When Piefed emerged, it was extremely sluggish in my browser and I got the impression that it was lightweight on the server side due to exporting a lot of the work onto the client side. That could be wrong or perhaps it evolved more. That comparison suggests I should have another look.

I could not login to the wiki using my lemmy acct. Response is: thpdo: Statement did not return 'name' attribute [auth.php:493]

First of all, you didn’t answer the questions.

But I will answer yours:

Why do people fear downvotes so much?

This is irrelevant and already addressed in Lemmy. Lemmy already has a disable downvotes config option. Beehaw is an example of where that is used. Anyone who outright opposes¹ downvotes can use beehaw.

Silent downvotes are a different matter entirely. There is good reason to oppose silent downvotes. They are a suppressive act that lacks justification, heavily manipulated, and adds negative value and toxicity.

Re: toxicity – silent downvotes are also an assault on dignity as they regard the OP as unworthy of explanation. Then there is the further side-effect of the OP being denied the viewpoint of a (cowardly) opposition and ultimately being denied understanding of the community they are in, which is not conducive to future positive content.

It’s ultimately shitty communication. Like when a bank’s way of communicating to you that your ID card expired on file is to freeze your account. Or when in Office Space they communicate to Marvin he is fired by fixing a payroll glitch. It’s that kind of communication that’s shitty. Bizarre how people actually think this is a sensible way to communicate in a civilised society.

If you don’t like the downvotes, you can use a sorting algorithm that ignores them.

There is no sorting algo that disregards silent downvotes while counting reasoned downvotes.

Also, the power of defaults is a thing. The suppression has effect because of default algos used by the unmeticulous masses. One’s own custom sorting algo could not make a dent in that even if it were magically feasible from the user’s view to associate upvotes to downvotes.

¹ I don’t outright oppose downvotes, but when our blunt options are the default shit-show we have by default or no downvotes, no downvotes is better which is why I use beehaw.

Downvote is the wrong tool for spam.

Also: spam is so rare in comparison to other downvoted content that in the off chance that the proper tool falls short, of course you can unsilently downvote the spam for the greater good. But as well, when you trigger “report spam” functionality, that is engagement. The server could of course cast a downvote in that circumstance while awaiting moderator action. That would be the most sensible of course.

This setting:

Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows

is true. I’m not sure what site data is involved there but I’ll try flipping that switch to false. I also reject 3rd party cookies but I don’t suppose that matters.

I don’t do change.org. Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden which is contrary to the principles of democracy.

When a published “scientific study” that uses derogation like the “tankie”, I wonder why a publication would accept it or neglect to at least tag it with some kind of warning about bias.

Moreover, the second most active community, c/genzedong, further solidifies Lemmygrad.ml’s role as a Reddit alternative for tankies.

There is a bit of irony here because the research is about toxicity and insult.

I’m not going to read further despite being curious about how they make a backwards attribution of anti-Ukraine to left-wing. It’s the right-wing conservatives who tend to love Russia or at least convey the most tolerance. And Russians tend to align with US right-wing movements and politicians. Liberals support Ukraine.

Corporations certainly would bend to consumer demand if consumers were wise enough to boycott and make demands. But the question is whether consumer wisdom would ever advance on a scale to make that happen. I think I have little hope of seeing it in my lifetime.

There are 35 million Mexican adults (38%) without a bank account. So living unbanked is at least an option, and more than ⅓ find it viable.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to hear that all banks in Mexico are digital and that not a single one offers offline service. And that not a single digital bank offers logins w/out 2FA, or 2FA by SMS (which includes feature phones), or 2FA by using a card reader. If all that is true, consider posting about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org.

This is extremely reductive and oblivious to the actual realities of banking in various countries.

I think you will be hard-pressed to find a country that does not have a single bank that can serve those w/out smartphones. If you find such a country, plz post about it in !smartphone_required@lemmy.sdf.org and send me the link. Then we may be able to make a case for ppl in that specific country not being boot-lickers, if at the same time being unbanked is illegal.

If you think it’s easy to be “unbanked” then I would suggest that you try it yourself first.

I have been simulating an unbanked life for years now. 5 creditors are threatening lawsuits for non-payment after refusing my cash. One took me to court and it was an easy win for me. I just appeared without a lawyer and pointed to the law.

It’s also worth noting that unbanked is more extreme that simply choosing a bank that does not require a smartphone.

It’s banking:

https://slrpnk.net/post/28294479

The army of corporate boot lickers in the mobile phone context is largely composed of people who think banking on a smartphone is wise, despite the attack surface and despite the bank being empowered to monitor their customers more closely. Banking apps are the most significant culprit for gluing people to Android.

We may never see the day when more than 5% of the population realises the importance of FOSS enough to shake free of their addiction to convenience.

That’s not a boycott. That’s the normal market working as designed. If you love the coffee but refuse to patronise them, then you are boycotting.

Seems like it could be a non-stop game of whack-a-mole. Even if you ban accounts they can just create more. If you do a good job of the baby sitting, they can use even more accounts to mask patterns. I don’t see how an admin can prevail.

Disabling down votes would prevent the practice of down voting to suppress. But probably the most effective is to disable voting entirely.

Down votes have a suppressive effect. Views and engagement drop when the votes are <1. The initial votes are important because they influence the votes that follow. My Tyranny of voting thread gives some detail.

Alexandrite is back for me now. But now the icons are missing in the normal stock client again, as they were yesterday.

It works now, and the icons are back. Guess it was just a temporary glitch. But Alexandrite is still dead.

There are 4 interesting attributes (which makes Fediseer quite useful because no other dataset captures this level of detail):

• open_registrations
• approval_required
• email_verify
• has_captcha

When running select open_registrations,approval_required,email_verify,has_captcha from FSnodeTbl where open_registrations = 0 | sort -u`, we get all varieties of combinations:

0|||
0||0|
0|0||
0|0||0
0|0|0|0
0|0|0|1
0|0||1
0|0|1|0
0|0|1|1
0||1|
0|1||
0|1||0
0|1|0|0
0|1|0|1
0|1||1
0|1|1|0
0|1|1|1

AFAICT, the value of open_registrations is not implied by the other variables. It seems to be an independent variable that should mean just what it describes on the face of it.

And if we consider just cases where open_registrations is true, there are fewer combinations, strangely, but still it’s independent of approval_required (2nd column):

1|||
1|0||
1|0||1
1|1||
1|1||1

Sounds like Paypal, who is “not a bank”, but who operates on the basis that you must link a bank or interact with a bank to do transactions. But you say unbanked people can use it? How do you get cash loaded onto it?

I suppose it’s still far from being something I could find useable because apps that reject rooted phones would be closed-source (read: untrustworthy; misplaced control).

Wow, wtf! I would not expect that degree of mass surveillance to be economically viable. And so overtly stark in the face of the GDPR. In principle, we should be able to make a GDPR access request to the central bank to ask them where we shop with cash and which ATMs we used.

I don’t get why “QR” is described as a “payment option”. It’s still a bank account transaction in the end which is exclusively for banked people. And worse, it excludes people without recent smartphones and the Google Playstore account needed to get the closed-source app that violates our software freedom.

I have a hard time giving a shit about the novelty of not carrying a plastic card in the big scheme of things, when forced-banking is being oppressively shoved in our faces and privacy is toast, while also being vulnerable to systemic denial of service in the event of cyberattacks as acts of war. While violating our human rights (banks treat different people differently based on where they come from).