Yea it’s pretty popular and generally I like that, especially compared to the whole discord thing (though real time chat is also a valuable platform).

Ideally, I’m with you and IMO this would be something where the fediverse could shine.

It feels to me like many pieces are already in place for some people to come together and create a fediverse space for filling that SO function. Lemmy, NodeBB and discourse (when they get federation stable, however close/far that is) are all there.

What’s likely needed is for the right pieces and modifications to be put together, the right instance, some basic branding and commitments, donations, sponsorships (and even ads would be appropriate here IMO if done tastefully).

But, in reality the devs on the fediverse are spread pretty thin and many developers generally are in a bit of a squeeze at the moment. Financial support hasn’t reached a healthy equilibrium on the fediverse, culturally and probably quantitatively, in that further growth, creativity and adaptation at any decent rate doesn’t really seem viable.

Back in the heyday of the twitter migration to mastodon or reddit migration to lemmy, there likely would have been some dev ready to go out on a limb and try to scramble something together (however healthy that is). That energy has passed and there doesn’t seem to be a more stable substitute set of incentives for new devs to build new things here (though there are of course devs building on the fediverse, lemmy and newer projects like SL, piefed and bonfire included). Instead it seems like the dev community on the fediverse has settled and they all have their work set.

So the best bet would probably be for some eager volunteers to take the best platform for the job (possibly NodeBB ATM) and put up an instance and see what happens. I think there’s been enough interest, including this post, to make it interesting.

And what’s especially interesting is that the SO archive, AFAICT, is open and available for download, so there’s a real possibility of having a live archive of SO for search coupled with new content, right here on the fediverse.

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

Sounds pretty conclusive to me. Thanks for going the extra mile on that!!

Oh yea it was a silly statement about Python.

FWIW, my understanding is that Mamba came out of Oliphant’s new outfit started after he left anaconda.

From the little I saw (and zero Rust, or Tokio (I think they use that) knowledge) … federation workers weren’t persisting correctly whenever it would hit certain errors or problems.

Huh. I wasn’t aware that a full separation had occurred. Is this new-ish? I recall Travis Oliphant in his Lex Friedman interview saying he thought Anaconda (which he’d left by that point) needed to build more of a community around conda. So maybe this was done after then? Still, I have wonder how closely knit the whole thing is with anaconda the company.

Otherwise, yes, Anaconda is bloat. And Hear Hear for Mamba. I told a Pythonista about it a while ago, explained that it’s written in C++ to fix condo’s performance issues. And they got a little upset that it was against the point/“dream” of doing everything in Python. I was quite curt and pointed out that everyone loved using mamba and that Python people should have cared more about there performance critiques.

Dunno really. I’ve seen P Wang post on BlueSky and there seems to be a strong “touch grass and get off of social media” message in a few of his posts, so I’d say Musk kinda burnt him out on the promises of social media (which he has always been positive on AFAICT) by creating too much cognitive dissonance.

My bet would be he let anaconda people decide from themselves where their social media presence is.

So that’s interesting. From memory, Peter Wang, Anaconda co-founder and CEO, was pretty pro-musk about Twitter in the early days of the migration, was always more of a BlueSky person and to this day doesn’t have a personal presence on masto.

So I’d have to guess something has passed his own threshold or this came from wider company many of whom may have been on the fediverse already.

It was only 0.19.0 instances, it affected outgoing federation only it seems, and it only started happening after a certain amount of time, basically when an error occurred the process would stop.

So it seems reasonable that it didn’t cause mass breakdown of the network.

The cost isn’t the software, it’s the time, energy and risk involved in using it.

The combativeness was deployed to fight off combativeness.

It doesn’t help that Mastodon has very little design considerations for dealing with popular accounts, treating every account as if you’re only following your friends and family. (Emphasis mine)

Came to the same realisation myself. The whole “just friends having lunch together” vibe that mastodon aims for simply breaks down at a certain scale, which means is essentially unsuitable as a Twitter replacement for all that looking for that.

The lack of any feed/notifications management then means that you get subjected to all the annoying randos as though they are your friends or neighbours.

Which, coupled with a culture of purism and gatekeeping and HOA-ing leads to what can be a genuinely toxic culture. Not for everyone all the time but enough of the time for some to have found it awful and left.

But not enough talk about this. It’s designed as a suburban social media where you chat to friends and neighbours. Push it beyond that and you’ll have problems.

When I can I try to bring up the idea of “pro bono” developer work with employed developers I know.

Outside of FAANG it garners confused looks because it’s so alien. But the argument never gets any logical pushback because the industry is culturally sick on this issue:

“ Do you use and rely on open source software?

If so some percentage of what your employer gains from that should be provided back, not out of some morality but to keep afloat the open source software ecosystem you and your employer are benefiting from.

What’s more, you and employer will gain more expertise in said software and can even ensure it is more reliable for your purposes.

All employers of developers using open source ought to dedicate a certain number of developer-days per month to open source maintenance and proudly make this number public.

Also, this idea isn’t new, lawyers have been doing this for decades. See this info graphic from a major Australian Law Firm showing off how 1/24th of their work is pro bono.

That’s right, the sharks might be better people for society than your industry is for itself. “

Ummm … fuck yes that’s awesome!!

Good to hear. I’ve been on exa for a while now and would hate going back.

Sad to hear of the original author’s disappearance. Hopefully they’re ok!

Well something to keep in mind is that hexbear isn’t one person … it’s a whole community that’s developed independently for a while. So it’s reasonable to expect that there’d be variation in the behaviours of members in the same way there’s variation on the rest of lemmy. From what I’ve gathered, not all hexbear members are keen on the re-federation, and some aren’t too keen on being “well-behaved” around politically opposed users (ie “libs”), though hexbear admins and other users have promised moderation and that such isn’t part of the core hexbear values.

It’s social media, afterall … and people can be rather shit and ruin it for the rest of us. In the end, the core service provided a social media platform isn’t the hardware, sys-admin-work or software (however necessary they are) … it’s the moderation work.

The moderation keeps the place sanitary enough for people to actually want to be here … however much we may have problems with particular actions of our moderators, we should really support and praise them at every turn.

Sorry, not from lemmygrad. And I’m on lemmy.ml because I joined before the Reddit migration and “Privacy and FOSS” (the focus of lemmy.ml) made a lot of sense for a lemmy instance/community.

Beyond that … more superficial, prejudicial hate mongering without any description of why or for what purpose. Sorry, I don’t think it’s worth reading … a downvote from me … and, just being real for a moment … at the moment it’s more likely that you’re a member of a “notoriously toxic … trollfest”.

Ironically, IME, I’ve seen significantly more troll-like tankie hate than I do tankie-trolling. I keep asking for receipts/links to tankie trolling here, as I’m genuinely curious to see it and understand what people are so upset about (please don’t explain to me what’s so upsetting unless it’s culturally thorough or coupled with some links+descriptions) … but no one has been able to do so.

they’re all incels and incels all seem about the same.

Downvote from me there. I’ve seen plenty of examples of hexbear people being nice, interesting and good sports. They definitely seem to have more of shitposting culture than is normal on mainstream lemmy. But all in all it’s seemed fun to me from what I’ve seen.

Beyond all that, this is just superficial and prejudicial. If you had some examples to link to or more substantial insights to share as to why it’d be “them”, that’d be worth reading.

Otherwise, they’re an instance. Not one person, I’m sure some on hexbear are assholes and some awesome.

Sorry this is more of a rant than a real post

Rant my friend! Preach! I feel you on this.

As many have been saying in the HackerNews thread … a notable aspect of Vim and Bram was that it was basically a charity FOSS, taking revenue from ads and committing it back to charities, and asking for donations (see the official Vim website).

Anyone looking to commemorate Bram’s passing might want to think about donating.