OpenStars

@OpenStars@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “disliking” a post isn’t going to do anything

  Not true - it seems designed to increase advertising revenue for the CEO:-P. That’s… “something”, technically? 🤪

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They are focusing on enshittification

  It is what they want - for them it is a “feature” to exist surely inside of their echo chambers. MANY Lemmy instances - hexbear.net and Lemmy.ml to name just a couple - are the same, banning people who even remotely disagree with them.

  Profit-seeking is not the only cause of enshittification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the way that PieFed implements this.

  1. “Highly contentious users” i.e. those who are consistently heavily downvoted by “trusted instances” (I don’t know the actual thresholds but imagine someone who receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes - and e.g. hexbear.net can be federated with but not “trusted” so that downvote brigading can be eliminated, unless ofc they use their non-HB alts but while nothing is perfect, every ounce of protection does help:-) are labeled, but there is currently no way that I am aware of to actually remove their content. Still, it helps to see that automatically-applied label as you scroll down, so that you can skip past it or at least realize that a reply is going to fall on deaf ears. People’s reputations precede us irl so why not online as well, where it is so much easier to measure?

  2. Individual content - posts and comments - that are highly contentious, according to user-defined thresholds, can be either automatically collapsed or even hidden. I personally disable both of these, but if someone wants to not see highly contentious content then this makes it happen for them. Similarly there are keyword filters - again nothing will ever be perfect but if you want to see less of e.g. Musk or Trump, then this is a method to help reduce the incoming flood of content related to such.

  3. Communities have access to “community-specific” voting patterns. I know less about this aspect but generally the entire community or perhaps an individual post could be limited to community-specific rules, like a member can vote but a non-member drive-by commentor might be disallowed under certain conditions. Not every community should be this way and I hope most won’t enable these features, but they are necessary sometimes - e.g. a community for and by women needs to exclude all the “don’t you know that I am such a nice man"-splaining that will inevitably arise.

  Anyway I love the hierarchy that distributes the work of moderation all the way from instance admins (for e.g. illegal content) through community mods (who have access to software to help them) and ultimately powers the end-users to control their own recipient of content, which they can change over time - e.g. rather than leave social media entirely they could enable some of the contentious user and/or keyword filter controls and thereby attain for themselves a break from the noise and hubub that the entire internet tends to prefer to throw at us all the time.

  In contrast, whatever little moderation that Bluesky has is obviously insufficient - the problems of outright monotonization spam and high contentious users seems to have overwhelmed whatever capacity there was to handle such.

  PieFed has really high me hope for the entire Fediverse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Moderation seems sorely lacking on Bluesky. And did you read the comment in the OP article? It offered “I am such a nice man” vibes, though technically not entirely wrong either, yet failing to consider replies not offered in good faith nor the consent of the recipient to receive such shocks to their systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Godfather of AI' says tech giants can't profit from their astronomical investments unless human labor is replaced⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They want feudalism back. Ngl, the technology available today might make it work for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific explanation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The number in the exponent is negative, so it’s a very tiny value, whatever the unit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everyone hide!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Velma can't math.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It just gets better and better-er(-est?/-ish?)

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Velma can't math.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I stared at the square of the square root of the squared square root for far too long…

  that I almost missed the obvious E = / * A. Where would the field of mathematics be without that good old E = / * A? :-D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨plump pumkins⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Naw, all the toxic chemicals would then kill the pumpkins! (see e.g. radioactive Wal-Mart shrimp)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Caption this.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Eldritch gendered playhouse?

  Just… no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I found Saddam! :-P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Secondsies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨snail lyfe⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No way - shame begins at home:-D.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Velma can't math.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I was trying to think what the funniest part was. I think it’s the b2 - like just take your b2 vitamins bro, it’s worth like squared a regular b.

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Velma can't math.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Those are questions that mere mortals would ask. Be better: just “vibe solve” it. :-P

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨eel butts⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  B-b-b-b-but(t)!?⁉️‼️

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨arborholing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Which MOST plants seem to want to avoid… (although for others it has become a necessity, depends on what you are used to I guess)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Everything Is Fake, What’s the Point of Social Media?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bots trained from bots, talking to bots, governed by THE ALGORITHM… surely this will end well.

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kohler Wants to Put a Tiny Camera in Your Toilet and Analyze the Contents⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Worse, you have to provide your own shit! 💩

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨*happy Kenobi dance*⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say more “how” than “why” though:-D

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Loops Joins the Fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So… another year then?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How should Lemmy sort posts so small communities can compete?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically accurate comment…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need someone to help me identify this shark plz. Spotted in the wild. Maybe a new species.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ 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????⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This comment wins the Threadiverse for today :-)

  Here is your medal:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨just one more bro⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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