Kichae

Here’s a google prompt for you: “raspberry pi police”

Are they still playing apologetics for the cops? Because if so, no thanks.

This is Elon Musk erasure.

Honestly, the problem with discovery is not that there are not enough posts in a single timeline. Merging local and global feeds makes discoverability worse on Lemmy and kbin, not better, because the timelines display posts, while the space is organized by communities. This means that smaller or niche communities just drown seas of posts from large or highly active ones.

If you want a real “exploration” timeline, you need one that limits the number of posts from any given community. And that still seems like it’s well served by local/global splits, because the website you join should be meaningful.

We do not need, nor should we want, a network of “dumb terminal” Fediverse sites. We should be aiming for the local stream to be the big selling point for any given instance, with the ability to interact with remote communities being a value-add. A merged timeline kills local identity, and tells users that their hosting website is a 2nd class citizen in the Fediverse.

A lot of new Fediverse projects, too, misidentify who their audience is. Calckey has a really good UX (most of the time), and I had zero issues as just an account user on Calc’s server, but the support for would-be admins is… A chat room, and documentation that is half so far out of date that some of it is in Japanese.

That’s not going to grow the presence. That doesn’t get new instances online. That doesn’t get an ecosystem with good moderators and admins. That doesn’t get the infrastructure in place - technical and social - to truly take off.

That’s a shame. As an end user, it’s a really nice experience, but running my own private instance I kept running into issues that just made it really difficult to keep it online, especially once life started to put a lot of pressure on my time and mental health.

One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of small FOSS projects is that they do very little to actually educate potential users on how to use their stuff. The underlying motivator is often to provide alternatives to existing products, but they fall down entirely when it comes to actually making those alternatives usable for the users of the things they’re trying to provide alternatives for.

The big ones get big by creating their audience. The small ones look for the small intersection of people who use the mainstream product, care about open source, and also are fluent enough in that world that they already know what to do to make things work, and that pool of users often doesn’t reach any kind of critical mass.

Meanwhile, capitalism not only reliably devolves into dictatorships of the wealthy, but also dictatorships of whichever caste or ethnic group manages to rise to political dominance.

Or do you think the consistent and aggressive disenfranchisement of people of colour is just democracy in action or something?

I don’t think anyone is advocating for literal communism.

So, you think the rest of us are as stupid as Fox and your Republicans, then?

I guess, but it also puts a lot of pressure on those small ones to be indistinguishable from the big ones, by having people treating them like they’re the same place.

I don’t think Lemmy scales the same way that Mastodon does. I don’t think this topic-based community forum model translates to federation the same way the individual-based microblogging space does. It’s a more complex space, with more layers to manage. It’s often mod or admin driven, whereas microblogs are entirely about average user behaviour.

I don’t think it replicates Reddit the same way that it replicates Twitter. I think the mental model just doesn’t fit the tech.

Like, yeah, letting users make personalized community lists is one thing, and I get the appeal, but it ends up functioning very differently in a space where multiple communities can have the same handle, you know? I can lump 5 different gaming subreddits together into a single stream, and be totally and intuitively aware that they’re different. They have different names, and they present differently, with different stylings, when you actually click through to a post. Without those signals, though, empowering users to lump communities together only has benefits to smaller communities if those communities are looking to grow for growth’s sake.

Mastodon has done a great disservice to its admins and users by trying to mask the federated nature of the fediverse. By trying to sell ‘Mastodon’ as a space in and of itself. By trying to make the actual website you’re using invisible. I don’t think we benefit from that in any way. Indeed, I think it’s only the platform developers who benefit, by making their product the only thing people really see. But the individual websites that make up these networks of social networks are entities in and of themselves. They’re like neighbourhoods, or towns. They have their own infrastructure, their own residents, their own characters, and their own needs. Treating them as interchangeable or invisible, ultimately, I feel, stymies the actual potential of the space.

Because this isn’t Reddit. It doesn’t work like Reddit. It can’t try to be “Reddit, but ____”, because it fails at the first word. The way forward is in recognizing that, and trying to figure out what this new space really is.

And one of the things it is is not one space.

community discoverability, […], and moderation tools

Those are big. But so is the lack of smooth interoperability with Mastodon. There’s a large population using Mastodon right now that could be participating in threaded discussions here, who are just totally blind to the space, and those that do engage have a super jankey experience.

And on top of that, it’s also a super jankey experience on the Lemmy end when Mastodon users engage.

Hopefully things get better on that front once Mastodon has implemented groups.

not being able to group communities together

I honestly see this being a continued expectation to be a bigger issue. Two communities with the same name on different servers could be very different spaces. Giving users the ability to group them together homogenizes them in a way that is likely bad for the ecosystem overall.

Like, it’s fine to have federated or merged communities, but I think that power needs to be in mods and/or admins hands, not end users.

mostly just a history of bad choices

What a weird way to spell “chronically overstressed”.

No. No, no, no, no, no.
No no no no no no no no
Noooooooooooooooo no no

… … … …

Yes.

Ooo, I haven’t had Velveeta in like 20 years. Now I’m going to go and eat a whole block of it, and I refuse to shoulder any of the blame or responsibility for that!

Not explicitly, maybe, but implicitly, absolutely, and in multiple ways:

• Supporting the system that creates one over the other
• Having ‘bootstrap’ attitudes about the poor
• Worrying about property value over utilization
• Complaining about the homeless rather than the lack of action on housing
• Voting against people who run on public housing

In so, so many ways, people say they prefer the latter over the former. Usually just with the caveat that the homeless people also be invisible.

*croaks* Bud…

Canada* geese.

Many different geese are Canadian. But Canada geese are the specialist little assholes.

“I joined a social media space founded on anti-capitalism and opposing the enshitification of life, and I’m annoyed by all of the anti-capitalism and discussions about the enshitification of life” sure is a hell of a take.

The entire factory industry, worldwide, uses the assembly line model invented by Ford, an American company. This system also brought prices down on cars, making them a staple of life rather than a luxury.

Right, but if you have the motivation to make things affordable for people, you can and will get to the same place. The profit motivation and the centralization of wealth are not the key motivators here.

They’re just the ones that made Ford rich and famous enough to aggressively publicize himself.

They make it obtuse on purpose, both to prop up the tax return industry, and to make it both possible to create loopholes for the rich to avoid taxes, and make it so that the rest of us can’t really benefit from those loopholes.

It’s Byzantine on purpose. They could simplify it any time they wanted to.

No, that’s not actually reasonable given how federation works. You’re not viewing content on other instance, you’re viewing content imported from other instances. Copies hosted locally. This puts admins in the position of actively hosting content they may find objectionable if it’s allowable on other sites and they’re federating with those sites.

Your instance is not some neutral community browser for remote communities. It’s not the equivalent of Chrome or Firefox. It’s the equivalent of a website hosting guest authors, and the website admins are responsible on some level for what they choose to host.

If you want wide open freedom of choice, you have the ability to host your own instance. That’s how you get carte blanch to decide what you see and what you don’t.