FaceDeer

0xtero, 10 months ago

The Lemmy devs are actively asking for donations and every Lemmy instance - apollo.town and vlemmy.net included links to the join-lemmy.org landing page with donation links, so I'm a bit more wary of the whole construct. Perhaps the instance admins mean well - but at the end of the day, they and their instances are soliciting links that finance tankies. That's a no-go for me personally. But each to their own.

Some of the Kbin criticism in those posts is valid, though.

Kbin is not "production ready" software and it's missing a lot of Quality of Life features for instance admins.
It's hard to deploy, hard to to troubleshoot, operate and update. It's not packaged. We users are missing moderation and migration tools necessary to deal with the federated nature of the content (moving instances, content filtering etc)

But such is life on the bleeding edge.

I fully understand if fedi-admins don't want to spend all their free time fiddling with the instance. Many of them are volunteers. It's their choice and no one can fault them for installing Lemmy instead.

Ernest has stated multiple times the project is just a prototype and it very clearly is. People are working on it though. The tracker isn't exploding with issues anymore and Ernest seems to be back working on pull requests instead of battling with the server load, There's 53 of them currently - and they're from multiple contributors. It's going to take some time, but seems there's good work being done - by multiple devs.

Starting a software flamewar between Lemmy and Kbin seems incredibly silly and unproductive though, so I'll just say this - the fediverse puts lot of decision making power into the hands of users. There is choice. So use the stuff that works for you personally. No need to build walls, throw FUD or talk down the other software product or act as a knight in shining white armor for the one you happen to use and prefer.

There's space for everyone and there's space for multiple software projects and products. There's no division.

BornVolcano, 10 months ago

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

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@nelson, @nelson

Lol the Twitter webapp is trying to load something from its internal graphql API and getting a 429 Too Many Requests response. Twitter’s JavaScript ignores the error and tries again, hundreds of times a second.

Twitter is DDOSing itself.

[An image taken from the sci-fi television series “The Mandalorian” that shows the protagonist “The Mandalorian” in their characteristic metal suit. Their face is obscured by their helmet. The subtitles underneath the image read the text “[sighs]”]

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^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

The original duration of copyright was a flat 14 years, with a single additional 14 year extension if the copyright holder applied for it. So 28 years in total.

It turns out that after 28 years the vast, vast majority of copyrighted works have already earned essentially all of the money that they will ever earn. Most of them go out of print forever before that point. It's only a rare few works that end up becoming "classics" and spawning "franchises" that last beyond that point. We're sacrificing the utility of the vast bulk of what should be in the public domain for the sake of making those occasional lucky hits into cash cows.

There's a great paper by Rufus Pollock, Forever Minus a Day? Calculating Optimal Copyright Term, wherein he uses rigorous economic analysis to calculate that the optimal duration of copyright for generating the maximum value for society is 15 years with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. So remarkably the original law hit the right duration almost exactly through sheer happenstance.

In an earlier paper he also determined that the optimal duration of copyright actually decreases as it becomes easier to distribute work, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively.

CynAq, 11 months ago

I just preemptively blocked the community for my account. I'd recommend everyone do the same until, and if they prove to be a problem.
I think instead of calling for pre-blocks or defederation of entire instances, we have to be vigilant and keep a close eye on the discussions going on around us.

I'm saying this not because I'm an "enlightened centrist" living in a delusion of tolerance or a fascist in disguise. I am as left leaning, antifascist, and antiauthoritarian as they get. I'm just saying this as I know from experience that there's no real way to eliminate people with bigoted views from our communities other than on an individual basis.

Ban an entire instance, you'll still have to block the individuals if they come one by one to stir shit up on your turf. Just skip the first part and go for the individual communities and users. They will simply find each other and form groups, as instances or otherwise anyway.

I know it's not ideal, but there's no real way to prevent these fascist groups from forming anywhere there's a large enough number of people. We can only block our own interaction with them and form counter groups, and actively fight against their bigotry.

I believe this is the sad truth we all have to live with, at least for the time being, because I can't see defederation as an effective tool.

Hawne, 11 months ago

Totally agreeing. I remember of my BBS and Usenet days and we're facing a somewhat similar situation: in a distributed architecture we will be dealing with unsavory individuals and communities. We definitely will.

I was talking about this exact situation the other day with a reddit-migrant (net)friend of mine. We were debating on how and where to move the (somewhat important) France subreddit, as for now the most populated French community in the verse is hosted on an instance relaying lemmygrad - which raises some concern.

Well, I talked to him about the UN. Sorry to get a bit pseudo-political here but I think you'll get the idea.

The comparison I used is that while it is quite irritating (at the moment, but not only) that Russia is sitting at the security council, it is still a good thing that it is still a member of the UN. Because what matters in the end is that we all can discuss issues and overcome conflicts in order to keep on living all together.

And here in the fediverse we don't even have to deal with a network-wide veto from any unsavory community. Worst case, they're sitting on their "local security council" - meaning they're ruling within their own node, but as a federation we don't have to comply if thing s get really ugly.

However in the end what matters is the federation - the UN. When talking about server-to-server or server-to-federation conflicts defederation must be the last resort, because what really matters in the end is the federation surviving. Without it we're just powerless and will soon get back to some shady reddit clone à la squabbles.

Now, to get back to these usenet days. If you remember those days we had newsgroups varying from gardening to politics, but wa also had some less civil newsgroups including cp and alike. Most of these "worst contenders" were only relayed by a few major nodes but still they made their way through Usenet because of its very distributed architecture.

People not wanting to have any interaction with those newsgroups could either connect to a node ralaying them while not downloading their headers, or they could connect to a more "safe space" node. And on the other hand people who wished to interact with those newsgroups had to connect to anode relaying them, just as simple as that.

I am convinced we're heading towards a similar architecture and situation. As the fediverse grows we definitely will encounter bad people and bad communities, and sometimes we will look as bad people or bad communities to others. This is my truth, tell me yours, that's the way it goes. And it's not really a big deal.

I'm saying it's not a big deal because in the end, with a distributed architecture, the only censorship that really matters is yours. Your own filters, your choice of either connecting instance or followed communities and individuals. Due to its very nature, in a distributed architecture you are the one setting up your own barriers. Hardware and network distribution cannot and shall not do this part of the job for you, and server-to-server defed should only be the worst-case scenario in order - for instance not to relay (and mirror) cp, and for openly bot-friendly instances.

Now mind you, am I saying there is no safe space? Well, to a certain extent. Just as in a centralized architecture each of us will make their own "nest" so to speak and will interact with the people and communities we choose. We can board a plane with a nazi without being "tainted" by its naziness and if it really unsettles us we can always ask for a separation curtain - as in, individual defederation. Those are already programmed and will be available in the next versions, allowing any user to just ignore some communities even if they are relayed by their instance.

In a distributed architecture, we must all deal with this double-edged paradigm: We WILL encounter people and communities we don't like, but we do NOT HAVE TO suffer from them. Individual filters (and soon, individual defed) are here to help us establish our personal way of cherry-picking whatever this network has to offer.

This is usenet on steroids. There is no premade safe space and it shouldn't be, because what matters in the end is the network and not its junk. In a distributed architecture it's mostly up to the end user to set their own junk filters.

maynarkh, 11 months ago

Well, whether Reddit likes it or not, mods were a department of specialists working on some unique aspects of their business.

That whole department got told to get bent, in essence fired, but they don't even have contracts in place preventing "disgruntled employee" stuff.

This is what happens.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Perhaps in addition to allowing some communities to set themselves as NSFW by default, Kbin could also let communities set up tags that get automatically added to their posts? That way the porn ones could add #porn, the combat footage ones could add #gore, etc. "NSFW" would be a special tag that indicates that the contents should be blurred or otherwise hidden from accidental view, and the user could then decide whether they wanted to view it anyway based on the tags that were on it. Meanwhile something that was a perfectly innocent academic debate on the subject of porn could have the #porn tag but not the NSFW flag, and it'd be shown normally.

yacht_boy, 11 months ago

I've been on reddit for 13 years. My wife finally got an account last year. She cannot understand any of the fuss. She didn't know there were apps outside the official app. She never used RES. She just scrolls and never comments or posts. I would be surprised if she even upvotes or downvotes. She's not a monster, she just doesn't reddit like I do.

95% of users are like my wife. 5% of users are like me. I haven't even tried to explain this whole Lemmy/Kbin experiment to her yet.

But the thing is, if 50% of the 5% of us who are active posters (e.g., 2.5% of total users) are now over here on Kbin/Lemmy, the 95% who are left are going to notice a huge difference in the experience of the site. Conversations will be dull. New posts will be more ad-focused. They may not be able to explain what happened, but they will notice that Reddit is not as fun as it used to be.

Will this stop spez from getting stupid rich? Probably not. Will my wife switch to Lemmy or Kbin? Never gonna happen. But the people who want to be part of the old culture will find their way here. The stuff that made reddit great is already happening over here. Reddint will not die anytime soon, but it will cease to be relevant. Think of how long yahoo lasted even though no one cared about it. Reddit is going to be like that.

I haven't yet deleted my reddit account. It will probably happen. But I also haven't missed it. I've actually been excited to come over and see what's happening every day in the fediverse! I'm posting more, and considering modding for the first time.

athos77, 11 months ago

I think what this entire debacle has revealed is how incredibly unfit Huffman is to be involved in running a major site, much less one with as much reach as reddit.

I've read most of his comments and it's all centered around "reddit can't afford to keep paying everyone's API fees while everyone else makes bank". Which is fair enough.

But it also reads like a CEO who simply hasn't been paying attention to much of anything and who woke up one morning to realize that they'd already handed away the company's most valuable assets by letting Google and ChatGPT and other LLM companies harvest everything they need to build their products while reddit happily and blithely pays the bills. And now that other companies are starting to look profitable by building off what reddit paid to give away, Hoffman is both massively jealous and panicking, desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Only instead of going through every company that uses the API, figuring out how much they use and what they use it for and how necessary that use is for reddit's business, it looks like he panicked and tried to charge everyone the same rate. He didn't do any research into the issue and realize that Google harvests massive amounts of data that it uses in it's search results and to improve and program it's products and makes massive amounts of money, vs small apps that run basic queries that massively improve the reddit experience and that don't make much money at all. He just wants to charge everyone the same amount and keeps demanding that small apps pay the same as Google, because he's pissed he wasn't paying enough attention to notice what was going on.

And he's scared shirtless because he's had an easy run of reddit CEO, and now people are asking questions about his lack of vision and he's afraid that no one will ever give him such an easy and lucrative job ever again. And $10 million in the bank plus whatever stock options he has may look like a lot of money to us peons, it really isn't among the people he wants to keep hanging around with.

The one thing he's doing half-smart is the spin game. That's what that AMA was about, not to engage with the community, but to put out a dozen or so pre-written quotes that reddit could point to in interviews and say "look, here, this is what's really going on, and we've tried."

In the end, I think Huffman's massive failings can be summarized in his comment that "[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey. Which seems to summarize his period as CEO: just coast along like normal and surely some profits will arrive - and then panic when the profits start arriving for companies with CEOs who do they job and attention to their business.

Tower14, 11 months ago

Its such a weird complaint that these people are having right now. They're demanding that unpaid people come back and labor for them for free and/or give away the tools they've created for free.

It's like they have no idea how reddit works. People whining that the NFL sub is closed and demanding it to be reopened for instance. They can go make their own sub and moderate it themselves, but they dont. The entitlement to just demand that people do free labor for you is insane.

half, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Try not to take it too personally: the commies are extra sensitive at the moment because they have to share the fediverse with a giant influx of liberals. You'd probably be upset if they were pouring into your space. Not that anybody owns it, but we all take things for granted. It'll cool off.

edit: the gears of this sarcasm machine are lubricated by Marxist tears

sharkato, 11 months ago

Comments in my threads => When people comment on threads I've created
Replies to my threads comments => When people reply to comments I've made on a magazine's thread
Replies in my posts => When people reply to my posts in the microblog section of a magazine
Replies to my posts comments => When people reply to comments that I've left on microblog posts
New threads in a subscribed magazine => Any time a new thread is made in a given mag, you get a notification
New posts in a subscribed magazine => Any time a new microblog is made in a given mag, you get a notification

I keep everything on except the last two.