Doesn’t that mean we’d have a proliferation of duplicate content, if multiple bridges connect to the same external services?

I love this idea in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in the context of Lemmy. Maybe it makes more sense in Mastodon? Or maybe I just misunderstand something.

How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one “mega-instance” effectively breaks that functionality. That’s not good from a UX perspective.

I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn’t have any luck. I guess I’m doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?

I would guess that’s not a hard limit. Maybe they decided to undersell it because many 4TB+ nvme drives are physically larger and/or require heat sinks, so they might not fit. I don’t see any details on their web site though.

Given two drives with the same size, same heat output, and same interface, it shouldn’t make a difference.

It’s pretty common to see fake limits like that on spec sheets. I can definitely put more RAM in my motherboard than is officially supported since higher-capacity DIMMs are out in the same form factor now compared to when the mobo was released.

It’s insane how many things they push as Snaps when they are entirely incompatible with the Snap model.

I think everyone first learns what Snaps are by googling “why doesn’t ____ work on Ubuntu?” For me, it was Filebot. Spent an hour or two trying to figure out how the hell to get it to actually, you know, access my files. (This was a few years ago, so maybe things are better now. Not sure. I don’t live that Snap life anymore, and I’m not going back.)

Yes, thanks! I did indeed mean Termux. I’ll edit my post.

There are some free, open-source command line tools that can do this.

First off, there’s exiftool. It’s the go-to utility to read and write metadata in a wide variety of file types, like mp3, jpg, and you guessed it, pdf. It’s very easy to use:

To read all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All (where is the path to your pdf).

To erase all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All="" (that’s two double-quotes, to indicate a blank string). Please note that this will overwrite your file in-place! If you want to save the output as a new file, use exiftool -a -All="" -o .

exiftool is likely all you need for your use case, but if you need more advanced PDF manipulation, with a truly dizzying array of options, there’s Ghostscript. Ghostscript can read, write, and convert PDFs, and provides hooks to apply any PostScript commands and options.

To simply print out information on a PDF file: gs -dPDFINFO -dBATCH . This will show you the metadata, such as author, title, etc.

I’m…not going to give you an example of how to use Ghostscript to edit metadata because I’m not confident I’d get it right. The gist is that you use PostScript commands with the -c flag. It is truly arcane but extraordinarily powerful.

If you’re on Linux, you can likely get both of these with your distro’s default package manager. On Mac, use Homebrew or MacPorts. On Windows, you can download prebuilt binaries from their web sites. I think you can even run them on Android using Tmux Termux.

Can you explain what you mean by “visually lossless”? Is this a purely subjective classification, or is there a specific definition or benchmark you used?

Yes, this is still necessary.

It wouldn’t make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.

Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I’d simply stop using Lemmy. The “all” feed would be utterly unusable.

Also, admins need control over what’s in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.

On Mastodon it’s pretty easy. Download the official app and go through the prompts. They should probably have a little note saying “just go with the defaults if you’re not sure” but this shouldn’t be a road block for any normal person. The fact that Mastodon has a standard migration method makes this a low-impact decision.

Lemmy is definitely harder. “Jerboa” doesn’t sound like an official app, and I don’t think you can even create an account in Jerboa. So the first step is finding an instance on the web with no guidance. That’s bad.

I still haven’t joined Matrix because it’s too hard. People say I shouldn’t use matrix.org for various reasons (like bans without warning) but I can’t find an alternative that seems sensible. All the guides I found are basically “you should really host your own, but if you’re too much of a noob, here are some Polish lolicon-themed servers you can join”. If it were possible to sign up without feeling like I’m doing something wrong, I would have many years ago.

The default “Active” sort option does that. Try “Hot” instead.