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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Yeah unfortunately it’s not quite ready for mainstream yet. I’ve noticed over the last several days that I’ve been using it a bunch of small UI things that would really frustrate someone without a high level of tolerance to such. e.g. you get a notification telling you that you have a message, you click it, but there’s no message; so you do a control-F to try to find it… nope, still no message; next you have to hunt through the entire page for every “expansion block” and “Continue thread” (which takes you to another page) and those “auto-collapse” (based on comment threshold), and I disabled “auto-hide” but surely that might really be a problem if there’s a Notification for something that becomes impossible to see later without changing your configuration settings.

    For extremely basic things it’s fine… mostly. Just never edit your messages and someone will be fine. I say that b/c you can’t edit comments in-line in the page where they are at, and once you are done editing one, it doesn’t take you back to it but rather to the OP thread instead. Whereupon again you have to hunt for your comment all over again as mentioned above. Which is especially annoying when you have to do it multiple times, b/c there is no Preview feature to let you know what is coming after you submit it - did you insert a space between your [alttext] (link here)? did you mess up your "quoting" rules? does an image not render?

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    (the above on purpose:-)

    On the other hand, they can allow YouTube embeds without having to wonder what is on the other side of that sus-looking link and click and leave the page. And personal instance blocks - that actually work - and categories, and like it will tell you, for every comment, both the time something was posted and the time it was last edited, woot!:-) There’s just a ton of fantastic features, more so than Lemmy in many ways, and yet at the same time less too - if that makes any sense at all.

    But then again, more people know how to code in Python, so I hope it will catch up soon:-). That might even be what we’re seeing now - the core UI needs to be not monkeyed around with by a bunch of people all working at cross-purposes, but then all these nice little additions could each be someone’s side project? But they need to get the core working too.


  • Not really. Well, instance admins can defederate from it, but as a normal user you have a pitifully small list of all not easy choices. First, a couple apps like Sync and Connect can (but for them I don’t know if they would block e.g. images from there); second is move to PieFed or Mbin (I moved to PieFed myself, but could not find this post there so had to come back to my previous account, as an alt now I guess, to be able to reply here - so it’s got issues); third is move to one of only 3 tiny instances that I’ve ever heard of that have blocked it; fourth is spin up your own instance, and defederate from them. The long version.

    Edit: oh, there is a basic Lemmy “instance block”, which blocks only communities on those instances - but not users, their posts, replies, votes, etc., and even that much was rolled back somewhere between 0.19.3 and 0.19.5 so that they can now send notifications to you. So it is very misleading named. The last one there is what almost caused me to leave the Fediverse entirely when I accidentally replied to one comment in ChapoTrapHouse and another somewhere in lemmygrad.ml. The replies to each kept coming in for WEEKS and WEEKS, long after I wanted it to end. The rule “remember the human” seemed to not apply to them.


  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineOPtoLemmy Be Wholesome@lemmy.worldYSK
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    7 days ago

    Uh oh, but you said that you would never say the words “not good”… /s :-P

    But yeah, the wisdom of the ages seems to tell us that “what goes around comes around” and “whatever system you choose to use to measure others with, you will end up using the very same system of measurement against your very own self” - i.e. if you don’t want others to be a certain way, like hypocritical, then don’t be that way yourself. It probably has to do with formation of the superego portion of our personalities, but however it is implemented, it seems to be an accurate description of human psychology.

    So if we say that others are “stupid”… then isn’t that surely what we think that we do ourselves, at least sometimes? In contrast, if we allow ourselves to realize that others may not be “stupid” but merely “misled” or “mistaken in this particular area” or “in possession of incorrect facts with which to base conclusions upon” - all of these being very distinct from such thoughts as “they are most definitely dumb as a post” - then we see others more clearly, and also thereby are more accepting of our own very selves.

    Which in turn allows us to see still other things (in the world, including both them and us) more clearly as well - i.e. instead of muddying the waters, we aim to see whatever is truly there. So it’s not even something that we need to do for the sake of “kindness” (to either them or ourselves), so much as it is necessary for deeper logical introspection as well.

    Anyway, to me these words seem to conjure a thought like “don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”. Or the political variation “surely the leopards who eat everyone’s faces off would never eat my face off in particular!” The converse of either of these points to a weaker, lesser, lower, unclear form of thinking… that will ultimately wrap back around to hurt our very selves, despite how at first glance someone could think that they only intended to be negative against other people. But there is a better way, and that is to realize the truth of this principle: “what goes around comes around”. So simple… yet missed by what seems like everyone that I’ve ever met (including, you guessed it, myself! 🤣).





  • Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

    Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

    i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.



  • Speak for yourself! I want it known that *I* for one, am *very* immature!:-P

    Ah, that part “without rational grounds to do so” makes such a huge difference doesn’t it? :-D

    Like e.g.:

    img

    Ignoring all the genocide done by Russia, and China, and North Korea, but hyper-focusing on the not even direct but mere indirect aid to the actual genocide-doing people, and even then painting with an extremely broad brush and saying that nobody who thinks otherwise exists within the group on that “other side”.

    I disagree though that it is directed at “random” people. Hexbears yes (it’s kinda their whole thing!:-P), perhaps Lemmygrad.ml too (whose content definitely appears on your instance) - though importantly, Lemmy.World (which this community is based in) defederates from both of those, and has ~80% of the monthly active users btw (thus the userbase “here” only partially but mostly may not be thought of to include those 2 instances, depending on how you look at it?) - and yes also that mod of Lemmy.ml who told the person to kill themselves seemed fairly random as well (yet all the more troublesome since lemmy.ml is federated by nearly every instance, the only exceptions being tiny single-admin ones). But the above image, note from the URL that it is from lemmy.ml, seems not entirely “random” to me - it is instead very much “directed”, at a particular group. As that style of propaganda tends very much to be… not “random” at all!

    Although conservative Alt-Right sources appeared on Reddit as well, so both sites have a hefty amount of “alternative fact” sources. Moderation efforts are a more limiting resource on Lemmy so it makes sense that there is more of it here, overall. So long as we allow the lure of communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml to sway us as we retain federation with those instances that not only allow but propagate that content, from the very site instance admins themselves, the situation will remain - the only recourse being for people to either leave their instances and go somewhere that allows defederation (either instance-wide such as the tiny lemmy.cafe or quokk.au; or switch to Mbin or PieFed that allows full content blocking of any instance that any user specifies, without needing admin approval). Edit: I forget to finish my sentence there: or else get an app that provides that functionality (I don’t know which ones).



  • This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

    People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

    Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

    All the rest: yup.



  • more mature and can actually discuss complex topics

    I mean… well okay, more than Reddit yeah, for sure, in the sense that here at least it is possible at all.

    Witch hunting is becoming a worse problem here than in Reddit.

    How so? Genuinely I’m wondering lately if I’m causing issues. Generally that phrase presumes that the “witches” do not exist (I … thought?), but e.g. tankies (literally: those who deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre ever took place, like with actual fatalities rather than being staged or some such) actually do exist. Anyway, I wonder if it’s a natural reaction to the contentious atmosphere that has developed. Like all it takes is one person to walk into Chapotraphouse unawares, and bam, now you have radicalized someone against the bullies on the Fediverse.

    Oh, or you might mean the overzealous modding of certain instances? Though I think that predates the Rexodus, so it’s not “becoming a problem” so much as it was here long before most of us that are now here came over. e.g. here’s a post from 3 years ago with a very familiar tone: https://lemmy.ml/post/206994. But I would argue that it is as true now as it was then: people don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of intolerance, hence tend to be intolerant right back, and yet that is as it should be.

    Anyway, the Fediverse has a lot more technical work to get done before it can be more palatable to most people, without HEAVY blocking - as that 3-year-old post shows, the issue isn’t going away anytime soon, hence the friction between mutually opposing ideological constructs (e.g. “people in the USA should just die”, vs… not that) is only going to spark more conflicts. We’d best settle in and get used to it.



  • Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. https://piefed.social/ (3 horizontal bars -> Topics).



  • On PieFed, although I’m not sure what I think about it, posts with more than one user-defined threshold will get auto-collapsed, and then a second such threshold allows it to be hidden entirely.

    So two people with opposing preferences could browse the same community but see it differently. The one wanting to see everything being allowed to do so - rather than that being the arbitrary decision of a mod (team), and the content hidden away in a mod log somewhere else, mostly inaccessible. Whereas the one who didn’t want to “waste” their time, and rather trusting the feedback of the community, could have those collapsed or hidden if they so choose.

    This allows democratization of the modding process: every voter is equally a mod as the next. Or maybe some trusted members more so than others? (But if so, it can’t be TOO much higher than the others, or it could become overwhelming)

    The major pitfall I see is if votes are allowed outside of the community, then it’s vulnerable to being brigaded easily by a larger outside force.

    Still, it’s fascinating to see these experiments actually happen in that software that is available right now! e.g. on PieFed.social.


  • Genuinely… why though? Why not post once a week rather than per day? Or per month? Who is counting? If people want to join then they will, if not then they won’t, but either way will one post per day for the last six months make any difference to their decision vs. one post per week?

    I am no good at what I do. I try to enjoy it anyway.:-) Do with that what you will.