Is there a solution to this whole government censorship problem? I don’t know networking, but it seems like the centralized systems get the central nodes shut down and the decentralized systems are too easily tracked and/or too inefficient. Reticulum looked interesting, but it was still pretty traceable, and appears to only really be for messaging apps since you have to know where you’re sending to already. Your motion idea has some merit to it, but I was kinda hoping for something more on the software side.

Also working on some 3d maths.

I’ve used the free versions a bit, but not really to the extent that I’d call it vibe coding. The chat bots often know where to find libraries or pre-existing functions that I don’t know. It’s also okay at algorithms for well defined problems, but it often says be careful not to do something I absolutely need to do or visea versa. It’s very hit and miss on debugging. It’ll point out obvious stuff (typos) reliably, and it can do some iteration stuff usually, but it usually doesn’t pick up on other things. Once in a rare while it will impress me by suggesting I look at a particular thing, and I think it manages this better in new chats, but most complex issues fail for it. I use it as a faster stackoverflow, but you need to be able to work through the code yourself, understand what you’re doing, and test that individual steps are doing what they need to do. The bots can’t really do any sort of planning or breaking down a problem into sub-problems, and they really suck at thinking about 3d stuff.

I still think universities and academic societies should be hosting instances and funding them with dedicated endowments. It’d also provide a great way to request more money from people who feel a reciprocal obligation due to using the instance.

Right! Plus, it’d be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!

While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.

I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.

Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.

There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don’t think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it’s place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.