maegul

maegul, 11 months ago

Yea, so, the “Chinese whispers” of negative rumours are super toxic. The rumour you’ve heard is probably the most untrue I’ve heard in a long time.

The devs are communists and a pretty staunchly anti-Nazis and racism. The reason you have to apply to join lemmy is that a while back a bunch of nazis came in here, and so to prevent that from happening ever again, the devs made the sign up process harder.

They’ve also hardcoded some anti-racism filtering into the codebase, which has attracted a good deal of criticism from “free-software” types while the devs just don’t want their software to be used by any racists.

If there’s controversy, it’s over the magnitude of their communism and the extent to which they happily defend china etc. From what I’ve seen, their position is mostly that western media/propaganda hypocritically exaggerates issues. Even if their defences go too far, I think this is a valuable perspective (because beyond “fake news” rubbish, the media is absolutely biased). Additionally, capitalism, even if you think it’s the best system, could do with a critical beating at the moment.

Beyond all that, this is FOSS and the devs have been nothing but supportive of people making new instances, communities and forks for a diverse ecosystem.

Back to the rumour shit. I’ve seen a bit of it on the fediverse and basically concluded that it’s a social media habit from big social platforms that really needs to die. On bigger platforms, it’s more harmless as the umbrella organisation running the platform is untouchable and the most likely victims are big powerful people that have actually done something wrong.

On the fediverse, basically no one is powerful. Instead, you’ve got volunteers and people trying to do their best, however much they might need to learn something. And it’s not one big shadow company keeping the place together, it’s just people. So any rumour is likely to be friendly fire against the fediverse as a whole. So unless you know something and are willing to look into it, it’s probably not worth thinking about. If someone says something is the case, ask for receipts or evidence. Often there won’t be a reply. Asking as you have here isn’t bad, but the weirdly wrong rumour you’ve acquired probably deserved more scepticism based on its source.

The big exception to this is racism. If someone who is the subject of such things says it’s happening it should be presumed true.

maegul, 11 months ago

Don't know if there are existing issues on this, but it'll be interesting to see how lemmy and kbin tackle user migrations, if at all.

maegul, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Big game from Denver! Demonstrates what makes championship teams.

Game 3, Jokic and Murray carry the team and break records for the win. Then in Game 4, they have relatively quiet games, for Gordon and Brown to get it done, out scoring Jokic and Murray. Also, 14-28 from 3 helps too!

Heat just looked outclassed. Any chance Buttler is carrying an injury keeping him down?

maegul, 11 months ago

There’s similar things for mastodon and a project currently in alpha/beta for multiple platforms, incl Lemmy, called spacehost.

See mastodon post here https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109905703584075719

See their main rep on the fediverse here: https://atomicpoet.org/users/atomicpoet and https://calckey.social/@atomicpoet (@atomicpoet @atomicpoet).

They also admin calckey.social.

maegul, 11 months ago

It would be really cool if the "threaded" platforms (my dumb moniker "threadiverse") could really come together on this and create a friendly ecosystem. Shared ideas, APIs, federation and mobile apps would be a real demonstration of what the fediverse "is about" compared to the mastodon dominance going on over on the microblogging/mastoverse

maegul, 11 months ago

I grew up with this culture, unfortunately, never rode a school bus or saw one.

And yea, it is complete trash. Let's put tiny vulnerable road-unintelligent children, all running around, in the same place as a bunch of stressed out parents driving cars while mostly thinking about work or not being late for work.

What could go wrong!

Shit ... let's reduce the speed limit drastically to prevent accidents! Ok, now it's just a big fat traffic Jam! Shit ... let's build specialised roads within the school to increase the speed of drop off. Ok ... now we've lost some of our school grounds and it's marginally better ... except everyone's driving tanks/four-wheel-drives now so it's pretty dangerous for kids still! Shit lets ...

Seen all of that. It's really really dumb and stressful for kids and parents alike.

maegul, 11 months ago

Yea ... bridges should be possible in theory ... which would be interesting.

Also, just in case you didn't know ... lemmy communites also provide RSS feeds (look for the icon at the top of a community page).

The inventor of RSS theorised not long ago that the fediverse would be glued together by RSS. They're obviously biased, but still an interesting idea, especially given that fediverse apps are struggling somewhat with how the platforms all have different APIs

maegul, 11 months ago

Wait what! Things have gotten this bad!? Like, this actually happened? I’m guessing there was no follow up question.

I mean, it’s either a dumb corporate strategy to discredit or psychopathic behaviour, or, sadly, both.

maegul, 11 months ago

So realistically, what would a sustainable business model be for something like Reddit?

Something like lemmy or a fediverse platform is going to rely on donations and community support. In the case of mastodon, for example, it’s been shown to work well enough for sustainable operations. For those willing to work on something worthwhile for lower salary, it is potentially a great gig. In a commercial context though, it’s basically a subscription based business model.

If we’re to recover from this ad driven data tracking economy, subscriptions seem like a healthy thing for businesses to adopt.

Reddit may have already signed their deals with the devil. But generally, the point of the fediverse is to escape this corporate manipulation of our basic communications in the internet, and it’s still interesting to ask what profitable but sustainable operations can look like.

maegul, 11 months ago

Possibly. I’m not sure how true it is that the fediverse necessarily leads to more efficient computing needs per user. I’d bet it’s the opposite.

But, as you perhaps allude to, there are other factors. For those who only want niche smaller communities, they can enjoy a more stripped down experience without needing speedy and beefy servers. Similarly, the platforms here are probably slimmer and not bloated with features that are trying to engage and monetise.

The major factor, IMO, is ownership. Admins literally own their servers. And should have a much closer and codependent relationship with the users in their servers, except in the case of large instances which become different beasts. Additionally, users have much more choice and mobility on the fediverse. All of which means admins/moderators and users have more at stake in their relationship. More ownership over their platform/instance. And therefore actually have a reason to donate and contribute and help out.

maegul, 11 months ago

Huh. I didn't get to watch any of the Bucks-Heat series (as a Bucks fan, sadly).

I can't remember any breakdowns or numbers from the series ... but does this explain any kind of disappointing performance from Kris?

maegul, 11 months ago

Yea. If the weekly/monthly user numbers are available, that'd be cool too. Tough to get a clear image during migrations though because signing up and never returning counts, I think, as a weekly/monthly active user in the time window.

Cool animation BTW!!

maegul, 11 months ago

Go beehaw!!

maegul, 11 months ago

Downside is that it's new and has some rough edges.

Upside is that it's a nice design. It's trying to fuse microblogging and link-aggregation/threaded conversations into one platform, and so far has done well. I really hope it does well in the future.

maegul, 11 months ago

And it's not a mastodon instance either ... pleroma.

maegul, 11 months ago

And it's not a mastodon instance either ... instead they're using pleroma.

maegul, 11 months ago

Oh right ... my bad. I know about akkoma, for some reason I thought they were using pleroma. Thanks.

maegul, 11 months ago

Also, nuggets were a two headed snake. Everyone’s talking about jokic, meanwhile just quietly lands a triple double too with 34 pts and aggressive all game. Gordon and Braun showed up too.

maegul, 11 months ago

And moved well and was intense. Felt like Malone gave an intensity pep talk and as the young guy he bought it whole heartedly. KCP and Porter missed their shots (1-4 and 1-7) from the beginning and didn't have the same intensity from then on.

maegul, 11 months ago

I think there are a few.

blahaj.zone

infosec.pub

pawbs is a furries thing on mastodon too I think

I wrote a small mastodon post with some links here: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110506940921141037

maegul, 11 months ago

Yep. Like there's a good point there from a software standpoint and whether this measure makes sense once the user base and spread of instances and cultures goes past a threshold (especially on the language barrier, but not as persuasively as they think I suspect given the grassroots origin of the software). It's probably at, past or near that threshold now, but similarly with the point at which friendly forks make sense.

But, "lets just resist racism as much as possible even with weird software kludges" being a problematic "ideology" that undercuts any claim to fostering diversity? ... LMFAO!

Maybe put the software freedom and free-speech flags down for a second, look around and touch some grass.

maegul, 11 months ago

So, there's a simple constraint built into the fediverse or decentralised social media: each separate instance or node does not have a copy of everything on the fediverse. Instead, each instance only has a copy of the things that its users directly follow or subscribe to.

Often this is described as what an instance can (or cannot) see.

In your case, you were probably searching for things that lemmy.ml just can't see or hasn't yet seen.

For lemmy in general, and I'm hazy on this TBH, this will apply to communities. That is, an instance won't have the content of a community unless one of its users has subscribed to it. When you search for communities though, any community from any instance that connects to lemmy.ml will turn up (AFAIU).

For mastodon content, when viewed from lemmy.ml, not much is going to turn up here because lemmy isn't about following or subscribing to individuals. No one on lemmy.ml is following the mastodon user you were searching, because they can't. And so the post you were searching for just isn't visible to lemmy.ml.

The only way in which a mastodon post is visible from lemmy is when that post is directly addressed to lemmy either as a post to a lemmy community or in reply to a lemmy post or comment.

This is actually quite easy to do from mastodon, in large part because both lemmy communities and users are presented to mastodon as though they are other users. As things are now, lemmy doesn't treat mastodon users as something similar to a community that you can subscribe to, that's not really what lemmy is about.

So yes, not everything is seamless here on the fediverse, and in principle I'm with you: there's some maturation yet to occur and it's honestly best to think of this place as a big prototype.

Personally, I don't think this is the fault of the platform developers, as they're doing what they can with the protocol and software available to them. The space that is, IMO, most fertile for growth and innovation is in the clients/apps, where multiple platforms can be woven together into a single interface in much the same way that a single email app can help you manage multiple email accounts. So far, to be fair, much of the activity in this space has been dedicated to trying to mimic the success of Twitter apps. Not much true innovation has taken off yet.

Additionally, there's almost certainly some work to be done in adding and developing sort of "middleware" software and services across the fediverse.