• 6 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • Cashier’s checks existed in Belgium a few years ago but I heard they are under fire and will be discontinued at some point.

    Personal checks seem to be non-existent but I heard they can be requested but the banks give some resistance and try to steer people away from it. They only work domestically. I think if you gave a Belgian personal check to a Belgian, they would not generally know what to do with it.

    Impulsive donations have been relatively killed off because cash donations are banned (I think because scammers impersonate charities). So that leaves check and electronic payment. Oxfam does not (AFAIK) carry payment terminals. Checks would make sense, but they are taboo. So they have to ask for a bank transfer, which gives donors a chance to be lazy and forget about it.









  • Why?

    1. It’s a big database. It would be a poor design to replicate a db of all links in every single client.
    2. Synchronization of the db would not be cheap. When Bob says link X has anti-feature Y, that information must then be shared with 10s of thousands of other users.

    Perhaps you have a more absolute idea of centralized. With Mastodon votes, they are centralized on each node but of course overall that’s actually decentralized. My bad. I probably shouldn’t have said centralized. I meant more centralized than a client-by-client basis. It’d be early to pin those details down at this point other than to say it’s crazy for each client to maintain a separate copy of that DB.

    And how would guarantee the integrity of the ones holding the metrics?

    The server is much better equipped than the user for that. The guarantee would be the same guarantee that you have with Mastodon votes. Good enough to be fit for purpose. For any given Mastodon poll everyone sees a subset of votes. But that’s fine. Perfection is not critical here. You wouldn’t want it to decide a general election, but you don’t need that level of integrity.

    A lot less effort than having to deal with the different “features” that each website admin decides to run on their own.

    That doesn’t make sense. Either one person upgrades their Lemmy server, or thousands of people have to install, configure, and maintain a dozen different browser plugins ported to a variety of different browsers (nearly impossible enough to call impossible). Then every Lemmy client also has to replicate that complexity.





  • You just identified the fallacy yourself.

    You’re going to have to name this fallacy you keep talking about because so far you’re not making sense.

    Sometimes a paywalled source is the first to report on something. Calling that link a bad link is nonsense.

    One man’s bad link is another man’s good link. It’s nonsense to prescribe for everyone one definition of “bad”. What’s bad weather? Rain? I love rain. Stop trying to speak for everyone and impose your idea of “bad” on people.

    Many people don’t know all the websites to redirect things through without that, so calling their contribution “bad” just because they posted that link isn’t the greatest.

    So because someone might not know their link is bad, it ceases to be bad? Nonsense.

    It’s not even like it’s that big an issue, because usually someone else comes along that provides an alt link in the replies,

    (emphasis mine) Usually that does not happen.

    so saying that this is a social failure is also ridiculous, because both were provided between two people.

    This based on the false premise that usually bad links are supplemented by an alternate from someone else.

    Also, the notion that you or anyone else is socially filtering non-misinformation news sources from the rest of us, because you don’t see the value in it, or cannot figure out how to bypass the paywall yourself, isn’t all that great either.

    (emphasis mine) Every user can define an enshitified site how they want. If you like paywalls, why not have your user-side config give you a personalized favorable presentation of such links?



  • A link is not a bad link for going to the source. You’ve misunderstood the post and also failed to identify a logical fallacy (even had your understanding been correct).

    Whether the link goes to the source or not is irrelevant. I’m calling it a bad link if it goes to a place that’s either enshitified and/or where the content is unreachable (source or not). This is more elaborate than what you’re used to. There’s more than a dozen variables that can make a link bad. Sometimes the mirror is worse than the source (e.g. archive*ph, which is a Cloudflared mirror site).