1·
10 months agoArch is, not sure about the others. I would imagine Debian also is.
Versions 3.0+ of Audacity are affected. It’s not like it’s malware and unclean but they did add telemetry and crash reporting and stuff.
Max-P
- 0 Posts
- 3 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 25th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
It’s still going but I think a good chunk of the FOSS community avoids it. Distros that still ships it disable the telemetry.
Definitely feels like the desperate attempts to monetize it, and the enshittification that typically arises next.
As far as I know it’s still fine to use if your distro disables the telemetry, which is what most people had issues with. It’s still under the same license in the end, which is probably why they’re now pivoting to cloud features: that they can make proprietary. I’m sure cloud-based AI plugins are next.
Not with the way the protocol is designed, no. Content is pushed to other instances by basically sending the event to every subscribers, so it inherently requires some kind of active subscription to receive content. And thus the bots.
Technically, ActivityPub would support a system of private communities and profiles, where the remote user have to accept your subscription/follow first, so it makes more sense seen that way why it’s not just broadcasting everything to everyone. Lemmy doesn’t support that and makes all content visible to everyone, so each instance really only needs one bot user to subscribe to every community it can find, and it shows up in everyone’s All feed which many use to discover content. And thus the bot subscriptions, one per instance that runs one of those.
On my small private instance it also makes sense I only receive content which I’m subscribed to, it makes my storage requirements much smaller and reduces the overall load for everyone by only federating what is necessary.
A simple workaround though would be for those bot users to have a special flag on them where instances can ignore them from the count to get a more accurate number, but it’s pretty low on the priority list. Plus when you have 1k, 5k, 10k subscribers, those 50-100 bot users stop being meaningful anyway.