FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I think it'd be good to have a reply field at the top and bottom of the comment list. The top one for when I want to angrily fire off my very important opinion without bothering to read through the whole comment list to see if anyone else has already angrily fired it off, and the bottom one for when I've finished reading all of the existing comments and have synthesized a well-considered and balanced opinion that accounts for all of what has been said so far (never used).

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I could see this being troublesome sometimes, trolls could stick images into the comments that go straight into the part of your brain that remembers horrifying images and pops them back up into your conscious mind at random intervals throughout the rest of your life.

Might be a thing that you could have settings for, both in the configuration of a community ("magazine" is a weird name for this, sorry) and in your personal settings. Turning it off could save bandwidth, too, though probably a specialized theme for that would be better.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

But then how will he draw users specifically to his instance and away from all the others, allowing him to eventually cash in one day by putting a paywall on his instance's API access? :)

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

He means the developers of the code, who are also running lemmy.ml.

I'm not deeply concerned, but I am somewhat concerned. Enough that I donated money to @ernest but probably won't to Lemmy's devs. Besides, it's always nice to have at least two popular implementations of an open standard, that way nobody can pull a Netscape and just add their own extensions to the standard whenever they want. Or similarly if one of them goes insane there's the other to fall back on.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I don't even know what "boosting" is, I take it this is from some flavor of social media that I'm not familiar with. Some kind of public "saved article" list?

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I don't know, I consider that to be one of the features of Reddit I particularly like. There isn't a cult of personality there, at least not usually. I know there's a handful of users who are "well known" for whatever reason, but even then I don't think many people follow them in any meaningful sense. In most of the subreddits I frequented there's nobody I can think of that I know the name of.

That means that every post, every comment, generally stands on its own merit. If I say something smart, it gets upvotes. If I say something dumb, down it goes. That's not universal but I think it's a good thing where it happens.

From what I understand networks like Twitter and Facebook are the opposite, and that's likely why I've never even visited those places much let alone felt a need to subscribe there. I don't want to talk to specific people or be judged as a specific person. I just want to see news and interesting things and jump in to say whatever I feel needs to be said about stuff.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I just ignored all that and mostly forgot it even existed. The only thing that would get intrusive sometimes is the new chat feature, since I'd get notifications that people wanted to chat with me in it. Every once in a while I'd click over into it and ignore all the requests so the notification would go away, but eventually it would come back.

I kind of like how both Lemmy and kbin have uploadable avatars and "banners", that feels like just the right amount of customization to make my profile feel "homey" without making it a big production I have to pay attention to. I might even fill out the bio at some point.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I would imagine a major remedy is the ability to create a new community with the same name on a different instance. Reddit had this a little bit, if /r/anklebracelets became the personal domain of some power-tripping mod then people could create /r/trueanklebracelets or /r/anklebraceletsuncensored or whatever and move there. But with Lemmy/kbin you can go to some other instance and create a new /c/anklebracelets and "compete" on a more even playing field.

Some instances could have admin policies that allow for easier mod removal or censure if things get out of hand, too. Reddit really didn't like messing with mods unless they felt like they "had" to for some reason, but each instance can have its own approach to adminning. That's both good and bad, but again, you can just move to a different instance if the admins go power mad on one. Provided they get to implementing proper account migration functions to make that easier.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I think that'd be confusing given how we're heading into a period where there are a great many "the other sites".

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

The only time I've ever upvoted a "this."

If I were to ever run an instance I'd want to be able to set up a comment filter to prevent anyone from responding just with "This." That's what the upvote button is for.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Depends on whether he's cutting costs faster than he's losing income. Time will tell.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Well, it's not strictly "my world." I'm currently in a Star-Trek-like roleplaying campaign with some friends and we are taking turns being game master, and each time we get a turn as game master we get to add new things to the setting. In my most recent turn I added an alien species called the Starflowers.

The Starflowers are an intelligent plant species with an unusual biology. They insert their seeds into the brains of monkey-like animals, taking control of them and use them as servants. This gives the animals intelligence in the process, as well as a lengthened lifespan and other beneficial physical improvements. These symbiotic servant animals are called Starborn. When a Starborn gets old enough it becomes known as a Starbright, and the seed in its brain becomes capable of sprouting into a mature Starflower in a process called "blooming." This is rare, though - there are thousands of Starborn for each individual Starflower plant.

The Starflowers once belonged to an old galactic organization called the Old Galactic Organization, a million years ago, at the apex of their civilization's development. They became masters of bioengineering, having the natural ability to modify their Starborn and themselves to serve more specialized roles. The reason the race are called "Starflowers" comes from this period, many of them modified themselves into living starships and cruised the galaxy as self-sufficient beings with "crews" of Starborn. Then an incident occurred that caused the Old Galactic Organization to collapse into infighting (the details of which are too large to fit into this margin, suffice to say information came up revealing an extragalactic invader was on the way to the Milky Way and they disagreed on how to prepare for it). The Starflowers collectively decided to return to their homeworld to "hide." They gave up space travel and most technology that wasn't directly derived from their own biology in hopes that when the invader came they'd be bypassed.

Over the years of their self-imposed solitude they developed a sort of "hive mind" among the Starflowers. The Starflowers were still individuals but with the ability to share information at a "higher level" than mere verbal communication, potentially unlimited lifespan, and nobody to talk to but each other, they fell into groupthink. Unfortunately they ended up collectively deciding that the other intelligent species of the galaxy who weren't also "hiding" were going to bring doom on everyone and they build a self-replicating weapon system to seek out and destroy those civilizations preemptively. Fortunately at least one Starflower disagreed with this so vehemently that the others "kicked him out" of their groupthink, cutting him off as an exile, and when the players arrived on their homeworld seeking the source of those self-replicating weapons that Starflower and his Starborn were instrumental in helping them wipe out the other Starflowers and put a stop to their campaign of genocide.

So today the Starflower species is essentially knocked back to barbarism, rebuilding with freshly bloomed Starflowers with little awareness of their previous culture (aside from that exile, who the players ensured the survival of despite his own best efforts to die along with his misguided bretheren. He had a major guilt complex).

It was hard cramming a lot of detail about Starflowers into this post without infodumping the whole setting, given how intertwined the various other aspects of this setting are. Hope it worked. :)

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Neat. How "rebuilt" is the outside world, is it 20th-century-level or something a bit more Victorian or Medievalish? I'm wondering how much they'd know about AIs, whether they'd consider this thing some kind of old demon or god perhaps.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

There probably isn't the time or will to do this, but it'd be fun if there was a "Reddit refugee" mode you could set in your profile that swapped all the words out to the more familiar ones. It'd only last until Reddit sent a cease-and-desist over trademark usage but that might still help a lot of people make the transition.

To make it feel extra-familiar for Reddit refugees, perhaps also cause people with that mode set to occasionally randomly double-post their comments, randomly show them a "You broke kbin!" screen, or maybe even simulate an abusive moderator randomly banning them from communities.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I just checked some reviews on buymeacoffee.com and a lot of people complained that the site was unreliable when it came to paying out, have you been able to withdraw actual money into your actual bank account from it yet? As soon as that's confirmed I'd be pleased to chip in.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Good to hear, have some coffee. :)

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Mods are in limited supply, they can't keep doing that for every subreddit.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

They will need replacement mods. Good mods don't grow on trees.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Yeah, I didn't bother with the AMA myself because I knew it would be exactly what we ended up getting. Anything useful would be widely disseminated anyway.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Yeah, several groups of friends of mine are using Discord to chat and arrange roleplaying nights and such. I use those regularly. But I've got several "project" Discords that are forum replacements and I find I almost never go there. Certainly never when I don't have some specific goal I'm trying to fulfill.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan. It was my first introduction to the concept of machine life, which turned out to be quite a formative concept for me going forward. A pity that Hogan eventually went off the deep end, his early books were pretty sciencey before he wandered off into loontown.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Indeed, if someone's a staunch opponent of advertising then it seems rather counterproductive to block an instance with advertising from your own - if they federate with you then that means people can see content posted on that instance without seeing the ads (I can't imagine how the protocol could allow for "portable advertising" otherwise).

That should allow for a natural "marketplace" to form that minimizes ads to just the level that's required. If people are able to pay for the server resources required for their instance without advertisement then people will naturally gravitate there, if those free servers become overburdened and can't expand their capacity then the ad-supported ones will naturally start to take some of the load back.

The only other way I can think of to let resources flow where they're needed would be to integrate some sort of cryptocurrency into the protocol, and while I'm personally a fan of cryptocurrencies and think applications like this are perfectly fine I can already hear people sharpening their torches and igniting their pitchforks.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

"Wait, why's the test server getting so much traffic all of a sudden...?"

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

I find it really hard not to lurk. So much so that the one time I got banned from a subreddit, I immediately unsubscribed from it because I knew someday I'd see something I wanted to respond to there and not being able to would be super annoying.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

Since I imagine this is going to be a chronic problem for the Fediverse I wonder if there's a technical solution, like multireddits. If I find two communities that are identical in content it'd be nice to set my subscription to them to be "merged" so that I see them both mixed together.