Programming.dev Meta

We now have a new alternate frontend for our instance, Tesseract!

Tesseract is a fork of Photon with some differences displayed on the project's GitHub page.

The overall main features being:

• Full Media Support in Feed and Posts
• Community Browser / Enhanced Discovery
• Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC) Integration
• Fediseer Integration
• Distinguished and Sticky Comments
• Keyword Filtering
• Multiple Account Support
• Improved Moderation Tools

You can find the Tesseract frontend at https://t.programming.dev/

Along with this, Photon is currently only semi-supported as opposed to being one of our main Alternate Frontends. Due to a recent swap in Photon's tooling we are unable to update to later versions of Photon. As such, for now the alternate frontend will exist frozen and will continue to exist in the future until either: a new lemmy version breaks that version of the frontend or the issues are fixed and upgrading becomes possible again.

I made some updates to the post system in stacks.programming.dev to make it a bit more organized. Categories will now be only the main sites and posts will be filtered into what categories they fit best in. Previously each subdomain has its own category.

The main change for this would be that things like alternate frontends will be under the Programming.Dev category instead of their own (but they still have a tag for people who want to filter by only that subdomain)

Ive also cleaned up the posts to organize them better in the source code by appending the date they were made in front of each ones file name and ive added some more tags (such as an Alternate Frontend tag)

Hey everyone! Theres an event upcoming for the fediverse in 1 week (you can see the countdown from this site: https://canvas.fediverse.events/). This is an event similar to place and ran by the toast.ooo instance

Everyone has access to a shared pixel art canvas and can place a new pixel every so often! Pixels placed onto the map color that pixel the color you choose which every person then sees. People often coordinate with things like templates to get art of different things onto the map.

An example of canvas

Last year we participated and managed to get a pretty big zone for programming.dev. This year however will have much more participants than last year so need more support and help constructing our area. I'll be attempting to establish a technology zone on the canvas so if theres any instances or communities that have to do something with technology and want to do something feel free to reach out and we can help each other.

Programming.Dev's area in last years canvas

If you're interested in joining the event theres three locations we will be talking. Theres event channels on the discord and matrix (that are bridged to each other). We also have an event community at https://programming.dev/c/events which most canvas posts will go in from now on. Hope to see you all there!

If you want to organize a section of the canvas for your community (e.g. c/godot) you can request a channel for your community on the discord and matrix which will help you organize better. Feel free to reach out to me (Ategon).

If you want to help out the instance itself make sure to join the locations and things will be announced for updates. If you want to help organize things (organizing the instance for the event) feel free to reach out so I can get people to lead the pixel placing for things like when I'm sleeping.

The current design for this year

Should start making some more blog posts on stacks as I come back to be active in the instance again. Took a large-ish break to focus on some game dev and now back to power through things.

After the federation issues the instance had earlier this week (for context see last meta post) its been taking a bit to catch up with all instances fully. Every instance apart from world should have federation fully functional in both directions now.

Federation from our instance to world is also working (so they can see posts the instance makes). Federation from world to our instance is 18 hours behind so we currently don't get posts as they are made (seems some recent comments are coming through for some reason though). This will slowly automatically get fixed over time (probably within a day) and is just due to lemmy.world being big and generating activities quickly enough to keep adding things to the queue of activities while the instance tries to catch up

In other news I'm coming back from taking a break from the instance for awhile and should be making some more posts soon for things like canvas that are coming up as well as some other stuff in my backlog so expect a couple more meta posts today

I will no longer be able to assist with development nor debugging actual issues with the software... Quite juvenile behavior from the devs. It stemmed from this issue where the devs continuously argued in public by opening and closing an issue. Anyway, thought I would keep y'all apprised of the situation, since these are the people maintaining the software you are currently using.

Some communities there are literally calling for the annihilation of Ukraine

https://programming.dev/comment/1999097

edit: Since people are either willfully or otherwose are missing my point, this is a pro-russia, pro-fascist hate group, therefore we shouldn't give them the platform to spread their shit. this is not about me seeing their community or then causing issues accross other communities, it's about de-platforming fascists.

Start by reading these two articles:

• https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
• https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Ok, now that you've done that (hopefully in the order I posted them), I can begin.

I have always been a strong supporter of Open Source Software (OSS), so much so that all of my projects (yes all) are OSS and fully open for anyone to use. And with that, I knew that things could be used for good... and bad. I took that risk. But I also made sure to build stuff that wasn't, in itself, inherently bad. I didn't build anything unethical to my eyes (I understand the nuance here).

But I've seen what unethical devs can do.

Just take a look at those implementing the ModFascismBot for Reddit (that's not its name, but that's what it is). That is an incredibly unethical thing to build. Not because it's a private company controlling what they want their site to do, no, that's fine by me. Reddit can do whatever they want. But because it's an attempt to lie about reality, to force users to do something through manipulation not through honesty. Even subreddits that voted overwhelmingly to shut down still got messaged by the bot telling them that the users (that voted for it) didn't want it and they had to open back up or they would be removed from mod position. This is not ethical. This is not right. This is not what the internet is about.

Or the unethical devs at Twitter, who:

• built in actual keywords to mark Ukraine news as misinformation
• marked Substack as unsafe when they released their own Twitter competitor
• banned Mastodon links for no reason besides the fact that they are a competitor
• marked NPR, BBC, CBC, and PBS as 'state-funded media' even though that is clearly meant to indicate something along the lines of Russia's propaganda arm RT or China Daily, the same for China. Then when there was enormous backlash, they removed the labels, but did the same for the actual government propaganda accounts like RT and China Daily. And then they removed the limits on virality of those posts from those propaganda accounts allowing them to have a massive spike in engagement, thus furthering misinformation.

It's one thing for an organization to have political lean...that is just a part of life, and that will never end. It's another to actually sow disinformation in order to accomplish nefarious things to further your profits. It is what has caused massive addiction to tobacco, the continuation of climate change, death and disfiguration from forever chemicals, ovarian cancer and mesothelioma from undisclosed exposure to asbestos, or selling 'health products' that claim to cure everything under the sun, but can "interfere with clinical lab tests, such as those used to diagnose heart attacks".

Please do not confuse this for saying that companies shouldn't be able to sell things and make a profit. If you want to sell someone something that kills them if they misuse it and you market it as such, you go for it. That's literally how every product in the cleaning aisle of your grocery store works. That's how guns work, that's how fertilizers work, that's why we have labels. But manipulation for profit is unethical, and that's why companies hide it. It hurts their bottom line. They know that their products will not be used if they reveal the truth. Instead of doing something good for humanity, they choose the subterfuge. Profits over people. Profits over Earth honestly. Profits over continuing the human race. Absolutely nothing matters to companies like this. And unethical developers enable this.

Facebook (ok, fine, Meta, still going to refer to them as FB though) is trying to join the Fediverse. We as a community, but honestly each of you as individuals, have a decision to make. Do they stay or do they go? Let's put some information on the table.

Facebook...

• lies about the amount of misinformation it removes ^1
• increased censorship of 'anti-state' posts ^1 ^2 ^3
• lied to Congress about social networks polarizing people, while FB's own researchers found that they do ^2
• attempted to attract preteens to the platform (huh, wonder where all that "you must be 13" stuff went) ^4
• rewards outrage and discord ^3

Facebook also...

• Allows for checking on friends and family in disasters ^6
• Created and maintained some of the most popular open source software on the planet (including the software that runs the interface you're looking at right now) [^7][^8]

From my perspective... There's not much good about FB. It has single handedly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people across the planet, if not hundreds of thousands. It continually makes people angrier and angrier. It's a launching pad for scammers, thieves, malevolent malefactors, manipulators, dictators, to push their conquests onto the world through manipulation, lies, tricks, and deceit. Its algorithms foster an echo chamber effect, exacerbating division and animosity, making civil discourse and mutual understanding all but impossible. Instead of being a platform for connection, it often serves as a catalyst for discord and misinformation. FB's propensity for prioritizing user engagement over factual accuracy has resulted in a global maelstrom of confusion and mistrust. Innocent minds are drawn into this vortex, manipulated by fear and falsehoods, consequently promoting harmful actions and beliefs. Despite its potential to be a tool for good, it is more frequently wielded as a weapon, sharpened by unscrupulous entities exploiting its vast reach and influence. The promise of a globally connected community seems to be overshadowed by its darker realities.

As a person, I believe that we need to choose things as a community. I do not believe in the 'BDFL'...the Benevolent Dictator For Life. Graydon Hoare, creator of Rust, wrote an article just recently about how things would have been different if they had stayed BDFL of Rust. From my position the BDFLs we currently have on this planet really suck. Not just politically, but even in tech. I don't think that path is good for society. It might work in specific circumstances, but it usually fails, and when it does, people get hurt. Badly.

So, with that in mind, I've been working on a polling feature for Lemmy. I seriously doubt I'll be done with it soon, but hopefully FB takes a while longer to implement federation. I understand there's a desire for me, or the other admins to just make a decision, but I really don't like doing that. If it comes down to it, I will implement defederation to start with, but I will still be holding a vote as soon as I can get this damn feature done.

[^8]: the website actually uses Inferno, but from what I can tell it was forked directly from React, judging from the actually documentation and references in the repo.

Now that people have settled in a bit into the instance and we have over 100 communities created I've created a new community that new community requests are going to be moved into rather than the pinned thread

Feel free to post community ideas in there and they will be considered to be added once they hit 7 points from upvotes

You can also request to take over communities that have inactive mods there

You can find the it using these links:

• Relative link
• Direct link