OpenStars

I mean… true but…

There’s only so much Russian outright propaganda I can stomach at one time, so even if it’s “less” it’s still “too much” at the same time?

https://lemmy.ml/post/21927716 - edit: to be clear I’m not talking about the post, but rather the comments within it.

Sigh… I used to be that way. But it does get exhausting, and I now prefer to spend my time in other ways.

Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.

Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?

It might though - don’t underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and… well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.

But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.

To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.

So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.

I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.

Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

100% of every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just “no thank you, if you don’t mind” but “FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?”. I mean, I’m no lover of capitalism but… if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of “Truthiness” to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very “discovery” of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

So, this post isn’t going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you’ve never so much as heard of existing (yes that’s a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. [email protected]).

Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there’s Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there’s lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won’t, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the “joke”? It’s really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we’re declining. I mean, I’m writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

I most certainly did not… but what do I know?! 🤔

Don’t put “it” there…

One of those upvotes is likely mine:-).

Actually…

In the membrane, ofc!

Absolutely. Plus the keyboard shortcuts are just outstanding - e.g. shift-M takes you to the middle of the screen - and you can even programmatically do things like make changes to every other line within the range 100-1000 but nowhere else, and even then restrict the changes to only those matching a pattern.

And it is installed on most every machine in the world - even Windows is putting bash onto things these days (I forget if that is still optional, admittedly I haven’t touched Windows in nearly a decade:-P) - and has been since virtually the dawn of computing, certainly long before the modern age. :-D I’ve used ssh on a fucking blackberry and edited files with vim before smartphones existed!

It is, however, notably hard to learn to use, I grant that:-).

It does not though. I made a post the other day from the StarTrek.website instance and couldn’t figure out if nobody had upvoted or commented on it, then tried to look it up on my regular discuss.online instance where it didn’t exist, then went further to look it up on Lemmy.world (where the community is located) and saw that tens of people had. I wasn’t able to respond to any of those at first though, until it caught up on an instance where I already had an account (edit: except I could not do that from the StarTrek.website instance where I had made the post from, bc it hadn’t seen the comment yet even the next day - so I had to do it from a third instance involved in all this.)

And that wasn’t even the only time that very same day that I saw a post existing/not existing and/or having a different number of comments and differences in voting counts. Perhaps 0.19.6 will help with some of these issues, at least on Lemmy but then PieFed, Mbin, and eventually Sublinks are still going to have to figure things out on their own as well.

So I am glad that things are going well for you who I note is on Lemmy.world, but the rest of the Fediverse is definitely struggling, in part because rather than in spite of that centralization. Also I note that Lemmy.world federating smoothly within itself doesn’t even count in my book as “federation” at all! That’s just Reddit 2.0 with everything on a single server, with all the benefits and pitfalls which that entails.

More generally when the subject is man vs. bear, and someone chooses bear, it doesn’t help to simply laugh at those making that choice. Maybe we should listen, and maybe even expend efforts to make changes to become more welcoming for more people that would absolutely love to get off of the likes of Reddit, X, Threads, or Facebook?

That’s my 2¢ anyway.

Okay but… obligatory “gVim offers the best of both worlds by offering use of a mouse if you want it”. There are also native ports for Mac OSX and Windows, etc.

Vim, in contrast, is a command-line program, suited for e.g. working with a text file on a remote server that may not even be running an X-windows interface, or maybe the user simply did not bother to connect to it:-).

Okay, we may now proceed with the humorous jesting:-).

Yeah, that does help - e.g. if people started defederating lemmy.ml, then all the Hexbear users that went there after being defederated from many popular instances would make alts on other platforms and it would be much harder to avoid their continual trolling:-).

And yes I’ve previously had several quite pleasant conversations with people from lemmy.ml, though I have now managed to leave them behind by moving to PieFed.social where I can block the entire instance. I will block many innocent users that way but… I am okay with that, compared to the alternative of having to put up with each new one that comes along and harasses people. Many people of conscience are fleeing that instance anyway, and the rest have most definitely been warned so it’s their choice, but I am not letting their recalcitrance dictate my own choices in turn:-).

Yeah it’s probably client-side. Boost… that’s good to know, thanks!:-)

Do you do it individually, or use like an app or something? Bc the Lemmy instance block does very little - only blocking communities but not users from that instance.

PieFed btw allows user blocking of any custom instance you want though:-) - I just switched to it today and think I am going to be happier here. It’s not quite as polished as Lemmy, but on the other hand I don’t see true user-level blocking ever being added to Lemmy no matter how long the wait. So I decided that I was tired of wading through the garbage rooting for treasure, and just decided to block it all.

Do you might if I ask how you accomplished that - by using some app? Or did you just mean the standard Lemmy instance block, which blocks only communities hosted there but none of the users especially their comments everywhere across the Fediverse?

PieFed allows custom user instance blocks, of whatever instance you choose, and I think Mbin at least used to (although I also saw a bug report saying that it doesn’t work right now). And Tesseract on dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe have specifically defederated from lemmy.ml, but I was curious what other methods would work as well.