OpenStars

@OpenStars@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Loops Joins the Fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  So… another year then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How should Lemmy sort posts so small communities can compete?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried and tried with Lemmy. The best I found that I could hope for was sorting by New, but mostly I just gave up hope for it.

  Until I moved to PieFed, and now the issue has multiple solutions. For one, using the Topic/Feeds (which are user-customizeable and shareable) you really can have your cake and eat it too, e.g. you can unsubscribe from all politics communities so that those do not show up on your main homepage, but an entire new feed completely dedicated to News & Politics is just a click away. Or Memes. Or Hobbies. Or Movies & TV, or any of a thousand other things - again, you can build your own, or subscribe to one that someone else has made.

  And for another, for sufficiently low-traffic communities you can click the bell icon (which you can do to pretty much anything - users, posts, comments, communities, etc. - plus you can even UNCLICK that to silence notifications from your own content!!), so that you get a notification for each and every single new post to it. But, if it ever does get to be too much, you can mark all as read and/or separate the different categories of notifications from one another - community posts by others vs. replies to your own content.

  PieFed really is leaving Lemmy behind in the dust, as far as features are concerned.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨it's that time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically accurate comment…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need someone to help me identify this shark plz. Spotted in the wild. Maybe a new species.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  When I asked around the answer I kept repeatedly being given was “no, just… no. HELL no!” /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL about this Fediverse software database⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah “obscure” was definitely the wrong word there - maybe “niche”?

  Thank you so much for your contributions btw! In this era of disinformation, making the Threadiverse more usable can be an enormous boon:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL about this Fediverse software database⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He did, as well as mental health. So perhaps it is good that he pulled back a bit rather than overwhelm himself further. He did come back from his hospital trip, but then left the instance completely unmonitored which caused the entire Threadiverse to become flooded with spam messages like advertisements, to the point where some instances chose to defederate from it. You can’t just leave something like open on the internet these days!

  Anyway PieFed is fantastic, you will probably fall in love with it instantly, like so many others of us:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL about this Fediverse software database⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Kbin the software has died - technically there is still one small instance in Poland that uses it, but all others have ceased, and the software is no longer being maintained under that name - yet the project lives on in its fork Mbin.

  Instances that include the kbin word - e.g. kbin.earth - only retain that now as a legacy.

  Sadly I don’t think anyone has heard from Ernst, the original developer and admin of kbin.social.

  App support finally came to Mbin though, see “Interstellar”.

  A spiritual successor to Kbin’s design philosophy that is very much worth checking out is “PieFed”, which I am writing to you now using it :-). Most apps that work with Lemmy also now work with it (except Thunder support still coming “soon_(TM)” but available only in the beta version for now, not the Play Store one). PieFed is written in Python rather than the obscure Rust language so its pace of development has been extremely rapid in comparison to Lemmy and it now has a feature set well beyond that of either Lemmy or Mbin. If you want to access both the Threadiverse/Lemmy/Mbin communities/magazines as well as Fediverse/Mastodon-style content, Mbin is still your best bet as it was designed for exactly that, but for Threadiverse stuff it offers numerous advantages. Anyway it is so nice to have choices to pick from!:-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨excuse me????⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This comment wins the Threadiverse for today :-)

  Here is your medal:

  image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨just one more bro⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To the set of all atoms in the universe, add one extra electron, easy peasy:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coordinated Pro-Russian Propaganda Network Targeting ActivityPub and ATProto Services⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Both sides fall for it, just not equally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beware, another "wonderful" conservative instance to "free us" has appeared ⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s literally how Lemmy got its start - from people who left Reddit not so much by choice, as later waves did, but rather by being so toxic that even Reddit wouldn’t put up with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beware, another "wonderful" conservative instance to "free us" has appeared ⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most people here strongly seem like they wanted a more leftist Reddit.

  Bluesky as well.

  The concept of an entirely new ecosystem, free of authoritarian control, escapes people.

  Of course we do not all have to federate with one another and share content, but to infiltrate and deny their existence entirely… is just another form of control. The accusation becomes revealed as a confession, now where have I heard that before…?

  At some point the division becomes not Left vs. Right but extremist vs. non. Though I admit to lacking a fully matured understanding there as to whether that is justified or not, it’s just that I am saying that this division exists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed - PieFed (2024)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair, though worth pointing out that the choice to use CloudFlare is an instance-level decision, not a software-level one, and the PieFed software is still faster than Lemmy regardless of the choice to use CloudFlare. And this despite showing 5-fold more posts, iirc it was a roughly 25-fold speedup per post shown for the main page.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Admins: Instnace randomly running extremely slowly? Check for this⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Good thinking!:-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Admins: Instnace randomly running extremely slowly? Check for this⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All of a sudden your edits went through - perhaps a delay caused by this same issue?

  Also some related posts:
  * another one reporting similar attack-like activities https://lemmy.world/post/36413045
  * a month ago similarly https://lemmy.world/post/34310429

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beware, another "wonderful" conservative instance to "free us" has appeared ⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I presume they were attempting to clarify that the type of xenophobia that they most likely expected to see was directed at themselves due solely to their nationality.

  But you could test this by making xenophobic comments against both, and see what happens. Then perhaps make an alt and perform in reverse ordering.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Admins: Instnace randomly running extremely slowly? Check for this⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is for Lemmy I presume (or also for Piefed or Mbin)? You’ve modified yours heavily though, I thought, which could complicate matters. I wonder if you are having those bot scraping issues that semi-recently (a month or so ago?) started increasing in frequency. So many instances now have a human detector before letting you in whereas before it was not necessary.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨proof of wormholes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not true! YOU just talked about it.

  And now I am taking about it… holy shit, it’s spreading!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you for your kind words. Most people who felt that way would either just be angry, or at best uncertain so would not share, so thank you for your bravery to open up and be vulnerable.

  I also am a big fan of dark humor, especially comedians that do it, then hearing the audience, pause to explain a little bit - the best ones, the absolute masters of their craft, are indeed super gentle about it.

  But we are just people, trying to get by in life. I will leave the actual “judgement” as to whether it’s good or bad to you (while acknowledging my own bias in that I think it’s bad, for numerous reasons but one is the slippery slope where it pulls someone down the pathway ever further along, bc if one step is fine then why not two, and if two is fine then okay what about three, and so on), but in any case I think that either way the situation is compounded by it being “unexamined”. Whatever our beliefs are, they are best if they are TRULY ours, rather than just borrowed from others without a thought as to whether they fit our actual selves. Crowd-thinking is not any kind of thinking at all.

  We have such PRIVILEGES, and we don’t like to think about that. Most of my closer friends online tend to be older gay men or trans people, who don’t like to think about how privileged they are to have experienced trauma that a traditional neurotypical person has not (mainly bc feeling suicidal, they would think along the lines of privileged="good”, which it is not - what they experienced is not “good”, but it does make them “privileged” in terms of having traumatic experiences that allows them to understand things that others outright refuse to or perhaps worse are flat incapable of doing). Access to education is one such privilege. Ability to spend time reading is another. In contrast, a single parent of multiple kids in the USA hustling by working 2-3 jobs does not have such luxuries, and is all the more vulnerable to disinformation as a result.

  And on the Fediverse, we spend a great deal of time blocking things that we do not like. We who enjoy fiddling with config files and trying out how they might change the outcome of a process - we are if not quite rare in the population then at least uncommon. Which is fine, but then we cannot delude ourselves - at least, not if we wish to remain honest with ourselves - that the stuff that we spent such enormous amounts of time blocking does not in fact exist.

  People advocate for murder here constantly. Some might even mean it. If Russia or China or North Korea were not here trying to push agitation, then they are missing a great opportunity, imho - although fortunately useful believers will do that work for them, having already been converted on more popular platforms.

  And then, as you said, there’s people just joking around. Which we DESPISE when we hear the right-wing people do it in our direction, yet we do it to them in turn. It’s natural though, and therefore lazy, and easy to fall into, without ever considering any other alternatives.

  Whichever way you end up on this topic, kudos for taking the time to examine it and decide what you actually want here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't argue that.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am glad that you checked then:-). I meant discipline as in a set of practices that you intentionally set up for yourself, not necessarily something like physically flogging yourself for choosing to take a nap rather than study something interesting but you were just too tired to do it in that moment. I agree you are totally correct that it should ideally be our of love rather than sense of duty. ❤️

  Going beyond one’s limits is a way to cause damage - possibly even to the very desire to remain curious - so should be limited to only high-value scenarios e.g. to make an external deadline that offers an accomplishment that you decided that you wanted. So even there, “discipline” (force) can be useful, so long as “discipline” (intentional practices) keeps the former within acceptable levels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't argue that.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We may never know. Functionally, capitalism describes what is “normal”, even if outside of that it could have been different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%

  Correct.

  doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too.

  Hrm… you know what, maybe? I mean my first answer is most definitely no, bc Reddit fights hard to censor it, but beyond that, people find ways to convey the same meaning, so there is a certain sense to which your statement could be true? Perhaps I am thinking back to my / our experiences on Reddit from two years ago without updating it in my head to reflect modern times.

  But then at that point I want to say no again, for several reasons. One, I do have to read some subs on Reddit bc the content is simply not here - and you go to where that is, and that concept will never change no matter how popular the Threadiverse gets - and I don’t see anything close to the levels that we see here. Then again, it might exist there, just not where I am looking?

  However, two, people in r/Redditalternatives say that we are too toxic - which we are - and that as bad as things are over there, we are worse from what they see, and we also have less content. The only thing we have less of here that they like is fewer bots - although tbf we have those here as well, despite how most of us have blocked them and they tend to be properly labeled here (which I would argue makes 100% the difference - one that you know is a bot is not a problem, as it is not pretending to be a human).

  All of this is far more complicated than I am able to say cleanly and succinctly - e.g. we do have a higher maximum here of extremists, and also it seems to me a much higher baseline level of it as well, but we also have kindness here, whereas there it seems mostly absent, and we have more intellectual discussions here whereas there the baseline level expectation seems to be either teenagers or right-wing trolls that everyone just seems to give up on keeping our and just accepts the fact that they are everywhere, in every sub, in most posts even though they get ignored.

  And yeah, calls for murder appear there - but they tend to be removed. And yeah, some of that content gets removed here as well, but as I showed links to, not all of it, nor even perhaps the majority of it, though depending on which community, on which instance, and which subject matter and in particular which mod (team) is looking at it.

  We are definitely a den of iniquity. Perhaps Reddit is too. X/Twitter even more so. Bluesky seems far less so though, so maybe that was the source of that comparative thought process - some journalist who is editing Wikipedia in their spare time, so applying their personal bias to it, which is true but mainly in a highly narrow sense?

  Perhaps the focus should not be on whether calls for murder exist - I’ve shown you, they DO, but that overall the Threadiverse provides tools to engage with content in enjoyable ways. Obviously engaging with controversial topics is going to bring up controversial wording, but someone can - as you do - block it easily. Reddit is too restrictive, and 4chan too open, but the Threadiverse provides a nice middle ground. It does require a helluva lotta work though, to understand how to make proper use of those tools. Or rather, Lemmy does, whereas PieFed makes it downright trivially easy with Topic Feeds and keyword filters and such (e.g. “guillotine” and “2A” and perhaps things like “, deserve it” and whatnot). Here at least you can make something work, whereas on Reddit you just can’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:

  A guillotine, or just tossing them in a nearby volcano would be cheaper.

  That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that “all” posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.

  Yes here’s an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:

  6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)

  Didn’t this guy get shot in the throat? Awful talkative.

  And someone replied:

  Not yet, unfortunately.

  Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call “murder” (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as “justice” might also or even rather apply).

  Of course it could be a “joke”, though isn’t the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a “joke” (possibly as in “haha jk except not really"), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially “joking” about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to “them”, the “other side” (again, I’m not wanting to get into whether it’s deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).

  These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.

  So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:

  As always these pussies will have a big whinge then back down.

  Please just make it legal to kill Nazis again, I’d do it for pay if we could claim a bounty on the hides.

  (And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more… “circumspect” comments to that same OP include such things as “The 2nd amendment works for all sides.”

  So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let’s move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement “the aristocrats!”, itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing “the enemy” are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what *is*, not what *should be*.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can't argue that.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I find that I get smarter as I get older, as stupid stuff that held me back gets discarded. You do have less energy I hear, but even there I think a fit 50 year old would be more energetic than a lazy 25 year old? Obviously having kids is a huge energy drain, but that’s not technically aging, just correlation rather than causation.

  So anyway even if this graphic were true, it would be irrelevant as the major factor seems to me to be a willingness to learn, only after which raw ability would come into play.

  In your case the adage that now is the time to learn is true, but not for any of the reasons mentioned above. Once you shift your perspective that the time for hard work is over and the time for personal play is at hand - to watch more TV, play games, hang out with friends, etc. - then it’s incredibly hard (most people phrase that as “impossible") to ever go back to that college mindset of “it’s study time, let’s go!!!”. That’s not even just human nature, but rather the raw physics of inertia coupled with adaptation that lowers energy requirements that were evolutionarily built into our brains and bodies.

  Discipline is a mindset that is mostly independent of age, except it trends towards older as those who have seen how it works first-hand now realize its value (coupled with individual survival of those who have more rather than less of it, i.e. the most reckless die the earliest in life), plus also younger as people listen and thus benefit from the accumulated wisdom of others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well then⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or you could do equally the same being yelled at by a female boss. It happens 😁

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Which one?

  Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name “Lemmy” has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.

  Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.

  Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).

  Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piss off!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Me either, and I have negative desire to learn that “skill”!:-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Beware of unearned knowledge.

  You “lose” 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.

  Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.

  Even so, it seems not wrong? “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”, regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.

  It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.

  The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I’ve entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piss off!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In this case wouldn’t they be giving it?