There are some punctuation errors in your title. It should read:

Plex is “overhauling” its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood “upgrades”

Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a dedicated [hidden] tab, while the Watchlist will take up prime real estate in the top navigation section. Plex says it also streamlined the user menu for quick access to things like your profile, friends and watch history.

So they’re hiding the entire point of Plex deep in the menu and promoting things that make them money. Enshittification.

reddit was open source as well.

was

I probably wouldn’t trust airplane mode, but I do believe power off is safe. There is no transmit capability in off correct?

But yeah, leaving phone at home is best knowing tracking sites like these exist.

Or just hit airplane mode / power off. Or just leave the phone at home, the procedure takes only 5-10 minutes.

People are way to attached to their phones. The world will not collapse in that hour, it is a survivable event, or so I hear from reputable sources.

That’s what high beams are for… Cars don’t need to light the dark side of the moon, drivers only need to see the roadway in front of them. Both provide ample illumination, it’s just one allows you to see the color of a zit on a mouse 3 miles away, which is entirely not necessary for safe night driving.

And I was saying that some higher end incandescent lamps are equivalent to some LEDs. I know there are LEDs that far exceed the lumens of traditional lamps.

It seems to me like we didn’t have this problem twenty years ago. If blinding LEDs are the problem, why not just not allow them anymore for headlights? It takes 5 seconds to pop in a new incandescent headlight on cars that have them, and well made ones can last 20+ years depending on the construction. Visibility is good and equivalent to some LEDs with higher end lamps, and it doesn’t create a superbly unnatural light that impairs the other drivers, pedestrians, or nature. It would also reduce light pollution.

On very rare occasion, the progressive step forward, actually looks a lot like the road backwards. It would take a long time to implement, but anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do it right.

Auto sensing technology is going to be more of a glaring headache in 20 years, when you have half of the cars with failing sensors and everyone getting blinded even worse. Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB) are not a solution, it does not properly address the issues of glare, and it will likely only make the problem worse by further removing human interaction from headlight controls.

Oh you can’t change apathy really. I was just suggesting if privacy friendly tech (ie: Linux) is to go mainstream, that it would have to be “easier” than what is currently out there to gain mainstream popularity.

Desktop linux is almost there, but the general population mostly uses mobile devices now, and phone Linux seems to be a dying prospect.

everytime I tell someone there are alternatives to using Google/Apple/etc their response is, “but it’s just so easy”. I guess you can call my view of that jaded, but people really don’t care? I mean I’m not trying to be defeatest at all, it’s just trying to accurately appraise people’s apathy to apply a proper resolution to the problem.

The solution has to make it “easy” for people because that is what they expect of technology now.

No one cares about this stuff but techies/Lemmy. Regular people don’t care, like at all. They know tech companies do this stuff but if convenience>privacy, most people take the former every time to make life easier. Data privacy is not a tangeable thing in most people’s minds.

There would have to be some sort of cataslismic event to wake people up enough for people to do anything meaningful. I don’t know what that would be, but I hope someone figures that out sooner rather than later.

I did do a test install (on a virtual machine), and everything seemed to install/configure fine using the python source code and instructions in your repo, but I wasn’t able to see any connections being made in the listener log. Brain is too tired, but I tried all of the addresses/ports listed (Debian/bash/ip addr) and created port exceptions with ufw per the instructions file. Can this work with a virtual box?

Very cool. 100% over my technical knowledge level but I’ll take a look at the code and give it a whirl when I get a chance.

I think it would be awesome if it worked. Power to the people! ;)

sounds interesting, is the source code on somewhere like codeberg or GitHub?

How does it work?

The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)

Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.

An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.

Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?

The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.

thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.

I don’t really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it’s too unimportant and tiny right now ;)

The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn’t have celibrities and NBA players. It’s (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it’s not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it’d get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. …eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it’s about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. …destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it’s value is gone.

I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don’t need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is ‘linking’ with any for profit entity.

Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I’d argue Lemmy isn’t the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it’s going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.

I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.

How do you bring more people? I don’t think people would disagree with that, the hesitancy is from for profits and EEE. People want the fediverse to grow.

What happens when foreign actors intent on influencing public policy decide to harass everyone critical of their issue? People will just stop being critical of the foreign narrative to stop the harassment, and you’ll wind up with posts that are completely against the public interest and for the foreign narrative.

You can already see this effect to some degree in comments, it’ll only get worse if everything is made public in the UI.

As counterintuitive as it is, regulated secrecy is necessary in all democratic processes, and I would argue that includes online forum debates.

It would actually be nice if community mods had the capability to turn the community to anonymous for comments and posts as well. Is knowing who posts the information more important than the information itself? If it’s worthwhile to share from one person, it’s worthwhile to share from everyone else so identity isn’t all that important.

The source code for Lemmy is free for all to view and modify, there will be no authoritarianism… And if it were to happen all of Lemmy administrators would either refuse the upgrade and stay retrograde, or quickly fork. The devs don’t really have total control of thousands of servers to have free reign to do stuff like reddit corp does.

I’m all for vote privacy in the UI. There are just too many downsides to public votes, and not as much weight to the positives in my opinion. People should not be afraid of backlash from down voting if a post does not contribute, it’ll only create echo chambers/ unchallenged groupthink.

Nothing4You commented Aug 14, 2024 •

mods can already see votes in communities they moderate since 0.19.4, so this would be reducing what is visible today:

and

Dessalines commented 5 days ago

I’d like to clarify that mods should only be able to see votes for the communities they mod only.

Admins can see all votes.

I dunno, we’re on 0.19.3 so I don’t see it but I guess it’s there.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967#issuecomment-2289596923

yep, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. It’s worth defending the 3% who disagree with the majority opinion cause, more often than not, sometimes the majority is wrong…

Defending the secret vote is the key to a functioning democracy, without it you just get cliques and in-groups who bully the outsiders. No one wins in that scenario, as critical thinking and critique are actively discouraged.