Alt text: A rocket engine attached to a train. The rocket is labeled "AI" and the train labeled "Enshittification train".

Disclaimer: If this isn't in the spirit of the community, feel free to remove the post and I'll re-post it in my app-specific community. I'm posting it here since it's a feature that I'm thinking through that may eventually make it into the Lemmy app I develop, and the people here would probably have good ideas/opinions on the matter. Plus, other apps may have already implemented this, and someone may helpfully point that out.

With that out of the way, I'm looking to get some feedback on whether this is a good idea or something that only sounds like a good idea.

Basically, when a post has crossposts, my idea is to fetch the comments for the other cross posts and merge them all into one big comment tree. Regardless of which cross-post you land on, you'll see the same comments.

• If you reply to the post (top-level comment), it'll post to whichever cross post you're currently on.
• If you reply to an existing comment, it'll go to whatever post that comment was posted to.

The goal is to bring some unity to disparate communities that have a lot of crossover content.

Is this a good idea? Dumb idea? Can anyone think of any gotchas that might crop up? If I do implement this, it will be something the user can turn on/off.

Potential issues:

• Culture clash between different communities
• Mods of one community would not be able to mod every item shown
• ???

Thoughts?

Image description: Homer Simpson runs a red light at a 4-way intersection, and multiple cars slam on their brakes to avoid an accident. He waves out the window and yells "It's alright, I'm running for president" and drives away.

Offscreen is Amos hitting on Lwaxana who just kind of materialized on the Roci. Holden blamed the Protomolecule, and Amos named her "Pumpkins".

I had this discussion with a friend, and we really couldn't reach a consensus.

My friend thinks Lemmy (and other Reddit-like platforms) is social media because you're interacting with other people, liking/disliking submissions, and all the content is user-generated.

I think it isn't because you're not following individual people, just communities/topics. Though I concede there are some aspects of social media present, I feel that overall it's not because my view of social media is that you're primarily following individuals.

In my view, these link aggregator + comment platforms are more like an evolution of forums which both my friend and I agreed don't meet the criteria to be considered social media (though they maintain that Reddit-like platforms are social media while I do not).

So I'm asking Lemmy now to weigh in to help settle this friendly debate.

Edit: Thanks everyone! From the comments, it sounds like my friend and I are both right and both wrong. lol. Feel free to keep chiming in, but I have to go do the 9-5 thing that pays my mortgage and cloud hosting bills.

cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/1130768

Finally releasing 1.3.0. I didn't quite rip it down to the studs, but it was damn close. Much of the UI has been re-written as well as a lot of the underpinning helper functions. There's a lot of changes, though most are just enhancements and polish to things that already existed in 1.2.9.

Screenshot description: Logged into my Lemmy World account, browsing communities hosted at programming.dev, and the community list is shown. Communities on programming.dev I'm already subscribed to are indicated, and the check buttons allow instant subscription to those (even if LW doesn't yet know about them). Also shown is an instance selector dropdown featuring my home instance as well as instances set by the admin to appear there. At the bottom of that dropdown is a field where I can enter the domain of any Lemmy instance to browse.

The full changelog is a beast, so I'll only post the highlights here:

Highlights for 1.3.0

API Compatibility

1.3.0 "Defiant" remains fully compatible with both 0.18.x and 0.19.x. This will be the last version to support 0.18.x. Once development of 1.4.0 begins, the minimum supported API version will be 0.19.3.

0.19.x Features Supported

0.19 has had basic support (mostly auth) since 0.19.0 was released. In addition, 1.3.0 now offers a few more features that become available when connecting to an 0.19.x instance:

• Scaled sort becomes available
• Instance block becomes available
• Instance blocks are managable through your Profile->Blocks page.
• Cursor-based pagination is used if available but falls back to offset-based for 0.18.x
• [New] Fixed bug where admin state is not detected when connected to 0.19.x instances. If you've been using Tesseract on 0.19 and didn't realize it has admin capabilities: surprise! It totally does and has. This bug just caused it to not detect you were an admin and hid them from you. See: https://dubvee.org/post/1148802

General

• Whole UI has been polished. See the changelog for the full list of changes since 1.2.9
• Removed markdown-it and all of its plugins as it was too cumbersome to extend to do some things I wanted to do and replaced it with svelte-plugin-marked. Wrote custom renderers to replicate the functionality of markdown-it-html5-embed and spoilers.
• New community moderation capabilities (directly ban/unban users, localized modlog with quick actions)
• Sidebar fonts are now more compact
• Long community names are intelligently shortened where needed
• You can now select one of several fonts to use for the UI. The default font is now Roboto.
• New notification widget
• Option to hide those obnoxious "anti AI" CC licenses people put on their posts/comments that they somehow think will prevent LLMs from training on their submissions. 🙄
• Posts with URLs will now have an [Archive Link] next to them which will automatically search archive.ph for that URL. Please stop commenting "Paywalled" when someone posts an article.
• "Copy Lemmyverse Link" added to user profile menus
• Can now change password without having to go through "forgot password" process (I swear I thought I already implemented this, but I guess it never got merged in. Oops)
• Action bar for posts/comments is now reversible. Primarily intended for mobile when you want the vote buttons to be on the right-hand side.
• Bugfixes: too many to list

Search

This deserves its own section since the search was completely revamped.

• Search filters cleaned up and polished
• Can now search from community or user pages which will automatically filter the search to just that community/user
• Added a "More from {user}" option to the community menu on posts. This will search for posts/comments by that user in the current community.
• #Hashtags are now automatically converted to search links

Remote Instance Community Browser Revamp

• Can now one-click subscribe to communities on remote instances
• Your subscription status for communities is now reflected against remote instances
• Got rid of modal to view community info. Each item is now a collapsible item; expand to see community details.
• Admins can specify a list of instances that will pre-fill the instance selector for quick browsing. Users can enter any instance they want also.

/instances Page

Can now view federated instances (allowed, blocked, linked) through Tesseract. Additionally, you can filter by software (Lemmy, Kbin, etc) and keyword as well as hide dead instances.

Each instance also has action buttons to view communities there (Lemmy only), visit the instance, view a Fediseer report for it. Dead instances are also indicated with a "thumbs-down" icon.

Instances are considered "dead" if they haven't been pinged in > 3 days.

Media

• Peertube videos now embed seamlessly. You can already follow Peertube channels in Lemmy, and now they'll show as a feed of embeds.
• Embeds now only render when they're in the viewport. Once an embed is out of the viewport, the iframe is destroyed and removed from the DOM. This saves a LOT of memory.
• Can enable an option to show alt text as a caption on images in markdown (not post images, but images in the post body and coments).

Feed & Posts

• Added buttons on community avatars to quick subscribe/unsubscribe (ok, saw that Photon did that and implemented it almost exactly the same. Sue me).
• "Explore" menu is now "Instances" menu. Instance-specific options are here such as Fediseer reports, block that instance (0.19+), and browse communities there.
• Infinite scroll is now the default.

Post Creation

In addition to the polish and cleanup, the form to create posts has some new features:

• Can now pull the metadata from the given URL to pre-populate the title and pull a thumbnail for previewing
• Uploading images can now use the image proxy URL to reduce load on the API server (if media proxy/cache is enabled by admins and users enable it in their settings)
• Can preview in both card and compact views

Modlog

Lots of tweaks and polish, now has quick action buttons that can be used to reverse a previous action or take additional actions. You can also easily turn a temp ban into a permaban without the intermediate step of unbanning first.

Features That Did Not Make It Into 1.3.0

There are only two planned features that didn't make the cut:

Reimplement custom feeds

Since this is the last 0.18.x release, and I'm having to support both cursor and offset-based pagination, I've decided to push the custom feed rewrite to 1.4.0 which is dropping 0.18.x support. That will make implementation easier and cleaner than having to support both methods.

TOTP 2FA Setup

Same as with the custom feeds, I want to do this cleanly. Since 0.18.5's TOTP setup is bonkers and can easily lead to accounts being locked out, I've decided to skip adding this until 0.19.x is the minimum-supported version. Tesseract supports logging in if your account has 2FA enabled, but you can't manage 2FA settings yet. I may add that in a 1.3.x release and just limit it to 0.19.x instances like I'm doing with the other 0.19 features as long as I can do it cleanly without impacting support for 0.18.x.

Update

My thanks to @gedaliyah@lemmy.world for pointing out a bug when working reports. Fixes have been pushed out.

Get Tesseract

• Changelog: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/1.3.0/ChangeLog.md
• Docker Image (amd64 only): ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.3.0
• Github: https://github.com/asimons04/Tesseract/
• Demo: https://tesseract.dubvee.org
• Matrix: Support Room

Feel free to play around with the demo instance (it's unlocked and can log into any Lemmy instance), but ideally, you'd host it yourself or ask your instance admins to offer it as an alternate UI.

Finally releasing 1.3.0. I didn't quite rip it down to the studs, but it was damn close. Much of the UI has been re-written as well as a lot of the underpinning helper functions. There's a lot of changes, though most are just enhancements and polish to things that already existed in 1.2.9.

The full changelog is a beast, so I'll only post the highlights here:

Highlights for 1.3.0

API Compatibility

1.3.0 "Defiant" remains fully compatible with both 0.18.x and 0.19.x. This will be the last version to support 0.18.x. Once development of 1.4.0 begins, the minimum supported API version will be 0.19.3.

0.19.x Features Supported

0.19 has had basic support (mostly auth) since 0.19.0 was released. In addition, 1.3.0 now offers a few more features that become available when connecting to an 0.19.x instance:

• Scaled sort becomes available
• Instance block becomes available
• Instance blocks are managable through your Profile->Blocks page.
• Cursor-based pagination is used if available but falls back to offset-based for 0.18.x

General

• Whole UI has been polished. See the changelog for the full list of changes since 1.2.9
• Removed markdown-it and all of its plugins as it was too cumbersome to extend to do some things I wanted to do and replaced it with svelte-plugin-marked. Wrote custom renderers to replicate the functionality of markdown-it-html5-embed and spoilers.
• New community moderation capabilities (directly ban/unban users, localized modlog with quick actions)
• Sidebar fonts are now more compact
• Long community names are intelligently shortened where needed
• You can now select one of several fonts to use for the UI. The default font is now Roboto.
• New notification widget
• Option to hide those obnoxious "anti AI" CC licenses people put on their posts/comments that they somehow think will prevent LLMs from training on their submissions. 🙄
• Posts with URLs will now have an [Archive Link] next to them which will automatically search archive.ph for that URL. Please stop commenting "Paywalled" when someone posts an article.
• "Copy Lemmyverse Link" added to user profile menus
• Can now change password without having to go through "forgot password" process (I swear I thought I already implemented this, but I guess it never got merged in. Oops)
• Action bar for posts/comments is now reversible. Primarily intended for mobile when you want the vote buttons to be on the right-hand side.
• Bugfixes: too many to list

Search

This deserves its own section since the search was completely revamped.

• Search filters cleaned up and polished
• Can now search from community or user pages which will automatically filter the search to just that community/user
• Added a "More from {user}" option to the community menu on posts. This will search for posts by that user in the current community.
• #Hashtags are now automatically converted to search links

Remote Instance Community Browser Revamp

• Can now one-click subscribe to communities on remote instances
• Your subscription status for communities is now reflected against remote instances
• Got rid of modal to view community info. Each item is now a collapsible item; expand to see community details.
• Admins can specify a list of instances that will pre-fill the instance selector for quick browsing. Users can enter any instance they want also.

/instances Page

Can now view federated instances (allowed, blocked, linked) through Tesseract. Additionally, you can filter by software (Lemmy, Kbin, etc) and keyword as well as hide dead instances.

Each instance also has action buttons to view communities there (Lemmy only), visit the instance, view a Fediseer report for it. Dead instances are also indicated with a "thumbs-down" icon.

Instances are considered "dead" if they haven't been pinged in > 3 days.

Media

• Peertube videos now embed seamlessly. You can already follow Peertube channels in Lemmy, and now they'll show as a feed of embeds.
• Embeds now only render when they're in the viewport. Once an embed is out of the viewport, the iframe is destroyed and removed from the DOM. This saves a LOT of memory.
• Can enable an option to show alt text as a caption on images in markdown (not post images, but images in the post body and coments).

Feed & Posts

• Added buttons on community avatars to quick subscribe/unsubscribe (ok, saw that Photon did that and implemented it almost exactly the same. Sue me).
• "Explore" menu is now "Instances" menu. Instance-specific options are here such as Fediseer reports, block that instance (0.19+), and browse communities there.
• Infinite scroll is now the default.

Post Creation

In addition to the polish and cleanup, the form to create posts has some new features:

• Can now pull the metadata from the given URL to pre-populate the title and pull a thumbnail for previewing
• Uploading images can now use the image proxy URL to reduce load on the API server (if media proxy/cache is enabled by admins and users enable it in their settings)
• Can preview in both card and compact views

Modlog

Lots of tweaks and polish, now has quick action buttons that can be used to reverse a previous action or take additional actions. You can also easily turn a temp ban into a permaban without the intermediate step of unbanning first.

Features That Did Not Make It Into 1.3.0

There are only two features that didn't make the cut:

Reimplement custom feeds

Since this is the last 0.18.x release, and I'm having to support both cursor and offset-based pagination, I've decided to push the custom feed rewrite to 1.4.0 which is dropping 0.18.x support. That will make implementation easier and cleaner than having to support both methods.

TOTP 2FA Setup

Same as with the custom feeds, I want to do this cleanly. Since 0.18.5's TOTP setup is bonkers and can easily lead to accounts being locked out, I've decided to skip adding this until 0.19.x is the minimum-supported version.

Get Tesseract

• Changelog: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract/blob/1.3.0/ChangeLog.md
• Docker Image (amd64 only): ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.3.0
• Github: https://github.com/asimons04/Tesseract/
• Demo: https://tesseract.dubvee.org

Feel free to play around with the demo instance (it's unlocked and can log into any Lemmy instance), but ideally, you'd host it yourself or ask your instance admins to offer it as an alternate UI.

I definitely do not want to support this practice, but there's no way to filter these out 😠.

It's so rare to actually see a new battery tech exit the lab and enter production. Always seems like there's 10,000 new up and coming breakthroughs in battery technology, but none ever leave the workbench.

While Na-ion batteries don't have the energy density of Li-ion, they make up for it with many other factors such as more abundant source materials, increased safety, higher charge/discharge currents, and increased number of charge cycles.

Slashdot summary:

>Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction. Even moving beyond the sodium vs lithium surname comparison, Natron says its sodium-ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials that also include aluminum, iron and manganese. Furthermore, the materials for Natron's sodium-ion chemistry can be procured through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. The same cannot be said for common lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel.

>Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage. [...] Natron says its batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, a level of immediate charge/discharge capability that makes the batteries a prime contender for the ups and downs of backup power storage. Also helping in that use case is an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

Second thought: "or into whom?"

More of a sysadmin humor, but there's not really a community for that, and from what I've seen here, there's plenty of overlap.

Note: This is just a drill, but it did happen last weekend.

Any practical advice is welcome.

Edit: After some research, the path seems to be basically this:

1. Get state residents to contact their delegates asking them to draft and/or support a constitutional amendment that gives citizens power to submit ballot initiatives (that's what we do not currently have in our state constitution).
2. The legislature has to pass it by 2/3 in order for it to appear on the ballot (governor does not need to sign it for it to appear on the ballot)
3. A simple majority of voters (> 50%) would have to vote "yes" on the proposed amendment on election day.

Sounds easy enough, but the last 4 ballot initiatives (all legislatively sponsored) were basically power grabs (thankfully none of them passed). Still, going to see if I can maybe get the ball rolling and channel my jealousy of other states into something productive.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/B.G._Robinson

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Mitchell_(Crewman)

(Also an unnamed Son'a officer in Insurrection which I did not know)

Have been on a QI binge lately, so I've been learning all sorts of random stuff. Here's today's:

Stephen Fry: [Upon reading how Lord Dawson euthanized King George V] "Isn't that what a speed ball is? He's basically gone the same way as John Belushi"

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_V#Declining_health_and_death

> By 20 January, George was close to death. His physicians, led by Lord Dawson of Penn, issued a bulletin with the words "The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close." Dawson's private diary, unearthed after his death and made public in 1986, reveals that George's last words, a mumbled "God damn you!", were addressed to his nurse, Catherine Black, when she gave him a sedative that night. Dawson, who supported the "gentle growth of euthanasia", admitted in the diary that he ended the King's life:

>> At about 11 o'clock it was evident that the last stage might endure for many hours, unknown to the Patient but little comporting with that dignity and serenity which he so richly merited and which demanded a brief final scene. Hours of waiting just for the mechanical end when all that is really life has departed only exhausts the onlookers & keeps them so strained that they cannot avail themselves of the solace of thought, communion or prayer. I therefore decided to determine the end and injected (myself) morphia gr.3/4 [grains] and shortly afterwards cocaine gr.1 [grains] into the distended jugular vein ... In about 1/4 an hour – breathing quieter – appearance more placid – physical struggle gone

> Dawson wrote that he acted to preserve the King's dignity, to prevent further strain on the family, and so that George's death at 11:55 pm could be announced in the morning edition of The Times newspaper rather than "less appropriate ... evening journals".

The clash over bathroom policy and other elements of a federal regulation finalized last week could set the stage for another wave of legal battles over how transgender kids should be treated in the U.S.