Skull giver

Most of them act(ed) like an access point.

However, the SDIO spec allows for cursed applications like WiFi adapters, Bluetooth dongles, and more to be fitted into an SD card. It was really just SPI, so in theory it also allowed things like GPS tranceivers and any other peripheral you can think of that’s low bandwidth enough to work over SPI. Need Bluetooth for your Palm PDA? Here you go! Just stick a massive slab of plastic into the SD card slot!

These days SDIO is only really used for alternative (faster) transfer modes and maybe some slow and insecure WiFi access points in cameras.

If they’re all hard wired, I don’t think you need to worry much about the mesh functionality at all. Wired networks can effectively be placed wherever they’re necessary, the only thing mesh will solve for you is wireless extensibility in the future and automatic switching between access points. I don’t know for sure how the wired backplane of different brands work (and if they all even come with wired interoperability at all) and if the devices can run without being in range of each other at all.

I haven’t needed to deal with this myself, but you may need to create some minor overlap for automatic hand-off to work well, so movable devices like phones automatically connect to the closest access point. You wouldn’t want two networks with equal, bad reception, because there’s a chance devices may flip-flop between access points constantly. I believe manufacturers should have documentation for this stuff if it’s important, though as long as the routers can “see” each other this should be dealt with automatically.

Close vicinity is only important if the routers use a wireless network to connect to each other. Even then the antennae and bands used for the interconnection are likely much more powerful than those of your phone or laptop. You’ll likely have some kind of app or web interface that’ll tell you how well connected the wireless devices are, and that’s probably the best guide to finding the boundaries of the signal.

That said, “close vicinity” can mean anywhere from 5 meters to 50 meters. The exact requirements depend on the interference you get and the obstacles between the different devices. Sometimes moving a mesh router 15 centimeters to the left can be the difference between spotty WiFi and perfect speeds.

Lemmy communities work a bit weird when (de)federation gets involved.

By default, any community any server member is subscribed to gets mirrored to your home server. If your home server defederates/gets defederated, that local copy is still available. Local users can still post content, post comments, and have all kinds of interactions, the rest of the Fediverse just doesn’t know about it. It’s a bit like a “fork” in git/blockchain tech.

I don’t think you can subscribe to the local copy of a different server (although perhaps technically you could implement that relatively easily, I think?) but in a way any remote community you follow is “cross instance”.

Lemmy doesn’t implement supercommunities like Reddit does with subreddits (you can’t merge the “technology” communities of different servers under a single name), though that feature has been requested a bunch of times. That would be a solution where rather than following a bunch of different communities on different servers, you could merge a bunch of remote communities together under one single supercommunity that everybody can then follow, allowing for an intricate network of local communities that’s harder to break up (until, of course, said supercommunity starts removing subcommunities for whatever reason).

Of course, admins are free to federate, defederate, and ban as they like.

I just think tying definitions like “free” to specific instances is silly. There is no inherent freedom in blocking specific instances. Different terms like “non-commercial” or “tracking-free” would be much better descriptions of these corpo-defederating instances than “the free Fediverse”.

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A list of advice and solutions I’ve had to come up with in the past:

Use ethernet where possible for the best results.

Put the router in a better spot for better reception. Use better insulation so the neighbour’s AliExpress baby monitor doesn’t wipe out your WiFi signal. Use 5GHz WiFi when possible for better speeds, sometimes even at lower signal to noise ratios.

Do not place WiFi routers behind metal objects or reinforced concrete if possible. Same for plants, not because WiFi causes some kind of cancer, but because plants contain water and water absorbs a lot of radiation.

Don’t buy WiFi hardware that sells itself as “high power” because WiFi that reaches four houses over is useless if your energy efficient phone doesn’t have enough power to actually send data back.

Look for WiFi 6, 6E, or 7 labels on boxes. MIMO is also very useful; it helps with network throughput. Higher AxB numbers are better (i.e. 3x3 is better than 2x1) but beyond 2x2 you’ll need multiple devices at the same time to make use of all that bandwidth. Do not use range extenders wirelessly, plug them into an ethernet cable. If you do use range extenders or mesh networks, don’t place them somewhere where you don’t get any signal, place them at the furthest point where the WiFi is still usable.

Never trust anything measuring in bars. Phones will overestimate the number of bars, WiFi drivers will lie about them to make it sound like their reception is better, and there is no standard indicator for “how well reception is” that translates into the bars in your status icon. Measure dBm if you have to measure something (a negative number, closer to 0 is better).

Disable software that spams your entire WiFi network, such as the software for certain Logitech mice. These things will interrupt WiFi streams to push packets through, waking up the WiFi chip in all of your device’s, draining the battery faster.

If your internet connection is slow, no amount of WiFi improvements will speed it up. Make sure your incoming connection and the cables to your WiFi equipment are good before you try to fix the WiFi signal.

For the best signal, buy decent WiFi access points and don’t rely on a router in a closet somewhere. If you’re somewhat technical, Ubiquity is a decent balance between user friendliness versus WiFi performance. Attach them to your ceiling and hook them up with ethernet for the best results.

Mesh WiFi can help, but if you get it, don’t mix brands. Like with range extenders, put up mesh devices where they can still reach each other well. Mesh WiFi is much better than range extenders, even if the technology seems to be the same, because of differences in how well they’re integrated and how many WiFi antennae are contained within devices.

If you get multiple routers, try to configure the as access points and hook them up with ethernet. Make sure you don’t chain routers behind each other in standard router mode, unless you know what the downsides of double NAT are, or you’ll have all kinds of stupid issues (“only some computers can see the printer”, “my game only works on this WiFi network”, “why does the PlayStation report different”).

Sometimes people blame IPv6 for their issues. IPv6 is very very rarely the cause and disabling it will hide the problem from you but cause issues in the background. If you disable IPv6 on your device, you’ll run into very weird errors (the “my photos app doesn’t start on Tuesdays” kind of weird, because apps don’t expect it to be off), so only do so on the network level. If you disable IPv6 on your network, make sure you (know how to) use an IPv4-only capable DNS server or you’ll get tons of error messages.

Another IPv6 thing: don’t disable IPv6 privacy extensions on your devices, and never disable the IPv6 firewall on your router entirely (you may want to disable it for specific devices, but that’s optional). I highly recommend learning about IPv6 if you haven’t already, because it’s inevitable but there’s still a huge lack of understanding even among the supposed experts.

How is Threads related to freedom? At best you can call these communities the “Threads-free” Fediverse.

I guess naming things become more complicated when you also include things like Foursquare and eventually Tumblr joining the Fediverse, but the Fediverse is as free in terms of moneys and freedom as it ever was. In fact, there’s a reason the"no big companies allowed" software licenses aren’t considered to be free software.

If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?

There’s a big difference between “theoretically this could become public” and “everything posted here should be considered public knowledge because the services don’t implement any boundaries”.

Theoretically, any message you send over SMS can become public, because it’s unencrypted and your carrier and the recipient’s carrier can read it and do whatever they want. That doesn’t mean SMS is as public as a Mastodon post where everyone can see and interact with it if they just know the URL.

With normal social media, like Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, you can expect messages between people to only be readable by admins and the people interacting with conversations. The same is true for “follower only” content; centralised services can easily hide this stuff from random anonymous people.

Most of the Fediverse is incapable of applying these filters effectively because of design decisions on the server implementation. It could be done, but it isn’t, because implementing it is a pain and maintaining the guarantees requires effort from instance administrators.

Even encrypted messages can easily become public if the other end is malicious or gets hacked. There’s no true private messaging between different people.

The threat model relevant here is “I want a service that lets me do social media in my in-group where trolls and other dickheads can’t enter our safe space without repurcussions”, not “Twitter can read my DMs” or “the government will prosecute me for being gay”. In that category, current Fediverse implementations fail, but Facebook and Twitter perform perfectly fine.

If you’re afraid someone may read your messages, use Signal, or maybe Matrix/XMPP, but that’s not really the point here. The closest thing I can think of that implements social media in a federated yet encrypted fashion is Circles, but I don’t think that’s popular enough for daily use.

In my experience edits and upvotes federate completely. Deletions apply to your server and the server that hosts the community, and some other servers.

I haven’t figured out what is causing the random behaviour of deletes, but as a workaround, you can edit your comment into an empty post and then delete it to hide the information as best as you can.

That said, consider anything posted on the Fediverse to be there permanently. I don’t think anyone malicious is scraping comments per se, but ActivityPub implementations are so buggy that you simply can’t expect edits or deletes or any other interaction to arrive at all servers that received the original post.

I think Circles gets semi regular updates, but I think they’re quite active on the Matrix community and not so much online. They regularly have a section in the this week in Matrix blog posts. They seem to have released a big update last month.

“Anyone with an admin account” comes down to “one or two people” not “public”. If your admin is a dick then yeah, your stuff may get leaked, but that’s not normal.

You may be interested in more privacy oriented social networks, because the Fediverse just isn’t. Even on privacy focused communities, the general consensus seems to be “yeah we don’t do privacy here, oh well”.

Almost all Fediverse software places the burden of information protection on the user (“don’t DM anyone unless you want that message to be shared with the world, it’s your fault for using the internet in the first place”). Mastodon is particularly bad about this, because it doesn’t have DMs (it just pretends to); rather, it has toots that aren’t published to any list. If you know the right IDs, you can pretty much read them. In fact, if you tag someone in a Mastodon DM, they’ll be notified and added to the conversation, so make sure not to tag anyone when gossiping on the Fediverse!

I think it’s pretty funny that the Fediverse is so mad at Facebook for its many privacy violations while maintaining that you should never expect any privacy on social media when it comes to their preferred medium.

If you care about privacy: Circles is a federated social media platform using Matrix as a backing protocol which uses encryption to control who can or can’t read your messages. You can use it to message and follow people on other servers just like on the Fediverse, but messages aren’t inherently public on it. I haven’t tried the app myself, because I don’t need yet another app in my life, but it’s underlying concept is a much better solution to personal social networking than the Fediverse will ever be. Unfortunately, I don’t think many people use it, but if you’re setting up an environment for people who may want privacy, you should consider it.

Yes, open federation is terrible for privacy for all the reasons you listed and more. That’s exactly the point here.

If you only share data with trusted parties, that you know will delete comments and data when requested and have the same standards vetting federating parties you do, you can have federation and privacy friendly networking. It’s also the only way to be GDPR compliant when running a Fediverse server as a business.

The protocol is entirely irrelevant here. ActivityPub merely standardised sharing information. The same problems also exist with Matrix, IRC, SMTP, or plain old “sending data over HTTP and storing it in a database”.

Also, Lemmy decidedly doesn’t accept deletes as you may expect it to. Deletes don’t always propagate (probably a bug) and delete requests will leave traces on a whole bunch of servers. It’s not intentional, but don’t expect deletions to work on Lemmy.

Furthermore, deletions don’t actually delete any data, instance moderators can click a button and restore a post even if you hit delete on it!

It doesn’t work for me on Firefox, but it does seem to work on Chromium. Hitting the play button just doesn’t do anything.

Even if it does work, Piped doesn’t seem to be doing resolutions higher than 720p, so I’ll probably stick with clicking the Youtube links even if they fix their broken video player.

I think it’s the default setting in Lemmy, or maybe it was in an earlier setting.

Do you have “hide read” enabled in your Lemmy settings, by any chance? I think that setting may be hiding certain posts from the API results.

I mean, Facebook is tracking these URLs anyway, why not show them to the user as a feature? If people are still in Facebook, this transparency into how much data they’re collecting may actually help push some people away.

Android/Chromebook users frightened by this concept need to double check that they don’t have Google’s “Web and App activity” enabled, which will do something quite similar.

I can’t say I mind Reddit being abused as a video CDN is particularly bad, but the reposters always pick shitty video quality for their posts for some reason.

Sync and other apps are smart enough to stream the HD version of these links (or at least Sync tries to, but it’s currently bugged) but it looks like the reposters just right-click-copy-address the Reddit posts from the frontpage in their shitty preview quality.

Personally, I’d consider remembering the credentials for the service you’ve signed up for to be easy. I think it’s unfair to expect companies to treat their users as utter idiots.

That’s not to say this specific company isn’t breaking any laws (least they could do is add a login form to the page you’re linking to), but I find it a bit much to expect companies to design a secure single-token login system that integrates with their newsletter system; such unnecessary technical design expectations only increase the risk that a badly designed authentication system causes a data leak.

The CAN SPAM act is a lot clearer in this sense, it spells out the “single web page” requirement. I suppose you may as well design for that, but I’m not a fan of the infatilisation of internet users.

What part is illegal? I’m not aware of any laws specifically requiring you not to provide authentication when accessing unsubscribe settings.