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hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months agoI think I mostly agree. The thing with that, we could solve a lot of the issues with technology. Give users more tools to decide what content and which users to expose themselves to. Maybe hide or collapse content on a user level. But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy. And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don't see things change substancially, the way it is.
One good thing about the Fediverse is everyone can have their own instance and make their own rules. Theoretically that enables us to have a locked down "safe" space and an anarchic place with freedom of speech next to each other.
In practice most people don't lean towards the extremes, you're right. I want something in between. Not just a*holes and trolls but some meaningful discussions. I wouldn't want to be on a free speech instance. But I also don't want to be in a bubble all day. So something in the middle would be appreciated.
maegul@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Tools could always be better for sure! This is still beta software after all! And the fediverse ecosystem is still finding its feet.
That being said … isn’t subscribing to communities a pretty good tool already? I ask because it strikes me that many here might be talking about the “all” feed. If so, that’d be a case of people just not using the tools given to them (and also an abuse of this system frankly).
Think I’m totally with you there. The fediverse for me has been a bit of a let down in terms of how much it has just recreated big social platforms without more experimentation. It’s early days and all so I don’t want to be harsh on all the devs. They’ve done great things. But it does feel like some basic revamping could be quite nice.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
I don't get that either. The "All" feed ist just a random pile of uninteresting stuff (to me). Lots of news of the day, memes that aren't even funny... I think I would have left Lemmy a long time ago if that had been my experience. I subscribe to the things I want to read. But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the "All" feed. I still don't get it.
I kinda lost hope that Lemmy will provide us with a new and different approach to this. The developers are kind of doing their thing. There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don't get implemented. Maybe they're just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media. And people also don't seem to like anarchy and freedom of speech over everything else because that just ends up being a place for trolls. I'd like to have something in the middle. And I think we've already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.
maegul@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Yea, I was surprised to learn this too. I don’t know the numbers but I’d bet it isn’t insignificant. I learned of the practice from a thread of people recommending to others that they use “All” and block all “the bad instances” to “clean it up” … and I was just kinda shocked at how much of an indifference to the design of the system and all of the community management and moderation all of the mods do not to mention an abuse of the federation mechanics to just block whole instances on a whim.
If it’s not too much to ask … do you have any descriptions or links or clues to see more of this?
Generally, there are quite a few people who feel this way about the fediverse as a whole. The sorts of people who are open to seeing all of this as an opportunity to make some progress on what “big social” did (perhaps like you and I). I’ve connected with a few in my time here (mostly over on mastodon) and the general feeling I’ve picked on is that all of this (incl the protocol itself) so far is a good “first step” or “prototype”, but that moving on to the next step and taking stock of what lessons have been learned could happen soon-ish.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
I don't have any good links. There has been an AMA with the developers earlier this year (on lemmy.ml) and I asked some questions regarding the development process and the direction of the project (and finances). I don't have the link available, since I switched instances in the meantime.
And I followed the Github issues for some time. Usually you get an idea about how developers handle things by looking at their interaction with the community. There are some requests from last summer which I think would be worth looking into, but the devs say they don't have the manpower. Same applies to several UI bugs. They're still pretty much untouched as development focuses on the backend. And I've heard from people that the maintainers aren't always happy with contributions. Which I think isn't great because if you have an open source project along with a community, and then people try to engage but get disappointed because their day worth of coding is wasted and the PR denied... That isn't going to foster a healthy community. I'm not sure if they're working towards a different vision of the project, or manpower is that scarce. I mean they have 2 or 3 people working fulltime on Lemmy and they get paid a salary. I think we discussed that in the AMA. They definitely don't get rich and pay isn't what a big company would pay.
And there was something with the instance admins that needs improvement. I'm not sure what that was. Either image moderation or resource usage. (Or both.) Because admins need to abide by the law and pay attention to what's uploaded (ideally without messing with the database manually) and I think they did some database performance improvements in the last few releases. I'm not sure. Rust should be fairly efficient. With databases you need to pay attention to what you're doing. But I don't know all the used frameworks. I'm just speculating here.
So... I really don't have a link. I just occasionally read what people post here and want. And I sometimes follow the development.
And the fediverse as a whole... I don't think ActivityPub is very efficient. The polling and simple design is compelling, but it's not very performant. And it has some issues with caching etc. Also people want extensions and functionality that is well-defined and interoperable. But AP is just a well-defined core. And I think not even voting is part of that standard and just something people kind of agreed on. Which is problematic. Lots of normal stuff in Mastodon, Lemmy, etc isn't really part of the standard. And I'm not sure if they release a new revision at some point. I think the current revision is a bit older as of now. I think we need that because the whole Fediverse is about interoperability.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
I guess most want to discover new communities.
Maybe something like quiblr.com ?
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 3 months ago
Thanks for the link. I'll have a look at that. Currently I use PieFed. Which as some way to go, but some gread ideas.
Concerning the All-feed: Using that to find new communities would be something I also do. But I heard people just use that instead of subscribing. And one or two people said they then just block all the communities they're not interested in. I guess that works, too. I haven't tried myself.