Lvxferre @ lvxferre @lemmy.ml

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The further I think about this, the more that it makes sense. The $1/year would even help to sort in the "right" type of bot (that wouldn't be affected, unlike disruptive mass account creation), while still allowing them to claim that they're getting rid of bots.

The very fact that you're requesting payment info already makes plenty people think twice. Specially in the light of the brand changing from Twitter to X - if you're clueless about the change something "smells off".

On the other hand for a lot of bot owners this is absolutely no issue. You shouldn't be popping up a whole bot army, but instead only a handful of well coordinated bots to astroturf the shit out of the platform.

In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in.

At the end of the day, there are three ways to finance a server.

1. The server owners do it, by paying from their own pockets. Only viable as long as the server is small and the owners are deeply concerned with the success of the server.
2. A third party does it by sponsorship, advertisement, etc. Bad idea as they will eventually want to meddle with your content - astroturfing, selective enforcement of rules, etc.
3. The userbase does it by donations, membership, etc. Frankly I think that it's the most reasonable solution.

OP raised the concern that most people won't donate. Does it really matter? I don't think so; what matters is the total amount being donated, not who does it. If it is a concern, perhaps a subscription model could work, too, but the instance would need to show some service beyond what you'd expect from a Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin/etc. instance.

I'm from the belief that "ethical ads" are a trap. 90% won't be ethical, and the 10% left won't pay you much. That's how the cookie crumbles.

Another concern that I see is moderation, as it's part of what makes an instance viable or not. The old Reddit model (let users moderate users) is surprisingly good in this aspect, as it allows the server owners to only address server-wide issues, but IMO it needs to be improved on (for example, letting admins and mods recruit users for specific tasks - e.g. I might trust someone to remove content, but perhaps not to ban users).

Please expand on “reddit-left”.

I cannot speak for someone else, but I'm still willing to chime in.

Slacktivists nominally aligned to social causes, and fairly vocal about them, but unwilling to lift a single finger on what matters.

Patronising towards marginalised groups. Often with an implicit "they shouldn't empower themselves, they should rely on people like ME to defend them, poor things".

Eager to defend corporations once they wash something in pink, black, or green, due to ignorance on the impact of the economic system on marginalised groups.

Assumptive as a brick and eager to witch hunt. Including distorting what others say to point fingers, or screeching at any sort of internal criticism as if it was a sign of allegiance to the other side.

Eager to employ Chewbacca defence and whataboutism when called out on blatant prejudice, in a way that sounds as irrational as "I have a black friend so I cannot be transphobic lol lmao".

They're the living proof that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Because, even if the alt right is idiotic, idioticising, morally repugnant and epistemically laughable, they might have a point when they say that those guys are "virtue signalling". They don't genuinely care about the marginalised groups, and they don't want to change shit, they care about their own precious OH SO PRECIOUS feelings of "being the good guy". (Except that the alt right is unable to recognise that their own ranks stink the same putrid smell as those guys, plus everything else.)

This sort of "nominally left-wing, but effectively right-wing" individual is by no means exclusive to Reddit, mind you. And there are plenty exceptions to it, even in that shithole. Even then, if you hit someone claiming to be "left-wing" in Reddit, there's a good chance that the person is like this.

Europa Universalis IV

That's a game that I went from avid player to not remembering that it exists. Power creep, poor design decisions, gross disregard to regions based on where Paradox gets money from, ditching believability for the sake of railroading, obnoxious DLC and sales policies... frankly nowadays I place Paradox in the same bag as EA and Game Freak + The Pokémon Company as "they don't deserve my money", because of how poorly they handled EU4.

What Menel said near the end about half elves immediately reminded me Achilles - the son of a nymph and a human, who was also forced to choose between a long and dull life or a short and glorious one. I wonder if the author took inspiration from the Illiad, or if this is just a coincidence - either way, it's some beautiful worldbuilding.

Anne confusing Mia's interactions with four-eyes Ludwig as romantic advances was the cherry on the cake in this episode IMO. Also, how much he was in awe of her sagacity... for repeating his own words from the previous loop!

(Since bot-kun didn't pick this series up, I'll update it manually. Hopefully next time as soon as the episode is out.)

Oh no. I also see people suggest we need to attract users and generate content for Lemmy by any means. [...] It drowns the regular stuff and it’s a sure way of not attracting normal people ever again.

I agree with you that the best approach would be to let them have some "containment cages" here and there. They tend to attract legal trouble and get deplatformed anyway.

I’m from Germany. It used to be a thing on the internet to make fun of people from Austria. Not because they speak differently, but because they were a minority on the internet.

I remember seeing a bit of this in Krautchan. Sometimes it sounded like plain humour, but sometimes as punching down (like claiming that Austrians on the internet were actually German shitposters, since there was no internet in Austria), or some local hate boner against "Serwus".

Do you happen to have better examples?

Yeah, that’s stupid. Hunsrik isn’t spoken in Germany. And 200 years ago when this seperated, Nazis weren’t a thing.

Remember the conflation between country and language? Their logic goes like this: Hunsrik is just a fake name for German language (implicitly Standard German), and this gets "proved" by the fact that there's a Germany in the map but no "Hunsrikland". The same reasoning is the one used against Talian (the name doesn't help).

The "Nazi" association that people do is mostly to make the person look like the bad guy for speaking a minority language. It's the same thing with "batateiro" (roughly "potato guy"), to imply redneckness.

Perhaps not surprisingly it's the same sort of person who makes a big deal out of Portuguese as spoken in Brazil vs. in Portugal, Angola, etc., by pretending that "Brazilian Portuguese" is 1) internally homogeneous (nope) and 2) has some defining, linguistic feature (nope too). As if crafting a language out of nowhere, to fill the "gap".

On the internet there are also technical reasons on top. To be able to moderate things, you need to be able to understand what is said. If you don’t have moderators for a language, you sadly have to ban that language. Or be happy to have an unmoderated corner on your instance.

I've thought about moderation for this, as I was creating a local comm. Back then, I've concluded that it isn't a big issue. Troublemakers beeline for the majority language (for visibility), and by the time that casual rule-breaking in a minority language becomes an issue, you're probably able to ask for help from speakers of that language. Context also helps a lot.

I don’t have too much insight about how it feels to be on that side. I live in a part of Germany with a bit of a dialect. Nagging people about how they speak is a thing. But I really appreciate that we have dialects and not every person I meet is exactly the same. I think most of the people I’ve talked to feel the same. And I myself feel attached to my region, maybe more so than to the nation as a whole. …I’d have to think about that, you can’t really compare the two things.

That's a great sign - for your community, the sense of belonging is still there, strong. That shold be the normal.

In Germany perhaps a better example would be the Sorbian speakers, I don't know. But for Europe as a whole, Vergonha ("The Shaming") is sadly a textbook example of it.

But I have to make a distinction to dialects when talking about written language. You can’t really write in dialect. Just speak. And hence things don’t translate into the online-world.

You can. And I've seen Swiss German speakers doing it informally. Since the distinction between dialect and language is mostly political in nature, there's nothing that you can do with a "language" that you wouldn't be able to, with a "dialect".

Also, thank you for this conversation! (Sorry for not using German with you; I'm not too proficient in the language yet, and keeping it in English benefits other posters here.)

Even tying sound with movement, on itself, is surprisingly insightful. If they thought that Earth didn't make a sound because it was fixed, this means that they were aware that movement creates sound. (Later on we'd discover that sound is movement.)

We drew many comparisons but I think I remember one being that the story opens like that in the Odyssey I think?

I'm a bit clueless on Greek but I gave it a check, and it was the Odyssey indeed - the "lyric I" starts right off the bat asking the Muse about Odysseus. And since Virgil crafted the Aeneid as a continuation of the Odyssey, he most likely took a lot of the poetic resources from it, kind of like a fan game ripping off assets from the original.

Note however that Ancient Greek poetry had another resource at hand, that Latin didn't - tone. And the authors of the past used it quite a bit, so the poem had a melody by itself, by just reading it aloud. Like this:

1. ἄν·δρα μοι ἔν·νε·πε, μοῦ·σα, πο·λύ·τρο·πον, ὃς μά·λα πολ·λὰ (H - - H - - L - - H - - L H - - L)
2. πλάγχ·θη, ἐ·πεὶ Τροί·ης ἱε·ρὸν πτο·λίε·θρον ἔ·περ·σεν (H - - L H - - L - H - H - -)

Those are the two first verses of the Odyssey. Here H/bold = rising or high, L/italics = low or falling, and dash/unmarked = unstressed.

Any preferred translations [for De Bello Gallico]? All I have is Latimore translations for the texts I’ve mentioned hahahaha

I usually follow it in Portuguese (my L1), so I can't help you much with that. That said I'd recommend you to avoid translations flowering the text too much (it goes against the "spirit" of the text), or insistently keeping Latin word order intact (e.g. "Gallia is wholly divided in parts three" or junk like this, it sounds awful in English).

Or other readings you might think I’d enjoy? I think Odyssey was my absolute favorite, but I’m also a Golden Ass enjoyer of sorts as well.

For the Odyssey the nearest in spirit that you'll get in Latin would be the already mentioned Aeneid. Past that you'd probably need to either go back to Greek works (like Argonautica) or even modern languages (like Os Lusíadas, same "we're out, to the unknown world, to do something great" vibe).

Things like the Golden Ass are easier to find, though. Anything Plautus will give you a good laugh: Aulularia (The Pot of Gold), Miles Gloriosus (The Proud Soldier), Bacchides. Often there are "moral messages" in them but they're mostly slapstick comedy.

You might also like some of Catullus' poems. The one from my example is well-behaved, but check poems 16, 39, 58 and 84 for some fun. 16 in special is quoted often due to the profanity.

I often compare Martial's Epigrams to the Roman version of shitposting.

The problems with "let votes decide" are that most people won't vote on the best interests of the community in question, and that it increases the impact of brigades. It's specially bad when dealing with marginalised minorities - because even if "outsiders" don't underestimate the impact of the mean-spirited meme in question, people put their own enjoyment over the well-being of the others.

As such, even if I'd usually agree with you (moderation should be light-handed), I don't think that relying on the votes is a good idea.

Instead I think that mods shouldn't jump at the gun and assume. Context is king; a meme about the LGBTQIA+ acronym being too long can go from anything between "it's fine" to "it's prejudice", depending on:

• how it's worded
• presence/absence of similar memes in the same comm
• how OP presents oneself (e.g. a trans person posting a meme about this would be interpreted as self-humour)
• other things that OP posted (e.g. does OP target those people?)

Also, sometimes mods should talk officially with the users. Speaking officially is seriously underused, even if it defuses issues before they even happen. Simply commenting "I'm leaving this up because it's about the acronym alone, but I don't want to see bigotry here, OK? Everyone, please be excellent to each other, including the LGBTQIA+ members of this comm." and then watching OP's reaction is often enough.

I apologise for the incoming off-topic... it's just that you mentioned Latin works, I fucking love it.

Two, the Roman’s also hated writing normally, expect lines and wacky rhyming schemes.

It's less that they "hated writing normally", and more that texts were made for a specific purpose and target audience, and the ones written "normally" didn't catch much attention. But they do exist - and we have surviving counter-examples, like

• Caesar's De Bello Gallico - he was being concise and clear. It's a military report, not fancy pants poetry.
• anything Cicero - he wrote a spaghetti, but he wasn't writing something catchy-sounding so the masses would remember and follow it, it was mostly philosophy geared towards educated speakers. The content mattered more than the form.

But not even for poetry the Romans used wacky rhyming schemes. Rhymes in Latin sound boring, because most words will end with a handful of sounds - it's too easy to pick a word that rhymes with another. Instead they did some fancy stuff with the metrics, capitalising on short vs. long syllables to create aesthetic effects. I'll exemplify it with one of my favourite poems. Bolded syllables are long, the others are short:

All verses have exactly 11 metric syllables, even if a few of them require you to elide an ⟨e⟩ before another vowel. Note the general pattern (L = long, S = short):

• All verses start with LLLS (spondee, then trochee).
• Most verses follow it with either SLSL (two iambs) or LLSL (spondee, then iamb).
• Most verses end in SLL (iamb, then a "dangling" long).

Why "most"? Because there are exceptions. And they're likely there because the author was playing with the rhythm alongside what the "lyric I" is saying:

• the first verse is trying to get Lesbia's attention, so the middle uses SLSL (two trochees) because they sound faster and more playful.
• the third verse ends with LLL (spondee+long). It's like someone saying emphatically "screeeeww thooose guuuys". It makes sense when you look at what the verse says - that the opinion of those old guys shouldn't matter a single as/"penny".
• in the sixth verse, instead of a "dangling" long syllable, you got a short one. It ends abruptly - just like our lives, and that's exactly what the verse talks about.

You'll also see this sort of attention to the metric foot in other Roman works, like the Aeneid; except that the effect that Virgil was seeking was completely different from Catullus above, it was more like a "shut up, I'm going to tell you something important and profound". But still no rhymes.

I don’t know where the Bible’s numbering in particular comes from

1560 Genevra. Before that, only the chapters were numbered. Probably a consequence of Protestantism, but even Catholic bibles adopted it.

It helped with navigating long works before the printing press gave us exact pagination.

It's still helpful, even nowadays. For example if I told you to find in Sermones the quote at 1.2.69-71 (1st book, 2nd part, lines 69 to 71), you could easily do it. Note how the numbering system is similar in spirit to the one in the Bible - except that the books get an abbreviation instead of a number.

You don't need to write it like this. Just write normally (prose or poetry, your choice), and other people will fragment your text this way, while either discussing it [proto-]academically or looking for hidden stuff in it.

Relevant detail: the modlog shows who did what, but only if you're a mod of that comm. Based on that, I think that it doesn't show it to the rest of the userbase to avoid mod harassment.

However I think that it should show to the rest of the userbase, at least, "[comm name] mod" or "[instance name] admins" instead of simply "mod". And there should be an easy way to contact the relevant group behind a certain mod action, that does not involve direct messages!

Another thing that I feel like missing is a proper channel for comm mods to "upstream" reports to instance admins, when the content fits the community rules but may or may not be in violation of the instance rules. That would indirectly help other users because there's a clearer division of responsibility, and you won't get situations like "comm mods need to take an educated guess on how to enforce instance rules that they did not set up".

People here are focusing too much on the examples and too little on the core complain (that Lemmy moderation is inconsistent and this frustrates users). I think that the later is worth investigating, IMO for two reasons:

1. The way that federation works, up to three groups can moderate your content: comm mods, admins of the comm's instance, admins of your instance. As such it's possible that users find mod problems far more often here than expected. And, while all those three groups are avoidable (unlike in a forum or Reddit), it's possible that users are having a hard time settling down in instances that work for them.
2. Lots of mods here were previously Reddit mods (inb4: myself included). It's perfectly possible that we brought Reddit's idiotic moderation culture into Lemmy, without even realising it. And... well, Reddit mods aren't exactly known for being transparent, smart, or consistent.

Reverse image search told me that it's puttu, and that the pic is from Wikipedia.

The description (rice cake with coconut shavings) sounds tasty - gotta try it someday.

I don’t think I’ve seen open racism or discrimination here on Lemmy, yet. (Except for those people that have strong opinions on communism/China perhaps.) Have you or other people?

I've seen a few. Way less than in Reddit, it's mostly low-key, and instance admins get rid of them fast. However I often see people here saying that we should allow them in, and I think that it's a mistake, specially if trying to promote Lemmy among non-English speakers. Because a lot of them will be somehow the target of this sort of discrimination, and they won't stay here if they feel hostility against them.

Since you wrote that in bold letters: Do you have some personal insight on linguistic minorities? Or was it more a general statement…

The problem with that conflation between country and language is that it alienates linguistic minorities badly.

I'm not a minority speaker myself, mind you. But I got close ties with Talian (a cluster of Venetian varieties) due to familiar background, and I've interacted offline with the folks from the examples below.

Sometimes it's external prejudice; a Kaingang speaker "speaks injun" so she's assumed to be primitive and dumb in comparison with Portuguese speakers.

Sometimes it's internalised prejudice; like Talian speakers claiming that they speak "broken Italian mixed with broken Brazilian" instead of a variety from Veneto.

Sometimes it's questioning allegiance to the country; like "fuck off back to your Nazi country" if you speak Hunsrik (a German variety).

Sometimes it's erasure, like people claiming "minority speakers? Everyone speaks Portuguese here. I never saw one." (Pragmatically saying "I'll pretend that they don't exist because I don't think that they should exist on first place.")

Often it's also practical matters - like online services not allowing you to access the service in your native language, even when available (often there isn't), because you're assumed to speak something else based on your country. Or expecting you to consume content from somewhere else than your homeland, because of your language.

And, from online discussions plus reading, I conclude that it's the exact same deal elsewhere. It is not just "shit Brazil does" or even "shit New World does", it's everywhere - from Galicians to Okinawans, Saami to Xhosa, Pennsylvania "Dutch" and Maori speakers. Often with that feeling that you shouldn't open your mouth, that you belong to no place, that you coexist with people who hate you, that even if your language is part of your identity your identity is wrong anyway. It's gut-wrenching how much linguistic minorities get the short end of the stick because they're expected to speak the country language instead.

[Sorry for the long text.]

Back to Lemmy. Those people want to consume social media as much as everyone else. Specially in their native languages, as it gives them the sense of belonging to a community - "this was made for us, by one of us!". Memes, shitposting, a thought-provoking text, a meaningful discussion. And yet traditional social media consistently neglects them, I think that the Fediverse should welcome them with open arms - not just because it's convenient for them, but also for the ones already here.

However when "we" [the Fediverse] create instances that tie languages with countries, we're effectively telling them "nope, you are not welcome here", exactly like the traditional media does. "We" can and should do better.

I'll try it although I think that part of the "wake me up" effect is from drinking it signalling to my body "nap is over, move". So I guess that I'll end drinking it twice.

Half hour nap. Plus caffeine afterwards.

It's less about "discounting" it and more about acknowledging that the human brain is not so efficient as people might think. As such, LLMs using an order of magnitude more parameters than the number of cells in a brain hints that LLMs are far less efficient than language models could be.

I'm aware that evolutionary algorithms can yield useful results.