You need to properly detect that they’re bots first and then they’ll just figure out how to spoof that. Then you’re back to square one.

Abstractly, POW doesn’t need to determine if you’re a bot or not. To make a request, as a human or bot, you need to pay in cpu-time. The hope is that the cost is not so high that a human notices very much but for a bot trying to hoover up data as fast as possible, the aggregate cost is high.

I think the more horrifying aspect is that they’ll just build ever bigger datacenters to crunch POW tests faster and the carbon cost will skyrocket even more.

Was the tape to cover the write protect notch on the floppy?

Careful. Lemmy is too small to draw the attention of sophisticated, persistent abuse. As a company, Reddit has struggled with revenue and we’ve all seen those struggles quite publicly. Lemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.

Federated networks give you freedom but the potential for abuse is proportional to that freedom while at the same time, federation is far more expensive taken as a whole.

If it’s not a tree, why call it a branch? Maybe branch doesn’t make any sense either. Maybe none of this makes any sense! Oh my God, what are we even doing here?!?! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

I’ll never understand why we didn’t just go back to saying “trunk”.

It was a tongue in cheek strawman or if you want to be fancy, a pedagogical tool.

If “providing housing” is a job/service/whatever produced by workers then I, as a theoretical landlord, own some means of production and split the profits with all of the workers: myself.

It seemed like a funny twist of words.

Ah, Landlords aren’t the evil capitalist class then. They’re just a worker that owns the means of production and splits the profits evenly with themselves.