It’s a convenient file transfer/sync tool. Copying data has to happen somehow, I’m not surprised someone thought to use syncthing for that purpose >.<, since it can do that. But its not really different than any other tool here.

The cruelty is the point.

We need i2p or veilid torrents ASAP, to protect uploaders and downloaders. One of the main reasons people don’t seed is the threat of lawsuits.

Couldn’t be the media constantly lying about trans people being rapists/pedos/etc., nooo, its that some trans people don’t just sit down and accept society shitting on us (and constantly Just Asking Questions about our basic humanity and identity) instead of being “”““one of the good ones””“”.

We are allowed to be pissed off, even if it hurts some bigots’ feelings or makes some people uncomfortable. People say the exact same thing about other minority groups (that their support would be higher if only some “bad subset” would stop complaining). I hope folks would have learned of the flaws in that for those groups and can apply it to trans people, but it seems they have to rehash the same bullshit for every single minority group that fights for rights <.<

It’s frustrating every time and I want to point this out to people. Civil rights, labour rights, etc. have never been won by sitting quietly and waiting. It often involves protests and even riots (the first stonewall was a riot, as in, throwing bricks at cops, though that one was in the usa). Strikes have in the recent past been broken up via violent police action and often have involved violent responses in self-defense ^.^

This attitude of “don’t inconvenience the system or upset people’s idea of normality and never complain or fight back against massive amounts of systemic and personal injustice even as it makes people suffer and die” in this country needs to fucking burn in a fire. Nothing has ever been made better by just waiting for it to happen. And the people complaining about minorities not being polite enough, frankly, need to take a long hard look in the mirror ^.^

I’d encourage people to have a read of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder for some context. I think it applies to more than just economics, and is at least part of what i am referring to when talking about “suffer and die” beyond just direct murder.

Creating systems sufficiently hostile, dehumanising, degrading, and autonomy-denying to various minority groups that their suicide rate goes up significantly is something I consider a form of societal murder, and it applies especially to trans people - because the attack is on our fundamental sense of self and often forces us to endure changes to our body against our will until we are deemed “”“sufficiently trans (and only in the way we deem to be correct and acceptable)”“”, if we don’t go the DIY route. It applies to other groups in their own way a lot as well that I won’t list out because it muddles the specific point, but I’m sure you can think of them :(

Honestly, as a trans person in the uk, my interactions with the general public have been mostly ok. Sometimes ignorant and occasionally rude (and I don’t mean this as an insult, I mean more asking really creepy stuff unintentionally or just being unfamiliar), but most aren’t at least outwardly hateful (though some have been and I live in a very left wing city, and of course lots of people just don’t have the guts to say anything).

Thanks ^.

I have a very shitty notebook this is likely to be very useful for ;p

How does this compare to zswap. For me, if you still want a swap device on a real disk, this might be better? Idk >.<

Edit: arch has zswap enabled by default https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap - someone below says it is better if you have zswap when you already have a swap device :)

And it’s a good thing. Fuck proprietary software 😎

Why is it that liberals only source is wikipedia??? Please read other things.

Not a lib, and my source is wikipedia because it has it’s own sources as well and provides a decent summary.

Says the person whose entire fucking understanding of the matter was gained from wikipedia 5 seconds before making this comment. Jesus fucking christ.

Yeah because you’re from hexbear and I don’t trust you to engage in good faith or not immediately jump to the worst possible interpretation of something I said or missed (like you have done with the trans clinic thing), or do the whole thing where you assume only you are right and people can’t reasonably disagree on something, or always pivot to “but the us/uk did…” and act as if the inevitable and only correct conclusion to any debate or discussion is that the US and “West” (which is itself a messy concept) is worse in every aspect of every single thing than anywhere else in every possible action. And I, you know, can read the information and compare it with the uk/us pretty quickly, without listing every single tiny factor that went into my consideration.

Frankly, the behaviour of hexbear users has made me always check the accounts of people with square-brackets pronouns before engaging unless I’m in a community on an instance that has defederated. I should not feel this way when pronoun tags are a trans supportive thing and would usually make me feel more comfortable when talking with people. But blegh.

I will probably block after this because all engaging with 95% of hexbear users does is cause me irrational amounts of stress every fucking time because of the constant goddamn micro-nitpick and aggression on every fucking thing, constant assumptions of superiority and assuming they are always completely correct in ever single debate or discussion, it’s like they can’t even conceive of being wrong on something. Honestly this is just a vent at this point lol, not even something you specifically have done since you’re nowhere near the worst I’ve come across from hexbear.

Engaging just makes me feel the need to analyse every single thing I say to see if it will set the hexbear folks off on a tangent or completely dismiss you and do the weird misdirection and whataboutism and such. It makes me afraid to ever engage with hexbears in any manner, or overanalyse every tiny thing I say in case they use it to deliberately evade my main point like I was forced to do when younger in very hostile situations as an autistic person to avoid unpredictably angry people, and just like then it brings very little practical success because all my effort is spent trying to find any tiny way what I said might be interpreted in the worst possible way and there’s always some excuse anyway.

China is expanding clinics for trans people. Notably for trans children, who it built its first clinic for in 2021 and has built a further 8 since.

True. This doesn’t change the other stuff I mentioned, and the UK also claims to be “improving” clinics for trans teens while doing the opposite, so forgive me for being a little skeptical of the persistency, especially since the hrt stuff is from 2022 and this is from 2021. It’s also only in a couple provinces. However, if it pans out, which it seems to from what you see, it’s a positive move, but again, it seems to be Shanxi and Beijing.

This was also explicitly mentioned in the wikipedia article and I did see it. But it was only a single province, compared to the entire government’s more negative actions >.<

The point here is that it is demonstrably obvious to trans people living in the US and UK that China is better to us than the US and the UK, one of which is currently performing a genocide against us and the other of which is transphobic on a near daily basis and is expected by the community here to follow in the US’ footsteps if it gets the chance.

China is pretty blegh actually.

They are actively making things worse w.r.t accessing HRT online, and require even more nonsense than the UK on changing legal ID, including shit like spousal approval, familial approval, and permission from various things like work, school, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_China

Access to hrt is also comparable to the uk by the looks of it. More importantly, the illegality of gay marriage combined with the massive approval process for id change means that trans people with different-gender partners can’t marry legally, and trans people with similar-gender partners are probably? in an unfortunate position here, though the page doesn’t include info on this >.<

The more sex-segregated components of various aspects of China also causes significant issues >.<

I’d say it’s worse in terms of being able to socially and medically transition, but there’s less overt hate. It’s more death-by-bureacracy and a need for even more extensive social approval to transition (I’m almost impressed that they managed a worse system than in the UK). The greater hold the Chinese Government has over their internet means accessing DIY HRT is likely much harder :/

People claiming China is much better on this than the US and the UK are wrong, they both have different issues. The UK in particular, most of the transphobia I experience is from institutions and media rather than “on the ground” (though this def. happens too), and the way the government is going with using us as a scapegoat is very concerning. But the - for now - lower amount of control over communications means I got started on DIY HRT pretty simply and pushed my way through the “official” system.

On a side note, stuff like this is one of the reasons opposing authoritarianism especially w.r.t communication is important, it makes it easier to do things the government has not approved of because the infrastructure is not in place to control communication and coordination as effectively.

The US is as always a clusterfuck because of it’s more federated nature, some of their states are trying to do genocide while others are acting as refuges and have things like informed consent HRT access and active protection against the more hostile states ^. - but fuck me if the dems aren’t spineless at opposing this stuff or (as can be seen in the op) sometimes support this.

Honestly most large states constantly try and censor the internet with stuff like this, though in the US/UK/Europe it has been a lot less successful at least. In this case it’s a more brazen attack on queer people, but this sort of stuff seems to happen every couple years. It’s very frustrating >.<

People definitely have some double standards though - maybe racism or the false idea that China is communist - but it doesn’t mean the Chinese govt is good on things, in my observation, just that people underestimate the things European countries, the UK, and US states do.

They may be better or worse and just because people often have double standards doesn’t make the Chinese government better (though it is often not worse in some respects, but the overall greater control of communication and computing infrastructure means it is harder to evade the subjugation or organise around it via tools like Tor, and the greater centralisation means that if the government decides to do something particularly awful it’s both harder for public dissent to occur and harder for regions to undermine efforts like that or even actively counter them :/).

I’m actually pretty pro-AI (and in particular, pro-FOSS AI), so I’m pretty unhappy about this myself ;p

If nothing else, this kind of shit will mean that only the existing “Intellectual Property” holders will have access to using AI. It would entrench things even more >.<

In theory, existing forum software could implement activitypub and link with lemmy & kbin…

I hope to see fediverse SufficientVelocity and Spacebattles one day ^.^

Yet another vitally important front in the war on general purpose computing (it’s a short and important read imo)

Fuck Google, and fuck DRM.

I use:

• qpdf for mucking around with pdfs, reordering, selecting pages, combining them, etc.
• ffmpeg for video and audio sicing and transcoding. Usually encompassing a command in a script because I forget the precise params every time ;p
• nvim for anything like Markdown (which can be converted to other things like LaTeX or pdf or html, sometimes in multiple stages)
• imagemagick for simple image conversion stuff.
• wget for downloads ^.^
• youtube-dl or yt-dlp for grabbing youtube stuff.

IPFS is pretty neat (though I think bittorrent is better due to content locality and speed, but that’s just my experience). I’m more talking about starting up hardware for alternate network paths - for instance, chained together wireless or wired routers - outside the existing internet backbone to get across the borders of these countries that want to cut off the internet nya

Presumably, you’d do this in combination with some kind of mesh network router (like yggdrasil) capable of organising discrete connections into a proper network without a central authority, so that many people can autonomously build up this kind of alternate routing backbone.

Basically, right now, anti-censorship efforts are in a constant back-and-forth war between censors and the anti-censorship groups. This is because it is far too costly for a country to completely blackout communication from the wider internet, at the minute, but many of the countries doing this are continuously working to make that more viable. However, should it become viable for a country to disconnect all cables linking their internet to the outside internet, they have the technical means to do it by physically cutting the cables.

They know where the cables are and control them - that is part of how the censorship is implemented after all nya. Current censorship resistance techniques essentially are an armsrace between trying to make it so their filters don’t detect your “forbidden” connections, and the censors trying to improve their filters without unacceptable levels of economic and social damage (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom)

The less their economy and population depends on external services, the more aggressive and broad-spectrum they can be in cutting off external connections, because the harm from the collateral damage is reduced. What these countries want to do is reach a point where the collateral damage from cutting off the wider internet is small enough that they can cut the cables and block all connections. You can’t actually evade that within the current model of censorship/filtering resistance, because at that point it’s basically like those connections don’t even exist and hence can’t be traversed by any mechanism nya.

What I’m proposing is we build alternate pathways out that don’t depend on these cables. For example, either our own cables, or a chain of wireless nodes capable of building paths through the network autonomously (this is what a meshnet is). Because these alternate routes out would not be state-controlled, and presumably operated in a distributed manner which is hard for the state to locate, censorship becomes physically impossible without essentially containing your entire country in a sphere of RF interference (which would destroy basically all modern life), and building a massive, constantly monitored perimeter of sufficient depth to check that no-one has laid secret cables or whatever.

One other example of a potential route out is Starlink-style satellite internet, except a mesh network of satellites rather than it being controlled by any singular entity. But that’s essentially a larger-scale version of the “massive number of small-scale wireless nodes” idea. Hell, to improve censorship resistance you could do something with Li-Fi networking too, or mixed cable-wireless networks, or anything. The most important part is that you can build routes in- and out- of a country that the country’s government can’t easily locate or shut down ^.^

Yeah but it would add localised - and extremely high efficiency in terms of water, yield, etc. - food supply that’s more resilient to climate shifts, needs no pesticodes, etc., and for those of us on islands like the UK where we import lots of food it would be good.

Might also help those countries we import from build up more food supply resiliency because thry have more excess. Or massively reduce land use for food ^.^. And a lot of the places food gets imported from or otherwise farmed are also at large risk for climate change, so perhaps using vertical farms or other climate controlled farming techniques would be a good idea for them too nya

Furthermore it makes the supply chain more auditable, so you can reduce the reliance on questionably or very unethically sourced stuff. A controlled environment might also allow for even more automation.

I’m a pretty big fan of vertical farming for lots of reasons though to the point of writing an article on it, so I’m a little biased ;p. The main obstacles are land/building price and energy (and also some techniques for growing staples, though I think that is not a fundamemtal limitation, and I think the other two are solvable)

Edit: also I think it’s desirable to return agricultural land to less managed environments like forests. Moving more human infrastructure into cities would enable more of this sort of “rewilding” (though I think that’s a bit of a misnomer as environments everywhere have all been fundamentally altered by people, and a lot of people’s idea of “nature” is the very sanitised version that avoids the constant slaughter and death, like cityparks and stuff which are actually very human managed - good for mental health, but not really ““nature”” in the same way)

Yep! Im actually somewhat familiar with those :)

I mean more we need a way to run either cables or a very long series of wifi relays into and out of these countries. Perhaps using something yggdrasil-adjacent for route autoconfig ^.^ nya.

Alternate hardware outside of state control or influence :)

Turn them into vertical farms if its apparently too hard to turn them into housing ;p

What we need is some way to make a distributed/p2p alternate meshnet backbone across borders ^.^ - much harder to control the internet when other physical links are available.

The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook’s Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I’ve used the phrase “Embrace, Extend, Consume”, to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they’re so big, most instances will comply in the service of “content”.

Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it’s various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it’s content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it’s users and non-users.

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad@lemmy.world) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for “user safety”, where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add “secure messaging” (lol, it’s facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it’s public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
• Meta’s algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-“paid”/“verified” Threads users.
• It’s already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

Instance Admins, and the “Friendliness” of Meta

Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do “due dilligence”, but I’ve seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn’t make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta’s orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they’d probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

Note on This Post

I’ve realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don’t have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p

Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.