Looks fine to me. I don’t use KDE, but searching, it looks like KDE Plasma’s audio mixer is “plasma-pa”. The “pa” there will stand for “PulseAudio”, so at least at one point, it’ll have been based on PulseAudio. I dunno if it talks natively to Pipewire now.

kagis

https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/v8hbyb/something_like_plasmapa_for_pipewire/

If you have the pipewire-pulse compatibility layer installed (which you really should), plasma-pa will work without any problems. Right now there is no pure PipeWire equivalent of it.

That was three years ago, so might be out of date, but at least then, it still used the PulseAudio API, so it may need pipewire-pulse to be active. In any event, I don’t think that it’d hurt to have pipewire-pulse.

I’d check and make sure that pipewire-pulse is active too, and if so, try using plasma-pa to have PipeWire set the volume to whatever it is that you want set to. I assume that once you’ve set a volume with PipeWire, PipeWire will handle restoring it next time you log in. It does on my system.

there’s no need to install pavucontrol but all i need to do is set up alsamixer to make the audio work

If you want to fiddle the audio at the ALSA level — the hardware — you can, but my guess is that in 2025, unless you have some kind of exotic need, what you probably want is for PipeWire to be setting the volume.

On my system, I use pavucontrol and pipewire-pulse — using pavucontrol doesn’t entail using PulseAudio. If you really know what you’re doing and you’re confident that you want to go bare ALSA, then you can probably go have systemd run a script at boot to run an alsactl restore command. I am pretty confident that that’s not what you want to do.

It looks like there’s a native console PipeWire mixer in Debian in the form of pipemixer, and I’d imagine that KDE Plasma probably has some sort of graphical mixer that either can talk natively to PipeWire or uses the pipewire-pulse PipeWire emulation of PulseAudio.

EDIT: Basically, you probably want:

------------  
|Sound Card|  
------------  

------------  
|   ALSA   |  
------------  

------------  
| PipeWire | <- You interact with the audio stack at this layer  
------------  

EDIT2: You should probably see that a user-level pipewire is running if you log into your KDE environment and open a virtual termainal and you run:

$ systemctl status --user pipewire.service  

It should say something like:

Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-09-02 00:27:11 PDT; 1 week 6 days ago  

If you have the PulseAudio emulation support active, then ditto for:

$ systemctl status --user pipewire-pulse.service  

I don’t use KDE, so I don’t know what the KDE mixer program is called or does, whether it talks natively to PipeWire or uses the PulseAudio interface, but KDE Plasma probably puts some sort of volume control in a system tray or something. And it’ll probably use one of those two APIs to talk to PipeWire.

EDIT3: Basically, the only times I’d have been wanting to run things through ALSA directly were:

• When it was introduced but before any standardized sound server was deployed, so maybe early 2000s.

• Until JACK and later PipeWire showed up, talking directly to the hardware was a way to keep latency low for real-time processing, so there were some reasons you might want to do this if you were using pro audio.

• Early PulseAudio was pretty broken, so I wound up using ALSA in preference to it.

But that’s all pretty much ancient history now.

August 2024, where the minister says: "We have to break with the totally mistaken notion that it is every man’s freedom to communicate on encrypted messaging services

Are you going to prevent people from using e2e encryption systems that run atop existing non-encrypted systems?

https://lemmy.world/post/28131754/16406545

If you’re concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system — which is what OP is talking about in terms of “blocking” would be – on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not — both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.

In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you’re going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.

As Miku has no physical presence, the relationship is purely platonic.

If someone isn’t already banging on that, I am pretty sure that they will be before long.

kagis

https://aimojo.io/ai-powered-female-sex-robots/

AI-Powered Female Sex Robots: Top 8 Models for 2025

Yeah.

Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.

— Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, HTML, URLs, and HTTP

I’m not totally sure about the chronology, but I think that the “old->new” block change on Reddit may have been due to calls from Twitter users. Most of the people I saw back on Reddit complaining about the old behavior prior to the change were saying “on Twitter, blocked users can’t respond”.

On Reddit, the site is basically split up into a series of forums, subreddits. On the Threadiverse, same idea, but the term is communities. And that’s the basic unit of moderation — that is, people set up a set of rules for how what is permitted on a given community, and most restrictions arise from that. There are Reddit sitewide restrictions (and here, instancewide), but those don’t usually play a huge rule compared to the community-level things.

So, on Twitter — and I’ve never made a Twitter account, and don’t spend much time using it, but I believe I’ve got a reasonable handle on how it works — there’s no concept of a topic-specific forum. The entire site is user-centric. Comments don’t live in forums talking about a topic; they only are associated with the text in them and with the parent comment. So if you’re on Twitter, there has to be some level of content moderation unless you want to only have sitewide restrictions. On Twitter, having a user be able to act as “moderator” for responses makes a lot more sense than on Reddit, because Twitter lacks an analog to subreddit moderators.

So Twitter users, who were accustomed to having a “block” feature, naturally found Reddit’s “block” feature, which did something different from what they were used to, to be confusing. They click “block”, and what it actually does is not what they expect — and worse, at a surface glance, the behavior is the same. They think that they’re acting as a moderator, but they’re just controlling visibility of comments to themselves. Then they have an unpleasant surprise when they realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t what they think that they’ve been doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann’s Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

“Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese, composed of around 92 to 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced shi ([ʂɻ̩]) when read in modern Standard Chinese, with only the tones differing.[1]

“Shī Shì shí shī shǐ”
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

“Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”
In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔦𝔪𝔲𝔪

𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔦𝔪𝔲𝔪

I would guess that it’s probably not viable. Like, the problem isn’t that a tool isn’t processing the webpage correctly, but rather that the website isn’t actually giving access to the video at all unless you sign in.

In general, if you can view a video but just not download it, Firefox (using the desktop UI) will let you the URL of the video. You click on the lock icon by the URL bar -> Connection Secure -> More information -> Media. This also lets you download images and so forth that have ad-hoc website-level “DRM” and try to make it difficult to download images. cough Pinterest.

Someone could create a service that logs in and then proxies the request, but I imagine that Threads would kill the account they’re using — I expect that they want to disallow video streams to not-logged-in users, or they wouldn’t have done what they did.

One thing that could maybe be done technically is for some service to do a fuzzy hash of each frame of videos — kind of like TinEye does for static images — and then given a static frame like this, lists all the videos that it has indexed that contain something that looks like that frame. Assuming that some service hasn’t already started providing something along those lines. But that’d probably require more processing power, bandwidth, and storage than someone like TinEye is using, as I bet that there is more data going up to the Internet in the form of video frames than of static images.

EDIT: I do see other videos further down in the thread playing. So not-logged-in viewers can see some video content, just not that. Hmm.

That video has to be treated differently than the later videos — maybe it won’t play without in-browser DRM support or the like? Or maybe it’s above a certain size?

EDIT2: I don’t think that it’s in-browser DRM. I just checked, and WideVine works in Firefox on this test page. And your URL doesn’t work in Firefox (or Chromium) on this system.

Maybe it could be some sort of new codec? I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have a fallback, though.

EDIT3: This service can provide an mp4 link. Not sure if they’re proxying it or just digging through the guts more than yt-dlp does:

https://threadster.app/download

EDIT4: It looks like the actual mp4 link I get is from a “threadster”-specific CDN account, so my guess is that they may well be proxying it, else I’d think that they’d just be linking to the video on Threads directly.

EDIT5: The downloaded .mp4 — which may or may not be identical to the original video stream — has a size of 6216038 bytes, so if Threads is restricting it based on size, it’s a pretty low restriction.

One other thing occurred to me. A number of services block “adult” content for some definition of “adult”. This (a) conforms to laws in various jurisdictions about blocking children from seeing content, and (b) creates a hook to get people to create an account. YouTube, for example. It could be that Threads has flagged this as “not for children”, so it requires an “adult” account to see the thing. I could very readily see some white supremacy group marching as qualifying as “adult” for one of those definitions.

EDIT6: It may be that Threads generates a unique video for each request, does a digital watermark or something, to try to track down what account entities like Threadster are using to pull videos from. Or it could be that Threadster is modifying the video. But I ran the video from from Threadster through rhash to generate a magnet URL, so if (a) neither service is modifying the video to make it distinct and (b) anyone has uploaded the file to a BitTorrent node with DHT enabled, then I imagine that this should get you to it; I generated a magnet URL for the file with all supported hashes.

$ rhash --magnet -a threadster_0ovs0ywp.mp4 
magnet:?xl=6216038&dn=threadster_0ovs0ywp.mp4&xt=urn:crc32:ce0986c6&xt=urn:md4:7f1b446dafac136ef41d7c8211a153b2&xt=urn:md5:af199305ebd27c6ff34e890d36374d37&xt=urn:sha1:qjyppsc27vuazq6zgyr4vflkumpour64&xt=urn:tiger:bff86af09fa62a93c35a67902ffbca9bdab5cf52f4d41baf&xt=urn:tree:tiger:vrk7ux5qrfzip24d7su4fjavdbj5iadh5i4le5q&xt=urn:btih:7d08a14e90712580809379ddf43778e1440c8ee1&xt=urn:ed2k:7f1b446dafac136ef41d7c8211a153b2&xt=urn:aich:qikeur6cwalyy4qokt62raheyvg7a7nc&xt=urn:whirlpool:4d6ae4d5ba366c6a0ed783efdff5371b7e969e03905952abcec3a8f398af4f5d5bdb81e9eb3c1c522ab336dab155dd89729c533ddbe8c0d00e7ad1b7e411331b&xt=urn:ripemd160:6067eae597a4a5a0c077b8b934bd0609dcffbdb1&xt=urn:gost94:83e5f32ca72e8d7e78868fe7c40cf1488483a49feaad06565ce272976dca68c6&xt=urn:gost94-cryptopro:bad114d3021ac70074f4cf315d78825b40141faa6502dd25f90ae6097b4fb38a&xt=urn:has160:7b0d2f95b6bf9a2beb091ddb66fa58486a8e15ec&xt=urn:gost12-256:ef405a539e4c565119537fc927e8a437c570085161fba529395bee2470be1147&xt=urn:gost12-512:237d11bc5a7f3205988675d24ae59eae6fe9b5604ca9fefdce0007b2f1f3a322ee36b6a2268e0fd8a63a4b7eee631cec159125a34bad7640febca983e148616b&xt=urn:sha224:f2c43a2d1fcff46517805cae7b2704ffc307249e779f208156d78e38&xt=urn:sha256:10aa072e2a340490550b75a3b31cc7bc2477675a86545efe10485255aae52dc4&xt=urn:sha384:5baf49ca38a7520d83e32cd34ceff2307a9ab58a968b289f4af60c3ca4652f536cd37308c4399058172923766cab7d18&xt=urn:sha512:29a41cec78761ade9d4da49c16c2b24f62a437bd4eef97948a3ae8fdb4498f64783e66000b5d53ac46dc90ffe22d4dc0a43d3d108798663a97c46138efc72b5f&xt=urn:edon-r256:05b271edb1ee478361d2b8cf2c7e2b30a98e96dc07d05c9afff5f04313ea497c&xt=urn:edon-r512:8697ed76da42f16abe913bcc3c4b73b8511dbf6117db35e9373401d03e56853a4297eaa46a9aec1c32e050ca11b1c4da33869a06f758234dfd8a6178da2cacba&xt=urn:sha3-224:0ffb43bb4c352cc2b5ee8d1386ec8949eed32403130bf8bab71d3f02&xt=urn:sha3-256:835b2f4ffad2efad5fd67b84508dbc41b4d1f977aee2a76fcc47245681b68dc3&xt=urn:sha3-384:81cb38988764b1941f4d50cacbfa0e98989128319508940558c1665f3edddb79d475495cd9962b76b2409f35066fa8d6&xt=urn:sha3-512:d50d706b9cbdab52d1564f0f89013194c60e9d158ce6bf714f35742949bfa7cfc3f3716fd8f1577c3a4755b42a30091b113aa20d15608fccffde46c62494faa6&xt=urn:crc32c:86313da6&xt=urn:snefru128:5e2348a151afe2cd50cf46c36a265c05&xt=urn:snefru256:401be5eb26ad7ba6f75dbfab9d8b66692bca8f3090eb69b75657824d8cde09e5&xt=urn:blake2s:aaf9ad51bb34f13b934decdec05989012fb2d34641d4de901bda3cd217b2e64f&xt=urn:blake2b:92cec72f95822075735249de8bb4014386ba7a71c22428fd44e7a071ed372034c2b76bdefe45824d2ab7ba8d1fbaa726d5210aa10cec7510308528495cd2386d  
$  

I’ve got a top-level comment about why I’d rather not have a feature of the form OP requested. Reddit’s block feature originally worked the way the Threadiverse’s block feature presently does. It was later changed, and that change introduced problems.

However, that being said, I do think that there may be a real UI issue if people think that they’re preventing responses, but aren’t actually doing so, and get frustrated. That’d be a legit UI issue.

considers

I don’t think I’d use “mute”. In IRC, “mute” refers to a moderation action more analogous to what OP wants. I think that that could still produce confusion.

Usenet uses “kill”, for “killfile”, in the sense of “automatically killing posts from a user”. Probably not a great choice either.

Maybe “ignore” would be better than “block”, though. I think that that would make it unambiguous what the operation is doing. I’m guessing that the Lemmy devs just chose “block” because Reddit happened to use it, didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it.

Related story: I once worked with a guy who had worked on Yahoo Maps, way back when. It was one of the first mapping services to provide navigation instructions. He told me that he was the one who had, at some point, suggested “bear” as a verb for the navigation decisions (e.g. “bear right”). It was a pretty off-the-cuff decision, but apparently it’s confusing to some people, since “bear” isn’t a terribly-commonly-used term and can potentially be confused with the animal of the same name. IIRC, Yahoo Maps ultimately changed it, years later, but I understand that not only did they use the term for quite some years, but some other services also copied it, so it had considerable inertia.

kagis

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/kid-gps-instructions-bear-right/

EDIT: Sorry, I think it was actually MapQuest that he was working on, not Yahoo Maps.

Ehh. I don’t think that the underlying goal was to try to obtain some sort of “ban monopoly” on the Threadiverse. If they had, they had a ton of things that they could have done that they didn’t.

• Don’t support federation in the first place.

• Have lemmy.ml and friends simply disallow federation with other instances.

• Break compatibility in new builds to make it harder for people to run other instances. Don’t open-source Lemmy in the first place.

Like, I think that it’s pretty lame that some of the official Lemmy software support stuff is communities on lemmy.ml, which has an admin situation that I don’t really like. But…that seems like an awfully weak lever to be pulling if someone’s goal is to try to exclude anyone else from having the ability to restrict users.

Can’t disagree there!

I don’t really think that I have a range that’s anywhere near that narrow.

First, some of my favorite games are roguelikes (e.g. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or Caves of Qud), and they often have very few assets, which is where all the data in larger games comes from.

It looks like the largest release of Cataclysm (the one with the graphics and sounds) unpacks to be 586MB. Caves of Qud — actually, I’m surprised that it’s this large — has a 1.4GB directory in Steam after installation.

I have a hard time imagining a lower bound (short of maybe demoscene type stuff, where I’d be surprised that stuff could fit into so little space). But I have a hard time imagining avoiding a game because it’s too small.

Second, I don’t think that there are any commercial games out there that are going to cause me to not play them due to storage space. Starfield is probably the largest I’ve done, and while it uses enough disk space that I’m not going to leave it installed if I don’t plan to play it anytime soon, it’s not an issue to store it.

https://twinfinite.net/features/biggest-games-all-time-ranked-install-size/

This says that Starfield has a 125 GB install.

The largest that they have listed there is ARK: Survival Evolved , at 435 GB. That does seem a little excessive to me, but, I mean, you can get a 4TB NVMe drive on Amazon right now for ( checks ) ~$200, so that’s really $25 in storage, and when you’re not playing it, you can just uninstall it and put something else there. As gaming hardware goes, $25 just isn’t that big a deal.

In theory, I could imagine some sort of game that procedurally-generates a dynamic world as one explores that has massive save files or something, something in the vein of Minecraft-style games. Disk space there could be theoretically unbounded. So you could design a hypothetical game that I’d object to. But…I don’t really think that there’s really a practical limitation that excludes games for me today today.

Devs want a monopoly on the power to block people they don’t like through the use of bans

Admins can ban on a per instance basis. Moderators can ban on a per community basis. But devs don’t have any particular banning power.

Clearly you’ve made a mistake by even getting onboard the distro train in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_from_Scratch

Linux From Scratch is a way to install a working Linux system by building all components of it manually. This is, naturally, a longer process than installing a pre-compiled Linux distribution. According to the Linux From Scratch site, the advantages to this method are a compact, flexible and secure system and a greater understanding of the internal workings of the Linux-based operating systems.[5]

What is the use case you expect where people are going to need a Rubik’s Cube character on a regular basis?

I guess maybe it could be used to symbolize “puzzle”, and maybe there’d be some limited use for that, but there’s already a Unicode “jigsaw puzzle piece” that I think pretty much fills that role:

goes to find it in emacs

C-x 8 RET j i g TAB  

U+0x1F9E9 JIGSAW PUZZLE PIECE (🧩)

I have not done so in the traditional sense in quite some years. My experience was that it was an increasing headache due to crashing into a wide variety of anti-spam efforts. Get email past one and crash into another.

Depending upon your use case – using the “forward to a smarthost” feature in some mail server packages to forward to a mailserver run by a SMTP service provider with whom you have an account might work for you. Then it still looks to local software like you have a local mailserver.

If I were going to do a conventional, no-smarthost mailserver today, I think that I would probably start out by setting up a bunch of spam-filtering stuff — SpamAssassin, I dunno what-all gets used these days on a “regular” account — and then emailing stuff from my server and seeing what throws up red flags. That’d let me actually see the scoring and stuff that’s killing email. Once I had it as clean as I could get it, I’d get a variety of people I know on different mail servers and ask them to respond back to a test email, and see what made it out.

I remember the first time I tried jalepeno fudge chocolate cake. I guess it’s not necessarily that oddball — and if you go back to how the Aztecs drank their chocolate, doing so with spices was a thing — but I remember being really surprised that mixing sweet with something that I normally thought of as savory would work so well.

I’d also add, for people who feel that they don’t have a good way to “hang up” on a conversation that they don’t want to be participating any further without making it look like they agree with the other user, the convention is to comment something like this:

“I don’t think that we’re likely to agree on this point, so I’m afraid that we’re going to have to agree to disagree.”

That way, it’s clear to everyone else reading the thread that the breaking-off user isn’t simply conceding the point, but it also doesn’t prevent the other user from responding (or, for that matter, other users from taking up the thread).

EDIT: Also, on Reddit, I remember a lot of users who had been subjected to the “one more comment and a block” stuff then going to try to find random other comments in the thread where other users might see their comment, responding to those comments complaining that the other user had blocked them, and then posting their comment there, which tended to turn the whole thread into an ugly soup.

Also, with Reddit’s new system, at least with some clients and if I remember correctly, the old Web UI, there was no clear indication as to why the comment didn’t take effect — it looked like some sort of internal error, which tended to frustrate users. Obviously, that’s not a fundamental problem with a “blocking a user also prevents responding” system, but it was a pretty frustrating aspect of Reddit’s implementation of it.

Sure, no dispute there.