I don’t think penguins are included in the population count, otherwise NZ would have another 500k population.

I’m pretty sure there’s a Big Antarctica conspiracy to keep penguins off the map, hiding their army of 44m penguins.

It’s there. I’d argue Australia is worse off in this map.

Yes! I don’t really rely on the battery that much but it’s nice to know I could buy a bigger one in the future.

Worth pointing out it’s not swappable, and many people have found the battery life a little lacking.

My experience with laptops in recent years is that having a replaceable battery is the exception.

Yeah their youtube has a video talking about their struggles with getting a commonly available full size SD card reader to fit into one of their expansion cards. I have an external reader I inherited from somewhere so I’m not too worried.

I guess it depends what you value. I have a Framework 13, first generation. I run Linux on it and really enjoyed putting it together myself (I ordered the DIY option).

I absolutely love their ports. You swap in the ports you want. I normally run a USB C on either side (so I can charge from either side) plus a USB A on each side (the Framework 13 has two slots each side, I think the 16 might have 3 each side?). But I also have HDMI, Display Port, and micro SD in case I need them. I can hot swap them in.

Their guides are awesome. I broke a screen and was able to order another and replace it myself following their guide. When the time comes (probably in the next year or so) I’m planning on upgrading. A bit like a desktop, since it’s been a few years it means replacing the motherboard (what they call the mainboard) and RAM since technology moves on. I"m pretty sure like all laptops the CPU is fixed to the mainboard, but you can upgrade RAM or storage without replacing the whole guts (assuming same slot type). In fact you can buy without some pieces and reuse stuff you have or buy from elsewhere to save some money.

When I eventually do it I’m planning on strapping the old mainboard to the back of my TV as a HTPC (replacing the old dying laptop currently there).

There are plenty of downsides. No touchscreen. I wish the screen was a little brighter, it’s not bad but could be better (might be better with later models?). I replaced the hinges with their more resistant ones but the screen still moves if I carry it around with the screen open (not sure if it’s still an issue on newer models).

I really value the idea of repairability and upgradeability. When I was younger you could swap a bigger harddrive or RAM into a laptop if you had a screwdriver (and sometimes even without), and repairing other parts was also possible. These days you’re more likely to find the whole thing glued together. Framework lets you do your own repairs, and has guides to walk you through every step.

There are probably more downsides, but I do love it and would buy another in a heartbeat. But if there are special things you need then carefully check. For example last I checked they did not have a full size SD card reader module available (though of course you can use a regular external one if you really need to).

I think it’s just not aligned, they didn’t get the scale perfect. That pointy bit over the ocean and the bit hanging down from it are actually pretty close to right, just need to be moved over and twisted a bit.

All in all, I don’t think I could do any better.

Today I can say I can see the comment on my instance. Quite possibly it took some time for federation to catch up after being broken for a while.

How? How did we let this happen?

Not only are there all these types but sometimes the same type has reversed polarity of pins such as the type I in your link.

Can we just start again?

No free tier, but some third party apps with a serious effort at going subscription based have been granted more time by reddit (but were required to remove their ads, and more stuff I can’t remember (maybe no NSFW?).

That’s fair. With the reddit example, the data reddit collects is used for advertising. Because reddit accounts are anonymous, there’s not much to sell to third parties.

But with a third party reddit app, reddit can’t show ads. The data is pretty useless. I’m not convinced third party apps can be a meaningful part of the revenue stream.

I don’t mean reddit. You made a general statemet that you shouldn’t pay to access user generated content.

Even Lemmy has users contributing tens of thousands of dollars to pay for servers. Someone has to pay.

Who pays for the servers?

And for a reasonable subscription price! It’s just a shame that we know it goes straight to reddit, so I’m not gonna do that.

You can put any pic you like. Doesn’t have to include any personal info.

I would not give my cellphone number to a random Lemmy instance.

But you don’t need to remember this. Copy the URL “https://sh.itjust.works/c/plugins” into search on your instance, and it should come up.

If you’re the first person on your instance, sometimes it can take some time, or require a refresh, but it should work.

Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?

There is a movement to get Fediverse instances to agree to block Meta. I guess if everyone did this, the Fediverse would continue on and Meta would probably be fine building their own platform.

But Meta has something the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t have: money. They can simply pay some carefully chosen instances to Fedirate with them (which might be what the secret conversations are about).

There will also likely be a bit of a fight between instances that do or don’t Federate with Meta, some thinking it’s good because of the new userbase and some thinking it’s bad because of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing. That alone will probably cause damage as well, possibly splitting the already small userbase into two factions.

Meta is making a twitter/mastodon-like site, so Lemmy might get to have a wait and see approach, but if Meta start changing (Extending) the ActivityPub protocol then the dozens of different platforms on the Fediverse will all have to decide whether to change too or no longer be able to Federate with anyone who does change.

One of the benefits of Facebook Federating with Mastodon is the users. Building a new platform is hard but if on day 1 you can already follow millions of others then this helps. But after a month thay probably won’t be very important, so it will be interesting to see what they do next.

Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I’ll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.

Open: the Fediverse is open, it’s software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don’t know what the code is behind Facebook and they don’t want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.

Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don’t follow any Meta communities and don’t use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there’s a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:

The strategy’s three phases are:

• Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
• Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
• Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.

In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.

Happy to answer further questions!

Servers are independent. You can only create the same username if it’s not already taken. dave@gmail.com and dave@hotmail.com are the same username but different servers. You don’t get dave@gmail.com reserved just because you have dave@hotmail.com, but if it’s available you can register both.

Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?

Lemmy is pretty young and there aren’t a lot of tools. Most likely in future there will be an ability to transfer you account to another server, notifying other instances of the change. But this would require the home server to be available for approving the transfer otherwise you would have people stealing other people’s accounts.

Mastodon (a twitter-like federated site) has an option to migrate an account, but as I understand it, that’s more about moving your followers to your new account. I don’t think the posts move. This page claims there it’s a technical reason so perhaps we wouldn’t have that on Lemmy either - but Mastodon does re-direct accounts, so perhaps on Lemmy in the future your posts might still point to the old user but if someone clicks on it then it will take them to your new account.

None of this is sorted yet so ideas will probably change over time.