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OpenStars

@ OpenStars @discuss.online

Posts
3
Comments
955
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Mastodon.world cancels famous German author Kazim's posts - now he left Mastodon completely

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  • Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated.

    This is not an objective fact but an opinion (whether well-substantiated or not I cannot tell). I am not clicking on a Facebook link to learn more, so thank you for adding some additional context here.

    There is also a !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com community that will certainly agree with you that anything done by a .world community moderator is by definition wrong.

    As for myself I have no opinion on this currently, but only questions like banning one person does not make a place authoritarian/fascist but a pattern of such events would. All that this post says though is a complaint about the one person - again, whether justified or not I have no idea, as other commenters here are likewise saying, we simply do not currently have the facts to be able to judge properly.

  • Tips on getting started on a small instance?

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  • I've never used Tumblr much less its alternatives, but on the Threadiverse side, before PieFed solved the onboarding problem (and I hear that upcoming Lemmy v1.0 may improve things for it too?), it required quite a bit of effort to be the first person on an instance to sign up to a community. For one thing you already had to know the precise name for it, having looked it up elsewhere, and even after the Rexodus often you couldn't even use the community lookup tools to kickstart that and had to resort to direct URL manipulation. (Edit: oh, and the community name most often was not the same as the name displayed for it, with some methods like 3rd-party apps usually not showing the actual name very readily.) And for another thing it can be quite unintuitive to people when signing up does not appear to work right away but instead over the course of several days to like a week the posts start appearing - except not older posts but only newer ones (and not all new ones, but only some, especially when defederations are involved). Therefore I tried to help by signing up for communities whenever I could to help get the smaller instances I was on a head-start, even if I had no interest in them and left them later, just to make it easier for future people to simply click the subscribe button (and even that causes confusion, when some older content is present but then not all of it).

    Anyway, the entire Fediverse is newer and the tools often are not so easy to use. It is like using a Linux CLI: quite worthwhile to learn and powerful after you do, even though it requires a rather large investment into learning how. Normally for someone not tech oriented I would strongly suggest to join one of the medium to larger-sized instances (while avoiding the absolute largest of course, to more evenly distribute the load), so that someone else has done the largest majority of this effort, and they can simply enjoy the content and contribute in other ways - voting, commenting, and posting - without being distracted by the underlying technical procedures of how it all works underneath the hood.

  • Mastodon.world cancels famous German author Kazim's posts - now he left Mastodon completely

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  • Remember when stroganoff memes were a thing on Lemmy?

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  • To resurrect the Stroganoff era, or let it lie, that is the question ⁉️

    I mean, it's not like we have seen that meme series before, a hundred times, a thousand, who can say?

  • Queen

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  • Don't ruin it for others

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  • Alright then, I'll try this variation instead:

    The cvnt knew… but they managed to get your engagement here, so it worked

  • breathes in 'My child...'

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  • The hair is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here

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  • yes

  • Oh shit, he's doing the 67 thing!

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  • If it helps, I can bring by your desk... THE INTERNET!?!

  • Some thoughts after 3 years on Lemmy

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  • I guess you know but that is infamously what Lemmy.ml constantly says upon removing people from communities that they've never even so much as heard of, for obscure reasons that seem to have little to nothing to do with Rule 1 to the person receiving the instance ban.

  • Life After I Turned 30 [Sarah's Scribbles]

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  • Skill issue: do better. (Referring to the parents that gave little her this advice.)

  • Oh shit, he's doing the 67 thing!

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  • Please try turning it off and back on again?

  • Don't ruin it for others

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  • The artist knew... but they managed to get your engagement here, so it worked.

  • You should've seen it!

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  • Hers are the same way.

  • Reddit keeps pushing on being a closed platform, now rolling out mandatory logging for old.reddit.com - worth pushing for the fediverse again?

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  • You are very welcome! 🤗

  • Reddit keeps pushing on being a closed platform, now rolling out mandatory logging for old.reddit.com - worth pushing for the fediverse again?

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  • To add to this: tankies are leftist MAGA. It's not what they (claim to) believe so much as they are toxic trolls who deny facts and reality itself. Discussions with them tend to be very unpleasant, since they use "alternative facts" and incel-style reasoning - e.g. when you block them they are quite proud of how they simply make a new account and keep right on going. No does not mean no to them but rather to simply push harder.

  • Reddit keeps pushing on being a closed platform, now rolling out mandatory logging for old.reddit.com - worth pushing for the fediverse again?

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  • Hell yeah.

    The issue with PieFed is that it is "opinionated". First, most of that is disinformation that the original people refused to correct (last I checked) even after being demonstrably proven wrong, like the main dev Rimu literally showed screenshots of the code to prove that it wasn't "hard-coded" as they had claimed, but nobody cared. In-group (Lemmy, as in those on the main disinformation spreading platform Lemmy.ml)=good, while out-group (choosing to see PieFed as their "opponent", despite VEHEMENT claims previously that we all should just try to get along in the Threadiverse and that Lemmy should not be singled out to be criticized in any way, a classic case of one rule for me while a different rule for thee)=bad.

    Beyond the disinformation though, the software truly is opinionated. Every such feature is at worst opt-out, and most are even opt-in, but the lack of transparency about the disclosure (vaguely similar to the Tesseract dev scenario as you mentioned, although that one was to an extreme degree) definitely turns people off. Admins of multiple instances were suddenly surprised by the vote quota, not realizing what was happening on their own machines, as this MAJOR structurally breaking and exceedingly poorly and incompletely implemented "feature" was dropped like a bomb onto them, yet with barely any mention, buried like literally 20 items deep into a very long listing along with minutiae - almost like the software didn't just implement a shadow-censoring change that rejects contributions from both people on the same instance that the community is located on plus EVEN LEMMY (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) but WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. All because the main dev had an itch to scratch, and then rammed it through despite everyone pushing back majorly in the chats, and despite some VERY well-known and most highly-active contributors on the entire Threadiverse quitting the platform in protest. And then most telling of all is how he responded to people asking about it - note the title of that post is "Upvotes turn green but number doesn't change", i.e. this "anti-feature" is causing bugs left and right, breaks the entire model of the ActivityPub Protocol and existing modes of how the Threadiverse has worked until now, and Rimu's response is that he felt (no evidence btw, see his linked post that fails to demonstrate the premise, as everyone in its comment section agrees) that people were voting too much, so he took that right away, citing how the end-users need to simply "Get creative" and live with the suddenly and only partially implemented and barely announced anti-feature, seemingly created on a whim with no advanced or even current notice as it was being rolled out, and against the advice of pretty much everyone, with the best case scenario being that people are mainly neutral (except like one prominent supporter, but notably I only counted one, vs. like a veritable MOUNTAIN of push-back!!).

    So understandably, this kills people's enthusiasm and worse yet, their hopes that PieFed could be the future of the Threadiverse. One reason for that is that the Lemmy devs are quite opinionated themselves, and have been known to do similarly in the past - e.g. when they implemented an English word slur word filter, which they ACTUALLY did hard-code right in (most of the detractors of PieFed seem to keep claiming that PieFed did this, which it did not, but in contrast Lemmy actually did do that at one point in time), and then moreover adamantly refused to change it, telling people to simply fork the code if they did not like it. Tbf, they did later relent on this and made the feature able to be disabled with an option.

    And that is one thing notable about the kind-hearted Rimu: this extremely unpopular and not transparently disclosed at all anti-feature of having implementing a vote quota was made to be opt-out. It would have been better to have made it opt-in, better still to have told people about it properly, even better still to have listened to all the advice and simply not done it at all, especially until it could be done properly, but at least he took the effort to make it able to be easily disabled, by an environmental variable controllable outside of the docker container. That is not nothing. (Edit: I mean to say that it is rather the opposite of nothing: it demonstrates a consideration for the needs of others who may have different viewpoints than the dev - i.e. even while being opinionated, it is not to the same degree as how Lemmy's slur word filter was handled. Both were imperfect, but managed differently.)

    Back to the Lemmy devs now: the software seems equally opinionated to me, although more in the sense of features that it refuses to implement, than in features that it does. e.g. Reddit has no modlog but it does have a modmail, and notifications to the user that their content was moderated, and the ability for anyone with the link to continue to see and even converse in a deleted post. PieFed has roughly half of these features, but Lemmy has zero of them. Lemmy is quite authoritarian in its design philosophy - it offers supreme power to an instance admin (even the ability to hide events from the modlog), somewhat less so to community moderators, but very little to none at all to individual end-users. Like why did the devs decide not to even so much as notify users that they have been banned from an entire instance or community, instead leaving them to find out the hard way? May glorious leader live forever!! The power differential there is extreme - even people using Reddit are granted more rights (e.g. to be notified of removed content) than users of Lemmy?

    I am tired of making excuses for Lemmy, as if it will ever get any better. It's been over three years since the Rexodus and I've seen some features actively get worse - e.g. after you banned an entire instance, the people thus "banned" used to not be able to send you DMs and trigger notifications, but then the devs claimed that was confusing and added the ability for these BANNED users to send you DMs and thereby harass you as much as they please from newly-created troll accounts. Lemmy software truly sucks in so many ways.

    And recently I am also now tired of defending PieFed as well, after the shadow-censorship of implementing a vote quota without telling anyone or listening to feedback.

    But at least both are FOSS, both are free, both provide an alternative to corporate enshittification, while each adding their own forms of enshittification, and each helps people get away from the corporate Algorithm, while substituting that for our own versions of undisclosed Algorithmic control.

    And yes, people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. See e.g. my very own reply right now, daring to criticize the devs providing us all with free software, emo-venting my fee-fees all over the place, mixing it together with facts and hopefully not but potentially some anti-facts as well (please do correct me if you see that I am wrong!). Whatever software platform someone is on, I would hope that we would always try to remember the human.

  • Reddit keeps pushing on being a closed platform, now rolling out mandatory logging for old.reddit.com - worth pushing for the fediverse again?

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  • Discuss.Online is one of the BEST instances! It has super-high uptime, meaning the admin team is very highly technically proficient. I left other instances due to very long delays causing problems, but I rarely to never experience such things with Discuss.Online.

    In case it helps, Lemmy is the name of the software that is being run, which implements the ActivityPub Protocol that makes the Threadiverse (the threaded conversion style subset of the Fediverse, different from the microblog style of Mastodon) happen. Then Discuss.Online (DO) is the name of the "instance" (a server machine, running Linux as the OS). Our primary admin is I believe m_f, since jgrim the owner stepped back a bit to take care of his newborn child.

    DO will share content with everyone else on the Threadiverse - not only other instances running Lemmy software but also PieFed, mBin, nodeBB, soon flarum may be added, and more. That's the beauty of federation: you aren't limited to just your instance, or even just Lemmy, you will access all of it, at once. I am not sure how your apps/clients handle things but I know that some of them hide the instance names - you can turn them on if you prefer to see them? It helped me get a better feel for the place - e.g. Lemmy.World holds about half of all users on the Threadiverse, and perhaps 90% of the most active communities (but people are trying to change that, to mix things up so that it's not all in one place like that!!).

    I guess you already know that a "community" is like a "subreddit", which we denote like c/pottery rather than r/pottery, and then add the instance name. That said, the absolute best way to refer to it is with the exclamation point !, then community name, the at symbol @, then the instance name. This will make a link that anyone from any app can follow to navigate directly to the community. Like this: !pottery@lemmy.world.

    DO would be happy to host a potty community here! See in the sidebar text:

    A general purpose instance for discovery, fun, & sharing. It's a welcoming place for all.

    Welcome to discuss.online!

    Home for interesting conversation, discovery, and fun. Everyone is welcome!

    Guidelines

    discuss.online aims to enrich the lives of everyone it touches. Please be kind as you use it.

    That said, the other community mentioned, the one on Lemmy.world (LW) seems to be struggling mightily, with only a single person posting to it and zero active moderators (the single mod there hasn't posted or commented anything in the past 3 years). So you might talk to the single person that is posting, Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online (if I had put an at @ symbol in front of their name, it would have tagged them, sending them a notification and making it into a link), and see if they want to collaborate with you, either here on DO or over there on LW. Either way you might make a friend of mutual interest!:-D And/or just start posting in that community and see what happens:-). Others occasionally do that I see, it's just far more rare. If you did make a community here, expect to have to do similarly: people won't know right away and you'd be the only one posting for a LONG time, perhaps a year or more. The Threadiverse just does not have a large userbase to support communities, especially outside of tech or politics.

  • Some thoughts after 3 years on Lemmy

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  • Thank you for the thanks! I saw your addition to your OP and am sorry it became so controversial for you. This seems to always be what happens. You have been here as long as I have and perhaps longer if you had an alt (I got my start in kbin.social that went down and have jumped around ever since), so you know that Lemmy used to be quite a bit kinder. I think a lot of those people have since given up and left, bc it just isn't worthwhile to continue beating your head against the same wall over and over again, hoping for a better result the next time.

  • Some thoughts after 3 years on Lemmy

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  • Oh this is an extremely well-known and documented effect, although as you can see you will receive a significant number of downvotes whenever you state it publicly. See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/29072279 and the community that it is posted in for FAR more details than you ever wanted to know about that instance. TLDR: as you saw with your own eyes, they are actively rooting for the downfall of all Western civilizations, and if that comes at the cost of millions of the lives of people currently living in them, so much the better - they "deserve it", bc they did not stop capitalism single-handedly, or something. Crucially, Russia, China, and North Korea does not ever do anything wrong though, certainly not genocide or like "invading" other countries or anything like that (hey, in fact, don't you know that UkRaInE iNvAdEd RuSsIa, not the other way around?!?).

    This btw is why many people are refusing to donate to fund Lemmy.ml, and by extension further development of the Lemmy codebase, since the main developer Dessalines refuses to separate donated funds to only go to the latter without also being used to moderate and maintain the highly problematic Lemmy.ml instance.

    And the pace of development of Lemmy is already glacially slow... PieFed's is significantly faster, but like the Lemmy devs, its main dev is likewise quite opinionated and bakes that into the codebase in a number of ways. So they both have their advantages and disadvantages, but either way Lemmy.ml itself looks to me like pure disadvantage.