OpenStars
@OpenStars@piefed.social
Compassion >~ Thought
- Comment on Every week has WTF in it (MTWTFSS) 4 days ago:
- Comment on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit will work with “various third-party services” to verify a user's humanity, after an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment 5 days ago:
We should all leave Reddit and move to the Threadiverse! Oh wait.... 😁
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 6 days ago:
I'm just being pedantic, but also the problem seems easily solved by having someone else moderate that instance, while they focus on just the coding.
Of course they are 100% free to do as they choose and I would not dream of wanting them to do otherwise.
Then too, the people deciding whether to donate can do the same - and it seems that the rather unusual moderation practices of lemmy.ml are a sticking point for whether they want to contribute funds or not. The amount of those funds, whether the devs have the "right" to do so or not, that is all besides the point. Some people just don't like to fund things like genocide, period.
But now we are veering into political territory that I know less about. Thank you for sharing those facts about the situation, as I continue to learn about it that is very helpful:-).
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
My impression is they're decent about making Lemmy a tech project not a personal political platform
But... isn't it impossible to donate solely to the software, when they also will use the funds to pay server costs for lemmy.ml? The referenced post did not exactly highlight that little tidbit of information... yet isn't it true nonetheless?
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now.
Why bother? Mbin, PieFed, nodebb, flarum, the list of alternatives goes on and on. Lemmy is fairly mature, that's true, but also the devs kept adding new features, so there wasn't a need to fork it. Plus, each individual instance already somewhat "forks" it each time they do an update - what I mean here is that some like Hexbear.net and Lemmy.world have extremely heavy modifications that they have made, affecting only their own instance (to clarify, the latter is more code checking iirc while the former was actual modifications).
If anyone needs to they could fork Lemmy at any time. But who wants to learn Rust, a language that is super difficult yet unfinished, compared to e.g. Python that PieFed uses, or Mbin is PHP (and Sublinks iirc is Java, etc.)?
Best to break away free from Lemmy entirely. Have you noticed how Lemmy is even more authoritian than Reddit? Yes modlog, but no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to contact a mod to ask why or discuss, no "right" to even know which mod it was - you simply submit your content, and if a mod decides that they don't like it, then it disappears, without leaving a trace (in contrast, Reddit leaves removed posts still accessible to anyone with the URL), or without warning. The closest thing I've ever heard of that is like this is when Reddit "shadow-banned" someone. While on Lemmy, every single post removal is that way. The admins have total control using Lemmy, and mods have a lot, but regular users? Naw, that's a different story... you all get much fewer freedoms than even Reddit offered (usually, unless they actually did shadowban you).
I much prefer PieFed tbh:-). It has a ton of ideas pushing for democratization of moderation features, putting control of such matters into the hands of the individual users rather than forcing mods to have to do all the work of moderation. e.g. if someone doesn't ero see posts containing certain keywords like "Musk" or "Trump", a user can elect to filter those out (the available options there are: All, None, and get this: Some, which is very nice!:-), rather than making a moderator have to decide for the entire community as a whole (they still can do that, but now they don't have to, bc the software provides another alternative for those users who want to, leaving the users who don't want that filtering to see that content, while still sharing the same space, rather than having to make a new community:-).
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
I am sorry for your bad experience on Lemmy. Most people fall into the same trap, and more often than not, leave altogether. I am currently at 100% of the people that I've told about Lemmy actively chiding me for having done so, due to them having come here, seen that, and immediately noped out.
It doesn't help that Google points people to Lemmy.ml (DuckDuckGo properly points to Lemmy.World, as the most active instance, but lemmy.ml has an older history), which to a guest account shows only Local (rather than globally All) posts, which ofc are full of people making fun of the Western world and society - even to the point of saying that people who do such innocuous activities as having bank accounts should be killed (sadly, I'm not joking, although the people making such claims likely were... and yet... were they, were they REALLY?!).
Nobody likes to be made fun of, so it's no surprise that the likes of Reddit's r/RedditAlternatives is filled with such stories of people encountering such and never coming back. But I am glad that despite Lemmy.ml's efforts to hide it, you managed to find the nicer portions of Lemmy where we can actually enjoy conversations.:-)
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
What?
PieFed, Mbin, nodebb, flarum - this is a partial listing of the software that does similar to Lemmy, and there's more besides them even (okay so development on Sublinks seems to be exceedingly slow these days, but the code is still there if anyone wants to contribute...).
And this doesn't even begin to touch on the likes of Mastodon, Friendica, Peertube, Pixelfed, Loops (okay tbf this one isn't federating yet iirc, but it planned to?), all of which share people's thoughts and words in a social media atmosphere.
Lemmy isn't the sole competitor to Reddit by any stretch. Heck, a year ago Lemmy.World put out a post (I can find it if you really need me to?) all but outright announcing their intention to switch to Sublinks when it became ready. And at the time that had like 80% of all Lemmy MAUs (monthly active users).
Lemmy is not what makes this place special. The people here are what make this place special. If the people move, then what makes it special will go with them. I personally migrated to PieFed 7 months ago (before it was fully ready), and now that PieFed has surpassed Lemmy in terms of features (e.g. we just added polls and post flairs), I am certain that I am not the only one willing to do so.:-)
You are paying for their programming, not their opinions.
Also, I was going to respond to your original comment but suppose I'll combine it here: you do not seem to be aware that donations also go to support the server costs of Lemmy.ml. Thus, you are in fact paying for their opinions to be spread - they seem to not be offering the choice for others to receive only the code support but not Lemmy.ml?
Check out PieFed - whether you stay with it or not is immaterial, I'm saying that you'll be impressed as fuck with what you see. The sign-up wizard alone will probably make you fall absolutely in love with it. And if not, then the LONG list of features definitely will - e.g. categories of communities, which are user customizable and shareable. Then, even if you decide to keep using your Lemmy account, you'll at least know what is going on with PieFed, which is amazing:-). (The Interstellar app supports PieFed officially, with that coming for Thunder as well.)
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Mbin, not Kbin. Kbin is dead.
There actually is one instance left, a tiny little hold-over in Poland, last I checked, but everyone else that was using Kbin has since switched to Mbin.
Except me personally, who switched to PieFed (which is fantastic btw!:-).
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
I moved to PieFed before it was fully ready, and I've been able to personally defederate from lemmy.ml by blocking all users since I did. No admin approval required. That feature alone was worth it to me to put up with the pain of the platform not being ready yet.
Since then, the platform has greatly improved, and now has many MANY features that Lemmy (and a few that even Reddit) lacks. For example the most recent additions are polls and post flairs. Which tbf Lemmy has plans to add, but features languish in its roadmap for multiple years at a time so I would not expect them anytime "soon". Tbf Rust is a difficult language to work with, but that's just all the more reason to love PieFed, written in Python that many more people can contribute to. Which is what has been allowing it to add new features literally weekly as of late.
PieFed is extremely nice - come check it out! Make an account, and by the time you get through the setup wizard you will already have fallen in love with it.:-)
- Comment on Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads 1 week ago:
Are you sure that you don't already know it by heart?
- Comment on A 9th planet in our solar system might be found — and no, it’s not Pluto 1 week ago:
This new "planet", more than anything I've yet heard in my lifetime, convinces me that life is fundamentally not fair. :-P
- Comment on Chances for the fediverse? Elon Musk takes hit as Europeans ditch X in droves 2 weeks ago:
They are not - he X/cancelled it.:-P
- Comment on Decentralization Scoring System 3 weeks ago:
Isn't ActivityPub extremely network intensive though? If all you wanted was a single user subscribing to a handful of communities then Lemmy would be inexpensive but to pull from a lot of communities I thought people have said that it can cost a bit of money, time, etc. Also defending against attacks such as CSAM.
Maybe make a distinction then between running a "tiny personal instance with only a few niche community subscriptions" vs. a small instance, either with multiple users or even just one person subscribing to many communities, if that cost would start to become more prohibitive?
- Comment on If every time you blinked an angel got its wings, we'd be surrounded by a veritable flock of celestial beings by now. 3 weeks ago:
Depends - what is their half-life? If it's less than the rate of eye blinking, then we aren't even keeping up a stable population!
- Comment on Is there an easy way to create blocklist of post or comment for other people? 3 weeks ago:
Yes and moreover, feeds work at the community level, not individual posts. Which is a step in the right direction but you may want finer-grain control. Filters may offer more what you are looking for in that case.
I did not mention previously but PieFed also allows you to block all users from a user-specified instance, without requiring admin approval to perform full defederation. It is not perfect but it is very good and e.g. I use it to block Lemmy.ml, which saves me a lot of headaches as most of the worst, most argumentative and unfriendly (and batshit insane) comments I've seen come from there. Lemmy's instance filter is horribly misnamed - it would have much better been called a community muting, as it blocks communities from that insurance but the users remain free to troll you in communities located in other instances, leaving replies, triggering notifications, etc.
The Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can also block all users from an instance.
- Comment on Is there an easy way to create blocklist of post or comment for other people? 4 weeks ago:
I can think of 3 easy ways to do it off the top of my head... all using PieFed. (1) Straight-up filtering of keywords, which allows All, None, or Some; (2) user customizable and shareable Feeds, so someone creates a good collection and everyone benefits; (3) the entire model of browsing content using PieFed is different: by offering more than simply Subscribed vs. All, you can do something like not subscribe to any political or news communities (i.e. have your cake), so that it doesn't show up in your Subscribed feed, but then when you want to read that content, it is a click away in the News and Politics Feed (or another similar one of your choice made by you or other users; i.e. eat your cake too).
Using Lemmy though, no not really (not "trivially" I mean). Search for people using ad blocking filters, possibly Ublock. Maybe an app would help? But I don't know which ones and kinda doubt it - I haven't seen such a thing in Voyager or Thunder or Interstellar, etc. Development of the Lemmy codebase, in the highly difficult Rust language, is super slow. Basically if you want something like this, you'd have to code it yourself.
A workaround could be to make several Lemmy alts - one for each type of content you would want to include in your Subscribed feed. Like one could be only uplifting news. Most of the time you'd be looking at the same older content though... without being able to widen your view that would allow bringing in of new content.
Or again, PieFed already has multiple forms of it.
- Comment on Lemmy has the ideal number of posts for me. Just enough to have a good time but not too many that I'm scrolling forever 4 weeks ago:
You used it the correct way 😉
Most people wanted more content then the niche subs could offer though.
Nowadays I do think like read physical books 📚😃.
- Comment on Lemmy has the ideal number of posts for me. Just enough to have a good time but not too many that I'm scrolling forever 4 weeks ago:
It is not "rational discourse" so much as "emotional vomit", assuaging loneliness with robots.
The only ones who win that game are the investors in Reddit, who sell more advertisements by using the "engagement metrics" that such argumentation ramps up.
Normal, satisfied people stop talking eventually, which lowers the profit incentive so they can't have that, now can they?
It's like gambling but worse - it's not mere dollars that can stop upon running out of them, but people's time that gets bled away moment by moment, until all the other opportunities they could have been spent on are gone. Taking advantage of people's mental illnesses, which they help foster in the first place.
- Comment on Lemmy has the ideal number of posts for me. Just enough to have a good time but not too many that I'm scrolling forever 4 weeks ago:
As a mod of a small(-ish) gaming sub, I noticed.:-)
One example is how on r/Android, people would ignore the daily posted and pinned (or perhaps it was weekly?) mega thread, and constantly ask questions like "what phone should I buy?", "which Android device should I purchase?", "should I get an Android and if so, which one?" Setting aside how these are impossible without sufficient details e.g. what price range, what country is the OP from, are there relevant sales they are eyeing that would make the calculations different than from simply reading the existing posts that all ask precisely the same question ⁉️... anyway in addition to all that, it made it extremely difficult to have discussions of any real substance.
Combine this with the engagement algorithms and Reddit pushes all that crap (bc it's "new") above even extremely highly rated content, even if it was merely a few days old.
Post flairs helped, except that submitters entirely ignore those rules just like they do everything else. User flairs as well, except... same.
About the only thing that really worked was writing your own moderation bot. Ofc the disruption of the 3rd-party tools by making the API cost irl money 🤑💰💵💸 stopped that from working as well.
In short, you must have been in some very well-moderated spaces, possibly also niche, and if you did not browse r/all (or rather r/pop) then yeah, you could miss that trend. But it was definitely happening, and people talked about it in the subs dedicated to moderation.
It did not help that Reddit continually made changes that made it worse over time - practically hiding the rules from new posters to a community, seemingly in an effort to switch the focus away from the roots (before I joined Reddit) of having multiple forums on one combined platform - e.g. each having their own design, like CSS elements (I even made some of these!:-), to having all forums be part of one giant interconnected space, with efforts to erase divisions when moving from one community to another.
i.e. the endless streaming of "content", but ENCOURAGING interaction via commenting or at least voting, despite whether the audience has any business doing so, e.g. whether their interactions add, do nothing to, or even detract from the conversation.
^THIS
I also choose this guy's wife
And my bow
etc. To be fair, a little of that is just plain funny, and I hope we can allow for such here on Lemmy (it seems we do actually, when offered with respect?), but when the comments are just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such in a row, such that it becomes impossible to find anything ELSE besides that... that is when a line has been crossed, and the platform becomes more difficult to read than it is worth. Imagine walking past a preschool on your way to work, and no matter how old you get (30, 40, 50, 60), they always remain the same - babbling as they play. Which they NEED, and hopefully you can enjoy engaging with it yourself. But at some point... don't you need to get on over to work? When the noise crowds out the signal entirely, making more adult conversations next to impossible, then the only solution is to leave.
Or kick the kids out, i.e. moderation, but that requires enormous efforts. Some subs still do it, but the more Reddit enshittifies the harder it becomes.
And it's not merely Reddit, it's simply the nature of the game: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.
- Comment on "I was born in the wrong generation" has turned from edgy to a sad reality for some 4 weeks ago:
I wonder if Gen X's truly "have" homes, or just have been paying on a mortgage, which at the rate 2025 is going might put them in the same category as Millennials, or even behind, so like Z?
Come, join us... uWu...
- Comment on "I was born in the wrong generation" has turned from edgy to a sad reality for some 4 weeks ago:
You say that like you have access to healthcare.
Google searches used to work, they don't so readily - technology, and things in general, always change(s), but it would be hubris to assume that such will always lead to it becoming "better" (for who? how?)
- Comment on Determining the reason no one replied to your Lemmy post. 4 weeks ago:
PieFed is trying a bunch of new stuff that even Reddit does not have, enabling the democratization of moderation by putting more power into the hands of individual users (e.g. mods don't have to be as aggressive as removing many posts with keywords when users who want such can set their own preferences via the built-in keyword filtering, which enables All, Some, and None).
Lemmy to me looks more like a straight attempt to copy, although the modlog is a great addition - unfortunately in the absence of notifications of a moderation event, lack of modmail, and presence of an obscured moderator name, Lemmy has somehow become even more authoritian than Reddit.🤷😳
Though with a MUCH more friendly userbase, and most admins, and ofc lack of profit incentive which all by its lonesome helps a ton.
- Comment on [Question] What just happened to 4 million posts? 4 weeks ago:
Bc he's just that chill, obviously! 😁
- Comment on Lemmy has the ideal number of posts for me. Just enough to have a good time but not too many that I'm scrolling forever 4 weeks ago:
Never heard of that one - neat!
- Comment on Lemmy has the ideal number of posts for me. Just enough to have a good time but not too many that I'm scrolling forever 4 weeks ago:
The average age of a Redditor started to go down even several years ago, long before Rexodus, in large part as the platform changed things to encourage speaking even without bothering to read anything at all.
Thus I decided to leave Reddit regardless, and only fortuitously decided to come here. Some things simply are not worth the trouble.
- Comment on Lemmy has the ideal number of posts for me. Just enough to have a good time but not too many that I'm scrolling forever 4 weeks ago:
Fwy, some apps allow for automatically applied icons to indicate such. I forget exactly which ones, but I know PieFed's web UI does it. It's very helpful imho.
PieFed also marks people who receive like 10x more downvotes than upvotes. That way you can still choose to read their content, but seeing that, decide how best to respond.
- Comment on Social Media's Future: User-Owned, Billionaire-Free 4 weeks ago:
I used to think it was that, but now I realize that it's not "just" communication.
Like Lemmy for instance is somehow more authoritian than Reddit itself - not for an instance admin but for the end user I mean. While there is a modlog, there is no modmail, no notification about an event such as removal of someone's post, no ability to even know who to DM to ask for clarification or appeal (the modlog used to say more, but nowadays simply says "mod"), and on Lemmy.ml people are routinely banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, for making a comment in some other community, and importantly, for violation of an entirely unwritten rule (that while the instance is e.g. pro-genocide when done by certain nations, any negative portrayal of an action done by other nations is not allowed). The latter, especially when the end user receives no notification of it happening, sounds an awful lot like shadowbanning to me.
Instance admins are free, mods can be depending upon the graces of their admins, but end users... are given whatever freedoms the admins allow. Just like Reddit, except less content, and no modmail. No amount of merely explaining this to people who tried Lemmy, got bullied (stories abound in r/RedditAlternatives), and went back, is going to convince them to try again. The tools themselves just don't live up to the hype that people have already tried promising, and the development moves at a snail's pace.
Though PieFed gives me more hope.
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 4 weeks ago:
Do you work at Boeing? 😜
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 4 weeks ago:
Even so I'll add a warning that Hexbear.net is a troll instance. They don't so much truly believe in anything so much as spoil for a fight, which is fine except consent does not matter to them and they refuse to restrain themselves outside of their instance that was created for that purpose. Also they have been caught actually lying to instance admins. Even so they can be fun to talk with, so long as you aren't taken by surprise e.g. mistaking it for people being serious:-).
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 4 weeks ago:
Maybe in certain communities? Some power tripping mods do exist. Likely they could be reported to the instance admins and possibly removed for such a scenario. It's happened before in some extremely high profile cases.
Downvoting the admin of Midwest.social would get you banned though.
Fortunately there are communities such as !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com that help spread knowledge of such information across the Threadiverse.
