The fediverse won’t succeed at putting up a #Stackoverflow substitute and that’s a problem?
Just an impression: All the pieces seem to be there. But what’s required is a team, with devs, PMs and coordinators, dedicated to making a particular place in the #fediverse .
That’s resources and decently sized financial and organisational demands, especially to get a critical mass of users.
Is the fediverse up to that challenge? If not, is it an issue worth addressing?
I dont think thats accurate. The problem here is data quality. In SO you likely get few but good answers because the system is designed that way. Thats why its not done here a lot. I tried asking code and sysadmin stuff here. The amount of hate and bs answers you get is shocking. SO is also insanely moderated. Something that isnt really feasible for mainline lemmy.
I think a fork of lemmy would work though. With the karma requirement that SO has to post and the same requirements.
SO is a meritocracy. Its not a nice feeling to not be able to answer a question. But it works. because you have to ask questions first, then comment and then post answers (iirc). this would not work on lemmy. but a special fork together with an instance (or many) could work imo.
Disclaimer: I designed and wrote a couple of programs for a company I created and others. it worked well. Not saying I know everything. Just my ideas.
PS: I made a mastodon fork to recreate linkedin/xing feel free to leave a star)
Thats not a bad idea. I might look into this. The karma requirement would not be the only thing. Making it impossible to comment until you asked a question is going to be hard I guess, no?
If you‘re down for it, lets discuss this and make a design draft for a faithful copy of SO under lemmy. I am willing to work for it. Just cant do it alone.
I suppose you dont have to look up code often, yes? Because SO is the goto for many devs and searching for answers to most general code questions lead there.
Obviously, the design leads to absurd situations sometimes since not everyone is allowed to post an opinion piece. You will likely rather get no answer than a wrong one. In that case you either have achieved a really niche problem or you should try asking another way or you might be looking at the problem the wrong way.
Amen. Same problem here. But feel free to hit me up if you find someone who wants to do it. I wouldnt mind helping with design stuff since that meeds different skills than coding.
After putting my account into "hibernation" for the past few weeks, I finally closed it. But I'm still looking for work. Thankfully I can still find positions (SRE and software dev) by just going directly to the company's site and finding a Jobs page.
Good luck to everyone else out there looking for work!
You will always have silos of control and that is a good thing. The fact that makes it democratic is that you have access to it. If you dont like the rules of the instance, you move or spin up your own.
What you‘re saying is just everyone for themselves, diverting the already thinly stretched attention of fedi-capable folks even more.
Again, I think its okay to disagree. I‘m just saying „but i want“ is not a valid reason to reinvent the wheel imo.
Our problem is not a system, it is certain behavior of certain people corrupting the system until itself becomes the problem. The solution is not bringing down the system but outlawing the behavior (the dark triad) because although I consider myself a leftist and close to anarchism, I recognize that we have a lot of narcissists and psychopaths in that space as well. Those who are willing to take any measure to bring the current people in power down to take power themselves. Bullying people into submission is no different than being rich and paying them for it.
Its you again! Your signature always identifies you instantly.
I agree that linkedin is shit. Any form of alternative would be good but honestly, I‘m not using any social media that isnt democratic anymore. So my only chance at it is making it democratic.
I just went ahead and did something. Since I consider you very knowledgeable I would like to invite you to look at it and share your opinion. I‘ll send you the link if you‘re interested.
I agree. Federation isnt the end. But right now, we have to build this up and abolish the old, not abolish the new imo. Thats why I say federation everywhere now, concentrate everything on making this work and worry about the next thing afterward.
The reason I say this is also because I founded a couple of very successful businesses because my autistic brain has a very significant advantage: intense focus. Focusing your efforts on one thing is insanely important and the only way to really get somewhere.
Have you ever wondered why there are better systems, fairer systems but they never take hold? The reason imo isnt (only) because the 1% actively fight them and lead the rest to fight them as well but because the anarchists and leftists cant agree on a goal to pursue.
They burn themselves out without much to show for it. Constantly shaming each other for not being leftist enough, voting, not voting, etc. Thats the only reason why autocracy works. Right wingers have one enemy: leftists. Leftists have hundreds because they’re all different shades of left.
If we actually for some reason got the idea to ask what our smallest common denominator is, we would actually het somewhere. But the little narcissist in most of us doesnt want that because their idea was „better“. Its the old curse of „too smart for your own good“.
Thats a very insightful and well formulated comment. Thank you for this. It was very easy to read ans touched a pot of points.
The standards xkcd is pretty iconic, ngl.
My point with mixing politics in is that most of us have common goals but we dont talk about them. I‘d imagine most of us want to be free from (corporate) control, which isnt by design political but in fact only really lived by the highly progressive and so on. But yes, I used politics as an example for splitting effort.
The idea of distributed spcial networks in itself isnt bad but saying it will work when we have no signs for it kinda is. Bittorrent is great and all but it works to overcome many problems that normal downloads at the time had and doesnt have any of the limitations what social media has (need for moderation, need for linked actions, etc)
Finally, the reason I think we have large instances is that running a social network is no joke. I have my own instance with just a handful of friends and there are technical, legal and moderation issues. These wont go away. People wont learn to host a server and open source wont make it dead easy tomorrow. It will take years until a next lemmy is easily deployable.
And the reason that lemmy isnt easily deployable is that making a social network is no joke either. the devs get a lot of hate for things that arent their fault. I donated a (for me) large chunk of money to them for their efforts because I am the change I want to see.
So, I agree, we will need to evolve further and further but we arent evolving in anything (it feels like) except the fediverse. So instead of pushing the one fhing that is actually progressive to break itself, I‘d use my energy to push voting to become federated, to push banking to become federated (as in think about a successor to crypto or get a standard to form that is clearly superior).
I hope my intension is clear here. I‘m pushing hard for the fediverse to succeed and see big scares along the way (corpo intervention for example) and I know how burnout and attention spread work against us so although I agree that progress is important, many people who havent lived through burnout dont get the need for nuance.
Its good to hear that someone does something besides talking, I‘ll give you that.
But imagine, you‘d do so much good making PRs for the existing fedi and not having the attention and pressure while working on the now.
If we prepare for it falling apart before it even matured, we‘re dooming it. You could instead make a pr for a new search function (because its insanely easy to search through all dederated servers on your server, we just need it to be the default) and by working on something different with no momentum while depriving the thing that has momentum is a bad idea imo. Sorry.
Voting, as in you vote for something to happen. Democracy. We should federate it so everyone can do it, probably cryptographically or some other way.
Now you‘re contradicting yourself. You‘re making an alternative to the fediverse because of issues you cant be bothered to solve but speculation isnt worth to call crypto worthy of a successor. Do you see how that is illogical? Also, reinventing the wheel is why we have corporate control. We need to work on one thing and make it good.
I have actually made a few PRs when I first came to lemmy.
Awesome!
solving the wrong problems
I would say this is far too generalized. Since you seem very smart you might want to reflect on this. The issues that lemmy solves are still prevalent outside of it and you are speaking from a place of privilege imo since you (as am I) are educated enough to make it here, build stuff and change things. We are the minority and we should not go running away before the world can catch up.
The proper solution to search, imo, is a separate service that indexes as much of the fediverse as possible.
I disagree, respectfully though since you make good points. I think it is already enough to index the servers you have federated with. For example, my own instance federates with world. I want to be able to see all communities, not posts or comments, that are on world, together with a rought member and post count. That way I can make an informed decision. I think you are making this too much a low level decision. The reason we are all here and the ultimate goal of lemmy and the fediverse imo is agency, nothing else. And that is what we should be striving for.
I have to run but I might come back to this later to answer the rest. I think we’re pretty constructive together. Maybe we should connect on github or something. I’m working on another fediverse thing.
See ya later. Feel free to send me a dm if you like.