For newbies qbitrorrent’s search is more than adequate enough to replace steps 5-7. But this is a great guide!

Any discussion/advice community that allows low-effort meme slop will inevitably become choked out by it. I understand I am in the minority and the mods like having the memes, but eventually we’ll need /c/piracydiscussion if content of this formatting is permitted.

Obviously 99% of people here would agree that Aaron Swarts’ story is a tragedy. But simple low-hanging fruit content is not what I want this place to have. And like it or not this community is likely to become the single biggest place to discuss piracy as Reddit inevitably cracks down on it.

I would transfer the playlist to Tidal (there are services out there that will import everything for a few dollars), then use Tidal-dl. The quality is much higher.

Nerds like to argue but this the easiest set-it-and-forget it way is to get a raspi or old PC and put some home server OS on it like CasaOS, Umbrel, or TrueNAS. Then get the following apps:

• Torrent app like Deluge or qBittorrent
• Prowlarr - Searches torrent sites
• Radar - Manages movies
• Sonarr - Manages television shows
• Plex - organizes downloaded media and streams to your devices
• Overserr (optional) a friendly GUI for requesting media.

Trash guides are useful for getting it all set up. There is a learning curve but once it’s up and running you don’t need to think about it.

Blocked

I fully agree. What worries me is if bad actors create bots that are able to overwhelm the human moderators.

Yes, strong moderation by members of the community is sufficient to recognize and remove bad (human) actors. The question is one of volume and overwhelming those human mods. GPT can create hundreds of bad-faith accounts.

It’s theirs. They can do whatever they want. Any limits their power within the instance/community is purely voluntary on the part of the owner.

Mods and admins on the Fediverse are not democratically elected, they have complete control. Accusing one of “power tripping”, in their own community, on the instance they presumably pay for, is not a rational accusation, since they definitionally cannot exist in a state of less power. What that community is trying to do is use the threat of public shaming to influence behavior. It’s how you get weak moderation and generic communities where bad actors can thrive. A community dedicated to “Stopping bad mods” sounds good on the surface, but it’s an argument made in bad faith.

Why are you putting up with a “shitty” mod? Are you trying to force your speech in a community who has asked you not to?

Great response, thank you. My concern is more so focused on future measures; what happens if/when registration applications are answerable by a bot? It’s not hard to imagine. What happens when a GPT powered bot leaves totally “normal” unique comments 90% of the time, but occasionally recommends a product or pushes a political agenda?

Further, there’s nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.

Yes, I’ve had this same thought and I think it’s a great model! If it comes to pass or not remains to be seen. But the concept is good!

“Power tripping mods” definitionally cannot exist on the fediverse where anyone can create an instance or community. Even on Reddit, 99% of the time someone said a mod was “power tripping” it was just a right winger upset that the mod removed their disruptive nonsense.

The purpose of communities like the one you linked to is to shame mods into employing a passive, generic bare-minimum style of moderation, when we should be encouraging the opposite if we want diversity in the fediverse.

What’s the incentive to operate an LLM on the fediverse that is truly helpful and not just trying to secretly sell something/push an agenda?

Any speculation as to what those tools might look like?

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I too think that regional instances would be ideal for a “backbone” of the social web. But at the same time, I feel that interest-based connection is a truly unique strength of the internet and it would be a sad thing to lose to the slop.

Ultimately, I think that more, smaller instances is likely the best “ultimate” defense against slop since there is no incentive for them to scale beyond their needs. But every instance admin is technically responsible for the content on all federated instances. Which can get overwhelming!

If you believe Kim Dotcom is promoting those values you are a complete sucker. He consistently advocates for more authoritarian control over the Internet, not less. Plus:

Dotcom has repeatedly spread anti-Ukrainian falsehoods, and Russian government propaganda.

And

In an August 2024 Twitter post, Dotcom quoted passages from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a discredited antisemitic text purporting to prove the existence of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. That October, he promoted the neo-Nazi propaganda film Europa: The Last Battle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Dotcom#Promotion_of_conspiracy_theories

Ukrainian sovereignty (something Dotcom has actively rallied against) is more important to me than a slow, bloated file hosting site. He’s also openly antisemetic.

Interesting that Kim Dotcom blames the MAGA boogeyman “deep state communists” for his persecution and celebrated Trump’s win, while Trump’s supreme court is currently poised to force ISPs to crack down on bittorrent traffic. I don’t expect intelligence form Dotcom, but does he really think a conservative oligarchy is going to be friendlier to the users of decentralized anti-corporate protocols?

The only reasons countries like Russia and china don’t police piracy is because not doing so hurts US corporate interests, not because they love free speech and want to enable circumvention of government-enforced censorship.

I use SyncThing to monitor and copy my photos to an (encrypted, offsite) drive.