OpenStars

And when it does happen, it’s (a) always as a joke, and (b) fucking STOPS after the first person. That’s the perfect level of buffoonery imho:-).

Possibly they were real at some point… before they were endlessly copied and modified by chatbots:-).

Lemmy is quality while Reddit is quantity.

Unless what you needed was specific niche information - but yeah in terms of general overall quality, of discussions, in particular not as an encyclopedia of knowledge but as a social media platform, then definitely. Though with that caveat rather than universally.

I mean maybe for you…

That Eldritch biology experiment shares many great memes & such though.

We are already experimenting with Lemmy, daily. The Rexodus happened, bringing an influx of users to this platform, and that crowd now wants different things than the prior one. And normies would want still more divergent matters. Though it matters little what people want, and more what people will expend effort to build.

Yes but… while they are greedy MFers, part of the problem is that they did need to find a way to make the whole affair profitable, not only for that goal by itself but also so that it could be sustainable. A lot of the controversy is in how he tried to accomplish that goal, not that he needed to do so - bc any company needs to be sustainable.

Reddit is likewise far from the only tech product that has been enshittified by chasing after profits to the exclusion of all else, so there’s that too. And I’m not even going to go down the rabbit hole of how much of this chases back to some changes in USA governmental policies at the time (Republicans were in charge of basically everything in ~2019).

Ultimately, Huffman has set himself up as the fall guy - the effigy to hold our attention and hate despite how he merely carried out the will of his masters, the venture capitalist bros behind him. So fuck spez, but also… not just him.

Though his ideas and execution of them were really fucking spectacularly BAD, so yeah, maybe him more than capitalism even. e.g. the Musk is really dumb, but then along comes Huffman who worships at the guy’s feet, thereby making himself somehow even dumber!?!?

So yeah, all their changes were designed to get profits. They didn’t work bc again they are REALLY dumb, and did not understand the slightest thing about humanity their userbase, but that didn’t stop them from trying to fleece people of as much money as they could. i.e., their stupidity was only outpaced by their greed. 😞

I came late to Reddit myself but even I noticed that happening during the pandemic. The decline was rather speedy, sharp, and extensive (affecting all subs).

And we could even track some of those to specific implementations or lack thereof of features by Reddit. Like how their search feature sucked so bad, thereby encouraging people to write a (still yet another) post to ask rather than look up an existing highly crafted and well-researched answer that even if posted a mere week prior still would not show up in the algorithmic feed pushing all the latest noise to the absolute tippy-top. And mods were forbidden from pinning more than two posts. And even those only showed up when sorting by Hot. And maybe not even then in some apps. And you couldn’t consolidate ones bc the moderation tools sucked so damn hard, e.g. posts made by Auto Mod could not be edited later by the very same mod team who requested that the post be made. Every damnable one of these things increases apparent engagement metrics like “number of posts”, but at the expense of actually connecting people with the information that they wanted to receive. :-(

To which we can say “fuck spez”, but it’s deeper than that bc of the chasing after profits to the expense of all else that led to that, as in if it wasn’t him that did it then it would have merely been someone else instead.

Fwiw, this might be a special time around the launching of the Loops service, which I heard will be placed underneath PixelFed. I know nothing more than that but thought I’d offer that much:-).

Right but the problem is that there are no “good” solutions.

Blocking Lemmy.ml and thereby much of the Russian propaganda can be a significant boon for some.

That’s a great point about beta software though.

Though if someone wants to block such, and they don’t want to use single-admin instances such as Lemmy.cafe or quokk.au, or non-Lemmy solutions such as PieFed or Mbin, then their only hope is an app. Which also offers the benefit to not have to migrate to a different instance. Though I don’t know which ones offer that.

At this point, the only way to implement blocking is to switch instances, it would seem. Or at least get an app, though that is the part that I know the least about. I switched instances myself specifically for this feature - and we’ve been saying how superb Discuss.Online is even, all the more notable for a smaller instance! - but I’m not sure how many others would think similarly. Still, they could be told that it’s an option. Or perhaps !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca is almost dead at this point, with so few posts? Then again it’s not the number that matters, if the content is relevant.

Oh, right, “from the top 20”. What about Lemmy.cafe - I’m curious about that, especially since they are rocking 0.19.6-beta, they might be doing okay actually, for a smaller instance?

Well I don’t know if “wise” would quite apply…

I started gathering some thoughts to make a post - I had intended !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca but it could be cross-posted, or whatever - about ways to block an instance. I got stuck with Mbin but finally have what I need there. The thing is: I lack the knowledge of which Lemmy apps will allow you to implement user blocks - and I mean the full defederation kind, not just the mere “community blocking” that does not block the comment replies of users from those instances. Do you know more about that? If you could give me a paragraph or table or link to point to or some such, then perhaps this weekend I could try to write that post.

Is there anything that they can do about it? It’s not that I am against telling them but… why complain about something over which they have little to no control?

Also, at some point it had seemed to me to be caught up, but indeed perhaps I missed something, or maybe another issue started after I wrote my reply above.

I see posts missing from there, from PieFed, and much more rarely but it happens, from Discuss.Online. It’s common, it’s expected, and at this point, I think that no instance other than Lemmy.World itself has any “expectation” to be fully up2date, specifically wrt content that is on Lemmy.World itself?

However you want to phrase that - the federated model is struggling, going through a rough patch specifically while we await 0.19.6 - it seems beyond the control of even admins?

Yeah that, but also the humans there too were a bit much. The entire culture is like “entertain me, while I shit on your efforts to do so”. People (don’t) wait to speak rather than actually listen.

Here we are allowed to have an older crowd of people - who use Linux btw - and do more to step up to be the change that they want to see in the world rather than merely vent like children.

I definitely would have left Reddit regardless of whether Lemmy existed to come to or not, so I get why so many content creators left Reddit - it just became not fun anymore. (And yeah, the chasing after profits is what originally made it that way, but also the sheeple consented too.)

Well now I don’t want you to feel left out so… this is for you:

Okay, but don’t say that I did nothin’ for ya m’kay!?

Here it is just for you:

Welcome! People are kinder here, overall. You’ll find yourself less defensive, more willing to engage, less snarky, easier to be around irl - man, Reddit was (is?) toxic AF, and whether or not I came here I was definitely leaving there.

Remember to block early and often here - back there that was almost pointless bc a never-ending stream of Reddi-trolls was ready to take their place, but here that actually works!:-)

Check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca for many more tips. You are going to like it here:-).

Also, since you mentioned PixelFed, check out PieFed as well as a Lemmy alternative - it has e.g. “categories” of communities rather than making you find and subscribe to each one individually, so it’s a whole different style compared to Lemmy where you have to browse by All to find new content. I’m speaking to you from it right now.:-)

But either way, I find that (most of) the people here are more worth talking to than Reddit:-).

Here’s such a conversation with an admin at sh.itjust.works if you are interested: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12051373, or with the mod of traditional_art@lemmy.ml https://discuss.online/post/12722075/11762479, and ofc there are many more. One conversation at a time, bringing up the logical points, condensing them, helping people know their options, etc.

blocking them is still one click away

Not… entirely, but yes an entire section dedicated to “hardcore tankies” helps!:-) I suppose that helps more for people brought in via Reddit, but not word-of-mouth recommendations, so if I am speaking of the latter then the burden is on me, and upon everyone else doing likewise, to “warn” their irl friends that they recommend to take a look at Lemmy. Which is why I am saying that it would be good to add automated labels. I think we are still waiting for a Lemmy upgrade though, that would allow for those? Or perhaps people are waiting specifically for 0.19.6 when Lemmy.World will upgrade, leading the way.

Lemmy.World naively might seem the most likely to attach a warning label to Lemmy.ml communities, seeing as e.g. they have defederated entirely from Hexbear.net, whereas so many other instances do not even do that much.

Though for myself, the longer this goes on the less faith I have that it will ever be fixed whilst remaining dependent upon the Lemmy.ml + lemmygrad.ml admins & devs to help accomplish the goals of bringing in more mainstream normies from the Western civilization that they so abhor and constantly ridicule. Why should they? They themselves do not want that. It is a harsh truth but we are on their platform, and that’s that. We will receive what they deign to offer. Which is why I am trying now to help PieFed thrive, despite how far behind it is, and it would be great to see Sublinks arrive as well.

I feel like we’ve had this conversation two or three times in the last few weeks

You keep asking questions though… so I kept answering them:-P. I feel like we got some addditional clarity on your only focusing on the top 20 instances.

Little by little, progress is made. This issue is not entirely solvable though, using current methods available to us - e.g. the issue you mentioned that the desires of users to avoid being bullied are at cross-purposes with being able to access particularly the FOSS content such as !firefox@lemmy.ml. I will say that “accessing open source communities” isn’t terribly hard - you don’t even need an account for that, though indeed lacking one would cut someone off from participating by asking questions, posting, replying, and voting. Which is why something like a “community label” holds such appeal to me, and even more approaches such as PieFed’s ability to enact user-initated user-blocking of custom user-specified instances without the need for the approval of an entire admin team and thereby the support of an entire community. It thereby democracizes blocking, making it available to anyone who wants it, which I for one think is awesome!?:-) Though the UI needs some polish, so I will focus on submitting bug reports to help with that.