I’m scared.

The irony, hypocrisy, and injustice here is that the UN’s own website itself discriminates against some demographics of people and denies access to the UDHR of 1948:

And this same UN will be creating the Digital Global Compact.

I would love to put my code where my mouth is. It’s on my long list of projects. The defects I describe in this thread probably do not justify a forking effort and I’m not enthusiastic about learning JavaScript, which is not just a shitty language but also it’s the wrong tool for the job. Although Rust is probbly a decent choice for the backend (but Ada would probably be better).

The biggest deficiency is that there is no decent threadiverse desktop client. I am just baffled that a majority of threadiverse users are using phones. There are like a dozen different mobile clients to choose from and not a single decent client for the desktop. So if I build anything it will be a proper client for a sensibly sized screen (non-portable).

As for fixing the defects exposed in this thread, the upstream Lemmy devs are rather stubborn but I think devs of an existing fork (Lenny?) might be more open to improvements.

Who would use a well-designed variant? You can see from the thread that millennials & gen Zers actually expect designs that prioritise the anti-bot agenda above the needs of both the direct user (the admin) and the end user. A majority of the population does not see how Google, Spamhaus, and Microsoft have broken email. This threadiverse crowd entered after email was already ruined. The emotional attachment to gmail (calling it what it is… there is no generic netneutral email infra anymore) trumps software that avoids the dog food problem. I might be the sole user of such software, especially if I also code it to enforce decentralisation (which would necessarily include anti-centralisation features that would be unpopular).

to have not actually had an account yet makes it pretty obvious when you try to login and fail that the application has not been accepted.

That would be a blunt non-transparent/non-specific message to send. It’s not obvious /why/ the reg was denied.

If the instance admins wanted to talk about it, they’d have emailed you; or published some means of contacting them outside lemmy.

Lemmy software is designed as comms software itself with email address disclosure optional. An admin can make it mandatory, but Lemmy’s design should cater for the email-free option regardless of how an admin toggles that setting.

I wouldn’t expect to receive the reason for refusing the application via any other means than the email I’d provided in that application.

I get that. People are accustomed to relying on email. But this is not an excuse for software deficiencies.

That’s the entire purpose of providing an email; so you could be contacted when/if there are updates to your applications status.

That can be accomplished without email. Email is a convenience at best. Some users have decided email is an inconvenience and do not use it. And Lemmy supports that – partially.

Let’s be clear about who the software is expected to serve. The comms feature of giving feedback to users without an email account is not to directly serve the end user. Software should serve its user (the Lemmy admin in this case). A Lemmy admin does not want to take the time to express themselves on their decision only to have their msg blackholed. They don’t necessarily know that an email address is disposable. The end user benefits by extension, but it’s about creating software that serves the direct user of the s/w. If you’re an admin who makes email optional, you might still want to be able to get a msg to a user.

The core purpose of the Lemmy platform is communication. So relying on out-of-band tech is kind of embarrassing. Think of it from the dog food angle. An in-band msg has the advantage that the admin has more control (e.g. they can edit a msg later and they can know whether the msg has been fetched). Lemmy relying on email as a primary means of comms is a dog food problem.

The only sensible concession I would see to make is that there are a hell of a lot more important things for Lemmy devs to work on because the software has a lot of relatively serious defects. I’m talking about how great software would be coded, but extra diligent handling of denials should have a low triage in the big scheme of the state of where Lemmy is right now.

The cognitive dissonance in this

It seems you don’t know what that phrase means. It doesn’t follow from anything else you wrote why you think that.

You don’t think providing an email from a throw away service would strike the software as a malicious user/spam bot???

You don’t think that legitimate streetwise users secure themselves by supplying disposable email addresses???

You keep talking like you know everything

The post intends to solicit intelligent and civil discourse with logical reasoning, not the sort of ego-charged emotional hot-headed pissing contest you’re trying to bring here.

I’m not seeing how this is a good justification for login refusals to lack information and transparency. When you are denied a login, a well designed system tells you why you are denied and the rationale the server gives you should either include enough info to imply a remedial course of action (e.g. “re-apply and tell us more detail about why you like our node”), or at least make it clear that the refusal is final for reasons that are non-remedial. Users should not have to guess about why they are denied a login when countless things can go wrong with email at any moment. The denial rationale should be emailed and also copied into the server records to present upon login attempts.

The only exception to this would be if they really believe they are blocking a malicious user. Then there is some merit to being non-transparent to threat agents. But the status quo is to treat apps rejected for any arbitrary reason as they would an attacker.

There is no valid reason for the United Nations blocking Tor.

A mom & pop shop selling cupcakes would have a valid reason (lack of funding, lack of competence, no conflicting principles). Blocking Tor is a cheap and sloppy attempt at separating ham from spam which inherently entails blocking ham, ultimately against the principles the UN theoretically supports. The UN should have the funding and competence to support their own values.

The UN probably should not be drafting rules about digital inclusion when they themselves have an embarrassing display of digital exclusion.

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.

On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

• Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
• The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
• The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

Hence why we need a public option.

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

Glad to see mention of Oki! Oki is the single most ethical choice. But they pulled out of the US market, sadly enough. The US is no place for ethical products.

First and foremost, #HP is not an option for anyone who boycotts #Israel. And even neglecting that, HP is still the least ethical of all ink suppliers.

from the article:

Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

So the 20 page deal probably reflects the consumption of most households that print. That means the cost ranges from $7—35¢ per page. You must print 20 pages to reach 35¢ pp. A library would likely charge ~5—10¢ pp flat. Print shops tend to be cheaper than libraries.

The 700 page deal amounts to $36—5¢ pp. So you have to print exactly 700 pages to get a good price. Everyone who does not print exactly 700 pages every month for a span of 2 years will get screwed.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet.

Bingo. It’s not a “smart” printer, it’s a dependent printer.