I’d never heard of STIR/SHAKEN…but after looking into it, supposedly T-Mobile was one of the first mobile carriers to implement it…and I’m on T-Mobile…but for the past several years, I keep getting unwanted spam calls to my cell phone that appears to be originating from very regional local numbers (area codes and number prefixes that are local to my area)…because of that I just assumed that they had to be spoofed since the calls are always an unwanted telemarketing robo call and never involve an actual business that is local to me.

So I don’t know how they are still doing it, but somehow telemarketers are causing calls to route through exchanges that are completely local to me.

I think it’s too late for this to be useful. Number spoofing is ultra-common these days and most of the unwanted calls I receive are from spoofed numbers that appear to come from local areas.

If we start blocking the spoofed numbers then eventually we’ll just be blocking every possible combination of digits that can exist.

What we really need first is better detection and blocking of calls using spoofed numbers.

Are you just talking about dynamic DNS services for one or a few home servers?

There’s always DynDNS, but that’s a paid service. I actually discovered that dynamic IP address service was provided free by Google when using Google Domains as the registrar, so I moved a few of my private domains over to Google several years ago to save myself $55 a year.

Unfortunately, Google Domains is shutting down and all registrar services and existing customer domains are getting moved to squarespace and I’ve not yet been able to determine if squarespace is going to be offering the free dynamic DNS service or not.

The most plausible path forward would be to pass the 2023 Medicare for All act (introduced by US representatives Pramila Jayapal, Debbie Dingell, and Bernie Sanders).

link: https://jayapal.house.gov/2023/05/17/jayapal-dingell-sanders-introduce-medicare-for-all-with-record-number-of-house-cosponsors/

On the surface this comes across as SciFi, but it’s a true classic horror with a scifi backdrop. It’s essential watching for any horror genre fan, IMO.

All of the Hellraiser movies (some are great, some are not so great, but it’s worth it to work through all of them in order). The newest was kind of a re-imagining and you can start there if you want).

The Thing - the 1982 film is a classic, but the newest one is a prequel that came decades after the original movie- I’d recommend watching both, starting with the original.

All the alien movies. Some don’t consider Sci-Fi horror to be true horror, but these are essential watching. I consider it to be the best complete horror series of movies ever made.

Vampire’s Kiss (Nicholas Cage) - this is truly bizarre and if you are a Nick Cage fan it should be considered required watching.

Barbarian (2022) - simultaneously mind blowing and absolutely terrifying. Probably the best horror of the past 5 years.

The Mist - and mainly just for the ending which was a total mindfuck.

Train to Busan - This is a Korean made film (with subtitles) in the zombie genre, and is absolutely riveting.

World War Z - an outstanding zombie genre movie - one of the first zombie movies to feature fast moving parkour capable zombies as opposed to the slow moving classic zombies.

American Psycho - scary because this could (and does) happen and you could be standing right next to the next American Psycho right now and not even know it.

Maximum Overdrive - doesn’t get recommended a lot, but it holds up and is a great machine-uprising type of horror.

Event Horizon - propped up as SciFi Horror but this is a classic true horror just with a scifi backdrop.

I WISH there would be a modern remake of “Scanners”. Scanners is great horror from decades past but it just doesn’t hold up well to modern standards-it desperately needs a modern remake.

There is no need to suspect conspiracy theories.

It’s not possible for a moderator to delete a post without it showing up in the modlog. Admins with direct access to the filesystem and databases could theoretically do that, but that’s unheard of for any well run and organized instances.

More likely, you didn’t post it to Lemmy World, but to a community on some other instance and it was removed by mods of that other instance community for cause.

Lemmy.ml also has a big and popular world news community, I checked their modlog, and sure enough there are two recent posts of yours removed from c/WorldNews@Lemmy.ml. They were removed for violating the community rule of posting links to articles that are more than two weeks old.

https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemovePost&userId=1071995

Every pair of boots I’ve owned have needed breaking in before becoming comfortable, and then they remained comfortable for the duration of their life.

If you think the only topics of conversation we need are Politics, World News, & Technology, then we don’t need more people here.

Personally, I don’t like having to keep going back to Reddit for everything else. For other communities to be successful on Lemmy, we need about 2 orders of magnitude more users.

Are you content to have meaningful activity in just a small handful of generic topics? I’m not.

So, yes, we really do need more people here. A LOT more.

My story, and my motives, will probably be different from a lot of accounts posted here.

I started smoking in 1988 and ultimately quit in 2009…so a run of about 21 years, which means I’ve been free from it for 14 years.

My Story: My tobacco of choice was ‘Drum’ and I hand-rolled and smoked without filters. I liked Drum because it tasted great to me, I liked the idea of hand-crafting each and every cigarette I smoked, and it was a pretty cool party-trick to be able to produce perfect hand-rolls out of tobacco or whatever - where ever I was, I was always the designated roller. It was also WAY cheaper than traditional cigarettes - I could buy a can of Drum that would produce 250 cigarettes for $12 - and that was due to a loophole in the state’s cigarette tax. Prior to 2009, the state only heavily taxed cigarettes, but not the individual supplies to make cigarettes (like loose tobacco). That loophole got closed in 2009 and the cost of a can of loose tobacco went up from $12 to $49 over night. I’d known for a while that I should probably quit, but I just never got to that mental acceptance of doing it, until this new tax came along. Ultimately, I decided I just wasn’t going to pay that new tax and so I didn’t really decide to quit smoking, I decided I was going to quit buying tobacco (which has the same end result). At first, I started cutting back, to make my remaining supply of tobacco last as long as possible. The lower my stock got, the farther back I cut down. At first it was limiting myself to 4 a day… then 2 a day (that I would smoke over 4 sessions), then 1 a day that I’d light and inhale a few times and put out and save for later. I stretched this out for months…and then one day it was gone. I didn’t use any medical aids, I didn’t use any substitution with something else. I just quit. I should also mention that I’d also always enjoyed cigars…and typically enjoyed about 6 cigars a year, but I’d decided to cut that out also. Shortly after quitting, I told myself that I’d treat myself to a cigar only after I could go 1-full-month without thinking about smoking. This went on for months, and I actually thought about smoking all the time. At first, several times a day…and then several times a week, and then eventually just once in a while. It actually took about a year after quitting that a friend and I were talking about it (he was quitting also) and I realized I hadn’t thought about smoking for several months. Finally, I seemed to have fully broken both the physical and mental addiction. It was about six months after that that I decided to treat myself to a cigar. These days, I have about 3 cigars a year (all on special occasions) - which is a small enough number not to re-kindle my desire to smoke more.

It’s nice to be escaped from the habit, the financial burden of it, and the negative health aspects. The other great side effects: lower life insurance premiums, whiter teeth (and easier/quicker dental cleanings), clothes that don’t smell like smoke.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with that…I just think it’s important to be realistic here. For niche communities to thrive the way they thrive on reddit, it’s just a numbers game. They have the numbers. Lemmy doesn’t. Lemmy is about two orders of magnitude short of the numbers of users needed to achieve the critical-mass / synergy that would be needed to make most niche communities actually viable here. And even then…it’ll probably take even more users than that because the very nature of lemmy is fragmentation/distributed - so having the total numbers still might not be enough.

It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it’s because of the size of the user base. The only point I’m making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.

Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience…which I’m sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.

There’s also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it’s still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there’s no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.

For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn’t functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren’t even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it’s popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there’s also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.

Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I’ll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don’t always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.

Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that’s unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn’t stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.

I can understand part of the motivation for doing this, but does this not immediately make it significantly harder for users to evaluate an instance and make decisions about whether or not to join an instance based on what other instances it allows/blocks?

If I’m understanding this change correctly, it would hinder user’s ability to find an instance that’s well-aligned to them because no one (including potential new users) will be able to see one of the most important metrics governing how an instance chooses to operate (what it federates and defederates with).

I think you are missing a big piece of the bigger picture.

Much of the ‘utility’ of the lemmy alternatives is the significantly larger user base, which is what’s necessary for more niche communities to get off the ground and actually be viable. Without that userbase, lemmy is just another alternate place to discuss the basest common topics, that can be discussed anywhere. I mean, technology and news are nice to have, but it’s the variety of the niche community that are what keep people still hooked on reddit.

So in the end, making a place popular for the sake of popularity actually does serve an important purpose.

This whole visibility thing is a serious problem

Yes. I have been preaching that since I first started using lemmy in June. Every time I bring it up my comment is downvoted to oblivion. The way it currently works is borderline abusive to new users of lemmy.

I’d be happy if we could just cease having the exact same post show up 2 to 5 times in a single community. I’m seeing the same article linking to the same URL showing up in news, for example, today, 2 days ago, 4 days ago, and 6 days ago.

As far as seeing the dupe across different communities, if you are subscribed to the same community on different instances, then I’d recommend picking one and unsubscribing from the rest. The only way a single community can become the most popular across all the instances is if people leave those other communities and settle on a champion.

Any movie by M. Night Shyamalan.

I had a pair of Galaxy Buds 2 Pro but my dog got ahold of the case and buds…it was a total loss.

I now have a pair of Wyze Buds Pro. They sniped some senior Bose engineers to help design their buds. The ANC on the Wyze buds is superior to the Galaxy buds, but the Galaxy buds are superior for audio fidelity. The wyze buds are not a flat frequency response and tend to be a little heavy on the bass for my taste.

So, if you want superior ANC, go with the Wyze…if you want superior audio, get the Samsung.

The other big benefit of the Wyze buds…they retail for around $90.

While there is merit to your post, I will point out the obvious: your post is hosted on an instance named “lemmy world” and you are citing US enforcement codes and sections, but lemmy.world (the servers) do not reside inside the United States. Lemmy.world (the server) would be subject to the laws of the country in which it is hosted, the admin team would be subjected to the laws in the countries in which they reside, the community moderators would be subject to the laws in the countries they reside, and the lemmy.world users would be subject to the laws frrom where ever they reside.

So, you can’t simply link to a writeup about some US regulations and assume it’s going to be exactly the same everywhere and for everyone.

Pixel tablets are not priced as if Google is “desperate to sell Pixel Tablets”.

I think the author is confusing “marketing team motivation” for “desperation” just because they got a push notification.