pitninja

What you’re describing is only possible on de-anonymized platforms that essentially have “know your customer” type policies where users have to provide some kind of proof of their identity. While I agree that there is value in social spaces where everyone generally knows the people they’re interacting with are who they say they are, I don’t think this is ever going to be feasible in a federated social platform. I think Facebook is the closest thing we have to what you’re describing, to be honest, and I believe Meta has even kicked around having a more sandboxed Instagram for minors (though I don’t use Instagram, so I’m not certain on the details there).

For me, in most cases on a platform like Lemmy, a person’s age is not something I care about. I care about what people are sharing and saying. But then again, none of my interests for online discussion at this point in my life are really age centric. I think there are clearly better platforms than Lemmy if people want to guarantee they’re only interacting within their age specific peer groups.

I stopped paying for YouTube the moment Google killed Google Play Music and forced YouTube Music on me. Now Google gets no money from me and Apple does because they still offer a true music library service.

I was able to get video streaming with audio working on Discord using pipewire, but it was a massive pain in the ass and somewhat unreliable. I don’t have a lot of experience with Jitsi, but I trust others’ recommendation there

Calibre is a fantastic and underrated tool.

Why not? Plasma is much more usable out of the box for many users including myself. GNOME’s out of the box experience is really lacking IMHO and requires me to install and configure several extensions just to get what I consider to be a functional UI. I know they have this vision for how they want people to use their OS, but that vision is not aligned with how I actually want to use it. The best way distros can vote against the design choices of GNOME is by making something else the default. The problem I have is that I generally prefer GNOME’s app suite to KDE’s, so that makes the decision a bit more complicated for me.

You can run headless or do what the person I was responding to recommended and put it behind an authenticated portal, but that’s not really going to stop other instances and clients from accessing the same resources that op is hoping to limit access to except in the most basic case of people casually browsing op’s Lemmy instance through op’s own lemmy-ui.

Edit, but to be clear, what I was responding to and my response didn’t directly address op’s specific concern (which I kind of misunderstood myself before just now rereading) that outside/guest users shouldn’t be able to search for communities from other instances and I think it’s a fair concern because just searching for a community from another instance brings in posts and could be a vector for spam/abuse.

Wouldn’t this do basically nothing to prevent a 3rd party client from browsing your instance without authentication? I don’t know that there’s much that can really be done about this because you need open APIs for other instances to be able to access the content of your instance in order to make federation possible. That said, it’s an important consideration that anybody running a single person instance should consider. If you run a single person instance, people can learn a lot about you just by seeing which communities are available on your instance. The only way to obfuscate your actual interests is to have a dummy account subscribe to all the top communities on the biggest instances. (Which, honestly, this isn’t a bad strategy to employ anyway if you’re wanting a fresh All feed).

It’s the wrong way to go about it, though. Just tax businesses’ profits and close the bullshit loopholes they exploit to avoid paying them.

It depends on your client, but yes, it can be possible to recreate a folder/file/naming structure with the exact same files, load the torrent without starting it, force recheck, and then you may have some metadata type files to wait to download before seeding, but you’d be helping the network a lot.

Edit, but you need to find a torrent that has the exact same files even if it’s not the one you originally downloaded from.

I have this same issue, also no posts load for me. I can go get URLs for individual posts in a magazine and search for them and they’re pulled in, but that doesn’t really help either. I’ve tried purging the communities as well with no joy 🤷

Usenet services are more concerned about removing illegal content when it’s reported than what users are downloading. You can get a provider that doesn’t log download activity and accepts Bitcoin payments, you’d want to use its SSL connection, and you can go through a VPN as well (some Usenet providers even bundle VPN services with their Usenet subscription). It’s generally much safer than torrenting from a privacy standpoint where anyone on your tracker sees your IP (or, once again, your VPN’s IP). I’m not aware of any Usenet server that says it didn’t log downloads secretly doing so because it’s really not in their interest to lie about it. They know why people are subscribing.

Sonarr and radarr manage downloads for TV and movies in a nice way for Usenet and actually torrents as well. You can set up quality profiles and choose which shows and movies you want to download and they will grab torrents/nzbs that meet your preferences, automatically start them in your torrent app or Usenet downloader, and then organize them in folders with appropriate metadata for Kodi/Plex when the downloads complete. They automate the process very nicely.

Edit, I’m a Usenet guy if that wasn’t already clear lol

TOTP support will be coming very soon: https://github.com/liftoff-app/liftoff/pull/56

Still needs to be reviewed, but keep tracking this over the next couple days.

I know I’m late to the game commenting in here, but I think it’s important to distinguish whether we’re talking about people merely adding descriptors to their NSFW posts or whether we’re talking about a whole tagging system being implemented into the Lemmy protocol. Adding a full fledged tagging system to Lemmy similar to Mastodon would be a pretty big undertaking. But anything short of that would feel like a kludgey, bolted-on solution. The NSFW flag + user added descriptors is the only way for users to go about it for now.

I do think a conversation about adding tags into Lemmy is worthwhile because tags could potentially allow for a lot of neat things. E.g. we might eventually be able to start making custom feeds by aggregating content from multiple similar communities across instances. It would also let users filter tags they don’t want to see at all (regardless of whether it’s NSFW) or don’t want to see by default (i.e. blur the images until they’re selected). But I know the Lemmy devs probably don’t want it to end up looking like a Reddit/Mastodon hybrid or just become kbin, so this is something they’ll consider carefully. I think right now they’re rightly focused on database and federation performance and the broader dev community is helping with more immediate needs like spam account mitigation. They’ve gotta stop the bleeding and get a solid foundation established before building major changes like a full fledged tagging system.

You’re probably going to have a bad time in the Fediverse if you’re hoping to avoid viewpoints you don’t agree with entirely. The best advice I can give you for now is to just block that community and move on with your life. As much as I hate TD and its members, the sh.itjust.works admin has the right to administer their instance however they want. If they end up with a sufficiently toxic total userbase where their users are causing problems on other instances to the point they are a net negative, they will end up being defederated by other more reasonable instances. Beehaw is being pretty aggressive with defederation for things like this, so if you’re looking for the safest of spaces in the Lemmyverse they really might be more your speed. Or you can start your own personal instance and defederate whoever you want 🤷