European. Polite contrarian. Insufferable green. History graduate. I never downvote reasoned opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine (which may be why you got no reply). Low-effort comments with vulgarity or snark will also be ignored.
Amusing. And what detective work! Your time is valuable, careful not to waste too much of it.
Personally I’m not especially bothered by sockpuppetry in itself (talking of people wasting their time…). But it’s obviously important to have a plurality of viewpoints. If only they would sockpuppet more creatively!
This seems right. Personally I’m not sure I could roll my eyes harder at the fact that so many people in 2026 are so ignorant as to be prepared to call themselves “communists” - after all the famines, the purges, the 40 years in which much of Europe was struggling to escape (literally) from communism… And then I saw that you, too, call yourself a communist! So I guess I’ll stop there.
Except to recommend you the Ones and Tooze podcast, in which the brilliant host (an ex-communist) recently did a whole series, in great and illuminating detail, on the various communist thinkers. Which I listened to… dutifully.
Out of interest, how do you know it’s sockpuppets?
To be honest I’m genuinely a bit interested in who this might be. I’m imagining a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands. Also seems likely to be Chinese in that they have a top-down concept of information, not seeing that obvious and relentless propaganda will just backfire with a sophisticated and relatively informed audience. Perhaps I’m being slightly optimistic, but I can’t see how they’ve convinced anyone here that “China bad” who didn’t already think that.
The real issue is that AI bots are making Q&A forums de-facto redundant. StackExchange posted its stats recently, and activity is dropping through the floor there too.
Of course, this leaves the question of what the AI bots are going to do in a few years when they have no new original content to eat. But right now they still have a banquet.
Ironically, the most active user on the current #2 China community, !china@sopuli.xyz, is an absolutely indefatigable anti-Chinese propagandist.
This person, @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org posts multiple times per day, usually quite sensible and well-sourced articles, but always on the same downer subjects (repression, Uighurs, corruption and so on) and never anything that paints China (let alone its government) in the slightest positive light. Since nobody else in this community can match their posting stamina, the end result is a community that, to newcomers, looks like one rando’s “I hate China” blog. Hardly surprising that it’s not a very successful community.
I’ve asked this user to consider dropping the tempo a bit, and been met with defensiveness. I complained in private to the mod, who is completely AWOL, and they didn’t care. Oh well.
Yeah sure, I understand all that, indeed it’s pretty much exactly what I wrote. You are simply taking an expansive definition of E2EE where I am using a narrow one. As far as we know, Meta is indeed sending its messages in an encrypted state, end to end, so technically it makes the grade as E2EE. That debate is kinda boring, I was simply trying to point out that this case study illustrates the importance of FOSS. And since you are downvoting me, that’s all I have to say here.
if they can read the messages then its not strictly speaking e2ee
Yes, it can absolutely still be E2EE: the message is encrypted and the central server does not have the key. The issue is that the clients (i.e. the "E"s) are controlled by the same entity as the central server, and we don’t know exactly what the client (app) is doing. So the fact that it’s E2EE is somewhat moot.
This is exhibit #1 in the case for open-source software.
PS: you obviously get this, I’m just trying to make it clearer for anyone who doesn’t.
OK. Oz might be a bit of an outlier situation but I stand corrected.
OK I understand better. Interesting information, too.
Given those figures, the numbers absolutely would have run out many years ago if every mobile contract was permanent and free of charge. The operators rent numbers from a central registry, just like with domains but with a much more finite namespace. There’s no way you still have access to a number “well over a year” after last paying anything for it. In any country. Perhaps there’s a misunderstanding.
Of course it expires. Otherwise the numbers would have run out decades ago. Depends on the contract but usually it’s around 4 months, you need to check the smallprint
To be clear, that SIM will expire after 2-4 months, somebody else will be assigned the number and they will be able to kick you off your account (though not access any undelivered messages messages except undelivered ones).
To avoid this possibility you need to have ongoing access to the phone ID.
The fact that emergency calls still work suggests that it must be doing some minimal pinging.
But that will be root-level stuff, apps are not going to have access to it and apps are most of the game with privacy these days.
Could have written this whole account verbatim. You’re not alone.
Recently I had a related experience when checking into a small hotel:
Etc. For many (most) people it seems it’s becoming all but unimaginable not to be connected and available to anyone who wants to contact them, round the clock. This is not healthy. The fact that a technology exists does not mean we have to adopt it.
This is great but perhaps there’s some other more appropriate community to put it.
Some general thoughts. I have done multiple CMS transfers of large sites involving Wordpress, Drupal and Discourse. No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming. That’s why the simplest option would be to stay as close to Wordpress as possible, using a fork for example to fix to the ethical problems you perceive. Otherwise you’re almost certainly going to find it’s much easier to archive and start afresh, with the compromises that implies.
If you do dump Wordpress, in your position I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo. So much simpler and more secure. But that’s just my opinion.
To be honest at this point Signal is the worst solution
Presumably you meant not the worst solution
For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!
Indeed, and this is the heart of issue. The network problem means that it ultimately makes no sense to have multiple IM systems, just we don’t have multiple telephone systems. I believe we need to get our act together, pick the winner of this battle and commit to it. As far as I can see the winner has been clear for years now: Matrix. And yet we’re not committing to its, we’re still talking interminably about the relative merits of all the also-rans.
It’s reminiscent of (among other examples) USB. If the EU hadn’t stepped in and mandated USB, we’d still be arguing about the relative merits of different cable standards. This is the problem of having no central authority.
Personally, like a few million others (here in Europe), I convinced a small handful of Whatsapp-addicted normies to also use Signal. I’m not doing that again until the FOSS replacement for Signal is usable, reliable, and definitive. DeltaChat does not meet those criteria so I’ll be sticking with Signal. Unfortunately.
He talked about it - some variety of Trotskyism IIRC. A bit of a surprise but shouldn’t have been. Tons of former Maoists have been in high positions. Even a neoliberal head of the European Commission (Barroso).
On the supposed virtues of communism, you won’t convince me but I suppose you know that already. IMO the world would have done very well to listen to George Orwell, someone who saw through it all on the basis of up-front experience 90 years ago. That might have saved an awful lot of needless suffering. Or Orlando Figes, who wrote a book whose title says it all: “The USSR: A People’s Tragedy”.