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do you use cotton leggings? would you recommend them?
  • Unfortunately it is relative. On reddit this probably wouldn't even be noticed, it would just likely be buried and never seen by the vast majority of people. Problem is people bring the same posting habits to Lemmy as they are used to on Reddit (opening lots of posts over multiple communities which is necessary in order to be seen) and it creates a lot of extra noise and perceived spam.

  • Need a list of FOSS alternatives
  • I think they mean "watch out" as in "keep an eye out for" rather than "be careful of".

    On a different note I love that you have Pulsar on there :), I'm one of the team working on it so its always nice to see it mentioned in places.

  • The Creators of the Atom Code Editor Open-Source Zed, Their New Rust-Based High-Performance Editor
  • On the plus side, the fact they stopped Atom development has allowed our community fork of Pulsar to flourish and it has seen loads of active development over the last year. I do find it hard to blame the original team, it was clearly a Microsoft thing to make sure they put all focus on VSCode.

  • What are some popular fermented sauces in your area?
  • When I was working in the Barnsley area I used to pick it up to bring it home to the south. The last time I was there I made sure to stock up on it, now you can just get it anywhere - they sell it in my local Sainsbury's and Waitrose now.

  • good luck little buddy, see you in 5 years
  • The technology is nothing alike though. Atom is Electron and Javascript where Zed is Rust with its own custom UI toolkit.

    And on the current version of Pulsar (the only real community fork of Atom seeing active development), startup time to point of the editor being usable is actually slightly faster than VSCode.

  • How did you lose weight?
  • Not a method I'd ever recommend to anybody but depression did it. Just stopped eating, like, almost entirely, had no appetite whatsoever, would force myself to eat at least something around dinner time, around 50g of carbs (when dry) like pasta, rice or noodles. Drank tea during the day for some caffeine. Combined with some exercise - started walking then running about 5k every few days.

    Things got a bit more normal after a while and just kind of went with watching calories. Mostly just kept an eye on carbs - no more than 100g per day, used less fat or oil in cooking, picked slightly (but not excessively) leaner cuts of meat, more veggie dishes, skimmed milk, no sugary drinks. Never was one for eating breakfast, my day would normally be some kind of lunch time thing like a couple of crumpets with some jam, an afternoon snack - usually rice cakes, japanese-style crackers, pickled stuff (gherkins, onions, sauerkraut) then dinner as I mentioned above. There was a few brands of ice cream that did low calorie versions I would buy for dessert, or I would have fat-free yoghurt and a couple of squares of chocolate.

    I found this pretty easy to do during covid (started this all maybe mid 2020). It was easy to hide the fact you were eating strangely if people aren't aware. The bit that I found (and still find) hardest is the intention to start or cut portion sizes. I never intended to do it but I found that when I stopped eating because I had no appetite, it was like a kind of reset that allowed me to build up to a more appropriate diet. I can't say I think this is a good idea for a whole host of reasons but that is what happened to me.

  • [ADHDinos] Emotional Dysregulation
  • No but I do understand where they are coming from. Can I read it? Yes. Is it hard to read? No. However for me it is oddly... uncomfortable... to read. Thats the best way I can describe it. I normally scan read the text and the way I understand it is that when people read like this they are looking for the overall shapes of words, not the individual letters, which is why it is possible to misspell the middle letters of words without causing too much issue with comprehension. However for me the way the letters are 'weighted' in the font is like a visual speedbump, they draw attention to themselves in a way which, for me, is unwanted and causes me to slow and change how I read each word.

    I've noticed it before but I can't say I particularly care, it isn't like I'm reading prose. If this helps others then I think it is great that it is being used.

  • ditch discord!
  • The moment I see the same question popping up more than a couple of times is an indication that it should be documented by somewhere that is actually indexed by search engines, normally the website/faq/docs/wiki as it is clear there is something missing.

    To me, as part of a small team/project, it feels so much better to be able to use chat for every day communication just as I would at work. It allows a lot more expression in communication than forum posting. It has really helped us have a good sense of community and teamwork we might have not otherwise had.

  • ditch discord!
  • I don't think much in this is specific to Discord so much as it is to chat/IM in general. Honestly we use both chat (yes via Discord although I'd love to move to Matrix) and forums. They just serve completely different roles. Traditional style forums (whatever it is, Discourse, Flarum, Github Discussions) work really well for "long form" topics and asynchronous conversations. i.e. if there is something to discuss that is complex and can attract valid conversation over the course of days/weeks/months then it is ideal.

    Chat on the other hand is great for co-ordinating and asking quick one-off questions that will get you an answer really quickly. We use it all the time to just discuss general plans, ideas etc. and answer simple questions like "how do I do x?".

    I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a "simple" question which wouldn't be a problem on a forum.

  • ditch discord!
  • I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I'd be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.

    However it isn't easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I'm part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.

    We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn't ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to atom.io but the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.

    We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn't be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.

    We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn't seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).

    Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.

    So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those "less than ideal" ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.

  • Text editor with predefined text snippets?
  • Pulsar (i.e. active fork of Atom) has a pretty comprehensive snippets package that comes bundled with the editor. Can be configured with some fairly simple cson, for example with Markdown:

    '.source.gfm':
      'Hello Lemmy':
        'prefix': 'helem'
        'body': 'Hello Lemmy!'
    

    You type helem then press tab and it will expand to Hello Lemmy! when using the Markdown grammar (source.gfm).
    It can handle custom tab stops too so you can make a longer preformatted sentence with gaps to insert words which you can just tab through (the $1, $2, $3).

    '.source.gfm':
      'My custom snippet':
        'prefix': 'mcs'
        'body': 'My snippet stops here $1 and then here $2 and then continues $3'
    

    You can even do multi-line snippets. For anyone wanting to try it out the docs are here

  • What do you think it would take for people to leave GitHub?

    So this is inspired somewhat by a question about somebody wanting to have a non-GitHub way of contributing to Lemmmy. I've really enojyed some other discussions on this community so felt somewhat inspired to ask this one too.

    And whilst Lemmy is mirrored to a couple of alternatives (a self hosted Gitea and Codeberg) they can't really be anything more than a mirror and a backup. If one doesn't want to use GitHub they still can't realistically contribute without signing up to GitHub and creating issues and PRs.

    So what would it take to actually get people away from GitHub and onto alternatives (GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut)? The situation seems to somewhat parallel the whole Reddit and Twitter thing. Both have/had a huge monopoly on users to the point where it just wasn't really worth using anything else, at least not if you wanted to be part of a decently sized community.

    Other mass migrations

    Obviously the difference with Reddit and Twitter is that they both have had their version of "the Event" which cause existing projects (Mastodon, Lemmy amongst others) to suddenly explode in popularity. Has it killed off the originals? No but it has made the alternatives actually viable with enough of a community to sustain them and encourage more to join, even if slowly.

    GitHub has had its fair share of controversy, most recently surrounding co-pilot and code scraping but no particular widespread outrage to cause people to leave it in droves.

    GitHub is the home of open source?

    I think for many GitHub has simply become synonymous with open source. The sheer number of repositories and projects hosted there means that people just use GitHub alone for all of their open source needs and don't even look at other forges. Not to mention all the services offered - most of the alternatives can offer some of the same features but not all of them. Not only do you get space for your project code itself but you get access to their CI/CD platform, a forum through Discussions, a wiki, a project management tool, static site hosting which is an awful lot for smaller projects like GitLab and community non-profit projects like Codeberg to compete with.

    There of course are some people that rely on their GitHub profile and their activity chart in order to get jobs and advance their careers - many of these people I suspect wouldn't want to fragment their profile by having to split their activity up over multiple profiles.

    So why would anyone not want to use GitHub. Quite simply it isn't really in the spirit of open source is it? Not only is it controlled by Microsoft who haven't historically been the friendliest towards open source but GitHub itself is closed source. You can't host your own GitHub and get all the same features it enjoys. It does seem somewhat odd that the biggest vault of open source projects is itself proprietary and completely closed off.

    What would need to happen for things to change?

    So realistically what could be done about it? What would need to happen in order to entice people off of GitHub? Something arriving in the hopefully not too distant future is forge federation - projects such as Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux aim to try and create a federation of software forges. One of the main issues about having to create different accounts for every single platform goes away as you just stick with the instance you like best (or host your own) and yet still be able to fully interact with software hosted on other platforms. This means that you should be able to interact with a project hosted on, say, Codeberg, from your sourcehut account. You should be able to see issues, PRs etc. just as if you were on the same website.

    GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden. I just don't see a world where they would want to join in with federation.

    Lastly I just want to add that I'm absolutely not judging anyone for using GitHub. The main project I'm involved with is also still on GitHub for some good reasons. Not only is it intertwined with their ecosystem but it provides services that we just need at this point. We still rely on some of GitHub's services so we don't spend our community donations on hosting stuff that we just don't need to. It lightens the maintenance on us whilst we are still in a very active stage of the project with an awful lot of moving parts. And the bit I hate most, we need to be visible to the community - we aren't big enough to go to one of the alternative platforms because what community engagement we have might well drop through the floor if people are suddenly forced to make accounts on other services just to log an issue or ask a question. I would love to move to a platform like Codeberg and any personal project I make would probably be hosted there but for a big-ish community project we just cannot justify it. So I am well aware of the attraction of GitHub and what keeps people there. What I want to know is what would be needed to actually break that inertia for projects, such as the one I mentioned, to justify a move away from GitHub - particularly people who may be far less ideological about the open source world.

    tl;dr

    • GitHub offer many nice thing
    • Other places have not so many nice thing
    • How other place make people change mind up to move from place with all thing and all people to place with less many people and thing?
    81
    Escaping from the Chromium monopoly - alternative browser engines

    So I was posting on this thread which is a meme about how everything is Chromium (except Firefox obviously) and was replying to somebody talking about needing the "Linux of browser engines".

    This got me thinking about a few things as this is an area which I'm very much for reducing the, honestly slightly obscene, amount of control that Google have over this space with Chromium.

    So I thought why not make a quick discussion to showcase some alternatives that are out there in development that people might not know about and bring them some attention as well as just foster a discussion in general on the topic.

    So this won't be focusing on Blink and WebKit (nor KHTML which, whilst independent is still closely tied to Blink and WebKit. For those unaware KHTML is KDE's browser engine, forked by Apple to make WebKit which itself was forked to create Blink. It has also recently been killed off entirely for KF6 so is very much dead end now). By extension this also includes things like Qt WebEngine or anything else based on WebKit or Chromium/Blink.

    I'm also not touching on Gecko - the other "big" engine out there. Whilst I am a huge proponent of Firefox, Gecko has proven that it just isn't as popular to use in alternative browsers as Chromium or Webkit. I'm not knowledgeable to explain exactly why this is but there are plenty of resources out there. By extension I'm also not expanding upon Goanna.

    The reason for my interest is also because it goes beyond just browsers - for example these could be used in Electron-like projects for desktop Javascript apps.

    So what alternatives are there or are currently in development?

    Servo

    A project started by then abandoned by Mozilla to develop a new experimental browser engine. Was picked up by the Linux Foundation and had a recent round of funding to begin active development again. Why do I find this interesting?

    • It isn’t being created as part of a larger browser project - i.e. it is a project to develop the engine and not to develop a browser. Hopefully this means it is far more portable and embedabble for anyone who wants to use it for their own project.
    • Supported by the Linux Foundation rather than any of the tech corps like Facebook or Google which hopefully means they are more open and friendly to community contribution.
    • Written in Rust - I’m not claiming that this is good because of the language technology itself but Rust is currently very popular with lots of people wanting to learn it and contribute to projects so hopefully this inspires people to get involved with it.
    • Not a KHTML/WebKit/Blink (or even a Gecko) fork
    • Repo is on GitHub - Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a GitHub shill, but generally people monitor and know how to use GitHub better than Google and Mozilla’s systems. I’d honestly be just as happy if using GitLab or any other alternatives as they still confirm to that same user experience (and to be fair WebKit is also on GitHub).

    Ferus

    A much smaller and lower profile project described as "A toy web engine written in Nim" but one I find interesting enough to be watching

    • Written in Nim - I'm all for getting less popular but interesting languages being used in more projects
    • Small GitHub hosted and actively developed project that seems would be easy to get involved with if you wanted to help develop or improve the project.

    NetSurf and NeoSurf

    Not browser engines but browsers that use their own engine and not based on anything else. NetSurf is the original and has been ported to a ton of different OSs (it was actually made for Acorn's RISCOS originally) but development is somewhat slow so it seems NeoSurf is a fork to try and improve and build upon it.

    LibWeb and Ladybird

    Part of the fascinating SerenityOS project - Ladybird is its home grown but cross platform browser using its own LibWeb browser engine. Honestly I'm not particularly familiar with the project and the first link does a much better job of explaining it all than I can.

    ---

    So yeah, just thought to put some open source alternative browser engine projects that are out there to draw attention and foster a little discussion in this community. Interested to see what people think.

    25
    What open source project(s) are you working on?

    So in the spirit of this community and not just to focus on the Reddit... issues... I thought it might be nice to get a topical conversation going in here.

    Basically, what open source projects are you currently working on or are you heavily involved with?

    I think it would be nice to see what projects people have on the go, get some publicity out there and otherwise talk about stuff that we should be discussing here.

    21
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)DA
    Daeraxa @lemmy.ml
    Posts 3
    Comments 144