Very cool, and thank you for taking the time to make such a detailed post!

If you are using any Synology products with your setup, you should go ahead and apply the recommended updates

I’d imagine it’s the same as personal finance apps. A spreadsheet can be enough, and it is enough for a lot of people, but a custom app can make things easier:

• reducing the friction of keeping track
• built in visualizations
• alerts
• integrating the data with other tools

etc.

Something being FOSS doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe / ethical, but a LOT of FOSS apps are designed with those principles in mind.

However, being FOSS means that if an app claims that it is safe / ethical (ex. In this case, not storing data anywhere but on your device), you or an experienced peer can check the code to verify that fact.

As for voting under duress, it’s also a concern with mail in ballots and voting by phone. It can be worse with online in the same way that scams are easier online.

I know someone who voted by phone this recent election in my home province, and they were eligible to do so because of sudden health issues. The phone call included multiple people who verified their information, took down the vote, and then verified the vote. I imagine something would get flagged if there was any discrepancy.

I’d also like to link to this Tom Scott video

Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

The strongest argument for me: trust

Even with our paper ballots, hand counting, and many checks along the way, people now have doubts about the accuracy of the results. No matter how good the tech is, it will be impossible to convince the general public that the online votes are accurate.

Also this classic xkcd

https://xkcd.com/2030/

It might cause federation issues down the road, especially with interactions between different platforms

Good note, I didn’t notice that in the original post. I edited the title

Huh

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/motel

Blend of motor +‎ hotel, from the original Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo in California, USA, established in 1925 by Arthur Heineman (1878–1974).

While looking for a term to describe the original post, and came across this. I’m going to make a separate post about it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate

I wonder if there is any pattern to those numbers

edit: ah I didn’t notice, thanks all :)

There was the attack on the Internet archive recently, are there any good options out there to help mirror some of the data or otherwise provide redundancy?

One option that I’ve heard of in the past

https://archivebox.io/

ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view websites offline.

Makes me think of this classic:

Instead of our, they use are as if they forgot the word our exists.

I’m not sure if I’ve seen this, is this about the pronunciation?

I think it’s just for comments?

I’ve been wanting the same for posts for some time now

We’re the giants in their ‘Human and the grass-stalk’ story

Research and organized information on a topic, however obvious it might be, is an important step towards policy changes. We also see those changes from time to time, for example some recent EU decisions

This could be a Goosebumps cover if it had slightly different styling

Taking a look at the current sidebar, it might be nice to reorganize the stats section completely

What I’m thinking is:

By default it will only show some stats, where users can select what stats they want displayed in the settings. This way I can hide the stuff I don’t care about, instead of having to look through the already busy list.

**Statistics:**                       [✏️edit]

- Monthly Active Users: 4,000
- Total Subscribers: 30,000

[ v see all v ]

Then expanding the box will give the full list of stats:

[ ^ collapse ^ ]


**Statistics:**

Active Users: 

- By day: 800
- By week: 1,200
- By month: 4,000
- By year: 24,100

Subscribers:

- Total: 30,000
- Local: 12,000

Comments: 
- Total: 81,000
- Today: 510
- This week: 1,315

[... etc]

It opens up the possibility of including more items in that list. We could also replace the expand option with a link to a full statistics dashboard page.

Creating a bunch of accounts possibly to manipulate votes

Looking from the admin level, doesn’t happen that often. Vote manipulation is already something we keep an eye out for, and usually it’s done to highlight certain content (ex. pushing some political angle) rather than boosting one community over another.

you can stop seeing by adjusting your “Show Bot Accounts” setting

I like some bots, but I only subscribe to a bot-only community if the volume of posts is reasonable.