Now that you have settled here on Lemmy. What is your impression of it?
Technically speaking Lemmy's improved a fair amount since before it blew up in popularity (compared to pre-Reddit API shenanigans), but it's still lacking in a variety of other areas, e.g. moderation tools & lack of any sort of modmail to avoid having to coordinate off-site, user tools/settings related to privacy and federation such as hiding profile elements or the opposite like enabling a microblog-esque mode for federating with Mastodon/Misskey/etc., and some other odds and ends (like not being able to mute/disable notifications for posts/comments, sorry OP!).
Culturally speaking Lemmy has similar problems as other federated platforms in that to this day no one seems to have worked out a way to better communicate them so that they're more widely adopted and grow significantly beyond the early adopter Linux/techie crowds (Mastodon's very gradually been getting there though). Some people also much prefer that, which is part of why and how these platforms have remained that way, but they seem to forget that small communities can exist within larger communities, and with well-developed federated platforms, ideally one could better curate their spaces more than they ever could in more popular corporate platforms.
Also regarding content, it's in a weird spot. There's a decent amount of it, but part of the problem is that it's neither all that varied nor original. There's a glut of news, political/technology mainly, memes/shitposts, many of which being older and thus reposted, and some mix of technology posts in general, then there's kind of everything else. If we were to throw together BS percentages, I'd maybe guess at like 32/32/32 of news/memes/tech, with the remaining 4% being everything else.
The issue then is, much of that content you can easily find on more popular platforms with greater variety and also originality, with potentially timelier posting, so outside of principles, what's the draw of any of the Lemmy instances? I think there's greater potential with more topic-focused instances (e.g. programming.dev/ani.social/etc.) and original content. That is, compared to the corporate models of attempting to be everything for everyone but really no one, and in turn also opaquely barring/removing/demonetizing creative content due to some ambiguous advertiser/copyright compliance measures.
Unfortunately you hit a causal conundrum where there aren't enough people yet for others to justify contributing original material, and there's not enough original material to draw enough people here to justify creating it and on and on. Classic network effect situation, in other words, which in turn also affects variety and timeliness of posts, and leaves everything in an awkward limbo state until several somethings start to change.
Yeah, it's a little weird that even broader topics tend to struggle here (e.g. music/tv & movies/books). Not as surprising with the niche stuff, as that can be pretty quiet even on other more popular platforms.
You might be interested in doing some reading on the subject of epistemology. I think it's a mistake to suppose that the hard basis of knowledge is experience alone, especially given that so much of our knowledge is formed through abstraction, and there's many questions of what it may even mean to directly experience anything to begin with.
Reflect on any historical moment you may have lived through to this point. The entire ability to recognize it as an historical moment itself suggests conceptual models of the events of being that are not in themselves necessarily representative of a true, factual basis unless one may somehow be privy to a wider range of information and knowledge than any individual typically has. One's experience of that historical moment then will be no more representative of a true history than any so-called victors nor any other everyday people.
Only after reflection and careful investigation of the moment and the contexts surrounding it may people come closer to something resembling a true historical account (and historians could speak better to what more be may involved in striving after this than I'm indicating here). It is much the same, imo, for any efforts to develop knowledge. Anything less may be some interesting stories that may hold some fragments of truth and facts, but are disorganized folk knowledge at best, perhaps malicious disinformation at worst.
Fastest or not. Though
thenthem fastests really fucking love it.
They're referring to this, I think. If you were typing via smartphone, your autocorrect done ducked you.
Taylor Swift is shadow majority leader in the Senate, it's all part of the conspiracy yo.
Joking aside, I think what Shepherd meant was that Swift being performatively liberal made her more similar to Democratic party leadership than to any sort of conservatives.
Besides it simply being different and other details others might bring up, it can also just be cheaper and simpler depending on your situations. No technical issues to sort through ("sorry my internet's acting up/i think the servers are down"/etc.) and no need for hardware at all to simply communicate and do whatever in the same space.
This service going down and me recently deciding to try to check in on whether some people I used to follow on Twitter had migrated elsewhere made me realize how much Twitter's basically isolated itself from the open web.
A part of me hopes this serves as a wake-up call for those that were still hovering between using Twitter and weaning off it using services like this, to reach out to those they follow and let them know, "Hey, if you think you're still posting publicly...You're not, only other people here can see this." For many people that may not matter, but for creators/influencers? I dunno, maybe network effect is enough that they feel the large audience there is plenty, but I'd think they might want as broad of a reach as possible, and a popular but limited view platform isn't necessarily that.
Much more importantly though are any government/critical services. They really need to be brought up to date, if they haven't been already, that the platform is no longer as publicly accessible as it may have once been. Also the same applies not just for Twitter but Facebook and the like as well, but that's another topic.
Something else to chip in here in terms of interesting ideas, specifically regarding "protected/limited (leashed?) boost", there's some angles to this that the Glitch fork of Mastodon seems near in terms of local only posts and hiding boosts from specific people.
On their own these features don't amount to what OP's describing, but I think they may offer some groundwork for ways to work out the "limited boost" idea. Also, the more I think on it, the more I kind of like Leashed/Moored as a description over protected, as I think it more clearly implies controlled reach of posts, but maybe that's just me.
Yeah, I can see where you're coming from on this. Personally I'm not a fan of Active as the default, yet I also don't know what might be preferable to others. With that being the case, I thought it might help to highlight some ways to work with it in the meantime, especially given the outside perspective.
For those here, I think it's probably good to advise them to consider trying different sort methods till they find one that suits their preferences if they find themselves annoyed by the defaults, which has been happening for awhile already anyway.
I should elaborate a little, while I think commenting is important under Active sort for helping surface posts, I also think it is being balanced out by the vote scores. For a post to be surfaced you'll want it to be both valued (upvoted) and commented on, then if you're hoping for it to remain visible for awhile, you'll want to see fairly steady commenting (that's part of why you can see posts from days ago lingering around under Active, I think).
I've not really noticed too many situations of flamebait style posts doing this, as I suspect they're generally downvoted...Aside from the beating-a-dead-horse sort of posts that, despite receiving the usual, "Ugh this again" sort of comments, seem to otherwise be valued by some lurking voters.
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Unfortunately as far as I've been able to find, those seem to be two of the main open source options (besides some AI TTS stuff, but I can't seem to find Android versions of those yet). Nevertheless, I did a little digging and found you're not alone in thinking RHVoice is on the quiet side, which led me to someone pointing out that you might try editing the config files and adjusting the volume values there, supposing you haven't already.
The person that submitted the issue never came back to mention whether or not that did the trick for them, so best of luck!
For some reason I thought The Verge was better about having transcripts for their podcasts. I was kinda interested but not around 28 minutes of audio interested. 😞
I’d argue, oddly, that it’s easier to hold a single corporate entity accountable for data breaches than mastodon instance owners.
It’s likely the case that both of are bad from a data security point of view, but at least with the corporations you know who to shout at.
I'm inclined to agree, albeit I'm of two minds about it. On one hand, singular entity is technically easier, but being corporate means it's likely to have more wealth/resources to make it untenable for people to hold accountable. Whereas on the other hand, if you put in the effort to pin down a Mastodon instance admin or even a few admins, chances are they won't have those kinds of resources to really defend themselves, so you may be more likely to hold them accountable.
That is, compared to a corporate entity which may drag things out for a slap on the wrist settlement/fine or the like. I can see the different angles to where you're coming from though.
Depends on the location and timing I think. Find a restaurant or a bar that's okay with you lounging with your drink of choice and you might find yourself eavesdropping on some strange chatter
Because bluesky and threads started with corporate interests and Mastodon has serious privacy concerns due to the amount of data that instance owners have access to.
Don't Bluesky and Threads have similar serious privacy concerns? Those running them would, I think, have similar if not even more access to people's information, depending on how much their respective apps request. Mastodon and its apps on the other hand, generally don't request as much access to one's information, meaning instance owners arguably have much less to snoop through.
A more fun variation on this would be to contest mathematical notation. PEMDAS is one thing, but mathematical notation? Not only might you get lost in the order of operations, now you're lucky if you can even read it without committing yourself to the maths cubicles.
Yeah, they don't get dungeons, they get cubicles because it's a geometrically appropriate hell.
I must've been more tired than I realized and didn't catch that properly, sorry about that! I was also more focused on the other person's question and taking it more literally as in the pseudo-guest feature of Discord, which enables you to pop in and ask without a full account.
Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, "Did you read the pins you fucking noob?" mentality. It's very much the old forum kneejerk response of, "Did you read the rules/stickied posts?" simply in a different context. As you note though, you'll find assholes in any communication medium.
Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that's also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server's more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord's inbox/mentions can be.
Some speculation on my part:
- There are other higher priority items for the developers.
- It's open to abuse, even with restrictions, and a restricted guest account may create a bad impression if the restrictions are poorly communicated (and considering some basic features of Lemmy as-is struggle with being communicated, this is a high probability).
- Larger/more active servers/communities (depending on implementation) may simply disable the feature altogether or further limit it due to 2.
Despite what @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml says, 3 (or variations on it) has become more common across some larger/more active Discord servers simply because communities understandably don't want to deal with drop-in trolls or raids, meaning some of them go so far as to temporarily limit or add small hurdles for people even with accounts.
You can of course still find many Discord servers that don't, which is among the reasons it remains so popular, but it's not as sure of a thing as it was in the past.
Isn't the Reddit equivalent something along the lines of, "We're better than people on [social media]" smugness? Social media being a catchall for say, Facebook, Twitter, or in the past few years, TikTok.
It reminds me of the classic silliness of competing forums for the same subject/topic back in the day. "We on TechFans95 are so much better than people on TechFans94" and vice versa.