I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

  • 202 Posts
  • 796 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I’d like to add on this bit that people often miss:

    • In Canada, the healthcare system’s costs include salaries for healthcare workers, supplies, training, and other necessary costs
    • In the US, the healthcare system’s costs include all of the above, in addition to all of the parisitic layers. Just the insurance layer includes insurance shareholders, insurance executives, insurance overhead (marketing, admin, aggressive claims denial), lobbying, etc. Then there are similar costs from each of the private corporations that own the hospitals, the clinics, the ambulance services etc.

    That is why the American system is much more expensive and much less efficient with the money. Since Canada’s system is still partially private and it never got fully actualized to the original vision (in part because of lobbying from the US), we have some of those inefficiencies too.

    Now the thing is, a large segment of the working US population would not be able to afford healthcare because of these parasitic layers. The US government needs to enter this system to keep it afloat, but they have to pay the much higher costs.

    So for an American, not only do their taxes ALSO go towards healthcare, but the US spends far more per capita on it. It changes year to year, but double the spending is what I’ve usually heard.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_healthcare_systems_in_Canada_and_the_United_States

    Cut out the parasitic layers. The savvy businessmen among them can find some other industry to make a profit from.



  • From the admin side, we see the following

    • lots of accounts trying to register with the same LLM generated text, or nonsensical spam in the registration application. Those get blocked
    • some accounts that immediately make it obvious that they are a spam bot by posting unrelated advertise-y content as their first post. Those get banned quickly, and usually the home instance prunes the account within a day

    The recent “DM me” spammers and the accounts that post on !selfhosted@lemmy.world are a good example of the second category.

    It’s pretty rare for a bot to be active for much longer than that. Usually some eagle eyed user will spot it and report it up the chain.


  • Welcome!

    We have some guides / infographics for new users, which you might find helpful. These two pages in particular:

    https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

    https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/detailed-overview

    An instance is the site where you make an account. If we extend the analogy to email, then gmail.com is one instance while hotmail.com is another instance. If you make an account on Gmail, you can’t use that login on Hotmail but you can still see content from people on Hotmail.

    Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are all software. It’s hard to extend this analogy out, but imagine if Google released the code for Gmail freely so that anyone could easily set up an email website that had the same appearance and functionality as Gmail. That is what is happening here.

    So in the same way, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and many other Fediverse instances are running the “Lemmy” software and that’s why they look and feel very similar. Where they differ comes down to the people running a particular instance, since they will have different rules for what you can do. You can find that information in the sidebar.

    Now all of the Fediverse platforms use a common and agreed upon language to talk to each other. Because Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin software all use this language and follow a similar format, you can easily share content between all of them. That is what the second guide page talks about. They all have communities, posts, and comments, and work in a similar way.

    Usually people make one account on a forum/threaded instance (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin), and one account on a microblogging instance (Mastodon). This is because the format of microblogging (ex. Twitter) is pretty different from that of forums (ex. Reddit), although it is technically possible to cross post in between them.










  • I feel that some further refinement is needed. I agree with the sentiment behind the latest version of the rule, but I think it still doesn’t address the recent issues.

    The way I see it, there is a very specific type of post that has started showing up very recently, and is getting lots of downvotes. Users here are justifiably suspicious of the pattern.

    The ones that get downvotes are usually:

    • from new accounts
    • the user makes one post, and at most they only responds to comments in that one post
    • the software uses the help of LLMs, while the post and/or comments are also helped by LLMs
    • the software is made to look “professional”, whether it is the UI, the demo, or the README

    I’m not sure what exactly the end goal is, but I don’t believe the story that they all use where they “had this problem and now want to share their solution”. I’m concerned that there is some other end goal, whether it is link farming, SEO manipulation, LLM search result manipulation, or it’s the setup portion of a cyber attack where questionable code will be added later (if it isn’t already).

    Normally I would suggest to just moderate it based off of “you know it when you see it”, but in this case it’s difficult since it’s very similar to legitimate posts. There are real users that want to post with a new account, such keeping their professional life separate from their main account. It’s also hard to differentiate it based on licenses, because those recent accounts almost always license it as FOSS. I also don’t think it’s fair to exclude all AI assisted code, since it’s very common to have that now.

    Perhaps instead of a rule, we could even try some of the following:

    • To reduce the risk of OpenClaw style bots creating content here: AI is ok for the code and external text (ex. the README), but the post here should be written by a human. It’s not like the post needs to be that long to express why someone should look at it, and it won’t go through that many edits. Translations should be done through traditional translation software.
    • To prevent driveby posts, we could automate a comment on new posts see if a user knows where they are posting. Asking about their favourite threadiverse community, or how long they have been a member here, or even how they learned about the community might separate bots from real users. It works pretty well for our registration applications on lemmy.ca / piefed.ca etc.

    On top of being suspicious, I think it boils down to “projects that have a future” and “projects that don’t have a future”. People in this community want to run software that is likely to stay useful and safe over time, and that’s at the core of why these recent ones are downvoted.