Keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:KI5WYVI3WGWSIGMOKOOOGF4JAE (think PGP key but modern and easier to use)

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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • They were doing the same on other repos for months.
    Both their npm module and android client.
    On android they tried to get people to add their own fdroid repo because the official fdroid has not had updates for 3 months due to the license changes.

    Edit: Looking at it now compared to 4 days ago, they apparently got frdoid to remove bitwarden entirely from the repo. To me this looks like they are sweeping it under the rug, hiding the change pretending it has always been on their own repo they control.

    Next time they try this the mobile app won’t run into issues, the exact issues that this time raised awareness and caused the outcry on the desktop app, which similarly is present in repos with license requirements.

    If they were giving up on their plan, wouldn’t they “fix” the android license issue and resume updating fdroid, instead of burning all bridges and dropping it from the repo entirely, still pushing their own ustom repo? Where is the npm license revert?



  • It means previous versions remain open, but ownership trumps any license restrictions.
    They don’t license the code to themselves, they just have it. And if they want to close source it they can.

    GPLv3 and copyleft only work to protect against non-owners doing that. CLA means a project is not strongly open source, the company doing that CLA can rugpull at any time.

    The fact a project even has a CLA should be extremely suspect, because this is exactly what you would use that for. To ensure you can harvest contributions and none of those contributers will stand in your way when you later burn the bridges and enshittify.


  • You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
    Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.

    In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.

    I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.




  • That isn’t really going out of your way, it is the base mode of how the fediverse works. Looking at something on a different instance.
    Plenty of people just use mbin and see this, without any action at all.
    The point is that as it stands right now, there are already basically no restrictions. The only thing perhaps missing is the knowledge that you can simply copy paste a link into fedia or another mbin instance to view upvotes.

    You can open an issue on mbin about it, to restore a semblance of restriction. But currently as it stands, all restrictions are about as fallen as they could be.

    You can ofc argue that we shouldn’t open another equivalent hole in lemmys webui and api, so that you can in the future remove the ability from mbin.

    I would in turn argue that this system has always been egregious, and that in the same sense as banning encryption you never hit those you want to hit using incomplete restrictions. Regular users are led to believe their votes are private, while the worst dataminers or trolls will always have their instances to query all of that info.
    And how could you inform people that their votes are public without at the same time telling them how to get access to that info?

    If mbin removes the info, you will get another fediverse software showing it. You will get fediverse activity pub log info pages, specific vote info pages, it will never end.
    Has reddit ever managed to kill the 200ᵗʰ removeddit clone?

    Please instead put your effort into changing the way lemmy federates, the only way to fix this is to make vote details private, between only a select few instances. An mbin dev in the other thread mentioned PeerTube as an example implementation where you could remove vote details like that.


  • This would solve some of the problems. If only 2 instances know about the votes, post instance and sublemmy instance, you can reasonably expect to get most instances to never release that info. It would allow either the sublemmy or post instance to manipulate around in the votes, but most manipulation would be detectable by the respective other instance.

    It would open the door however to manipulating around with internal posts made from the instance in a sublemmy on the instance. And it would allow the post instance to drop votes selectively, though I think that is possible currently all the same.

    Votes being sent to both the sublemmy and the post instance simultaneously would make manipulation a lot harder. And for cases like internal posts, you could add another involved “judge instance” that receives the vote details directly from source, and is merely there to confirm the total. Instances that hand out non-independent “judge instances” could be labeled as untrustworthy in the lemmy community.

    So you end up with a list of instances per post that votes are reported to, to which you add the post instance, sublemmy instance, judge instance, and maybe some more.

    In terms of implementation, I think the activitypub protocol needs an origin for votes, right? I would say an instance can just report the votes coming from a stock of obviously fake accounts, like “masked_upvote_1” to _999999 … and “masked_downvote_1” to _XYZ.
    About the votes, I am not sure. It could be done as a lemmy-internal feature where lemmy instances and other instances knowing of the lemmy protocol send the info to all the relevant instances, while any votes from external instances only arrive at I guess the post instance and that then forwards it on to all other instances. This way the checking doesn’t work for software unaware of that lemmy specific vote implementation, but everything is still compatible.

    You could then even for those lemmy-external votes add an interface on the judge instance, that would confirm via pm if your vote has arrived.

    Do you think this could work?


  • In my case I would like them to be private, but currently they are not. I don’t think it is good to try to hinder the visibility into a fundamentally transparent system.

    I don’t see a technical way to make votes private either, that doesn’t prevent bad actor instances abusing the vote system. As an admin of an instance I could just add 5-10 votes to all of my interactions whenever I feel like it, and noone would be able to tell it didn’t come from legitimate users on my instance. The accounts of vote origin are needed as proof, hence moderators on lemmy having access to them.

    Do you perhaps have any idea how this could be accomplished?







  • Careful, Google is currently forcing apps to migrate from SafetyNet to PlayProtect!
    SafetyNet is used by tons of security theater apps like banking 2FA. It is an API of play services.
    PlayProtect is basically the same but you have to talk to it though google play. This is a blatant move by google to make exactly what OP is suggesting impossible, and means that if you do this, you may soon see many apps break that you are forced to use.


  • Yes, those could be detected.
    Ill see how large that portion is on my system in a bit, but I would expect it to come out as the minority.

    Non-detectible ones I can think of rn:

    • Tab muting manager
    • VPN manager
    • link redirect skippers
    • stats printers, like a tab counter
    • dynamic shortcuts, like opening the archived version of the current page on archive.org
    • old reddit redirect
    • cookie managers

    Many more of the ones you listed won’t be detectable on most websites.

    userscript managers (grease/tamper/violentmonkey etc.)

    A userscript manager is by definition detectible only on pages you define or install a userscript for. Even then, modern userscript managers like tampermonkey are running scripts in a separate scope that is completely sandboxed from the actual websites js context, you can’t even pass an object or function to the website and access it there, it will fail.
    Youtube has actively fought some userscripts and failed, which they probably wouldn’t have if those userscripts were detectible.

    User theme managers should be similar, but I can’t comment on them as I don’t use any.

    page translators

    Translators are only detectible when enabled.

    addons serving in-browser ads

    Why would you have an addon that serves ads?

    site-specific UI improvements (RES, SponsorBlock, youtube/SNS tweaks)

    Are site-specific, i.e. not detectible anywhere else

    privacy blockers (CanvasBlocker/JShelter/etc.)

    Please don’t use those anymore, use only uBo. Same for uMatrix.
    uBo is pretty good about not being detected, for obvious reasons.