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I’m not even sure Taiwan makes that claim, but if they do then I’m fine with that.

They do. The official government line currently is that they have no need to formally declare independence (which might trigger a Chinese invasion) because they already are an independent country by most meaningful measures (which is true of course)

I had heard they view themselves as the legitimate government of a (unified) China.

That used to be the official position decades ago. But apart from a few old nationalistic farts maybe, nobody on Taiwan really holds that position anymore.

It will stop a lot of people from entering random commands they googled up though.

Even most of the Linux apps use Shazam or similar for the backend. Most everything you will find in that area has some proprietary components and I can imagine that being hard to avoid for something that has to interface with licensed content (the music)

How does installing packages or configuring software work, if system files can’t be changed?

On reboot. You install your changes into a separate part of the filesystem that’s not running and then “switch parts” on next boot. Different distros do this differently. Vanilla OS has an AB system which basically works like Android does it, openSUSE uses btrfs snapshots and Fedora also uses btrfs I think but they got a more complex layering system on top.

I get that there’s a security benefit just in that malware can’t change system files – but that is achieved by proper permission management on traditional systems too.

Is it though? All it takes is a misconfiguration or exploit to bypass it, so having several layers of protection isn’t a bad thing and how any reasonably secure system works. And having parts of your system predetermined as read only is a comparably tough nut to crack.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over memes@lemmy.ml etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over memes@lemmy.ml etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.

Fwiw Lemmy is written in Rust

That might just be a mock up. Probably still fair to say that it’s most likely planned at the moment.

Edit: in fact one of the accounts shown on the screenshots never was in a conversation like that.

I have my Masto account set up to auto-delete most of my posts after a while. If Meta connects to the fediverse, I have absolutely zero confidence they will honor those deletion requests.
Not sure how to grapple with that yet, generally speaking I don’t think one of the social media giants embracing ActivityPub necessarily has to be a bad thing.

Google is fairly bad, but a lot of that badness imo stems from them being so ubiquitous and controlling so much of the internet. If Meta, Amazon or TikTok were in that kind of position, I honestly think they would behave even worse.

“I don’t really have anything to hide, but you never know whether the government might act authoritarian at some point. So best to be safe and use privacy tools.”

French police: “Hold my tear gas”