Kichae
@Kichae@lemmy.ca
- Comment on lemmy should tots let you post things to your own user profile 3 weeks ago:
Well, stop expressing that people shouldn’t have to make choices about what they use, and maybe I’d give a shit what you say or do.
- Comment on lemmy should tots let you post things to your own user profile 3 weeks ago:
They’re websites. You’re arguing that people shouldn’t use different websites. On the Internet. Which is kind of how the Internet’s been going the last 15 years, and has turned out to be a total disaster.
The idea that the largest game in town should adopt the features of smaller players, rather than users exploring other options because there’s a slight inconvenience to the user just seems, I don’t know, incredibly entitled. It’s also how smaller projects stay invisible and die, leading to a monoculture.
So no, you’re not arguing that “we should have a monoculture!”, you’re just saying “people shouldn’t have to make choices!” which… leads to monoculture. And overwhelmingly supports the status quo.
- Comment on lemmy should tots let you post things to your own user profile 3 weeks ago:
they would have to do the whole “which instance to join” dance, again.
Oh, this again.
Seriously, you’re now arguing for a monoculture and centralization.
At that point, just go back to Reddit.
- Comment on lemmy should tots let you post things to your own user profile 3 weeks ago:
We can not just tell someone “what you want is on kbin, use that instead”, because there will be different use-cases that kbin does not fulfill.
So instead, it’s “let’s beg Lemmy to fulfill these use cases that it currently does not”. Got it. Makes total sense, and is not internally incoherent at all.
Definitely not just arguing for a monoculture.
- Comment on How active is Lemmy now? 3 weeks ago:
Remember when forums would be super active with, like, 500 users?
“Millions of users” is a vanity stat. The critical mass needed to keep a discussion group alive is actually quite small – assuming you’re interested in, you know, discussing things. So, how active “Lemmy” is is entirely dependent on which topics you’re interested in.
- Comment on lemmy should tots let you post things to your own user profile 3 weeks ago:
The thing is, mbin is right there if you want that kimd of functionality. There isn’t really a reason why everything needs to evolve into omni-applications. It’s better to have a broad ecosystem that has something for everyone, rather than a monopoly that’s servibg everyone a compromise.
Just look at the Twitter mugrations in 2022, and the clammor for quote posts. Misskey was right there, giving them exactly what they wanted, but you couldn’t speak the name of anything that wasn’t “mastodon” because everyone is brand focused and context blind.
What OP wants exists. It’s right there. It’s just not named Lemmy.
- Comment on Doom on a CAPTCHA is the most frustrating though admittedly raddest way to prove your humanity to an algorithm 4 weeks ago:
Tell me you played with strafe in 1993 and I’ll never belueve another word out of your mouth.
- Comment on Doom on a CAPTCHA is the most frustrating though admittedly raddest way to prove your humanity to an algorithm 4 weeks ago:
Go on. Play like it’s 1993 all over again.
- Comment on Day 1 Reddit Refugee 4 weeks ago:
Welcome! Always happy to see new faces showing up.
This place is significantly smaller than Reddit, and also significantly more spread out. It grows on you, but it’s important to look beyond the similarities between how lemmy.world and Reddit look. Under the hood, these are very different spaces.
“Lemmy” is actually a large network of independently operated Lemmy-based (or not… more on that later) websites. Each website has their own rules, and their own “communities” (AKA sublemmies, magazines, groups, etc.). You’re using one of, if not the, largest website in the network, and the one that is probably most Reddit-like (pre-IPO) in terms of rules and policies. It’s a general purpose content aggregator.
There are quite a few other medium-to-large general purpose content aggregator sites on the network. lemm.ee comes to mind, as does sh.itjust.works. And, of course, lemmy.ca, which is where I’m commenting from. Each of these websites has its own communities, and houses mirrors of remote communities that their users have subscribed to. Remote communities with local subscribers synchronize with the host website every so often (it can be quite frequently, but usually isn’t instantaneously). This makes the whole thing kind of like being on a web forum, but being able to follow topics from other web forums.
As you can imagine, this means there are some niche websites on the network. ttrpg.network is dedicated to table top gaming; startrek.website is focused on… I don’t know, some tv show or something; programming.dev hosts a bunch of communities focused on software engineering; lemmy.kde.social is focused on the KDE desktop environment for linux. These are often low-population sites, but they can see a lot of off-site engagement. Focused sites like that are great sites to use if your primary interest is the topic at hand; it really makes the Local feed super valuable.
If you remember that we’re not all using the same website, and that the different websites are, in fact, different websites, with their own rules, cultures, and norms, it helps grok the space a lot more. It also makes it easier to understand why there might be 8 different politics communities, and that c/politics on lemmy.world might be very different, both in terms of who is posting there, and also what they’re interested in discussing, from c/politics on lemmy.ca, or on aussie.zone.
Now, one thing that’s not obvious from lemmy.world (or any Lemmy-based website, really), is that not every website you have access to here is actually running Lemmy. kbin.earth and rimworld.gallery both run mbin, which is a different content aggregation webserver. community.nodebb.org runs nodebb, a web forum server.
People have access to Lemmy communities from an even wider range of website types. Users from Mastodon-based websites, Friendica-based websites, Hubzilla-based websites, and probably quite a few more.
We’re all on different websites. Some of those websites are significantly more different than others. That shapes this space in ways we haven’t even begun to truly explore yet. And it adds a little jank.
But the jank is worth it, as far as I’m concerned.
- Comment on I never realized this 4 weeks ago:
No one is off-put by the realization. Just the attitude the post represents.
- Comment on Is the Fediverse Too Complex? Can It Embrace Simplicity Without Losing Its Identity? 4 weeks ago:
Ni, but the UX is shit, and the value proposution is so poorly thought out that you can’t really sell people on it who aren’t already ready to buy in.
Everyone makes the same mistake: Diminish the home instance, paper over the heterogeneous nature of things, and try to make it look like centeralized social media. It breaks the user experience.
- Comment on My attempt at explaining the fediverse in a way that is more fun and engaging 4 weeks ago:
My analigy:
You have a Reddit account. You recently bought a Honda Civic, and know there’s a web forum for civic owners over there, called hondacivicforum. You would like to participate in it.
You can just subscribe to the forum topics you care about from your Reddit account. No need to create a new account.
Also, you have family on Facebook that posts updates and photos and whatnot. You can follow them, too, and reply to their posta without needing a Facebook account.
You use Reddit. You can interact with content outaide of Reddit from Reddit.
Tada.
- Comment on Fediverse alternative to fanfiction/writing platforms? (Wattpad, AO3, FFN, etc.) 4 weeks ago:
There’s no reason you couldn’t do this with a network of Lemmy, mbin, NodeBB, or even Friendica wrbsites
- Comment on Fediverse alternative to fanfiction/writing platforms? (Wattpad, AO3, FFN, etc.) 4 weeks ago:
Presumably for the same reason you’re on a federated forum-like platform: to have your posts syndicated to other websites for easier discovery, and to comment on posts from other websites without needing abother account?
- Comment on Potential Decentralized Fediverse Alternative to Ko-fi, Patreon, etc.? 4 weeks ago:
Lemmy is a failure at being like centralized social media, just like I’m a failure at being an athlete. It’s no more built to do that than I am.
I get that many folks around here don’t care for it, but Beehaw is a better model for this space. If people started treating the fedeverse as a Local+ framework, and treated the websites as the fundamental building blocks af the fediverse, and not just weird dangling tails on the ends of things, the experience would be significantly better. But none y’all want to do that, because that means leaving the mental model of centralization at the door.
- Comment on Not federated Lemmy instances? 4 weeks ago:
Why is it a silly thing to do? A non-federating lemmy instance is just another content aggregator site like Reddit.
In many ways, it’s a better experience than federated Lemmy. It’s just harder to recruit members.
- Comment on what is your opinion on mastodon and other fediverse microblogging sites?? as opposed to forum-type websites 4 weeks ago:
Wait, are people unaware that forums, Reddit, and Lemmy are also social media?
Social networking sites are a type of social media. Discussion groups are another.
- Comment on what is your opinion on mastodon and other fediverse microblogging sites?? as opposed to forum-type websites 4 weeks ago:
Is the 4 column layout not standard on Mastodon?
- Comment on Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon 1 month ago:
It’s got a lot of untreated, traumatized people, and frustrated power nerds on it, and both groups let you know it with haste.
- Comment on Assassination is a Leaky Abstraction 1 month ago:
If the people putting money in deserve to be paid for that money, it can be treated as a fixed term loan, with an established interest rate. That makes it a business expense.
Profit is what’s left over after everyone is paid for their work, and the costs of materials, housing, and maintenance - invluding the maintenance of debts - are covered. It’s either what you’ve over-charged your customers, or underpaid your employees.
And that’s wrong.
- Comment on Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon 1 month ago:
It’s frustrating, because a lot of the interesting people to follow and engage with on Mastodon have also jumped to Bluesky, and the fedi crowd continues to crow about algorithms and brain rot, when the biggest reason people bounce off of Mastodon is the other people on Mastodon.
There’s a deep undercurrent of “angry, hostile nerd”. When people started flooding Mastodon in 2022, you could see the binary reaction of “Finally, the recognition we deserve!” and also “you’re in my house now, you fucking normie, and you’d better start acting like it”.
Unsurprisingly, the “fucking normies” noped out, either immediately, or as soon as they had another option that satisfied their objections with Twitter.
But we’re going to wring our hands and bitch about onboarding flows and the great sin of defederation, because it let’s us ignore that we are the problem.
- Comment on Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon 1 month ago:
Couldn’t disagree more.
The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you’re using. That means, if I’m running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I’m platforming everyone who has contact with my website.
And I’m not going to want to platform a lot of people. I’m not going to want to pay to host their posts. I’m not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don’t run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites.
- Comment on A new way to describe the Fediverse and its opposition to Big Tech 2 months ago:
the Fediverse may be missing a clear, cohesive narrative.
I think this is because it’s not a clear, cohesive place. Developers keep trying to make it look like centralized social media, but I don’t think that’s going to work in the end; it certainly isn’t working now. Trying to dress it up as something that it’s not, just because that thing is currently popular with the masses, does nothing but set us up for failure.
Mastodon is a second rate Twitter, Lemmy is a second rate Reddit, etc. The existing model of trying to make all of this look like one, single, central location is uncanny, and people notice that.
Lemmy’s got some good theming options, and the templates are there to do custom theming work. There’s the potential for some real website branding there, in that. But if you look at Mastodon, the biggest player in the game right now, the developers go out of their way to homogenize the Mastodon experience. Every Masto website looks fundamentally identical to all of the others. It’s doing everything it can to make it look like “Mastodon” is a place on the Internet, in the same way that “WordPress” is not.
And that’s a problem. ActivityPub doesn’t really support that fiction.
Some ideas have been floated around in the microblog space, and tested in some places. Having ‘Local’ be the default timeline has worked out pretty well on Catodon. Strong community theming has kept tenforward.social on topic, with most people there discussing Star Trek. The art-based Masto instances work well, and seem to be fairly sticky. But generic, general “Mastodon” is failing to inspire folks, and lacks the pop culture discussion that the general public wants. Journalists have bounced, due to audience engagement tapering off. Communities of colour keep getting chased off of the big instances.
Attempts to occupy the “general” space and branch out into niche interests aren’t working. The focus really needs to be shifted back in the other direction.
- Comment on some fediverse and open web thoughts 2 months ago:
I’ve been arguing for over 2 years now that the actual value proposition of the fediverse is Community+. There are several Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are built around this – tenforward.social is a Star Trek themed and focused Mastodon site, where the vast majority of local chatter is focused on Star Trek, and startrek.website, beehaw.org, midwest.social, ttrpg.network, etc. are all community or interest focused Lemmy-based websites – and they all seem to actually work in that model. People aren’t signing up to the Star Trek Lemmy site to talk primarily about Call of Duty or American politics. They get their Star Trek community, and they can engage in those general interest discussions that are being hosted elsewhere, and everybody wins.
The key to growth, then, really is getting enough special interest and community websites up and running on the fediverse, and letting people discover the the power of being connected to people on other social media websites without having to sign up over there, too.
If Bluesky was using ActivityPub, there’d be no issue here right now. We’d all be able to get Community+Bluesky and be all the happier for it. But they’ve created their own system that’s prohibitively expensive for the average person to utilize without having a direct connection to Bluesky’s hardware, meaning the control forever remains in the hands of corporate interests and the rich. And that’s just a play at being the next Amazon. We’re either locked out, or we’re under their thumb. And that’s not really where any of us who are engaged with this fediverse project wanted to be.
- Comment on What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? 2 months ago:
It also points to what the best use of a federated content sharing network is, and it’s not “create something that looks like it has unfettered access to some canonical whole”. It’s small networks of users with related interests having the majority of their discussions with each other, while also being able to pull content from other interest groups they may be interested in.
Like, a… to re-use a random example I pulled out of my ass in some other thread… Mazda enthusiast forum, where most people are talking about their Mazdas, but also one person’s really into the New York Yankees, and another also cares about their Dodge truck. The usage case is 80% local discussion, 20% off-site.
The currently attempted model is “everything is general interest, and you have to search for your niche, and it could be anywhere”, because that’s how it works on Twitter, or even on Reddit (subreddit squatting, subreddit splits, and early millennial internet humour come to mind). But it’s all being done to disguise what the fediverse is, and make it look like what already exists, rather than trying to usher in something different. And it just… can’t compete that way.
- Comment on Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of 2 months ago:
Do the volunteers want people to use what they make?
Because, I’ll be honest, based on how people on the fediverse talk about people coming from Twitter or Reddit or wherever, I’m not convinced that they do. Rather, they just want to pat themselves on the back for being high minded developers.
- Comment on Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of 2 months ago:
Everybody on Reddit is praising all the moderation capabilities of Bluesky
Bluesky is an unmoderated space. People don’t seem to know what “moderation” is anymore. It’s not the ability for end users to block other end users.
block lists and starter packs
This is a bigger issue than it seems, because the people building and using the fediverse care very strongly about things like trust and consent, and so discussions around stuff like this get stifled.
It’s not a technological issue with Mastodon. It’s a social one, with the fediverse at large. The place is swarming with people who will openly attack you for making the place more comfortable to less technically adept users, because they themselves were bullied off of Twitter.
Like, this is the real issue the fediverse can’t get traction. People will overcome other hurdles, and develop work arounds for other limitations. But being treated as unwelcome tourists by the people who are already here? No, they won’t do that.
The way you can verify your user by using your own domain as a handle.
This is a core feature of the fediverse. Run your own server, use your own domain. And mastodon offers secondary validation by adding an ID string to your website that it can check and verify.
- Comment on What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? 2 months ago:
I feel as if it runs against the concept of federation itself.
So, you believe that operating a website using Lemmy obligates you to host content from other sites that you don’t want to have a relationship with?
Because the concept of ‘federation’ does not come with the expectation that you abandon editorial control over what you host. That’s an expectation you’re projecting on it.
- Comment on What is the difference between lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works? 2 months ago:
we all get the same content anyways, aside from defederation?
We don’t, though. We get whatever content people on our chosen instance have subscribed to. Even without blanket server bans, there are Lemmy-based websites that your host has never heard of, hosting content you do not have access to. Someone from your server has to introduce those sites, and subscribe to the communities on those sites, for your server to have their content.
The fediverse is subscription based. Shit doesn’t get sent around unless it’s specifically asked for.
- Comment on Mastodon's federation consistency is laughably bad. 2 months ago:
You’ve misidentified how a decentralized, federated network of content sharing works. Like many, many people, you seem to have conceptualized it as a hub-and-spoke model, with a centralized data store and remote terminals.
But it’s actually a subscription-based mesh network, where each update is only sent to places that have specifically requested it. Importantly, at the moment at least, things are not forwarded along to other servers due to secondary contact. If someone on my site (A) subscribes to you (B), and someone on a third website © comments on something you posted, if nobody on my website subscribes to C, C does not send that comment to my website, and your website does not forward it along, either.
There’s some buzz about forwarding replies and stuff like that possibly getting worked out. But even then, being on the fediverse means making peace with the idea that there’s no single source of truth for the whole network. You won’t see it all, ever. And it’s likely, and possibly even desirable, that the network splinters into loosely connected islands. But that can’t happen if what people keep demanding is a centralized service with a single benevolent dictator. And the single dictator will stop being benevolent at some point.
They always do.