know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they’re not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.

    1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
    2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

    The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

    I’d prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

    I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.

    Not my experience. A few examples:

    • No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.

    I’m not sure how that goes against what I said. That’s mostly people disliking the admins.

    • Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.

    Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.

    • Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

    Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn’t an active community elsewhere.


  • New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.

    I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

    Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.












  • There’s Anki which is one of the most popular flashcard apps. Kiwix is pretty great for having tons of offline content from websites like Wikipedia, StackExchange, and Khan Academy, but I’ve run into a few bugs with it. I believe the current version isn’t on F-Droid but they plan to remove the non-free build tools in the next version. There’s the translation dictionary QuickDic. There’s some language specific apps like Der Die Das and Starke Verben for learning German, Kakugo, Fun with Kanji, and Kanji Dojo for Japanese. There’s several language specific dictionaries like Nani?, Nheengaré and a PReVo. For learning numbers/time there’s the Nanji clock widget that can show the printed time in several languages.


  • It depends. Many addons have effects that can be tested for and fingerprinted, but it’s not always straight forward. There’s a way to detect any specific chrome extension, but doesn’t work on firefox because it uses unique extension ids per person.

    With addons like CanvasBlocker, they generate random values for a bunch of apis like canvas. So each time you will look unique, but it changes every time so you’re not easily tracked. I’d assume it’s similar to what Brave does, but I haven’t looked into the details. Some stuff isn’t randomized by default, so they can get info like timezone and languages, but probably not enough to give you a unique identity.