Pamasich

in fact, I follow several Lemmy accounts, and I can directly follow your account as well, right from the web interface.

Is there any point to following Lemmy users though? Like, unlike the rest of the fediverse, Lemmy doesn’t send any activities to followers. They just exist, don’t actually receive anything. Is there even any point to it then?

Yes, because this isn’t just Lemmy.

Lemmy itself is more like a forum or old Reddit. A focus on discussion and link aggregation, not people. I personally still consider it social media, but there are enough people who draw the line there. Like others said, it depends on how YOU define social media.

But this is the fediverse, not just Lemmy. I’m writing this from Mbin, which has a much bigger focus on people (you can follow users here). But you can also talk here from Mastodon. Then there’s platforms like Friendica, afaik the Facebook of the fediverse, which theoretically also have access (though I have yet to see a user from there, so idk if they’re functionally compatible with Lemmy).

Lemmy itself might or might not fit in isolation, but if an instance is connected to the fediverse, it’s definitely indirectly a social network. ActivityPub (the protocol used to connect the fediverse) is explicitly a social networking protocol as per its spec.

I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?

Like, they obviously can’t enforce these fines. This article says as much. The fines can’t be enforced, but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article). Which are fair measures imo.

Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way? The US has these laws too, like COPPA iirc. It’s not really something the UK came up with, it’s a bit of a standard with laws like this as far as I know.

I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.

Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we’re really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There’s no way we’ll take a stance against EU law.

This already exists, I have seen it used before, don’t know any exact repositories though. The reason it’s not really used is because it’s pointless. What are you trying to achieve with it? Your community won’t look more active if it has more posts with zero upvotes and zero comments all made by the same user.

Hiding posts from bots will also hide posts from this bot.

Keep in mind that not everyone here uses Lemmy, so a Lemmy feature isn’t a good defense in a federated world like this.

Like I said, I love Windows 11. I actually prefer its features in general to what I’ve seen of Linux, I prefer its design a lot, and there’s some stuff, like WSA and autohotkey, which simply doesn’t exist on Linux with the same simplicity as far as I know. Can’t use classic shell on linux either, and the start menus I have seen either looked ugly or were more launchers than start menus.

I love Windows 11 (the non-copilot+ version) and am positive on AI, but if they pull through with this vision, I WILL switch to Linux once Win11 support ends.

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest.

You mean like how the french aren’t protesting their country’s support of Chat Control? At least I can’t find any information on them doing so.

Donating costs me money. Donating to every single website I like or rely on requires far more money than I have available or am willing to spend. I don’t know your situation, but I’m not rich. I don’t have that kind of disposable income to just throw around.

That said, thanks for mentioning that. I did donate to kbin when it was still around, but I’ve forgotten to set up donations for mbin and kbin.earth since switching over. I’ll have to get on with that.

YouTube just quietly blocked Adblock Plus

They’ve been A/B testing anti-adblock attempts for months or even years now, idk exactly with my sense of time. Sometimes adblocker A doesn’t work, sometimes adblocker B doesn’t work. Sometimes switching browser makes the same adblocker work, sometimes clearing cookies helps, sometimes its dependent on your account. Different users at the same time report different experiences with different adblockers. Sometimes watching a single non-blocked ad restores adblocker functionality magically for a few days.

What I’m trying to say is, this didn’t “just” happen, and it’s specifically the author’s current experience. I myself use Adblock Plus on Edge and Youtube works perfectly fine currently. This has been happening for a long time, and I’m sure there’s uBlock Origin users currently who have the same experience while Adblock Plus works for them. Since that’s how it’s been the last times I’ve seen people talk about this, everyone talking about different experiences.

I’m using Adblock Plus, because of their Acceptable Ads system. Imo it’s far more ethical to regulate ads than to ban them entirely. Websites have to make money to sustain themselves, and ads are the least intrusive way this can be done besides donations (and let’s be honest, most websites can’t support themselves on donations alone). I’d rather have an ad or two at the end of an article than a paywall.

I would love to switch to a different adblocker, ABP has quite enshittified over the years imo. But it would have to be one with Acceptable Ads support.

Acceptable Ads is the very reason I’m still using Adblock Plus. What’s the problem with it? It’s an optional feature, just turn it off and you don’t have to deal with it at all.

Time for community git to somehow be federated like lemmy.

Already being worked on for a while. It’s called ForgeFed and being developed by Forgejo (the software powering codeberg). It’s an extension to the ActivityPub protocol, which is also powering the fediverse.

I have never (and will never) use Threads.

Your instance is federating with threads though, and you seem to have image posts. Maybe Meta managed to figure out that your Facebook and Lemmy accounts are both you and is referring to a Lemmy post of yours federated to Threads?

Update 7/31/25 4:10pm PT: Hours after this article was published, OpenAI said it removed the feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines. The company says this was a short-lived experiment that ultimately “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.”

Interesting, because the checkbox is still there for me. Don’t see things having changed at all, maybe they made the fine print more white? But nothing else.

In general, this reminds me of the incognito drama. Iirc people were unhappy that incognito mode didn’t prevent Google websites from fingerprinting you. Which… the mode never claimed to do, it explicitly told you it didn’t do that.

For chats to be discoverable through search engines, you not only have to explicitly and manually share them, you also have to then opt in to having them appear on search machines via a checkbox.

The main criticism I’ve seen is that the checkbox’s main label only says it makes the chat “discoverable”, while the search engines clarification is in the fine print. But I don’t really understand how that is unclear. Like, even if they made them discoverable through ChatGPT’s website only (so no third party data sharing), Google would still get their hands on them via their crawler. This is just them skipping the middleman, the end result is the same. We’d still hear news about them appearing on Google.

This just seems to me like people clicking a checkbox based on vibes rather than critical thought of what consequences it could have and whether they want them. I don’t see what can really be done against people like that.

I don’t think OpenAI can be blamed for doing the data sharing, as it’s opt-in, nor for the chats ending up on Google at all. If the latter was a valid complaint, it would also be valid to complain to the Lemmy devs about Lemmy posts appearing on Google. And again, I don’t think the label complaint has much weight to it either, because if it’s discoverable, it gets to Google one way or another.

Plus, you explicitly have to opt into this, for each chat you share individually.

I get that it says “discoverable” at first and the search engines are in the fine print, but search engine crawlers get it anyway if it’s discoverable on ChatGPT’s website instead. That term is plenty clear imo.

ChatGPT chats are only public when turned into a shareable chat (which is a manually created snapshot of the chat with a link). And they only show up on search machines if you, after sharing, select the opt-in checkbox for having it show up there.

I don’t know how duck.ai works, but I assume it doesn’t do this.

That’s not correct, it does have an app (Interstellar).

Not official, but neither are all the Lemmy apps.

Switzerland announced a new LLM project which might be of interest here.

Here’s a German article on it. If you’re okay with a Reddit link, here’s a translation.

Some points on it:

• fully open source in its entirety — source code, model weights, and training data will all be publically released.
• licensed under Apache 2.0
• compliant with Swiss data protection laws, copyright law, and the EU AI act
• respects crawler opt-outs on websites

While nothing there explicitly says the data is ethically sourced, we’ll be able to tell based on the opensource training data, and I assume copyright law takes care of stuff like books being used (though idk if the AI has a way to determine the license of web content, or if it fully relies on opt-outs there).

Also it’s only for AI Windows which requires an AI chip. Considering how anti-AI the fediverse is, I doubt any of the people here would be getting AI Windows in the first place. It’s a non-issue for the users here already from the get-go at the requirements.