OpenStars
@OpenStars@discuss.online
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I took a quick look and it seems that SDF is not defederated from virtually ANYTHING at all (just one instance that as it was dying got taken over by spam) - not even the known CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) ones, nor the most controversial triad across the entire Threadiverse: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and the one that the main Lemmy software developers also run, lemmy.ml.
One time I said something in hexbear.net along the lines that Biden, who was then President, at least lowered gas prices, so at least there was that - and my inbox just BLEW UP with replies streaming in for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. Then I did something similar at lemmygrad.ml with the same result. They are purely engagement trolls, enjoying their argumentation style of… well, as you said it. They are basically 4chan.
And it is not like I am on a campaign to wipe out their very existence, but neither do I want to recommend the Threadiverse/Fediverse to people if that is the kind of experience that those people will receive - and then look weirdly at me for having recommended it to them in the first place. There are stories aplenty on r/RedditAlternatives saying exactly as you: they came, they got disgusted with what they saw, and they immediately noped out, heading right back to Reddit. People here can be kind - whereas on Reddit that is extremely rare, especially in the larger subs. Traffic here is low and you can feel like you will be heard - on Reddit you are buried beneath an avalanche of thousands of comments, some of which are proven bots (repeating identical patterns of messages spaced years apart, just from different account names but they are word-for-word and it is beyond any rational thought of credulity to think that they could be otherwise - e.g. if you repeated this, my entire message here back to me, not even just this sentence or paragraph but the entire thing, then I would surmise that you had copied and pasted it, not responded organically, and would not believe you if you claimed otherwise, especially upon finding out that you literally could get paid irl money $$$ for having done so, to increase “engagement stats” and therefore advertising revenue).
I doubt you will remain long on SDF - the Lemmy software has very few features to help you deal with such trolling, although you can help reduce the clutter a little bit by blocking the instance. Unfortunately this does not “block” the “instance”, instead only muting the communities on it - leaving the users there free to reply to you in other communities, triggering notifications, blowing up your inbox, and otherwise wasting your time. You will convert nobody there as they exist in their own artificial echo chamber realities, and instead you will become more like them.
I recommend checking out PieFed - the list of features that it has that Lemmy lacks is long and it is FANTASTIC! e.g. polls, flairs (both user and post), Topics/Feeds that are both user-customizeable and shareable, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., but most importantly the ability to block all users from an instance, which that one feature alone silences I am not even kidding basically 99% of all trolling negative experiences on the entire platform. See more at join.piefed.social e.g. a list of instances at join.piefed.social/try/. Or if you want to stay with Lemmy (but… why though?) and are in the USA then discuss.online or if in Europe then feddit.org - neither of which defederate from lemmy.ml nor allow you to personally do so unlike PieFed, but both of which at least defederate from both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.
Unless you are also a troll:-P, but the above is still sound advice imho.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
I said that journalists said that Mastodon is bad. Personally I love PieFed and the Lemmy software isn’t half bad, plus both are improving, the former swiftly and the latter slowly but does grow. I don’t know what is holding Mastodon back, as I do not code in those languages. I only tried to help shine light on a diagnosis that could help us move forward past whatever it is that represents people’s major obstacle to joining Mastodon, or yeah perhaps the Threadiverse instead would be more to their liking.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
You are, intentionally or otherwise, distorting what I said. Who cares about “me” - yes I stopped recommending Fediverse tools bc it’s useless to do so especially when the developers themselves don’t even seem to care about making it a good platform to use for others besides themselves, meh it’s their code and their right to do whatever they wish - but anyway I’m just one person.
What I said though was that journalists are writing articles saying how much Mastodon sucks. That could have been listened and responded to, but instead the concept was attempted to be buried, and the position of the person offering such rejected - exactly as you are doing here to me now btw, as if consent of the governed should not matter somehow, and they all just need to suck it up, get with the program, and use the same platform regardless of what it personally costs them? That btw is also the identical position of X as well.
I even included a link to one example of such an article. There are MANY others.
I hope you choose to be curious, rather than think that you already have the answer. There is so much more that I think that you are missing here. We seem to not have the same goal at all if I would like to entice people to use the platform but you would rather tell people that they “must” - that approach will not work out well in the end, imho, and you do not get to decide what is “better” in the minds of other people. If others likewise display it, that kind of hubris will continue to leave Mastodon in the forgotten bin of history. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Ikr? However that is not politically expedient hence major pushback exists to even do much as diagnose that issue much less deal with it. Even so, I (successfully);petitioned Discuss.Online to defederate from Hexbear.net, although in that I also asked for this instance to be removed from lemmy.ml as well, but that portion was rejected. Lemmy.ml is STRONGLY anti-Western, so whether its philosophies are correct or wrong (they are wrong imho:-P) either way it is a barrier for specially Western people who check us out and then nope out back to Reddit.
Even after that partial success though I basically gave up that idea since Lemmy does not allow for true blocking of all users on an instance, so nowadays use PieFed (which does offer that ability, as well as SO MANY other additional features) 99% of the time and only occasionally check my old Discuss.Online Lemmy alt. So at this point I’ve lost any hope whatsoever for “Lemmy” to become mainstream, but if there is even a sliver of hope left for that then I am putting it all in on PieFed rather than Lemmy. Perhaps I am wrong but I doubt it.
But it too moves slowly to catch up to being something that mainstream normies will want to use. I am making codeberg requests to try to help it along, even if I cannot contribute code directly. I understand the position of a mainstream person though: we here are fairly (and sometimes even extremely) toxic, especially to newcomers, and all the more so if they are non-techical. It would require much more extensive moderation to kick out people being mean to newcomers, which actually PieFed offers some great tools for that, and yet at the same time a level of traffic that makes coming to the Threadiverse worthwhile. Those two goals seem incompatible though, so realistically I don’t expect it will ever happen. Still we have to try!?
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Celebrities are told by some people to go to Mastodon though? Perhaps they think that Bluesky being a more centralized server will not be prey to the issue of impersonation as Mastodon is? I do also think that the call to go to Bluesky is being received better. If you read articles espousing that call they are like “come check it out, it’s so fantastic!” whereas the calls to Mastodon were like the calls to vote for the not-Right party in the USA each time that Donald Trump ran: "hey, Mastodon sucks, and let me list all the reasons why, but here’s why you need to eat your vegetables even though you don’t want to: X is so much worse (except it feels so good but… we really should do the moral choice, I/we don’t want to but we should…).
People basically laid down the line saying: fix this handful of things and then I will join (perhaps that has just 2 items on it - the impersonation and discoverability issues - or perhaps there is more). But then Mastodon ignored that demand, and now here people are saying “can’t you see what a nice man we are?” as if consent does/should not matter but it does! If we really want people to use Mastodon, teach yourself Ruby on Rails and Typescript/JavaScript and get busy making the implementation better to use - it’s the only way, or else people are just going to use what (they think) already works: Bluesky.
Ask yourself why people all flock to the same platform. The network effect is real yo, and not to be brushed aside lightly.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Thank you for that context. Perhaps then one day Mastodon can try to hope to pull people away from Bluesky after people have given up on Mastodon and on X and spent all that time and energy moving to Bluesky, and then don’t want to have to move still yet again. I didn’t really use Digg but that seems to me to be an apt analogy where people gave up on it and seeing nothing better switched to Reddit, and then finally we here moved to Kbin, now Mbin, and/or Lemmy, and now PieFed as an option as well. Except so many remained on Reddit.
Once people move to Bluesky, they will stay there and resist moving elsewhere. Many would RATHER move to Mastodon, if only it would make its experience actually usable,. Especially by journalists who then write negative things about their experiences trying to use it and how frustrating it all was for them.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Also as I understand it, searching for content is really poor. e.g. docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/ says:
To allow you to discover potentially interesting content, Mastodon provides a way to browse all public posts. There is no global shared state between all servers, so there is no way to browse all public posts. When you browse Live Feeds > Other Servers, you see public posts from across the fediverse. Your server shows posts it knows about through various methods. Most posts come from accounts that other users on your server follow.
PieFed + Lemmy + Mbin has the same problem: someone must first join a community before it can be “discovered” by others on that same instance. Which typically means that someone must know about it - somehow? - via other means, and then go hunting specifically for it. I have tried to be the one who braved this trail for many a community on smaller instances such as Discuss.Online and PieFed.social (back when both were smaller than now), but not everyone - even scientists - are as technically minded as to want to deal with such complexities.
So if let’s say some University decides to set up their own Mastodon instance, by default it will not know most of what is available out there in the wider Fediverse, and anyone using that instance will get frustrated when it seems so very empty to them.
And the voting thing. And the impersonation issues. And so very, Very, VERY many other issues as well. I am not trying to criticize Mastodon here so much as I am advocating that will people please open their eyes and have some EMPATHY: mainstream normies do not enjoy using Mastodon. This is what is driving them to BlueSky where they say that it is FUN to use. We can cry about it, whine about it, do all the purity testing that we want and downvote me for saying this, but at the end of the day these people will either remain on X/Reddit or else move to BlueSky, but they will not, they will not, THEY WILL NOT move to Mastodon. They do not want it, and at the end of the day their consent is actually required if it were to happen.
Eww gross, I just looked up what programming language Mastodon uses: it is Ruby on Rails and Typescript/JavaScript front-end. No wonder it is so slow to be developed!! (not so many people use those languages) PieFed in contrast is written using the extremely popular Python language (+ more pure HTML, some CSS, and JavaScript), so at this point I wonder if (a modified?) PieFed would be used more by scientists sooner than Mastodon if the latter will not be able to catch up to the former’s pace of development? :-P
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
If only Mastodon would spend time making the platform more usable, perhaps they would. e.g. the impersonation issue, which is much less of a problem on a non-federated platform, plus Bluesky takes a highly aggressive stance against it.
Also the enormous discoverability issue on Mastodon has lead people to say that “Mastodon seemed to actively discourage discoverability.” This article seems very worth reading btw, as many of the same issues plague the Threadiverse as well - hostility to non-technical normies, hostility towards anyone less ideologically pure than oneself, hostility towards… wait, am I sensing a pattern here!?!:-P Early adoptors (who are proficient in using Arch Linux btw) are quite a very different crowd and while yes scientists are smart, they are also smart enough to realize that moving from a place where their work can be seen to a place where it will not be is not a very productive endeavor, in the short-term, for themselves.
- Comment on We hate AI because it's everything we hate 2 months ago:
When technology allows us to do something that we could not before - like cross an ocean or fly through the sky a distance that would previously have taken years and many people dying during the journey, or save lives - then it unquestionably offers a benefit.
But when it simply eases some task, like using a car rather than horse to travel, and requires discipline to integrate into our lives in a balanced manner, then it becomes a source of potential danger that we would allow ourselves to misuse it.
Even agriculture, which allows those to eat who put forth no effort into making the food grow, or even in preparing it for consumption.
This is what CEOs are pushing on us, because for one number must go up, but also genuinely many believe they want what it has to offer, not quite having thought through what it would mean if they got it (or more to the point others did, empathy not being their strongest attribute).
- Comment on We hate AI because it's everything we hate 2 months ago:
Everyone who uses AI is slowly committing suicide, check ✅
- Comment on I'm curious. 3 months ago:
Ironically they would have been happier if they had remained ignorant of such matters…
- Comment on Pls halp 3 months ago:
I hope OP is okay…
spoiler
(for those not getting it, recall the definition of “OP”!)
- Comment on Ed Sheer-enough 4 months ago:
So should I like… downvote this one then? 🤪
- Comment on On trees... 5 months ago:
And it’s not even one creature or even type of creature. Look up rhizobium.
Tbf, as we learn more about our gut microbiomes, it turns out that humans are that way as well. Maybe that’s why we have the thoughts in our heads vs. the feelings in our guts… (no that’s actually not it at all, except… isn’t it though?).
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
I got busy and did not respond sooner, but wanted to say that I think you are correct: it’s not merely the listing of Topics, which e.g. an RSS reader could do, but rather their ranking of those topics that was an enormous part of made Reddit so popular.
Although didn’t some forums offer that functionality, even if not all?
So as you say it’s the Threaded content, ranked by users as to priority order, that people want to see.
This ofc is all justification after the fact for us here - for whatever reason, people decided on that name, whether they should have or not, and I guess now the question is would a better name be worth the pain of switching? :-)
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don’t use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren’t shown, and downvotes).
I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.
Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.
But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
Topicverse sounds kinda nice.
To be fair, people were using Threadiverse before Meta revealed that they were working on their Threads. And now they do not want to switch?
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
Thank you for your contribution:-).
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
The word itself sounds nice, but is the least inclusive.
That’s like saying that all of these conversations that we all have are on Lemmy.World? Sure, it’s between 50 and 80% true (users and the most active communities, respectively, including this one we are in now), but it misses a ton of nuance and detail there.
PieFed, Mbin, and now nodebb, with others on the way (flarum, perhaps Sublinks) also exist.
So why call this all “Lemmy”, when that’s only a part - granted, by far the majority portion - of the whole?
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
Bc a network of forum boards?
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
Might be too obvious:-).
Alternatively, The Linux hangout.
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
Yay Jayne was fairly simplistic. The dude barely had any morality bc he was more animal than man. So in that way he played a “straight man” to Mal’a greater level of complexity? He even gave voice to what many of the others were thinking, including Mal himself, but they had the grace to not say it.
True evil requires a minimum amount of “character” in order to achieve anything at all - great or otherwise. So it’s less like Jayne was “bad” and the government was “good”, and more like Jayne was simplisticly animal-like, while the true evils rose up much higher. With great power comes great responsibility, or whatever.
Jayne is like a wall painting in the background - he’s scenery?
As far as Whedon, I dunno, I like a lot of his works, I don’t like his character. The two aren’t entirely connected in my mind, though perhaps they should be more so, I just don’t know.
On the other hand, wasn’t all of this pretty much happening even while the show was still in production? You mentioned that it had “aged”, so I wasn’t coming at this from a perspective of bad show vs. good show, but from it having been a good show where something external caused its goodness to have tanked. If it had been bad at the start, then we wouldn’t say that it “aged”, just that the show sucked. Which it didn’t… and yet, also… didn’t it always though? That yin and yang seemed to me to have not been so much changed by the passage of time?
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
I feel like that’s more just human nature, which occurs everywhere.
Also, you still retain the right to say whatever you want… though conversely, why then shouldn’t the other side of every single conversation likewise have the right to opt out of it?
Unfortunately Lemmy does not offer great tools (though PieFed offers many more!) to close the enormous gap between “must federate everything” vs. “defederation, thus no longer federates anything at all”. Like there’s a “user instance block”, which doesn’t actually block instances nor users on them. So if someone doesn’t like something, block it is then, bc the tools themselves offer nothing else. We are somehow more authoritian than even Reddit was over here!? Yeah, bc Reddit at least notifies you when your content is removed, and offers a modmail to communicate about it, plus a removed post remains accessible to anyone with a link, but not so wrt Lemmy, which shows a 404 not found, please try again later message when a post is removed by a mod. Seriously, “try again”?! - why, is the mod going to reconsider for some reason?
But… it is what it is.
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
So far, mainly from this post bc the poll has such a small sample size, the term that seems vastly preferred is Threadiverse. Bc of its history, and how people have already been calling it that. Sort this post by Hot to see what I mean.
I don’t think Forumverse is “bad”, plus as you say it better represents the new additions of nodebb and flarum. Although that term would be swimming against the tide of people that have been using Threadiverse all this time and seem to not want to switch (possibly bc I did not explain the situation well, especially the clarification about the term Fediverse already existing, and now how the situation is a bit different wrt nodebb and flarum).
Ofc this is all just on a Sunday -> there is still lots of room for things to happen in the next coming days, to see how these results may shift:-).
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
I think one of the major tropes present in the show was to demonstrate how there aren’t simply white hats vs. black hats (to use cowboy terms). Mal is a criminal, “forced” into living that way bc the government won’t “allow” him to live legitimately (except… really? Why won’t they again?). Therefore, the presence of great darkness within his lightness, or as you might prefer the presence of occasional boughts of lightness within his darkness, is not a “bug”, it’s a “feature” of the show, to walk out that yin and yang in a fantasy space opera setting.
Nobody is perfect. Some are far less so than others. Those at least tend to be aware of their imperfections, as opposed to e.g. The Galactic Empire muwhahaha, ahem cough, anyways they seem so stolid, so absolutely certain of their moral righteousness, that unlike the criminal Mal who often isn’t such a bad guy once you get to know him, commits atrocities the likes of which would turn people’s stomachs, if they knew (hence those are kept as closely guarded secrets).
So I think you missed that: from the perspective of the show, that was no accident - that was literally the entire point of what they were attempting to convey. Mal was not a “good guy”. He just had light in his darkness, the same way that the empire has darkness in its light (or is it rather the other way around?).
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
B-b-but Lemmy isn’t known for aggressive, opinionated users, i-i-is it!? :-P
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
That works for Lemmy + K/Mbin.
But now with +PieFed, +nodebb, and soon +flarum, and perhaps +Sublinks, Lemmyville doesn’t seem very inclusive?
I already started this as a poll about post flairs, neither of which features is nor is expected to appear on Lemmy very soon iirc. The rest of the Fediverse isn’t waiting around for coders to learn Rust and eventually getting around to adding features to Lemmyville.
So Lemmy in particular may want to not start being exclusive! It will get left behind if it does!
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
It was Lemmy+Mbin.
Now it’s already up to Lemmy+Mbin+PieFed+nodebb.
And flarum and Sublinks may be added at some point as well.
So the plus syntax, now that there’s already 4-6 of them (7 if you count Kbin but there’s only a single instance in the entire world, in Poland I believe, that uses it these days, everyone else switched to Mbin), seems untenable?
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
I’m not sure what you mean by that -> if you mean that we need new episodes, then absolutely! Or if you mean that real life has caught up to implementing those ideas real-time, I think that was always going to be the case, sadly…:-(
- Comment on What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called? 5 months ago:
On the other hand, the software used has an ENORMOUS effect upon the quality and such of the communication. e.g. forum software such as Lemmy allow much longer-form, topic-based discussions than e.g. Mastodon where you have to follow a particular user account or else you won’t see anything at all. So “Mastodon” implies extreme difficulty in having conversations in the first place, especially for non-technical, normie users, and also a heavily short-form tweets/X-cretes/skeets/whatever, user-centric form of communication. Whereas Lemmy allows me to ramble on for quite awhile, and even if you don’t follow my account, by being interested in this topic, you’ll see my words.
So software isn’t everything, but it also is not nothing either.
Anyway, we could call ourselves anything we like. Brain-dead fart pirates, I don’t care, so long as we pick a name:-). It might help to pick one that people like though, especially the people that contribute much to making this place what it is.
I personally don’t mind -verse. I don’t watch most Marvel movies to begin with, and the word itself carries connotations of “the universe”, which is what we want I think bc we are talking about like “the set of all, i.e. the universe of, connected (using ActivityPub protocol) forum-like software platforms”. Hence Fediverse at the high end, i.e. including such platforms as Mastodon and Friendica and Pixelfed, but at the lower end… what there? Threads? ActivityPub Forums? Any short, catchy moniker may work -> so what is it then?
