Thunder has an option to dim read posts.

That’s because, currently, the community stats that you see in the sidebar are only from your instance – community stats are currently not federated. Afaik, federated community stats are going to be implemented in 0.19.

and see people upvote their own comment.

Upvoting one’s own comment is default behaviour on Lemmy. When a user makes a post, or comment on Lemmy, it gets automatically upvoted by that user.

It matters because American culture currently prefers everyone to have a college degree as opposed to any other type of education. […] If this avenue was cut off then the attitude of the public would change to allow other means of education.

I completely agree that our favoring of, or requiring of post-secondary degrees for employement is an important cultural issue. I don’t agree, however, that the solution is to make the provision of loans illegal – illegalization is rarely anything else than a band-aid on top of a gaping wound. An argument could be made that the government provision of student loans should be stopped (in countries where that occurs e.g. Canada), but I don’t think the solution is to simply make all student loans illegal.

and then yoke them into debt for the rest of their lives.

Hm, that is an assumption. There’s a few issues with that statement. The total cost of one’s loans are directly related to the cost of the post-secondary institution that they decide to attend. There is little reason to go to a very expensive institution. I do understand that some employers are elitist in that they won’t hire anybody outside of an ivy league school, but I would wager that that issue is not very prevalent – the free market should take up the slack. Furthermore, one’s ability to get out of such debt is related to the income that they expect from employment after attaining their degree, as well as their level of monetary responsibility, and savviness. If one decides to blindly go into student debt for studies that will offer little in return, that is one’s own risk to take. You must also not forget that there is no requirement that one must do white-collar work. Trades do not require such degrees, and are just as well-paying, if not better.

I presume that anywhere where interest-free loans are offered, they are offered by that country’s government. Canada, for example, as of April 1st 2023, offers federal student loans interest-free. Depending on the province, some may not have interest on provincial loans, as well.

What issue are you looking to solve? You state that you believe people are able to seek out, and attain their education independently through resources like the internet. So why would it matter if there are alternatives that cost money which one can pay, and receive loans for?

A bug report has been submitted for that here.

It is.

Its not used with e2ee, is it though? At least it’s not the default and I doubt it can even be enabled.

It depends on what the defaults are for the client that you are using. Element, for example, defaults to E2EE.

Another thing is that e.g. spammers might choose to use a misleading preview. Though I suppose that’s a minor point, probably server-side previews can be tricked as well.

In my opinion this isn’t a huge deal, but you do have a point in that it could be an attack vector for phishing.

What is the security/privacy flaw if the server does it? No point thinking a non-encrypted would be very secret in the first place.

What do you mean? Matrix supports E2EE.

I guess the idea is that this works with simpler clients as well. Other nessaging networks with initiator-side previews usually have single-provider clients, as far as I know.

I mean, it’s up to the client to implement URL previews, anyways; if the client is simple, then the client wouldn’t implement them. Unless you mean that the simple client should still provide other people that have non-simple clients URL previews, which would only be accomplished if the server generated them.

I certainly could link my server into play as well just to keep an always online device in the mix

Yep! That should work perfectly fine.

Neat idea! Although, it would probably be more practical to use a centralized model since if one peer is offline, then the syncing would not occur. That is, if my assumption is correct that you are thinking of directly syncing between 2 devices.

I was more referring to what entity is forming the request, not how the preview is generated from a technological standpoint.

I found this documentation which outlines the possible methods, but, from what I can see, it doesn’t specify what one is actually used in practice. I was also unable to find any information in the Matrix spec.

Perhaps the next emergent entity is not corporeal, but, instead, of the collective. A good example could be similar to what @kozy138@lemm.ee stated about how the movements of people in crowds are, on the “microscopic” scale, seemingly random, and unpredictable, but, on the “macroscopic” scale, can be predicted quite accurately. One could look at economies, traffic flow, entire nations, etc. as emergent entities that rely on our individual, autonomous interaction. A very interesting such example is outlined in this paper which explains how “Online communities featuring ‘anti-X’ hate and extremism” can be accurately modeled using “novel generalization of nonlinear fluid physics”.

It doesn’t have to be referenced on the site that uses it?

This is Techrights (But with Jews!) – a satire site based on Techrights (But with Jews!)

It looks like the site is satire. But, I’ll be honest, it initially had me fooled. How have we gotten to the point in society where one could come to the conclusion that it is perfectly possible for such an article to be unironically written?

Isn’t Friendica the fediverse equivelant to Facebook?

Is it possible to sync Nextcloud News to it? What repo would be their main one? Netiher Github, nor Gitlab have issues enabled.