TWeaK

The king is dead. Long live the king!

Yes, exactly. For example, I can still see the main Piracy community at dbzer0 with https://lemm.ee/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, however if you try to go to the lemmy.world version at https://lemmy.world/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com it turns up an error.

Edit: apparently lemmy is altering my links lol when I click the lemmy.world url it takes me to lemm.ee anyway. Let's try this: https://lemm.ee/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and https://lemmy.world/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Edit2: Nope, you might have to copy and paste the links https://lemm.ee/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com https://lemmy.world/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

That bot below is pretty redundant now lol

Yeah API access is more efficient for the host than delivering the human-viewable content. Hence why Twitter and others always used to have their API open, so they could minimise the load from scraping.

I’m of the impression that only the origin and destination servers see any given private message, but I haven’t verified this.

It's a bit more than that, when a client connects to lemmy they connect to all instances with displayed media. This includes thumbnails. Even inside a post, you'll connect to every user's instance to get their profile thumbnail. This could be quite exploitable, as the federated instance is always the user's instance, not the instance of the community they post in - it would be possible for someone to fish for IP's by setting up their own instance and posting on a popular community.

/u/sunauras@lemm.ee is making a new UI that apparently handles all these calls a different way, without connecting everywhere. It's still a work in progress (you can't comment there yet) but it looks promising.

like recently the piracy community was removed due to concern over possible legal hassles

To be clear, lemmy.dbzer0.com wasn't removed, it was defederated by lemmy.world. That only affects lemmy.world, it's still federated with other instances.

Pretty sure account migration is now in Lemmy also.

And there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s simply how a decentralized network works.

It's also how the internet works, and you wouldn't need to set up an instance to scrape the data from lemmy.

More than the developers of Lemmy, you're putting your trust in the instance owner/admin. Even if the site says "v0.19.3" at the bottom, there could be any code put in there by the server admin. This can be for better or worse, for example in lemm.ee the admin has frequently included code improvements that have made this instance more resilient than others. I'm not aware of any instance including malicious exploits, but in theory this would be possible. If one was caught doing this it would likely be defederated by others.

Is each instance like another person with a server?

Yes. However the instance admin and server admin might be different people. The server admin is probably also an instance admin, but some people might only be instance admin.

Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?

Yes, the server admin has complete control. Instance admin have control within the instance, they can remove just about everything but they can't quite flip a switch and turn it off.

Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?

Facebook/Meta came in with Threads, but most instances refused to federate with them. I think the BBC also set up a Mastadon instance, they ran a trial which has either been extended or made permanent. There may be others, but the whole point of federation is that anyone can make an instance, be they private individuals or corporations. The big downside is that any instance then becomes another place to remove your content from - but really this is true of any website, which might be scraped by a 3rd party.

Awesome! I won't be surprised if/when your UI ends up being the main UI hah.

Edit: One comment I have, while the minimalist design is nice, everything ends up very spread apart on a widescreen monitor. It reminds me of Wikipedia a few years ago, where I ended up browsing the mobile page on desktop to get the content all in the middle. I imagine if you had a large wall of text it would stretch across the entire monitor, which can make it hard to keep track of which line you're on as your eyes jump from right to left. Wikipedia have resolved this now, maybe their solution could be applied here?

Edit2: Oh ok, it doesn't stretch too far, however the main content is on the far left while the community banner is on the far right. It's not horrible, but it does feel a bit awkward looking to the side.

Compared to the default UI:

Also the poor logo has his ears chopped off!

And I'd like to get in early and request a button for expanding and minimising all images :o) stock lemmy has an option in settings to always start expanded, but RES always had a button to toggle everything, and that's sometimes better if you're just trying to find a specific post again.

DivestOS here, it's not in my ROM.

Yeah, but the comment you replied to said he was an asshole pre-68.

Edit: Oh okay, they said from 1950 on, you said the change was 1968 - he was an asshole after then. You were just saying it happened later, I thought it was maybe the other way around or something.

Yeah you haven't actually said anything here, like if anything post-68 Superman seems more of an asshole here.