• Continuing study after school. Whether its science, political theory, or anything, a lot of people stop reading or studying anything after college / school.
• Doing something creative as an outlet (music, art, knitting, anything). A lot of people are just consumption machines nowadays, mostly consuming things other people have made, rather than creating something.
• Physical exercise.
• Having explicit long-term goals and working towards them.

Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).

Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.

Thank you so much for writing this, it articulated a lot of things I've been thinking about this past week. So many of us are all spending our most valuable resource, time, trying make this a better place, in whatever way we can, and none of these 4 groups (some of us are members of more than one) deserve any vitriol or negativity for their efforts. We all need to think about ways we can reduce that negativity, and not all of them can be fixed with computer code, or at the admin level. We all need to improve how we interact with people, and treat them the way we'd like to be treated, with a view towards their well-being.

I'd like to follow your good example, and send out my genuine thanks to all the users, admins, developers, those doing server support, and contributors in any form to lemmy, and it's ecosystem of apps and tools. Members of all of these groups are absolutely vital, and this place is only possible because of our cooperation.

Anyone who still visits reddit, how [deleted] is this story over there?

Edit: I've created a torrent for the video if anyone wants to help seed. His sacrifice in bringing attention to the US-sponsored genocide in Palestine must not be forgotten.

I've been tagged here, so to answer some of the questions I saw below:

We already have a way to permanently delete / overwrite your comments when you delete your account. That's been done for a long time., and is easily visible in lemmy-UI when you go to delete your account.

We do federate that removal, but there's nothing that stops a malicious server from ignoring that request. Activitypub is ultimately like email; there is no unsend email button.

That ticket is more about image removals, which gets tricky. We recently added a table that makes sure to attach image uploads to the local user, and now what's needed is to build out an interface for handling those also, in addition to handling the removals properly. Issue for that is here.

Data privacy will always be an ongoing issue, and we have to handle new problems as they arise. That's nothing new for us.

The main issue in that ticket is that there are 2-4 of us devs working on software that is now used by over 40k ppl daily, and we're spread extremely thin. So my personal patience for people making demands, while refusing to do anything to help out themselves, is very thin. We are not a multi-million dollar corporation with hundreds of developers. If someone wants a feature that we don't have time to work on atm, they can help out by adding it.

I think maltfield is well-intentioned, but they've also shown no interest in helping out with any of these GDPR-related requests. We have no legal expertise about the GDPR, and lemmy is not european software, it's international software.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml and I work full-time on lemmy, and there's a large number of additional contributors, helping out not just with code, but with translations, documentation, moderation, etc. As donations increase, we'd like to add more full-time/paid devs to our little co-op (we're in the process onboarding two more rn).

Growing up during the US war on the Iraqi people, the jingoistic coverage in media for all US wars, then the subsequent alienation I felt after I started working, is the main thing that turned me to Marxism. Essentially, when the extremely untrustworthy warmongers start calling everything they dislike, "communism / socialism", then it must be worth looking into. And I found that there was good reason they carefully steer populations away from Marxist literature, and deem it a heresy: because its a clear and straightforward description of how things actually work, and it threatens their fortunes. Nearly every communist grows up in liberal-dominated cultures, and goes through their own process of rejecting the world that enshrines property and profit over human lives, and how it affected them personally. Their stories are all worth listening to.

I've worked in many different industries in software, and found the same issues in all of them, and just lost patience, especially seeing that all the work I did creating proprietary software was essentially thrown in the trash, and societally useless. I'd much rather be paid very little, and contribute something positive to the world; time is our most valuable resource, and we should spend it doing things that improve the world, because there is so much that needs doing.

I'm personally a hard copyleft developer, so I'd prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.

One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy's source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.

So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.

Side note, but I've seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they'll get it, whether its closed source, or not.

And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I'd def recommend other instances defederate from them. I'd rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.

Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.

Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.

Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:

• https://startrek.website/c/news
• https://starwars.website/c/news

This also isn't unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.

Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.

There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.

Overall tho, I'm against the concept of "combining / merging communities" that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.

Neither @nutomic@lemmy.ml or I are too familiar with the GDPR, so we don't know everything that it requires. Lemmy doesn't do any logging of IPs or other sensitive info, but of course instance runners could be doing their own logging / metrics via their webservers.

We have a Legal section under admin settings, that's an optional markdown field, that can probably be used for it. We'd need someone with GDPR expertise though to help put things together. Lemmy is international software, not european-specific, so we have to keep that in mind when supporting GDPR.

Removable battery is the big one. I had a phone where they only cost like $15, so I could take 2 of them on a trip and last a week w/o charging.