It's not much different than a profile picture on most social media networks, is it? You could have done all of this with your Lemmy profile picture as well.
handvat
joined 3 years ago
I wouldn't be surprised if some audio watermarking is already going on right now. Universal Music Group has done this for a while on their music. In 2008 UMG was using watermarks unique to each distributor, not to each person purchasing or streaming the watermark. I'm not sure if UMG is still doing this, in the update on the first blog post linked, some said it has stopped, some say it hasn't.
The technology to do it is already there. I'm not surprised if near-inaudible audio watermarking exists now, I'm not an expert on this field. To put an unique ID per subscriber can be done as well on a technical level I assume. I believe whether this is done depends on the streaming service or download store, because it comes at a cost of using more computing power on their servers. I don´t know whether it is allowed by the GDPR and similar laws either.
I don't know if it is worth it either. If I look around into my social circle, most people have moved towards streaming services. Only a "stubborn" few, such as myself, still—legally or illegally—download music. Based on this, I feel like music piracy isn't as big as it used to be.
I'm currently using SailfishOS as my daily driver due to the lack of apps on Ubuntu Touch. I have Ubuntu Touch on my PinePhone though. It certainly has its advantages over SailfishOS such as better app isolation, fully open source, a newer Qt version and I really like the idea of convergence.
I'm considering to port one of my Saiflish applications to Ubuntu Touch as well (a Jellyfin client), if I ever find the time for it. :)
I like ElementaryOS as well, but there is one big downside in my opinion that makes it less user friendly and that is that it does not officially support upgrading between major versions (e.g. 5.1 to 6.0). You have to either mess with repositories on the terminal and hope for the best or you have to do a complete reinstall. So if you install Elementary OS, make sure to create a separate /home partition so you can perform a major upgrade without loosing too much data.
Otherwise, I believe that Elementary OS is quite nice. Although I had to help them at first by pointing out where the application menu is and to help them install LibreOffice (they were already used to it on Windows and it apparently did not show up in the App Centre), they mostly seem to be able to use it themselves with the same amount of assistance required as while using WIndows.
I've seen Reddit devolve since 2014. Look at /r/all and it almost resembles a Facebook feed.
There are several annoyances that made me switch:
- More and more people posting low-effort, stupid short jokes that tend to gather lots of upvotes instead of giving an actual answer
- The upvote system likely causes subreddits to only have one view. If your opinion doesn't align with that view, it will be downvoted and hidden. Opinions that align with that view will float to the top.
- The stupid new awards system with coins and all that kind of rubbish. When it just was Reddit Gold, it was fine in my opinion. It was simple,, it helped out Reddit, you could buy it for yourself or gift it to someone else and most importantly, it wasn't hidden behind a virtual currency to make the real cost of awards ambiguous and easier to spend.
- The enormous focus on growth by making Reddit accessible to people who were thrown off by the old design. I feel like the big influx of new people by this changed the Reddit culture instead of those new people adapting to the Reddit culture that was there.
- People writing "I have a question" as their post title. Just state your question in your post title.
- People posting a link to an image and then writing the actual post as a comment. Please just make a self-post and link your image in there if it is necessary.
- Subreddits starting to require email verification on your account (looking at you, /r/linux).
Combined, these made me search for alternatives. The thing that I liked the most about Lemmy is that it is federated, so that became my main alternative. But I'm afraid that if it gets too big, that it will get the same problem regarding upvotes as Reddit has.
I tried Raddle.me as well for some time, but I lost interest at one point. I don't know why anymore, perhaps to few users? When I look at the frontpage now, the content on the website doesn't really appeal to me. It seems too extreme to my tastes.
The side-effects of upvotes (or likes, by extension) are a though problem to solve, I think. You can do without them them, like some image boards. But on some of those, like 4chan, you'll get people who post not for the upvotes, but for the amount of replies they can get. This simply ends into many flamebaits being posted. Look at /g/, it's not about technology in half of the threads, but simply about transsexuals in a transphobic way, because people take the bait, get angry or join trolling and end up replying to it. The poster gets their dopamine kick and the janitors (moderators) seem to enjoy it as well. The other half of the post simply are text editor X is better than text editor Y and other similar. And then there are threads baiting with sexually provocative images, again, to get people to reply.
I'm wondering how far the the federation is being planned. Is it just that an user on Gitea instance A can discover projects on instance B? Or can an user on instance A also open issues, pull-requests etc on a project on instance B, assuming the user has the required permissions?
If it is the latter, I believe that would be awesome. Right now, I feel like as a starting project, if you want to be discovered and get contributors you basically need to be on a large, centralised code platform or instance such as codeberg, gitlab.com or github.com. I hope that it will lessen the barrier for people already on another Gitea instance to contribute to a project on another instance.
It's Dutch for handle, because this is my online handle. That's really all there is to it.
Just like a kitchen knife can be used by murderers does not mean that the kitchen knife manufacturer should actively monitor who is buying their knifes and go after the ones with bad intentions in my opinion. In the same way, I don't think free software should be licensed under such an ethical open source license.
First of all, it's just very hard to enforce I'd imagine. Would people who do not care about respecting human rights to begin with even care about such a license? You're not stopping "evil" by making up rules that "evil" people don't follow almost by definition. At least the license is more clear about what is considered as acceptable and what not unlike the infamous "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause, for which I have to give it some credit.
Everything you can make can be used for wrong things and I suppose you'll have to accept that you'll never have full control over that. The only thing that can stop something to be used by people with bad intentions is to never create it in the first place.
Besides, I´d rather have my enemy use open source software instead of closed source software. If they use open source software, it's easier to get a grasp on what they're capable of.
For software like Lemmy with federation, I'd just say to block those from federating to your own instances and stop giving those instances attention. As long as the flagship instances that federate with each other keep up a positive attitude, I would just ignore those extremist people's instances
And that's why European Union introduced the Digital Markets Act. By March 2024, Meta will need to give a way for third party clients to communicate with WhatsApp users in 1-to-1 chats. Group chats will probably follow 2 years after.