Bloonface

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Frankly, Mastodon already has trouble scaling just by serving up images and small bits of text, PeerTube would fall over almost instantly if it had to deal with even 1% of YouTube's volume.

Nobody's replacing YouTube, and from the perspective of a user who just wants to upload a couple of silly videos and watch thousands more, getting rid of the big corp that is willing to provide that ridiculously expensive to provide service feels like killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

On the flip side, they provide an inherently unprofitable high-cost service that, unlike virtually all others, actually does compensate its content creators.

Nobody I talk to about this ever seems to have any idea as to where the money is supposed to come from other than not ads and not blocking adblockers and not reducing bandwidth costs. So in other words... Nowhere.

Honestly... Leave YouTube alone. Even with ads, everyone's getting a pretty good deal out of Google on that one. You don't want to be sharing or taking on their costs.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Everybody gangsta until they realise that their usage of services incurs costs

Bloonface, 3 months ago

That furry spam was infuriating. Especially since on Kbin, you have to navigate to the specific domain itself using the Kbin interface, which means seeing more furry porn.

While it's just annoying in the case of furries getting to shove their fetish in peoples' faces, it poses a serious issue in case there's a domain that starts posting less-than-legal porn or whatever - in some jurisdictions, even having that in your browser cache is a crime, so specifically having to look at all the content from such a domain is... sub-optimal.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It was unfair for the lettuce, which still hasn't recovered.

Emotionally anyway. Career wise, it's doing much better.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Interesting assfuck.

That is all.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Let's be real, fedi's favourite subject of discussion is itself, and its second favourite subject of discussion is how bad all the sites fedi is supposed to be a replacement for are.

I'm hoping that dies down soon, one of the signs a site is doing well for users is that it stops with the navel-gazing shit.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

I think you've hit the nail on the head a bit, Reddit users were for all intents and purposes anonymous - you'd find usernames you recognise but it's among a sea of thousands of others, and the posts would all blur themselves into one. By and large, you go into a thread on a topic, not because Person X posted it, but because it's a topic you want to read about, and you upvote a comment because you liked it rather than because Person Y posted it.

Twitter is all about who you follow and you curate a follow list that matches what you want to see, and by return you engage with the people who engage with you. If the people who you'd want to follow on a replacement for Twitter aren't there, or nobody can or will engage with you, it's a shitty replacement for Twitter for your purposes. This is especially true with Mastodon, whose model is that you only see posts from the follow lists of people already on your instances, so if it starts off sucky then absent some external force, it stays that way.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Truth be told, he doesn't give a shit about us, the money is in selling ads to show to people who want to go on an app to look at cats and memes.

Absolutely no judgment on those people, but the sort of people who get upset over APIs are not who spez wants to cultivate as a userbase, as a deliberate business move.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

OnlyFans in general is a complete fucking racket. Most "creators", who are young and often vulnerable people, make nothing or next to nothing from subs, even while taking on risks they may not know about or be able to mitigate them if they do know about them.

The world would actually be better without it.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

If Spiderman shot webs out of his arsehole I might actually go and see one of those dumb films for a change

Bloonface, 3 months ago

That's not just a Reddit thing, it's an Internet thing.

Americans absolutely dominate the English-speaking Internet.

But then the population of the US is greater than the population of Australia, the UK, New Zealand and Canada combined, twice over.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It was already bad enough indulging racist/sexist/transphobic shitheads with platforms just so they could have "polite debates" (that they didn't actually care about, they just wanted pulpits); having a place specifically for them to come and have more debates they don't actually care about was an especially stupid idea.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It is actually illegal in some jurisdictions, including mine.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

OK, more concretely then, sexualised drawings of people who are or appear to be under 18 are illegal in the UK.

This is an odd hill to die on if you're not interested in looking at sexualised drawings of people who are or appear to be under 18.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

For real, I've been trying to learn Japanese on and off, love the country, like lot of its media (albeit not much anime) and I'm absolutely desperate to avoid being associated with those guys.

Most people who aren't nonces recognise fairly instinctively that a sexual image of someone who appears to be a ten year old girl is a pretty noncey thing to both produce and look at, and that finding some level of sexual attraction to someone who looks like a ten year old is pretty noncey. But you know, weebs gonna weeb.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

The more pressing matter is that simply viewing such images is a crime in some jurisdictions, let alone distributing them. It exposes both the site itself, any federating instances and users of any federating instances to potential legal issues.

More philosophically, I don't care if people that want to look at underage anime girls fuck off. They can go and be creepy weebs somewhere else.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Yeah but that would be bullshit, and frankly your definition (which appears to be being skewed by a desire to look at sexual cartoons of children) would not need to be believed by anyone else.

"Canonically" also doesn't matter because someone saying "actually this person who looks exactly like a five year old girl is a million years old" also doesn't have to be believed by anyone else.

That is why the UK law is "appear to be" - specifically to avoid consumers of child pornography, real or drawn, pulling dumb stunts like that.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

I think it's just that they spend all their time around other people who get off to that shit so they think it's normal and fine.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It's amazing seeing a company try to give itself Galapagos syndrome.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It's almost like Nadine Dorries isn't very bright.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

This is just an absolutely fucking dismal idea.

I can't think of a more surefire way to ruin the site than make it so that the mob can tear down anyone who sets a quality bar any higher than they like.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

The EU or the UK. The Information Commissioners Office would take an exceptionally dim view of this shit.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

There's a lot of people who just resent the idea of mods in general because they feel affronted that they can't just spray their shitposts wherever they feel like and/or object to the idea of the Internet having any kind of quality bar. They're mainly just reacting to it with a "if the mods are for it, I'm against it" mentality.

But yeah, also, the people who didn't leave for the blackout are more likely than not to side with Reddit, or actually like the Reddit app and not care about the fuss.

Also also, there's a vast majority of people who consider this whole brouhaha to be nerd shit and don't care.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It's in the same boat as Reddit is where it has gained a lot of goodwill by providing free content hosting for pretty much anyone, but because they've done that for so long it's seen as having little value, so attempts to generate value from it are resented.

I'm a lot more sympathetic to YouTube than I am to Reddit though, to put it bluntly.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Boris Johnson in "liar" shocker.

This should end his career but then again, there's been lots of other things that should have ended his career well before this and didn't.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

The sort of sneering at newbies is exactly the sort of shit that in no small part gave Mastodon a reputation of being hostile to outsiders.

If we want this shit to take off as something other than a nerd curio, it needs to be accessible, not delivered with a side helping of judgment for not being 100% on board with the endeavour from the beginning.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Absolutely. In my experience, there's a really strong tendency from people who are already all-in on fedi to treat "this thing doesn't have feature X that my previous site Y did" as simple whining and respond to it with hostility rather than constructive criticism, you can see that with the thin-skinned reaction to some criticisms of Mastodon back in November about e.g. lack of quote posts or poor discovery features.

They don't treat it as constructive criticism or actual feedback from users but instead as an assault on something they identify with personally, which is a recipe for disaster

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Yakuza 0.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Yudkowsky really is one of those people who's a stopped clock. I wish he'd focus on that sort of stuff more than the mad AI crap.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

The problem with this assessment is that we've tried the approach of reasoning with people like this and all it does is allow them to proselytise. They don't want a polite debate, they want a pulpit.

A neo-Nazi who's stuffed in a box talking to other neo-Nazis is a neo-Nazi who's not infesting some other place trying to spread shit about "race realism". They'll find it a lot harder to "march on Washington" when it's just a couple hundred Nazis and not a couple hundred Nazis plus thousands of others they've radicalised.

Sunlight's a shitty disinfectant. I prefer bleach.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

A lot of subs are still dark.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Everyone has used the "email" metaphor since the Mastodon migration back in 2022 and it still sounds overcomplicated, because frankly from the point of view of someone used to a single service on a single website, it is.

It really is better to ignore the whole federation stuff entirely while you're getting people on board.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

You are repeating the same mistakes that were made with Mastodon if you bamboozle people with a bunch of shit they frankly don't care about when you try and sell them on a replacement for a site they already use.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Yes, but apparently it's not enough to actually get people using this Fediverse thing, they also have to be completely sold on all of its technical and ideological underpinnings and you need to make sure they are right at the point where they might be willing to try it.

I mean, who wants users if they unbellyfeel fediverse?

Bloonface, 3 months ago

In my view the issue with explanations of the Fediverse in general is that they all seem to rely on people either already having a rough understanding of what a server is and how that relates to them. If you don't have those priors then the concept will simply not register.

Frankly a lot of people had trouble understanding subreddits, let alone client-server architectures for online services. They just saw Reddit as "an app", or Twitter as "an app". The stuff behind that is essentially magic to them, but is also abstracted away so it's not their problem. The fediverse seems to make that their problem in a very confrontational way, not helped by a) some people insisting that prior knowledge of how fedi works is necessary for participation and b) the fact that unlike email (the most popular metaphor) communication between instances is neither fully automatic nor often transparent to the end user.

To be blunt, it's nerd shit. Nerds like it but to everyone else, it's just nerd shit. Most people don't want nerd shit getting in the way of their online time.

The best way to explain the Fediverse, to my mind, is to not. Anyone who's interested will find out about it, anyone who's not can just use it. I don't need to understand the mechanics of a hybrid drivetrain, lithium ion batteries and combustion engines to drive my car. I just press the "Start" button and drive it.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

I don't really agree with this because the fediverse is not only interconnected by a technology (ActivityPub) but also by some shared values, like inclusivity and kindness to each other.

That's kind of overegging the pudding. There's nothing intrinsically "nice" about fedi, quite a lot that isn't, and this feels like a promise that will be very rapidly seen as hollow lies the moment someone has a negative interaction, as well they might.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

I'm going to keep banging the drum here that the fact Kbin.social exists and is basically the instance is why it's gaining traction over Lemmy, which is far more splintered.

Not having to choose an instance massively reduces the barrier to entry for newbies. I really don't think we should be pushing people to other instances if we can help it right now, that can be a consideration further down the line.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

You can't create two magazines with the same name as the check for that is case insensitive (e.g. I own /m/uwotm8, you can't create /m/UWotM8 as the software checks for that).

So it's mainly a UX thing relating to URLs, which does need to be solved.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

Surprised that nobody's pointed out the obvious:

It was the middle of the night in the US. All the Americans, that tend to dominate English-speaking forums, are just waking up.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

The "value proposition of the Fediverse" as defined by you is something of basically no interest to people who ultimately want to have Reddit but not Reddit, who are also coincidentally the people most likely to be attracted to Kbin.

The Mastodon migration got screwed up by people pushing their purist version of decentralisation over decent UX, Christ help us if Kbin blows its chance in the same way.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

It also confused the shit out of newbies who neither know nor care what an instance is and find the idea too outside of their existing comprehension or level of caring to wrap their heads around.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

This is about where I land.

It's essentially an open market of instances, if people find more utility on big ones - as they are very likely to, since being on small ones makes the new user experience suck big dangly balls - then maybe that says more about the general attractiveness of the fediverse concept to end users than it does about either those users or the instances concerned.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

If it is like Mastodon, then the more users you have, the more servers you'll federate with, the more posts you will pull down, the more disk space you consume and the more you'll have to actively manage your disk space and probably continually seek more system resources.

I would honestly say to give it a few months and see if you're still here before taking the plunge, which as a side benefit will allow you to wait for more admin information and documentation to be created.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

I honestly think that if you care about adoption of Kbin then closing down the flagship instance is going to be absolutely toxic.

It was bad enough in November 22 when people went to "Mastodon" (i.e. Mastodon.social) and got turned away, it made people think the entire network was closed, and all the explanations just sounded like nonsense to people coming from Twitter who'd just heard about this cool Mastodon site that was going to fix everything.

Bloonface, 3 months ago

people just got extremely lazy when all they have to do is open of the 5 mega-platforms like Twitter and Reddit to access everything.

That's a funny way of saying "to an end user, not having to give a shit about what instance you're on is an objectively easier and thus better experience".

Particularly when most people couldn't tell you what a server even is. It just makes them confused because it's neither something they understand nor something they're going to be motivated to care about.

If using a platform feels like hard work compared to its competitors, that's a failing of the platform, not of users. Users don't owe the platform anything.

I can guarantee there are also plenty of things you, in common with everyone else, simply do not care about and cannot be convinced to care about, and would similarly consider it an imposition to be required to care about them or be judged as "lazy".