I started following people I found elsewhere, then followed people they boosted until my feed had enough volume. Since I mostly consume content and don't post much, that has been working for me. It does take some figuring out and blocking people (like some on this thread) who'll act like you're not supposed to be there if it isn't all obvious to you (it really isn't to anyone). If you like both lemmy and twitter (X) it might be worth giving masto another shot.
I think Nyxt is not Chromium-based. Still too experimental to be used as single/main browser, but has some very interesting concepts.
Would it be reasonable to host an instance just for myself? I wouldn't be creating any post on it but, from what I've learned so far about the fediverse, it could be used to back up content from instances I federated with (which would be my primary way of interacting with content) and it might take my account's load off of someone else's servers. Does this sound about right?
This one point about the fediverse that I find essential to consider when thinking about reliability. Distributed ownership of servers drastically decreases the chances of the fediverse as a whole going down (not considering differences in the reliability of individual servers). But each individual server has a much higher chance of going down than say an individual subreddit. This is a subject I'd very much like to understand better, but it's clear it has implications to the chance of any given post getting lost.
As much as I agree with the argument for QWERTY agaist Dvorak or Colemark as a default, alphabetical ordering seems more generally standard than even QWERTY. And in any case, when typing something on the TV the remote seems to be the real bottleneck.
It should help people maintaining servers exactly the same way any sort of ads would, i.e. as a source of revenue to cover costs. Having ads targeted to developers might make the ads more appealing to the public at lemmy, but whether that's good or bad is a matter in which I take no stance right now. Both Intel and JetBrains are listed on the EthicalAds website as users of this service, so this is not necessarily geared to small developers, except for job opportunities on the ads.
I can see opt-in/opt-out options working outside of the box for server maintainers: I think each server would need to take the initiative to implement EthicalAds in their server. Implementing this option per user seems more complicated, but that's my perspective from the outside.
On Ads for FOSS - EthicalAds
TL;DR: found this ad company that seems to have the right ideas and values compatible with the community here. Posting for feedback on whether to go deeper in the topic.
A while back I came across EthicalAds which, in my undestanding at the time, used to show ads based strictly on the site's content, i.e. it used no information about the user whatsoever. I just looked at the EthicalAds site again today and noticed two things: they now brand themselves as ads targeted to developers, and they use geolocation information for showing the ads.
I'm interested in this topic because of my more general interest in the growth of federated social media and the understanding that servers cost money. I'll express here my current take on the subject, and if there is enough interest I'll be compiling more information on the subject.
Ads are the most commonly recognized way of monetizing content that is free to access, including much (most?) social media today. The main perceived issues with ads are tracking (by which I mean the collecting of identifiable information about the user) and visual polution. The matter of visual polution (including information overload) works on a spectrum, as any who went through the pop-up age of the internet must admit. Where to place ads is something that can be managed by a site's admin, even under the constraint that less convenient locations (from a content consumer perspective) may be better monetized. If ads are poorly placed, I'll be anoyed when trying to get to the content I'm looking for, but that's really the extent of my issue. All in all, visual pollution seems simple to consider and deal with.
Tracking, on the other hand, seems like a whole different beast. The first important difference is lack of transparency: it's hard to know what data is being collected, when, for what purpose, how it's being processed, as well as tangible and potential impact of the use of this data. The impact of my data being collected is so indirect to me, that my worry about it feels irrational at times. Yet I'm convinced enough that data can be turned to power, and the way this power is centralized today makes me uncomfortable.
If visual pollution can be handled by the platform, the tracking issue is where EthicalAds might come in. EthicalAds collects location information about the user, but not much else that I could identify. So here we have a first issue of determining with certainty that no more information is being collected. On their pricing for publishing ads, they have two regions:
- US, Canada
- UK, W. EU, Australia, New Zealand This suggests the location information collected is not necessarily sufficient to pinpoint any user's location, again without certainty on the matter.
Furthermore, EthicalAds has a minimum ad buy of $1000.00, which ads up to at least 166.000 ad impressions (at $6,00 for 1000 ad impressions as the most expensive available). The large volume of ads distributed over large regions without granularity seems conducive to maintaining audience privacy.
There is also the matter that they use Machine Learning on contracting sites' content in order to choose which ads to show. With my relatively shallow understanding of ML I am not very worried about this point, but the existence of what may amount to a black box consuming user information seems worth pointing out.
Based on all of the above, I am personally mostly comfortable with seeing EthicalAds used for financing proper FOSS and federated projects. I would, however, like others' opinions on the topic (both from technical expertise different from mine as well as just the perspective of others).
As a last note, EthicalAds is a company, which I cannot say for sure whether is for profit. Also, I have no affiliation with them and would be glad to learn about competing alternatives.
I realized recently I started reading books the same way a keep listening to videos on the background. It works for passing the time or unwinding a bit. For retention, mindfulness exercises (silly as it sounds) seem to work: taking a look at my environment and taking a moment to clear out distractions, stoping to think what is it I last read on that book (which is always harder then I expect), reflecting why I'm reading whatever it is I'm reading. Doing these things as little rituals tends to help.