I don't think this is particularly surprising. Handshakes can form legal contracts, and contracts can be formed orally. There's no reason why an image couldn't indicate acceptance of a contract, generally speaking (certain specific types of contract may require additional formalities).

Donations, or with a small enough instance a server admin might just pay out of his or her own pocket. Maybe if Lemmy were ever to get much bigger there might be paid or ad-supported instances.

I think a big part of the point of federation is that the costs of hosting servers can be distributed so no one has to spend millions to keep their server running. That way there is less of a need to monetise an instance (and less of an incentive, as if you start doing anti-user stuff, people can just move to a different instance).

Completely agree, and anyone with any foresight would insist on something more robust. But very often the courts have to deal with situations where the parties did not have that foresight and instead proceeded to do business with one another on the basis of informal or very flimsily documented arrangements. And it falls to the court to look at what little evidence there is and determine (to the extent they can) whether there was an agreement and, if so, what the agreement entailed.

You would actually be surprised just how much business is conducted like this.

Doesn't your browser warn you before closing a tab where you have entered text in an input field?

This is a bizarre article.

In the UK, average life expectancy at birth was 81 years, according to 2021 data from the World Bank - the same as in Slovenia, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria.

To frame that as "the UK has one of the lowest life expectancies among rich countries" is... misleading, to say the least. Why does Germany have one of the lowest life expectancies among rich countries? Why does Denmark?

When I was young, I spent a lot of time playing Extreme Paintbrawl. I only learned years later that it had achieved notoriety as one of the worst video games of all time. Looking back it's not hard to see why. But back when it was one of the very few games we had for PC, I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

• Lower upfront costs and quicker to set up as you don't have to buy the hardware
• Don't have hardware taking up space in your home
• Flexibility of being able to scale up or down your specs (or get rid of the VPS entirely) at the click of a button
• Don't have to open your home network to the internet
• Better uptime (not your job to fix outages)

It's good that they mention the refurbished option. The most eco-friendly phone is the one you have, the second most eco-friendly phone is one someone else is getting rid of. Of course, the repairability promise of phones like the Fairphone is exciting and might make them a good bet longer-term.

I plan on using my current phone into the ground but I'm not sure what I will do when it finally dies. I think if there is a Fairphone 5 with modern specs by then, I would strongly consider it. I know constant new releases kind of goes against Fairphone's philosophy so there might not be a 5 for a while, but with the Fairphone 4's specs I would worry about how long it will remain useful. If there is not an improved Fairphone out by then, I would still consider a Fairphone 4 or would likely buy a refurbished Pixel.

I'm not an anti-capitalist. I'm pretty middle-of-the-road in that I believe in a regulated and taxed market economy. But on a personal level there are some aspects of my life that I would rather not place in the hands of corporations whose incentives aren't necessarily aligned with mine.

Google, Twitter, Reddit - I don't really disagree with their right to exist (concerns about monopolies aside). But the less involved they are in my life the better.

Every time I browse without adblock it blows my mind how shitty an experience it is. I genuinely don't know how people browse the internet every day with so many ads being shoved in their faces.

https://tasks.org/

But I agree that who upvoted a post shouldn't be federated.

This also surprised me. I wonder is it necessary for technical reasons to prevent repeated upvoting of a submission by the same user?

I was planning to sign up at BeeHaw because it seems pretty active and with high quality discussions. When I heard that it had defederated from Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world I decided not to sign up to any of those three as I would rather have access to all of them (though I can understand why BeeHaw defederated). So I just went with VLemmy.net as it was one of the recommended ones (on join-lemmy.org and the Awesome-Lemmy-Instances GitHub) and seems to be very broadly federated.

I don't think it matters too much, though I think if you were signed up on the same instances as all your favourite communities it would be a bit more convenient.

Not a DE but AwesomeWM. I like its default aesthetic and it's highly extensible using Lua which gives a lot of power to the user.

Hi there, thanks for working on this! One thing I am trying to do is write a script that fetches all of a particular user's subscribed communities (on any instance). It seems like a fairly simple thing but I can't seem to find any library that offers that functionality at the moment, unless I am missing something.

Another thing I'd like to be able to do is follow a community on a different instance to the user's local instance. I see Plemmy has a follow_community method but it's not clear if it allows following communities on different instances.

Are these things that Plemmy does or will support? It wasn't clear to me from the docs and am just wondering if Plemmy (or any existing library) will work for my use case.

Services vary a lot on how they are deployed and their dependencies, etc. The knowledge I have (and honestly I don't have much) I just built over time, tinkering with different set-ups and trying to debug problems when they arose. So I guess just choose a few difference services and try to get them working (choose low-stakes ones at first, where the risk of getting pwned or losing everything is very low). Docker can abstract away a lot, so maybe try more direct deployments if you are interested in learning.

Oh, great news! New Fairphone looks good, look forward to seeing the specs. I hadn't heard of the Shiftphone before reading the article so will also look into that.

Interesting, thanks for the explanation. I thought it might be available as I can follow off-instance communities on Jerboa but I haven't dug into the source code there to see how they do it.

If it's a "classic" cocktail experience you're after then some of the high end hotels have good spots. The Connaught Bar and the Library Bar at the Lanesborough are very nice (quite expensive though and a bit stuffy).

Personally I'm a fan of Bar Américain at Brasserie Zédel.

Cahoots is another decent cocktail bar with a London Underground theme (set in an old station).

Not a cocktail bar but the Southbank Centre has a cool rooftop garden area with a small bar.

Looks good! Is there a reason it currently only supports Python < 3.11?