Subsidized devices blur the line between a fee for terminating service early, and paying off the cost of the device. Perhaps the former should be banned to encourage competition, and the cost of the device and the service clearly separated. That way it’s clear when the device is paid off and (in my imagined ideal regulatory scenario) must be unlocked.

a poor person would have to pay BOTH. An early termination fee AND then go buy a new phone

They probably don’t have to pay the fee. They might owe it legally, but the likely consequences for not paying are some impact on their credit score and inability to get service from that carrier under their own name for a while.

I suppose it depends on whether you think regulation should be used to dissuade poor people from buying expensive phones. That seems like a reasonable enough goal, though I don’t believe that’s the proper role of government.

I’ve always bought phones outright, used when finances so dictated. I agree that’s the wiser approach.

It seems to me that a carrier should be able to lock a subsidized/financed device until it’s paid off. That makes it possible for people who would otherwise not qualify for financing to have relatively up-to-date devices.

A carrier should not be able to lock a device that’s paid off for any length of time.

I’m guessing not a lot of users know about it. Their ActivityPub implementation is still only about half done.

It will be interesting to see of they promote it heavily when it’s more complete.

There’s nothing keeping them from scraping that kind of data now.

TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.

It’s most likely that the anti theft feature is based on a hardware identifier (IMEI) and won’t be triggered by installing a different OS.

That’s a valid point, though it looks like Popfile’s installation instructions call for manually installing libraries, presumably current ones. I think it processes only text, not PDFs or images, which are traditional sources of vulnerabilities. I’m fairly certain it doesn’t attempt to execute Javascript. It is, itself written in Perl, which is memory-safe.

It’s worth considering security because there’s so much malware out there trying to spread indiscriminately, but Popfile is less vulnerable than an Android app (which bundles its dependencies) or anything written in C (which is subject to all kinds of memory management bugs).

Abandoned doesn’t necessarily imply no longer useful. Sometimes, though rarely in the modern world software is finished.

I may give it a try. It does actually have the features I’m asking for.

Not yet, but they’re actively developing ActivityPub support.

I block ads pretty aggressively, and I find it surprising anyone else can tolerate the modern internet without doing so.

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.

Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.

Some peoples’ thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn’t good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That’s also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users’ social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.

I usually treat social media as public, so I’m not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.

Can we do Emacs vs. Vi next?

Yes, a code-oriented one meant to be very fast and responsive. It’s pre-alpha on Linux but compiles without any fuss for me. I haven’t spent much time with it, but the only bug I’ve seen so far is an uncommanded theme change when switching between files.

There are two general areas:

• The history of the internet is full of examples of companies taking data about or creative output from people and trying to make money from it without permission, in ways the original creator might not like. Nobody has gone there with a Fediverse scraper or search project that we know of yet, but it’s going to happen if the Fediverse gets big enough.
• Some people want to be able to easily share things with a certain audience without them being easily discoverable by a different audience. There are of course privacy settings to control visibility and software like Matrix that provides not only access control by cryptographic security, but those add friction. It’s only possible for this group to have it both ways if nobody develops good search tools, which turns some of them into bullies.

I think it’s a small, but very loud minority who have unrealistic expectations about how other people will use data they share in a manner that’s inherently rather public. I kind of see where they’re coming from, but ActivityPub with open federation doesn’t work that way.

Lemmy search works pretty well on larger servers, and they’re indexed by major web search engines.

The microblog side of things is worse, with Mastodon long having near-useless search because it might “encourage negative social dynamics” or some such. Some other software, such as Akkoma has had better search, and Mastodon has recently improved somewhat for accounts that opt into being searchable. Mastodon directs search engines not to index most pages.

Some people get very upset about attempts to build general-purpose fediverse search tools.

In this case, generating fake excerpts is not something a user on a server controlled by someone else can do; they have to operate a malicious server themselves. Defederation is a good solution to malicious servers.

Certainly someone very determined could spin up a bunch of malicious servers and put out a bunch of posts containing fake excerpts, but they’d need followers to get any reach on the microblog side of the fediverse. They could spam Lemmy communities, but users would notice and downvote/report the posts.

So I think “just defederate” probably is an adequate solution here, at least as things currently sit. Were the fediverse to grow by an order of magnitude, I think it would need a reputation system to add a bit of friction to a brand new server or user getting a lot of reach quickly.

The proposed solution of an intermediate server caching embeds is needlessly complex. The first server a link is posted to can fetch the embed, then push it out to every server receiving the post.