It doesn’t help much if your cousins signed up with their real name. If you are male, they can figure out your surname even if no close relative submitted samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname_DNA_project

but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?

Now when a user reports a troll, the report goes to the moderators of the community. But in special cases the admins of the user instances should deal with banning. So the admins of the community instances have to deal with reports, but the solution is at the hand of the user instance admins. It’s the same as dealing with users from other instances, but an edge case.

My recommendations would be something like this: (I’m just a random user, so it’s just my point of view)

• Shut down the fully inactive instances. Noone will even even notice it
• Merge the semi active communities to a handful of instances, like sports and technology… . I’ve seen active communities move instances, it would be possible, take a look how !europe@feddit.de migrated to !europe@feddit.org. Give enough time for subscribers to notice and subscribe to the new one.
• Allow registration of moderators on these instances, so they can work around the current limitations of moderation tools. Maybe an invite only solution or something like this.
• You could find help more easily if you look for admins for 3-4 instances instead of for 18 instances.

This would be useful for you and other admins, because you would have to admin much less number of instances. They would be still considered small instances, compared to big one, so you still not at the “too big to fail” level. For users it would help community discovery, there are overlap between followers of similar topics, e.g. I have friends who follow both European football and NBA at the same time, I read both selfhosting related topics and about general tech support, etc…

I don’t like this kind of community/user instance because 2 instances have to deal with the same problem. E.g. a rogue user can troll on most community instances until they are banned by their user instance.

The instance fragmentatios is not as big issue as it’s quite easy to create new accounts. There was a thread about this some days ago here, I also use different accounts on different instances for different topics.

If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn’t it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?

I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.

From Creative Commons FAQ:

We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available. We recommend considering licenses listed as free by the Free Software Foundation and listed as “open source” by the Open Source Initiative.

Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.

Version 4.0 of CC’s Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) license is one-way compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3). This compatibility mechanism is designed for situations in which content is integrated into software code in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish the two. There are special considerations required before using this compatibility mechanism. Read more about it here.

Also, the CC0 Public Domain Dedication is GPL-compatible and acceptable for software. For details, see the relevant CC0 FAQ entry.

While we recommend against using a CC license on software itself, CC licenses may be used for software documentation, as well as for separate artistic elements such as game art or music.

PR open since February: https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle/pull/1481

You can get a relatively understandable tldr with well segmented text like this, if you read only the first sentence/few words of each paragraphs.

Harmony Os exists because of the US trade embargoes, they would put Google Play Services on their phone if they could. I don’t know if Lemmy is blocked in China (I guess it is), so if you could write that comment it means you are not even the target audience.

Fully offline “proplus” is still office and fortunately that’s the only one I had to deal with since this change, so I’m not 100% familiar with their newer offerings

They love to do this. 2 years ago they renamed Office (the online, browser based version) to Microsoft 365 https://www.computerworld.com/article/1614302/office-to-be-rebranded-microsoft-365.html

They can present the “new” apps to shareholders

No it’s an RDP (Remote desktop) client

If you would read the article you would know that the title is perfectly correct, as currently it’s only available to Win, other platforms are just planned.

It’s an RDP client you can connect to pcs on the network or vms on azure

I can confirm. Updated on my laptop and every extension works so far.

Do we have an extension apocalipse again, or is it a “bump supported version” type update?

Was it even a goal? Mastodon can be used for internal communication, e.g. https://social.kernel.org is only for linux developers, and I know a local university where they have a defederated mastodon instance where every student automatically got registered.

If they just needed it for posting news maybe simply having a profile on one of the big instances would be enough. I see they had only 270 users.

It sounds to me as a documentation issue, as the next comment says, simply including a wget script should solve this.

How would it otherwise? Network based location?

Yes. Your phone could triangulate its location from nearby celltowers ane wifi networks. Google has a database of wifi routers (actually that was the point of google streetview, they collected wifi bssids alongside taking photos, they also collect this data from android devices).

With microg you can select from different dbs for this, they are called ‘UnifiedNlp backends’: apple has a similar db from iphones, mozilla used to collect this data with a separate app for MLS (they shut down the project in 2024 march). Microg builds an on device private db as well, it will remembers the wifi networks and celltowers you were close to, and next time you are there it won’t need gps, saves a ton of battery life. This was called Deja Vu, I love this name. Search for UnifiedNlp on fdroid you can find some more options.

Since MicroG 0.3 you don’t have to install these separately, Mozilla and Deja Vu are builtin, and they are more than enough

Huh? Which rom asks this? Usually you have to go through hoops to get microg, and only a handful of roms have it builtin. It can only ask if you want to enable microg not installing it or not, microg to correctly work it should be installed in /system/priv-app, to do that after boot on device, you have to be root.

Do you use any app from aurora or outside fdroid? If your answer is no, than you can use android without a GMS package.

Also as I wrote, location won’t work for you underground or inside concrete buildings. If you are fine with these kind of limitations than you can obviously.

Marwin (the main developer of microg) said in some interview that he doesn’t want microg to exist, and in a perfect world we shouldn’t need such workaround. I would be also happy if android wouldn’t depend this muhc on google

Is snapchat still a thing? Never used that but I thought from screenshots and memes that tiktok killed it (never used that either)

(I reread ops question and I can only see the term open source 2 times, but whatever, I understand what you say, and I don’t want to debate about semantics.)

The point with microG is it’s still the best way if you want to use android. The other options are:

• Play services (GMS), or Huawei has some similar solution because of US trade embragoes.
• You can use android without play services but notifications won’t work for most apps, even if you can open them. (UnifiedPush tries to solve notification part) Wifi and cell based location won’t work
• I see microG as an acceptable middle ground. I still have to give up something to goog, but it’s not much compared to GMS, and I can use all available apps