By default, a piefed/Lemmy instance only knows of the existence of its own local communities. To see any off-instance communities in the search, they first have to initiate federation by a local user manually searching that community and/or subscribing to it.

Once the off-instance community has been federated by a single user, it will stay that way forever, and other users on your local instance will see it show up in the search as well.

There is an effort to automate that initial federation by Lemmy-federate, which creates a bot on participating instances to automatically subscribe to participating communities, but I’m not sure if piefed instances are compatible with it yet.

I would suggest that it is as complex as you wish to know.

My explanation above is not truly required to effectively use a federated platform, in the same way that most email users don’t actually know how precisely email works, and would find an in-depth explanation of it very complex.

All someone needs to know about email is that they must login to their email host provider, and that every user they might send email to has a unique name, and possibly a different host name after the @ symbol.

In the same way, the only thing someone needs to know about this platform, is they must login to the same place they signed up to (their host provider). They can then use it in a similar way to reddit. They might wonder why usernames or communities have different names after the @, but it doesn’t actually impede using the platform to not understand.

If anything, that might make it easier to use than email.

They each use a different backend, and their web UI’s are designed with their own unique backend in mind.

There is Photon, a third-party web UI/client that may someday be compatible with both Lemmy and Piefed, but currently only properly supports lemmy.

As far as I know, Piefed, Lemmy, and Mbin essentially are just displaying the data made available from ActivityPub in different ways, like the comment aggregation for crossposts.

Lemmy is a software that people can host on their computer, and many people doing that form what is essentially a bunch of mini-reddits that can talk to each other to create one big platform.

Piefed is trying to fulfill the same goals as Lemmy, and is even fully compatible with Lemmy, so someone hosting a piefed server on their computer can join in with all the Lemmy servers, and to the Lemmy people, it appears to them like any other Lemmy server.

But underneath everything, the code base is entirely different. The commonality they share, along with mastodon, is they all use ActivityPub, which is the standard that allows them to all communicate and be compatible with each other, just like there’s an email standard.

Kbin (now Mbin) is yet another Lemmy compatible software that you can host on your computer, but it also tried to implement features that make it more like mastodon (twitter-like), so it can act both like reddit, with threads and comments and communities around single subjects, or be like mastodon and work with hashtags and following individuals instead of communities, like a microblogging website.

They also use different interfaces, but it’s only visible to people who directly use that server; to others who access it from their home server, it’ll adopt the look of the software their home server is using.

So as an example, you are using Lemmy since your home server is Lemmy.ml. if you visit a community hosted on a piefed server from within your Lemmy, like !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social, it’ll look like any other Lemmy community.

But if you directly go to that piefed server by going to https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube you’ll see it from the piefed interface, since you’re accessing that piefed server directly.

All of three of the different federated Reddit-like softwares are intercompatible, so they all make up one big network.

I’m not German, but I would know better than to praise a pick from the AfD.

The Proton CEO thought that the party taking bribe after bribe from oil companies to Tech-bros, and which removed the FTC chairwoman that was bringing anti-trust cases against amazon and publicly criticized Google’s monopoly, would somehow install a good, pro-competitive and consumer rights advocate?

If he genuinely believed that, then he’s either wildly out of the loop in one of his company’s largest markets (which I’ll grant as possible, CEOs can be pretty out of touch with reality), or a fool.

This praise is, itself, ass-kissing the orange, likely in the hopes of getting in the good graces of the administration.

This article shows what happened: https://techstory.in/proton-mail-faces-backlash-over-claims-of-political-neutrality-amid-ceos-praise-for-republican-party/

Unless something has changed, I believe Windscribe also allows port forwarding.

AirVPN does as well, but as they are based in Italy, I think they may have to comply with the new Italian VPN anti-piracy law enacted there.

Quite damning of Proton, but unfortunately isn’t too surprising after the CEO’s pro-trump comments.

I would say they have proven themselves untrustworthy and mostly concerned with profit-seeking, and would suggest moving to alternatives if you use their services.

Mullvad is a solid VPN (Tor is better), and Posteo, Tuta, or Disroot are good email providers (don’t use email for anything sensitive, private providers only give protection against survailence capitalism).

EDIT: With more context provided by @artyom@piefed.social, this recent action by them was, perhaps, not as cut and dry as it seemed. (Though I still am skeptical of their integrity, personally)

To be fair, Windows 10 has some meaningful upgrades compared to 7.

1. Windows 10 can handle radical new hardware (such as swapping a drive to a totally different PC) much more gracefully, where as Windows 7 could sometimes freak out and crash or not boot.
2. Windows updates were ungodly slow to install on Windows 7, but were much quicker on Windows 10.
3. Windows 10’s ability to automatically download drivers was very convenient, bringing it more in-line with the experience of Linux, which generally has drivers out of the box.
4. Windows 10 was generally quite stable, even more stable than 7, in my experience.

But with all those advantages, came many downsides as well:

1. Windows 10’s system settings interface is an absolute clusterfuck, making changing simple things like the refresh rate of a monitor difficult to change or find due to being buried behind so many sub-menus. The Windows 10 settings are usually a dumbed down version, with a small easy to miss hyperlink somewhere on the page to bring up the older Windows XP/7 era settings panel that actually adjusted the thing you needed.
2. Windows 10 has a lot of annoying pop-ups for features that barely anyone uses or wants, but likely helps monetize the OS.
3. Windows 10 incorporated ads into the start menu. Fucking ads!
4. Windows 10 was a privacy nightmare compared to 7, and the privacy settings were in a constant state of flux after an update
5. Windows 10’s automatic driver installer had a downside, in that it would automatically download an outdated version of your GPU driver automatically before you could beat it to the punch with the proper up-to-date one from the GPU vendor’s website.

The administration:

My first tech was a Sega Genesis and the family’s 486 DX2 computer running Windows 95.

While I had access to new genesis games by renting them, getting new games for the 486 was a rare event due to how expensive software was back then, and there were few places we would visit that sold it (mostly what Costco had available). That meant rotating through a lot of the same games for quite a while, which meant I would eventually get bored of them for a while until I would try them again a month later.

The effect of that is it seemed to encourage me to find other ways away from the tech to entertain myself, like play with legos, or head outside to invent games with the neighbor’s kids.

I don’t want to assume that type of exposure to tech is ideal just because it’s what I experienced, but I wonder if an artificial software limit may be a good idea today for young kids to encourage them to find new ways to solve boredom with their imagination instead of it being done for them exclusively.

I’ve also seen parents start their kids off with 90’s tech and games, and slowly introduce them to newer tech/games each year, which is an interesting idea.

I think I’d start them off with a raspberry pi running a retro emulation os and a small selection of the best games from the 90’s, a small camera, an mp3 player, and a Linux PC without internet access, but with access to some edutainment games (humongous entertainment, some point’n’clicks, etc), and programing tools with kids appropriate teaching material.

Once they’re old enough, I’d give them internet access, and eventually a phone so they can keep in touch with their friends.

Yes, but a user would need to be experienced enough to know how to uninstall the previous desktop environment components they don’t want, otherwise their application menu would have both DE’s applications (2 file managers, photo viewer’s, text editors, terminals, etc), which can feel a little cluttered.

There’s this handy list of online games with anti-cheat that are compatible with Linux. The majority isn’t supported, but some major titles are, surprisingly.

It doesn’t bode well. Honestly I fear at some point in the future, if these countermeasures can’t keep up, small sites may need to close themselves off with invite-only access. Hopefully that’s quite a distant future.

That’s actually a major plot point in Cyberpunk 2077. There’s thousands of rogue AI’s on the net that are constantly bombarding a giant firewall protecting the main net and everything connected to it from being taken over by the AI.

I’m not being defeatist. I’m saying in a straight up open confrontation, civilians would lose without the military fracturing with them.

The Troubles is asymmetrical guerrilla warfare, which is sustainable, but very costly and certainly something to avoid if possible.

Appreciate it :)

The only other option is civil war, which relies on the militarily joining the rebellion, otherwise it would be a massacre if done openly, or simply become similar to The Troubles if done underground.

We’re hoping the non violent general strike works instead.