OpenStars
@OpenStars@discuss.online
- Comment on I find it funny that American republicans seem to want a king, when the definition of republicanism is a government without a king. 2 days ago:
They are also “patriots” and “Christians” (love they neighbor - who is that? everyone. what does it look like? not… like… that) and “smurt” and “efficient” and so on.
- Comment on Frogge 4 days ago:
I see your… whatever that is, and raise you a honey badger don’t care.
- Comment on Frogge 4 days ago:
Ikr, like OP couldn’t have waited a couple days!? 🤪
- Comment on [Lemmy Social] Join Lemmy istances/communities (share useful links🔻) | Fediverse 2 weeks ago:
For anyone in the USA, I highly recommend the Discuss.Online instance - it has a great server and admin team, as evidenced by its fantastic uptime stats, plus is quite welcoming to casual discussions. I bounced around a couple of different instances before making this one my primary home and have had zero regrets since.
Also if anyone wants to see a peek of what’s coming up in the future, while it’s just shy of being fully ready for the masses yet, PieFed is an amazing project that will soon enough overtake Lemmy. It already has tons of features that Lemmy lacks - like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, an absolute ton of customization options, and much more - even if there are a few still missing in reverse (like “searching” for content, user account tagging, the ability to preview a message prior to sending, receipt of notifications is quite buggy… - for early adopters though, it’s almost fully functional, especially for someone experienced in knowing how to fall back to Lemmy when necessary).
There are lots of exciting things happening on the Fediverse lately!:-)
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
But - and this is crucial - someone isn’t going to be able to block things unless they first have an account. It’s like saying that a particular general location (like a city or a nation) has no crime… if only you avoid the “bad” parts (but where are those even, and how are you supposed to know especially before you get into them - also, are there even any parts that aren’t bad? it’s a valid question, to someone who does not yet know?)
So you are correct in the sense that Lemmy != “Alt-Left Nazi”. What I said though is that we are an Alt-Left Nazi “bar”. We are not totally that thing - some of us are simply here, hanging out, having a drink, doing our own thing(s). But there are Nazis here (or rather in our case, the Alt-Left instead of the Alt-Right).
And that political content is everywhere. Well, not literally, but like if you browse by All or enjoy any kind of “news” or especially “memes”, then it’s really super difficult to block out. Someone used to Reddit simply won’t bother learning how to navigate around the Alt-Left spaces. We who use
ArchLinux btw are different - perhaps less sane?:-P - Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
There’s a reason the current Lemmy sourcecode is named 0.19.8 - this is beta version software, awaiting very many changes to reach completion. Heck, reports don’t even reach moderators on remote instances yet, as the whole drama with 196 is showing (they left the mod reports there for days, then got mad when the instance admin did what she said she would and cleaned up in the absence of the mods being willing to do anything about the situation).
But people either don’t know Rust (it’s reputedly difficult), don’t want to deal with those developers, or simply don’t want to help with the writing of code. Hence the creation of K/Mbin, PieFed, and Sublinks to deal with the former pair of issues, though not catching up to feature parity with Lemmy yet (except PieFed is already quite ahead, in some ways even though not ready for the masses in some fewer but more foundational and crucial ways).
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
Yeah… I’m actually okay with censorship so long as it is clearly explained in advance and fairly applied - then again, I don’t necessarily want to join it either, just saying that I’m okay that it exists… over there somewhere (away from me:-).
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
If LW helped you migrate from Reddit to the Threadiverse until you knew more what you were looking for and could find a true home in lemm.ee that meets your needs better, then both of them sound awesome at their respective roles to me.:-)
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
Mods are generally not going to surrender their power, especially as differences in moderation techniques is what most often leads to new community formation in the first place:-).
Other than PieFed’s Categories of Communities, the only other ways I know of to make Topic aggregations like that is to either find and switch to using an app that provides such (I have heard of at least one, but I don’t recall which:-), or else have many Lemmy accounts and constantly switch between them - like one for News, another for Memes, etc. Or you can browse by All, and see mostly only memes and news from the USA all the time:-P.
But PieFed provides numerous methods handle this: not only Categories but also Topics to aid community discovery, and you can trigger Notifications for anything - a person, a comment, post, or even an entire community.
One day very soon I strongly believe that PieFed will surpass Lemmy in terms of usability. It already has in so many ways, though not quite all.
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
I’m surprised to hear about the slowness issue - I think this is the first time that I have, though I am definitely spoiled at Discuss.Online that has such a great technical admin (he also is the one who was developing Sublinks, before life and a baby intervened:-). Is lemm.ee much faster than lemmy.world for you?
Tbf there is legit fear in the USA that Trump will start to place bans or at least watchlists on social media outlets that Musk does not make money off of. Then again, I thought that LW wasn’t really associated with the USA in any way besides having a bunch of users from it, and anyway you have found a perfect solution to the problem - if they don’t want it, go somewhere else that does allow what you need.:-)
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
At a guess, bc it doesn’t have that many communities on it?
Efforts are underway to change that but yeah it definitely lacks the same punch as others - like sh.itjust.works has 5 communities that are each larger, some by almost 3 times, than the absolute largest one on lemm.ee.
That instance seems not so much a “source” of content across the Fediverse as a “destination” for posts made to communities elsewhere.
Then again, very little else compares to Lemmy.World in that regard - it has another 10 communities each larger, some twice as large, as sh.itjust.works does. It would be healthier for the network effects to split that up a bit more… but fortunately their upgrade process over the next few months should help a little.
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
If we don’t grow then we’ll shrink merely due to attrition. Or perhaps I’m overblowing things out of proportion, but I definitely am saying that we won’t simply grow as if by magic - that would take effort, and part of that is making this place welcoming enough for others besides ourselves to want to come here. Which we really struggle with, despite how great this space truly is, in part bc perhaps the people that we most want to come here - comic artists and the like - are not like us.
In particular they may not care about politics at all, or even have a different stance than most of us. I mean centrist, bc Alt-Right MAGATs can just fuck all the way off! So… do we want to remain as we are, or change to become more inclusive and invite them in? We can do whatever we want, but it takes being honest and then making it happen. And right now we are an Alt-Left Nazi bar, just as X is an Alt-Right one, leaving the biggest place in the middle as… sigh, Reddit.
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
Well, now you are on a firm basis to chant being #4!? 😜
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
People used to say how Lemmy.World had ~80% of all users on the Fediverse. I’m not sure if that was older defunct accounts or what. But it does illustrate one thing: does it even matter where user accounts are located, when the federation model means that someone can access the entire thing, minus only whatever someone’s instance has chosen to defederate from?
On Mastodon that matters greatly, due to the discoverability aspect, but here on the Threadiverse (or whatever we want to call ourselves to distinguish the forum vs. microblogging nature of our spaces, accessible via Lemmy, some app, Mbin, Friendica, PieFed, Tesseract, perhaps Sublinks one day, etc.)? On that note, my instances (Kbin.social, then StarTrek.Website, Discuss.Online, and now a mix between that and PieFed.social) have mostly been extremely tiny, but I never felt like I was excluded, being able to browse by All.
In fact quite the opposite! Having wandered into Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and thereby exposing myself to their echo chambers, right inside the very ones hosted on their own instances but due to federation, hosted likewise on my instance as well, I strongly wished that the Fediverse would have been a little less connected - or at least if it has offered me some warning! (The sidebar text is only shown on a “community” page, not an individual post when arrived at via browsing All.)
And then there’s communities to consider - so many are on Lemmy.World, but how much should that matter, vs. the users? Moderation though is primarily something related to communities. So like sh.itjust.works doesn’t have all that many, there’s e.g. !whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ca also, like there’s !pcgaming@lemmy.ca and !canada@lemmy.ca, yet these general-purpose instances have so very many users, even if the communities themselves are mostly on lemmy.world.
If lemmy.world were to go down though, we’d lose a LOT, at least in the short term. Archived copies of older posts would remain cached on remote instances, but a new community would have to be created somewhere in order to allow continued posting.
So I don’t think that the Threadiverse is all that distributed - but I also don’t think that it matters for us?
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
Wouldn’t total posts bias towards older instances though, counting posts over time rather than activity today? So then good point that sh.itjust.works is so high up by both metrics:-).
While lemmy.ml continues to fall - by active users I think I recall it was #3 at some point, then #4, while now it’s #5, where based on the gap below it, it seems likely to remain since users are now more distributed than previously (which is a good thing!:-).
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
It is far worse than that imho, sadly.
For one, we are most definitely actively getting smaller, both since the Rexodus and also since just earlier this year. I think people are returning to Reddit but wherever they are going it is not here. We lack sufficient content for them, despite having the good apps that Reddit used to. This is software built by tankies, and has authoritarian purposes baked into the core.
And for another, a Google search for “Lemmy”, after the singer, pulls up as the top instance lemmy.ml, which notably uses a Local rather than All feed by default. So it’s just absolutely full of posts hating on the USA, UK, Germany, and anyone else who opposes the interests of Russia and China and North Korea. THIS is what “Lemmy” is, to people who don’t use DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine.
It may already be too late to reverse this trend: we lost the momentum of the Rexodus, and we won’t even be honest about who and what we are now, which would be a prerequisite for change - we are a Nazi bar.
An example of our authoritarianism is the modding tools here. The fact that we have a modlog at all is awesome, but the fact that it just says “mod” rather than who removed something, while simultaneously offering no modmail to communicate with whoever did it in order to ask why, is not. Also reports don’t federate. Lemmy was built by the admins of lemmy.ml, and if we want more of a non-authoritarian experience - e.g. a modmail - it seems we would have to build such ourselves?
Also, on Reddit (at least, prior to the Rexodus, I dunno if it still does today?) when a post is removed the post link remains viable, and people can still have discussions within it. On Lemmy, a capricious mod can remove something entirely. Imagine writing our a long response (such as I’ve done here:-), only to find after all of that that the post has been removed in the meantime and I can’t even respond to the person I was talking to, even if they were not the OP. Nor can I even finish reading through the comments - they are just, poof, gone.
As authoritarian as Huffman made Reddit into, we are so very similar - not at the top, obviously, bc open source makes all the difference, but when it comes down to the actual user experience, e.g. how a Redditor will look at us and judge this place to be, based on how we will treat them (and I haven’t even begun here to get into how centrists from the USA will feel in this leftist dominated environment!:-P). We have the seeds to be more, but we won’t make the computer code to make that happen.
- Comment on [sh.it.post] We're #5! We're #5! 4 weeks ago:
Personally I would go with Monthly Active Users, e.g. since Hexbear has managed to run off a good fraction of its users over time (which lemmy.world is in the process of doing as well).
This puts sh.itjust.works as #4, which it’s been for a good long while, above Lemmy.ml and Hexbear and nearly all other instances.
Link, but the URL does not preserve the options shown, so you have to resort by Monthly Active Users.
- Comment on How long does it take for a quantum torpedo to cover a distance of 12 parsecs? 5 weeks ago:
While Star Wars fans understand that near a black hole those two concepts begin to converge… and even trade places?
- Comment on Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon 2 months ago:
Lemmy.World (LW) is a nice place: ~80% of the entire Fediverse is there, and it has some of the best communities and least trouble connecting with those communities of all instances.
On the other hand, using LW goes against the entire spirit of decentralization that is one of the primary hallmarks of the Fediverse. So I definitely agree that you may want to explore some additional options. If you are adamant about being defederated from nothing, some instances to look at include Lemm.ee (the #3 largest instance after LW and lemmynsfw.com, see lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for more, and for best results sort by Active Users) or lemmy.today. The #4 instance sh.itjust.works is also quite nice I hear. #6 Hexbear.net is a troll instance and while #5 lemmy.ml pretends to be leftist it is actually tankie (I hate that term as it is pejorative, but they really truly do deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually happened, as in that anyone actually died in it, so it does fit). You may want to find a regional instance, like Discuss.Online is in the USA, or a language one like feddit.org is a German/English mix, or a themed one like Lemmy.zip is for “tech, PCs, and gaming”. Pay attention to the uptime stats, that’s an important one for me. Maybe for an app that can grab content in a manner that doesn’t always have to be live it could be less so?
Btw in the future, while I have never heard of that app name, in the webpage UI you can go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings “Import and export your account settings as JSON”. Choose Export, and then wherever you want to set up a new (perhaps an Alt?) account choose Import and give it that file. Messages sent to your old account will not follow you, i.e. there is no way to set up forwarding yet, but at least your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred. Even if you have to do this once from the web UI, this will definitely affect whatever app you use after that.:-)
Oh wow this is a lot. I should have just made a post about this - maybe I will!?:-P
- Comment on Technology Connections' thoughts on Mastodon 2 months ago:
On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.
You can read more about it here: pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).
I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.
You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)
- Comment on Privacy Difference: Threads vs Mastodon 2 months ago:
[Breathes in…] it’s a breath of fresh air.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 3 months ago:
Speak for yourself! I want it known that *I* for one, am *very* immature!:-P
Ah, that part “without rational grounds to do so” makes such a huge difference doesn’t it? :-D
Like e.g.:
Ignoring all the genocide done by Russia, and China, and North Korea, but hyper-focusing on the not even direct but mere indirect aid to the actual genocide-doing people, and even then painting with an extremely broad brush and saying that nobody who thinks otherwise exists within the group on that “other side”.
I disagree though that it is directed at “random” people. Hexbears yes (it’s kinda their whole thing!:-P), perhaps Lemmygrad.ml too (whose content definitely appears on your instance) - though importantly, Lemmy.World (which this community is based in) defederates from both of those, and has ~80% of the monthly active users btw (thus the userbase “here” only partially but mostly may not be thought of to include those 2 instances, depending on how you look at it?) - and yes also that mod of Lemmy.ml who told the person to kill themselves seemed fairly random as well (yet all the more troublesome since lemmy.ml is federated by nearly every instance, the only exceptions being tiny single-admin ones). But the above image, note from the URL that it is from lemmy.ml, seems not entirely “random” to me - it is instead very much “directed”, at a particular group. As that style of propaganda tends very much to be… not “random” at all!
Although conservative Alt-Right sources appeared on Reddit as well, so both sites have a hefty amount of “alternative fact” sources. Moderation efforts are a more limiting resource on Lemmy so it makes sense that there is more of it here, overall. So long as we allow the lure of communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml to sway us as we retain federation with those instances that not only allow but propagate that content, from the very site instance admins themselves, the situation will remain - the only recourse being for people to either leave their instances and go somewhere that allows defederation (either instance-wide such as the tiny lemmy.cafe or quokk.au; or switch to Mbin or PieFed that allows full content blocking of any instance that any user specifies, without needing admin approval).
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 3 months ago:
Here’s a whole playlist from that same author that is amazing: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrttDbiWQ1XO1iHAszAsPo…. The first one there will probably fuck you up though - it did me - as paradigm shattering is supposed to do, but hey, I did want to warn you in advance (to be absolutely clear: yes it is SOOO worth it!).
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 3 months ago:
more mature and can actually discuss complex topics
I mean… well okay, more than Reddit yeah, for sure, in the sense that here at least it is possible at all.
Witch hunting is becoming a worse problem here than in Reddit.
How so? Genuinely I’m wondering lately if I’m causing issues. Generally that phrase presumes that the “witches” do not exist (I … thought?), but e.g. tankies (literally: those who deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre ever took place, like with actual fatalities rather than being staged or some such) actually do exist. Anyway, I wonder if it’s a natural reaction to the contentious atmosphere that has developed. Like all it takes is one person to walk into Chapotraphouse unawares, and bam, now you have radicalized someone against the bullies on the Fediverse.
Oh, or you might mean the overzealous modding of certain instances? Though I think that predates the Rexodus, so it’s not “becoming a problem” so much as it was here long before most of us that are now here came over. e.g. here’s a post from 3 years ago with a very familiar tone: lemmy.ml/post/206994. But I would argue that it is as true now as it was then: people don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of intolerance, hence tend to be intolerant right back, and yet that is as it should be.
Anyway, the Fediverse has a lot more technical work to get done before it can be more palatable to most people, without HEAVY blocking - as that 3-year-old post shows, the issue isn’t going away anytime soon, hence the friction between mutually opposing ideological constructs (e.g. “people in the USA should just die”, vs… not that) is only going to spark more conflicts. We’d best settle in and get used to it.
- Comment on What do you like/dislike about lemmy? 3 months ago:
Not on Lemmy proper but both Mbin and PieFed have that already. e.g. visit piefed.social, click 3 horizontal bars -> Topics.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 3 months ago:
Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. PieFed.social.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 3 months ago:
For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See !fedigrow@lemm.ee.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 3 months ago:
On PieFed, although I’m not sure what I think about it, posts with more than one user-defined threshold will get auto-collapsed, and then a second such threshold allows it to be hidden entirely.
So two people with opposing preferences could browse the same community but see it differently. The one wanting to see everything being allowed to do so - rather than that being the arbitrary decision of a mod (team), and the content hidden away in a mod log somewhere else, mostly inaccessible. Whereas the one who didn’t want to “waste” their time, and rather trusting the feedback of the community, could have those collapsed or hidden if they so choose.
This allows democratization of the modding process: every voter is equally a mod as the next. Or maybe some trusted members more so than others? (But if so, it can’t be TOO much higher than the others, or it could become overwhelming)
The major pitfall I see is if votes are allowed outside of the community, then it’s vulnerable to being brigaded easily by a larger outside force.
Still, it’s fascinating to see these experiments actually happen in that software that is available right now! e.g. on PieFed.social.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 3 months ago:
Genuinely… why though? Why not post once a week rather than per day? Or per month? Who is counting? If people want to join then they will, if not then they won’t, but either way will one post per day for the last six months make any difference to their decision vs. one post per week?
I am no good at what I do. I try to enjoy it anyway.:-) Do with that what you will.
- Comment on Stop whining. Do it yourself. 3 months ago:
It is a niche topic, here, where we all use Linux btw (or at least we keep our mouths shut if we don’t, for fear of being mobbed:-D).
We talk about what we want to talk about here. Linux, memes, TV, uh… Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, beans, jeans, not pooping - and I think that’s pretty much it, except for politics, am I missing anything? 😁
