FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

It's probably a bit early for this sort of thing, but I don't have a fundamental objection to it. One nice thing about the fediverse is that the different instances can compete with each other, if one is able to provide the same service as another with no need for ads then users will flock to that one instead of the ad-riddled one.

I actually wouldn't mind using an instance that had simple banner ads or sidebar ads, as long as they didn't try to insert themselves into the content. I've trained myself to ignore such things quite effectively.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

There's certainly no way to enforce this fediverse-wide, of course.

As a matter for this specific instance, I'd say "maybe." Ideally the reason for such a limitation would be foremost - we don't want to have absentee mods or power-tripping tinpot dictators because of the bad results they give. So maybe an instance could have a policy against that sort of thing, and if a mod breaks them then they get ousted. Reddit's approach has generally been "mods are gods, don't bother admins about them. They rule their kingdoms and we don't care if it sucks." It doesn't have to be that way.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Some Mastodon instance admins that I chatted about it say that Meta will "likely attempt to pull their user data", and they "will defederate immediately".

If the data's able to be pulled by another instance, then there's no point hiding it, Meta can already get it. Anyone can.

I don't see it being inherently bad to have Meta get in the pool. As long as they stick to the protocol it's a huge boost for the fediverse.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

The reputation score calculation is totally broken right now, as far as I'm aware. It's probably a low priority to fix compared to all the other fires going on but should get fixed eventually.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Perfectly fine. In the end, I think the original devs of Lemmy are going to be swamped by the ecosystem that's developing around them; they don't get to decide what the community's overall opinions are going to be and if Lemmy.ml becomes hostile to that people will just go to other instances. Like Beehaw.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

"Illegal" varies with jurisdiction. If an instance is allowing material that is illegal for your instance to be hosting, then you'd probably want to defederate from that instance.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

It's awesome that such open custom CSS and JS is allowed.

Next question, though; how do I disable that? :) I just came across /m/boycottreddit with customized CSS, and wow, I can't read it. It's got dark gray text on a black/dark orange background. It'd be nice to be able to disable it on a per-community basis in case I like most of the customizations but occasionally come across a community like this one that I'd like to read but can't.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

And although Trump can be elected from behind bars, I see no reason why he would be allowed out of prison to do campaigning. So that might factor in to the debate roster as well.

Maybe he can answer debate questions from in one of those plexiglass booths with the telephone for visitation.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Yeah, I'm expecting that Lemmy's going to get forked pretty soon just to avoid the building controversy over that.

As far as I'm aware Lemmy (the software) itself is fine, though.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

For me, the analogy that I find most helpful for intuitively grasping the way this "fediverse" thing works is a system where everyone can see your emails. There are a bunch of different servers out there that all handle email, like gmail.com or hotmail.com, and you sign up to one of them and get yourself an account there - facedeer@gmail.com, for example (not my actual email address, this is just for this example). I can post my "emails" for other people on gmail.com to see, but since the email standard includes methods for sending emails to other servers as well people on hotmail.com can also see my emails.

So you're @TheCreatureAnswered@kbin.social because you have an account at kbin.social, and you've posted a comment in this thread here. But someone with an account at lemmy.ml can also see this thread. They can respond to it, and you'll see their response from @someone@lemmy.ml show up here on kbin.social.

It's actually not much like Discord. Discord is more similar to Reddit, in that it's all being done on one giant server that everyone has an account on. That's simpler, but it has the downside that everything is under the control of just one organization and if they decide to do something you don't like (such as this API thing with Reddit) then there's nowhere you can go to escape from it.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Going back to the email analogy from earlier, Lemmy is like Microsoft Outlook and Kbin is like Mozilla Thunderbird. They're two different programs written by different people in different languages, but they both communicate using the same underlying protocol.

My understanding of the main differences:

• Kbin is written in PHP by @ernest. Just by ernest. He's really busy right now. Maybe buy him a coffee to keep him going.
• Lemmy is written in Rust by a couple of people who literally think North Korea is best Korea (this is a source of a certain amount of controversy about Lemmy, as you might imagine. But as far as I can tell this isn't negatively impacting the software itself, and it's open source so I don't expect it will).

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Yup. Though bear in mind that the instance name is an important part of the username, it shouldn't be ignored. There's nothing stopping the facedeer@hotmail.com and facedeer@gmail.com email addresses from being registered by two different people, but since people should be paying attention to the part after the @ that shouldn't be a problem.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Lemmy's devs are what are commonly referred to as "tankies." Authoritarians who dress up in Soviet/Maoist pagentry, basically.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, personally. They were influential when Lemmy was small, but I expect they'll be marginalized to irrelevance once the Reddit flood fully arrives.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

The best set of primary sources I've come across so far is in this comment which has links to one of the Lemmy devs denying the Uyghur genocide. Other than that I have to admit that it's one of those "everyone knows" sorts of things, as far as I'm currently aware. I did a little Googling and found this post that contains some more discussion and sources backing the accusation up.

Since I'm not too worried about this in terms of what it means for the Lemmy software and fediverse I haven't gone delving any deeper myself.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

It may help that the sword isn't really very sword-like, which means it can get away with a lot and still look cool.

It's a god, though, so it's fine that it doesn't make sense. :) The sword looks like some sort of solidified cloud, perhaps work that into the gods' origin myth.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

The various notification types are rather confusing, is there some kind of help page yet that explains what the various terms mean? There's "comments in my threads", "threads comments", "posts", and "posts comments" and it's unclear what the difference is between these various things.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I can only think of one D&D character death for one of my characters, and it was something he had been setting up to have happen for 20+ levels. He was a wizard who had rigged up insane layered paranoid contingency plans for that situation, to such a point where it actually was a better outcome for his plans for him to get killed than for him to survive.

There are two general philosophies I've seen with regards to playing D&D. Some people see it as a game where the risk of dying is part of the fun, and some people see it as more of a storytelling thing where "losing" a character to circumstances outside of their control would ruin their fun. I lean toward the latter, but both are fine - it's just important to make sure the DM and the rest of the players are on the same page with each other about their expectations and plans.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Same, I boosted something randomly to see what it did and now it's stuck there. And then more recently I boosted one of my own comments because I heard that doing so added to your reputation points and I wanted to see if that was true (it is). So it seems this "boost" thingy could probably use a bit more work.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

One unfortunate thing is that it's not really the communist ideology that's so awful. I think it's been proven to not be particularly well founded at this point, but Marx never envisioned a dictatorship. It's just been used as an excuse for bog-standard authoritarianism so much over the years that the whole concept has become tainted.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I expect Lemmy will get forked at some point soon. I'm still using both, because it's good to have options and redundancy. Especially when dealing with an open protocol, having multiple implementations helps keep the protocol from developing a bunch of ad-hoc proprietary extensions.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Indeed. I was oversimplifying, Marx is just the best-known "founder" of communist philosophy and even though I think most of it's kind of hogwash I still feel a little bad for him about how horribly it got misappropriated and turned into an excuse for history's worst atrocities.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

BRB, going to boost all my comments. :)

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

The main issue is that the devs (and, until this exodus started, a large chunk of the community) are apparently apologists for authoritarian regimes. Specifically China, Russia, and North Korea. "Tankies" is the common term.

I'm not too concerned since it's open source, but it's good to have kbin and other alternative implementations regardless.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

One of my best campaigns was the year I ran the "zero-prep campaign", where I explicitly told everyone that I was preparing nothing ahead of each session and would be scribbling down monster stats the moment the players attacked them.

As it turned out I did sometimes come with a bit of stuff prepped, now and then. But for the most part everything was just prepped in my head, I'd think about what was likely to happen and be ready to make stuff up along those directions.

Somehow that campaign came out with one of my most cohesive storylines. There's a friendly Aboleth named Snowdrop who came out of it who'll likely be making appearances in future "serious" campaigns.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I've been using Stable Diffusion to generate illustrations for roleplaying games and I have personally experienced this, I usually end up with dozens of good images for each particular thing I'm trying to illustrate and have to delete most of them without them ever seeing the light of day. As a datahoarder it's the worst thing about these AIs.