rimu

What do you notice about the comments on this post? https://piefed.social/post/555259

The post was made in the [email protected] community and other posts linking to the same news article were made in [email protected] and in [email protected]. 3 different posts in 3 different communities.

PieFed de-duplicates them and only shows the post once in the timeline and when viewing the post all the comments on those 3 posts are shown in one place.

The fragmentation problem is solved.

In 2016, Duterte’s drug war left 26,000 to 30,000 families, fatherless or husbandless. The wives and mothers of the killed victims are left trying to make ends meet for their families. The documentary follows three women named Maria after the bloodbath of Duterte’s drug war.

We cannot navigate the current moment using existing political frames or received wisdom.

One of the things that the recent addition of the Feeds feature highlighted was how many cross-posts / duplicate posts there are. When you display posts from [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], etc all the cross-posts make it get repetitive, really fast. The same thing happens on the home feed too although it's a bit less obvious because there's a wider range of subjects involved.

Except now, it doesn't, because PieFed de-duplicates your feed! And your home page, and your topics. Attached to this post is a screenshot showing how it works out - an article posted to 7 different places is only shown once despite me having joined most of those communities.

We're still figuring out whether it's a good idea to merge all the comments from all the cross-posts into one page and how to do that in a way that respects the different culture/rules in the communities that the posts were made in. It's a tricky UX and social question.

I've held off on adding a cross-post function to PieFed until now but it'll be added soon.

looool

[email protected]

50 States, 50 Protests, 1 Movement.

I can’t believe nobody has done this list yet. I mean, there is one about names, one about time and many others on other topics, but not one about languages yet (except one honorable mention that comes close). So, here’s my attempt to list all the misconceptions and prejudices I’ve come across in the course of my long and illustrious career in software localisation and language technology. Enjoy – and send me your own ones!

Guantanamo is not just a prison – it is a place where law is warped, dignity is stripped, and suffering is hidden behind barbed wire. We lived it. We know the clang of metal doors, the weight of shackles, and the silence of a world that looked away. We know what it means to be caged without charge, without trial, without hope.

Detaining migrants at Guantanamo denies them constitutional protections, trapping them in the same legal limbo we endured. This deliberate ambiguity enables abuse, just as it did with us. We know firsthand what happens when a system is designed to break people. This is not about security; it is about power, control, and using Guantanamo’s darkness to conceal yet another injustice.

Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams. Environmentalists have been especially ineffective in creating any shared vision of the world they are working toward — a sustainable world in which people live within nature in a way that meets human needs while not degrading natural systems. Hardly anyone can imagine that world, especially not as a world they’d actively like to live in. The process of building a responsible vision of a sustainable world is not a rational one. It comes from values, not logic. Envisioning is a skill that can be developed, like any other human skill. This paper indicates how.

A common need in web applications is to create a form that allows the user to enter a list of items, with the number of items not known in advance. This is a pattern often used when entering user information, specifically for phone numbers or addresses, but has a lot of other uses as well.

Implementing this with Flask is surprisingly tricky, as it requires a combination of back and front end techniques working together.

What do we need to change about how we operate, now that the political environment is darkening?

The overall goals would be to safeguard user identities, ensure communication privacy, and protect against censorship and state surveillance.

User Anonymity and Privacy

• End-to-end encryption: Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data
• Anonymous accounts: Allow users to create accounts without requiring personally identifiable information (PII), such as email or phone numbers. How can we balance this with the need to combat spam?
• Tor and VPN Integration: Ensure compatibility with privacy tools like Tor, and provide guidance on using VPNs.

Data Storage

• Remove or minimize data collection, including IP addresses, geolocation, and device information. No web server logs.
• Ephemeral content: auto-deleting posts, messages, etc after a set period.
• Instance chooser that flags which instances are in unsafe countries.
• Defederate from instances in unsafe countries?

Communities

• Private communities - currently all are public
• Communities where every post is encrypted
• Approval process to join some communities
• Better opsec around instance owners, admins and moderators

What else?