dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

But we need to convince people to care about freedom too. There will always be some excuse to not use the freedom respecting alternative. Look at Reddit users. They could all join us here and change something, but they don’t care. Same with Twitter, Windows, etc. It’s always difficult, it’s always annoying. But if we spread the message and help people with their issues, we can convince at least some of them…

….But we can’t just give up on our freedom and privacy. We are aware of Matrix’s issues and they won’t be fixed in a month or even a year. In the future Discord will have even more users and it will be even harder to escape it. So there is no reason to wait, we have to fight this battle now. This is the right thing to do.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and Ian starting to feel like the situation we are in feels impossible partially because of the way we have let capitalism define what we call “friction” in apps.

Friction as a concept can do a lot of good in getting developers to be laser focused on how it actually feels to use a software as a human, but also… does Lemmy cause “friction” for new users because they simply cannot physically imagine a social network outside the context of a massive corporation?

Discord is undoubtedly very slick to use but no one can convince me that Discord, Bluesky, Threads etc… don’t have a huge advantage in being low “friction” from being imaginable by the average person.

We need to start differentiating between the shitty kind of friction that needlessly pushes away users and frustrates them and generative friction where the difficulty of getting someone to use something is an expression of traction where a broader invitation to think more radically about what is possible in community organization can happen. Seen from this light onboarding someone onto Lemmy is a million times harder than onboarding someone onto Discord, but that is because onboarding someone onto Lemmy is actually doing something far more difficult and meaningful.

Getting someone to try Lemmy who before wouldn’t have tried it (or hadn’t even heard of it) expands the realm of what is possible in that person’s mind. It isn’t fair to expect that to magically happen with less friction than shuffling people onto yet another corporate social media service in the honeymoon phase where there aren’t many ads and things are artificially cheap…. If the situation is the same, and your onboarding has done no work on the system, it damn well better be easy.

I mean, not all books should be difficult or challenging works of literature, but if your objective is to be genuinely changed by a book than you can’t really expect to get there without friction between you and the book. A frictionless book that just glides through you has no purchase to enact a genuine change in the fabric of your mind.

Should we not think of social media community building in a similar light? Yes there are annoying works of literature that seem purposefully obtuse (bad friction) but by the same token it is the challenging books that actually transform our minds.

Even if that one person you get to try Lemmy only tries it briefly and then just drifts off, you have fundamentally changed what that person thinks can be possible in the realm of online communities and that is no small victory even if it is harder to quantify.

I think in a weird way one of the problems is the feeling that you have to get it right the first time. I think we need to obviously make it wayyyy easier and less intimidating for people to find instances to sign up at that are a good fit for them, but also I think we just need to send way more of a “get it wrong, treat your first account as just a fun diversion, don’t feel like you need to find the perfect home immediately” vibe. Not every social media account needs to be a permanent investment, it can just be a momentary passing version of yourself along your way from one place to another.

I think a lot of the subconscious anxiety is about trying to nab the handle you like to use on a popular up and coming social network before everyone else jumps on and takes your precious name… but there is no rush here. Your handle will likely sit untaken on more fediverse servers than you can shake a stick at, indefinitely.

Unfortunately the terrifying thing is nothing is actually physically wrong with those people that is making them believe crazy shit. They don’t all have dementia or something.

America is just so dysfunctional that it shoots perfectly normal people off the deep end into crazy (very hateful often) conspiracy views like a particle accelerator shoots protons into stuff to make them explode. Some businesses actually target that as their explicit business model here (YouTube).

Definitely glad this exists, has anyone tried it here who can speak to how nice of an experience it is? Does it have voice channels?

This is confounded by both a) you join all channels on a server, 2) the ability of individuals to 'mute' servers or channels; combined it means it fills up with a bunch of idlers in a way which is worse than IRC as it’s unlikely they will ever read the contents or participate beyond asking a question then leaving.

Right, and this isn't just a minor issue, it is fundamental to Discord and it has serious consequences.

Somewhat astonishingly microblogs like Mastodon or Twitter are generally a more successful place for expert conversations to happen than Discord communities. Think about the amount of Twitter threads written by someone who is an expert in a topic speaking candidly that have been shared with you before whether it was in the context of social justice, your favorite hobby or science. This is because the way conversations sort themselves on Twitter isn't through rigid subchannel structures maintained by topic gatekeepers, conversations are instead "kept on topic" by users having profile descriptions that describe what on topic is for them both in subject matter and tone. Users can then choose to follow or not based upon profile descriptions and previous posts. This provides the necessary "fuzziness" to topic and community boundaries that is required for novel, expert, interesting conversations to happen (though of course microblogs have plenty of drawbacks).

One could easily say that "well, the point of Discord isn't to do serious stuff like that" but Twitter never set out to be a good place for expert, technical discussions. Make no mistake, Twitter made it possible for an activist to write a post describing an unfolding political situation in detail from their phone straight onto Twitter and potentially change the course of history when a major news picks it up... SPECIFICALLY so that teenagers could easily share memes with each other and fans could easily keep up with their favorite celebrity bullshit. Even before shitstick mcspacepants bought Twitter, the company if anything actively disliked this subversive, radically democratic potential within its product.

I think it is damning though that with all the structure Discord brings to the table over something like a microblog, most of the time it utterly fails to elevate the conversation along any metric, especially ones relevant to expert and niche topics. Compare that to Lemmy or Reddit, and even after you handwave away the particular differences of structure and goals in as generous as a fashion possible to Discord, the contrast in quality of conversation and knowledge curated is staggering.

I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a “simple” question which wouldn’t be a problem on a forum.

Right, there is nothing wrong with discord type services other then the fact that I hate them and find them annoying and impossible to engage with, but that is a personal opinion I can just sit there and deal with if communities also have other places I can interact with them online but again for the overwhelming majority of them…. they don’t.

My whole life I have been very much a “social butterfly” engaging in lots of different hobby communities and enjoying learning and reading expert conversations on niche things I never knew about. In the last 6 years or so, more than anything else Discord has been destroying my capacity to do enjoy doing that. I join a Discord server about something I am passionate about and I just can’t find the interesting conversations anywhere (even though the topics are extremely interesting to me) and I end up zoning out and disengaging with the community. I also need an account to search old conversations which feels VERY VERY wrong to me.

My point isn’t “woe is me” but to stand up and sound the alarm that we are rapidly losing agency, searchability and general knowledge curation capacity systematically across digital communities as the Discord tidal wave envelopes all. It has and will do massive longterm damage to the health of internet communities.

I mean, for goodness sake my damn workplace was trying to unionize (hell yeah) and we had a great signal chat that was very focused going on (not perfect by any means) and then a couple of people who like Discord got EVERYTHING to move to Discord and….. guess how effective we were at organizing our ≈110 person company?

Spoilers, we weren’t, at all.

It just crushed me to see people trying to agitate and encourage people to think outside the narrative of what the boss says is possible or how people’s relationship to work has to look like according to the boss, but there was zero creative or imaginative power to conceive of the politics and consequences of the tools we were using to organize or thought into how a communication tool fundamentally impacts the kind of conversations that happen in favor of others. I get that it wasn’t the primary question, but it seems to me like a far more relevant question than people gave it credit for, especially since our solution was “use the popular social media service being massively subsidized by investors in an attempt to develop an unassailable monopoly on the industry” which seems like not a great place to build the future of worker power, especially since Discord is a U.S. based company.

I would rephrase this to: the people who designed discord and the stupendous amounts of investor money facilitating such a huge rise in discord adoption (keeping subscription prices relatively low, not going aggressively for monetization out the bat) don't really give a shit if discord doesn't really work for groups of more than a dozen people, nor how healthy for users it is (especially minorities of them). They care about how many people are using discord, that is all.

It isn't a great place for ughh ...somedays what seems like 95% of the hobbies I love centralizing there communities on.

Obviously discord type communities have their place (I don't like discord, but fine, I am a grumpy piece of shit) but what concerns me is how much energy is being put into this powerslide of community after community moving over to discord (or more usually, new communities just forming on discord and never going anywhere else). It feels like a distortion, like the hype is a misconception about discord being the best future for every facet of digital community structures (owned by one company, based in the US...) rather than an awesome new spin on IRC, voicechat and lite community organization all rolled up in a package that made it a fresh alternative to all those federated lemmy and kbin instances (that all had years and years of open threads you could search through and read like a normal ass website)....

I think I might make this my fucking profile picture, I am so sick and tired of this.

The other day I finally got myself to join the discord of a small early access game to give some feedback/ideas I thought would fit the game really well.

I posted in the right ideas subchannel but then I also made the mistake of saying in the general “hey what do y’all think about this idea!”. I didn’t spam it, I spent awhile writing my idea out in a clear and concise fashion to post in the idea channel, tried to make it lighthearted and even made a bad photoshopped image to go along with it, and then I mentioned it ONCE in the general chat.

The only two people who responded either in the idea channel or in general were two people in general that immediately jumped down my throat, saying I was begging or advertising (by saying I wanted a feature in the wrong place once?)… and everybody else was just silent like that is a sane way to great people at the door to a community.

I hate discord so much, what an awful place to try to organize anything. Either there are only a couple of firehose channels where interesting conversations are diluted into inscrutability by low effort jokes and meme posts or someone taking up half the chat window to say something only to one person… or there develops an ever increasing suffocation of hyper over-organized channels where the only conversations allowed proceed along strict boundaries for what is considered “on topic” for that channel (and thus the possibility space of conversations becomes a series of tiny islands, unconnected from anywhere else conceptually).

This last point might seem like an oddly specific pet peeve, but I have noticed over and over again that the kinds of people who enjoy setting up discord communities and creating an extremely organized system of subchannels just don't understand how the way that feels good for them to structure the world actually critically fails to capture the organic, living aspects of it. In my opinion one of the major reasons people enjoy microblogging services like twitter so much is a structural resistance to "discord channel organizer brain" kinds of people taking hold of communities and making them into their personal pet organization project that makes them feel good at the end of the day when "everything" can now have a perfect spot. Human conversations and interactions derive their genius from being messy and stepping over boundaries, if you make it so every type of conversation has one precise corresponding spot in some mess of subchannels it is very difficult for it not to mortally wound the living fiber of conversation. The problem with Discord, is again, you HAVE to do this when you get any more than 15 people in a Discord channel or the whole thing becomes unmanageable.

It just doesn’t work for a software project ANYWHERE along the continuum of a handful of firehose channels to a confusing web of subchannels and I hate it. Either way, the search is utterly useless in terms of helping curate a body of expert conversations (like say a Reddit-like or forum) but that won’t stop people hanging out in discord all day yelling at you for asking a question that has already been asked before…. in a chat room…. where the whole point is conversations repeat as different social groups join and leave…?

Did I mention I hate discord?

Microsoft with gamepass (and other large game companies) are trying to do the gaming industry what Spotify did to the music industry. Blow the bottom out of it, get consumers used to subscriptions where money goes to massive companies not the artists actually doing the work, and let it all collapse into a heap so execs can do whatever they want because workers in the game industry have zero leverage left to dictate a higher quality of life since the path to profit has been carpet bombed by the finance industry (you don't want to work for Microsoft or Sony? Oh sorry yeah nobody else can make money in video games so tough luck finding a job somewhere else).

Why now? Well unlike the movie industry, video game nerds have a stunted awareness of the value of unions and worker organization so in plain daylight the rich can drive the entire industry off a cliff, fire a huge percentage of the workers and try to replace them with AI.... and worst comes to worst those companies will be in a great position to demand whatever they want from the remaining human labor after the dust settles even if the AI crap doesn't work.

Good old Disaster Capitalism.

The force that pulls a society over the edge into a realm where fascists can seize power is that comfortable feeling of deciding one person or ideology is right and then just turning off your brain, end of conversation. Exhaustion can recede into a comfortable finality.

It makes sense why someone would find that particular kind of hate blanket comfortable, but that doesn’t make it any less pathetic or disgusting.

This is just textbook fascism.

It frustrates me that fascists like this can claim “this is the way of nature, the strong survive and the weak perish in competition” and no one challenges them. We are so primed to see everything through a fascist lens by neoliberalism because neoliberalism doesn’t provide any path forward but a broken, insufficient narrative.

Nature is full of cooperation, the interplay between fungi and trees for one is a dizzying network of relationships. In most ecosystems flourishing is a mutual process not a zero sum game, diversity begets stability, capacity to adapt and efficiency.

The ideology of fascists like Netanyahu will never lead a society to strength, because the point of adopting such a cruel and hateful ideology is a violent disinterest in understanding others, which is the precise opposite of an expression of strength.

The ultimate strength is realizing what others are capable of that you could never accomplish yourself and developing a mutual relationship to gain access to those things, the type of “warriors” Netanyahu are talking about here are just sad, isolated people with very little power to do anything meaningful in this world but needlessly kill and maim, they are incapable of even beginning to understand the rich, dizzying tapestry of different kinds of genius that a functional society requires to thrive and grow. They are incapable of doing actual work to retain status in their community so they clumsily fumble at violence and fear to try to fill that void of uselessness.

Seriously, Instagram and Facebook would also need to to delete the CIA’s account for this to make any sense (hating how extremist Iran is without acknowledging it was an explicit consequence of the CIA forcing regime change is just naive jingoism) but this is just about pissing on Iran to curry favor with other people.

I wonder if you took the comments of Iran’s evil leader and mixed them up with statements from conservative US politicians, removed obvious references to Christianity, Islam, and countries and then sat people down and tried to get them to guess who said what it would be pretty damn hard.

Fascists gonna fascist

Exactly it is precisely like talking to a child

The thing about conservatives is they are babies, they can’t handle an actual policy discussion and they don’t care. They just want a story about a bad guy to hate and they don’t care about any aspect of reality that doesn’t interface with that story they like. In the conservative viewpoint of the world NOTHING matters except narratives pre-processed into those little applesauce juice packs for kids that they can slurp up without having to use a spoon.

If you start talking about the boring reality of governments and movements (I hate that “organizing” is a perfectly accurate term for building movements lol but that’s exactly what the work is) how change happens through policy making and how those policies can have reallllly annoying details that make them backfire or have the opposite impact they are supposed to (CAFE regulations with trucks and gas mileage in the US) conservatives just shit their pants and start screaming at you.

Conservatives would really like to be able to enjoy their baby food without someone else (them it is always them) making another steaming turd appear in their pants, ruining the whole experience yet another time, but it almost never happens which is why they are so angry all the time. They are babies.

I use emacs anyways, pshh why did you think I even cared, nerd.

Ok yeah I mean I use evil bindings but I don’t need to fumble around with practically analog equipment like :wq and :x

…alright fine I just use stock spacemacs, someone let me into the wizard school and it is amazing but literally everyone else here knows to do magic and the most I have done is make a frog balloon up twice it’s size. I have to keep pretending like I am working on these massive architectures of spell books to influence weather systems in a way that takes dynamic inputs from remote wizard servers in towers…. and honestly I just love org mode in a pretty package that works well out of the box. ..most of the gravestones here are dedicated to a great wizard known as Dotfile and I have NO idea who he is.

Don’t tell anyone or they will find me and run me out of the gates.

What!? Are you serious? She texted me later and said “Don’t bother coming over again” and I honestly took it as having satisfied her so thoroughly that all she needed was one time with me!?

Also in vim “gg” navigates to the beginning of a document (remember it as the opposite of “good game”, you are at the beginning). “dG” deletes to G the end of the document, G being the opposite command to gg in that it brings you to the end of a document.

:wq of course means write and quit

Does Nanny NOT make you do the chores?? She told me everyone else was very studious about doing them and that only I was slacking off.

Wait a minute….

She had me convinced SHE was the one being fooled this whole time, she even told me so

Yeah it is called Vision Student Edition but it isn’t that casual because when you put them on it just shows you the crushingly cruel reality of your student loans in a context of countless other people with crushing student loans who will never be able to live a full life because of a predatory ruling class.

Most people start crying when they put it on but for some reason upper management think it is the funniest, most relaxing thing ever they just pass it back and forth in board meetings doubled over laughing hollering stuff like “I can’t believe they let us do this to them, can you imagine?” so it hasn’t been canned despite almost no positive reaction from normal users.

Because Apple is mommy and when mommy does something it is different than other people doing it