Kichae

@Kichae@kbin.social

Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

Kichae, (edited )

The John Oliver stuff is happening on Reddit, though. That's where the attention is, that's where his face is being plastered everywhere. It really has nothing to do with anything here.

It's all people who don't want to be here, sending the message that they don't want over there to change.

Plus he's probably heard of Reddit, but not Lemmy, kbin, or the Fediverse. And he has no dog in

Kichae,

You can see all of those same users on kbin, too, though. You can access those same communities from here on kbin.social.

It's really only Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml that have aggressive Chinese apologists on them. There's a whole pile of Lemmy instances out there that care way, way more about Beehaw than China.

Kichae,

Testing, I'd guess. Experimenting with hardware configurations, software configurations, bot configurations. Testing rate limits, looking for exploits, etc.

We can tell when they pile 1 million bots onto 5 servers all at once. Will we tell when they pile 100,000 across 10 servers over the span of a month?

Kichae,

They've just spoon-fed us the data to help us identify a very particular type of attack. They don't need to use that type. They just need to know the ins and outs of the software.

Kichae, (edited )

It's also surprising because there are just fewer prominent kbin-based websites. Lemmy has lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works. And Beehaw, I guess, but they specifically throttle their growth.

kbin has kbin.social, and then a bunch of instances that are just way, way lower profile.

I mean, it's so surprising that we should probably question it a little bit.

Kichae,

Indeed. If it's an instance intended to mirror Reddit, it's fine as a basic backup of Reddit. We definitely don't want to encourage this behaviour in general purpose spaces, though. That'll just fill communities with comments that no one comments on, making everywhere look dead.

Kichae,

A Martian globe.

Kichae,

You see a bunch of instance pop up with zero reputation and a large number of brand new users, basically none of which have any posting history m, you can be pretty sure what those accounts are.

Kichae,

Something like fedi observer can probably only gauge posts and comments, so active users will severely undercount people actually using the platform. But we should expect posting users to grow proportionally with less visible but active users.

Kichae,

Join request forms do a good job at doing what they're designed to do.

Kichae, (edited )

The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that "politics" doesn't just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.

And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there's a good chance that people'll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they'll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what's going on and settle on the one that suits them best.

There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don't need to take on names like "r/truepolitics" or "r/onguardforthee" (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).

We'll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.

Kichae,

IQ probably has little to do with it. It's socialization and learned expectation that are acting as a filter currently.

Kichae,

Ah. I got woooshed!

Kichae,

Automatically mirroring content will come with a couple of issues. One is that you won't be able to actually address the OP. This is fine in a context like WhitePeopleTwitter or something where you're talking about a thing someone has said on another platform, but if someone is posting something that's specifically driving engagement, there's a meaningful bit of environmental context missing.

Having a Best of Reddit community makes sense for stuff like that.

The other issue is that the current population here can only support engaging with so many posts. Yes, an environment with a lot of content is important to make the space feel useful and alive, but a space with thousands of posts with zero comments or upvotes actually ends up looking like a ghost town populated by forgotten animatronics.

Plus, posts pulled from Reddit will drown out anyone trying to post original content here, discouraging actual, real engagement, and pushing people out.

Kichae,

For the people who make their living owning property, having people do most of the labour for free is the best deal possible, and they still couldn't make a profit, or a useful mobile app, or an actually engaging website.

Somehow, after almost 20 years, Reddit still doesn't have an actual value proposition for its product. Everything worth anything is found in its users. And those assholes are going to walk away with massive money bags for it (even if those bags will probably now be somewhat smaller than they would have been had they not just repeatedly stepped in shit and licked their shoes clean).

Kichae,

They're Fediverse microblogging platforms. Alternatives to Mastodon. Pretty neat ones, at that.

See calckey.social for an example.

I have a theory, the current doctor when you started watching is your favorite doctor. Would this apply to you?

I started watching Dr who when the reboot was 3 seasons in, I think David Tennant was the greatest doctor. A few years later I finally got wife to give it a shot as I started a fresh rewatch in preparation for Matt Smith's second season, she was ok with Eccelston and Tennant but Matt Smith is far and away her favorite doctor....

Kichae,

Holds for me. Started with 9, still stan 9.

Kichae,

Sounds like a good entry for the issues tracker!

Kichae, (edited )

Media hosting is the biggest expense, and there are services that make that significantly cheaper through sharing and deduplication.

A major instance can probably get by on a few hundred dollars a month. If it has, say, 100k active users, and 1% of them donate $5 a month, then not only is there enough to cover infrastructure expenses, but they can also put some aside in a rainy day fund, use it to expand hosting to other platforms (lemmy.world is made possible, at least initially, by donations to mastodon.world), or even pay instance-level mods.

Mstdn.social, a very busy Mastodon site, has 200k users and runs on a 32 core VPS with 128GB of RAM. Comparable unmanaged VPS packages go for around $300/month. After that, it's all media storage.

Kichae,

On the other hand, reply chains drifting further and further off topic make comments much more difficult to navigate as active branches become busier and more popular. Being able to collapse them is good, and necessary really in those circumstances, but being able to split a discussion into a new post as a moderator is a super valuable feature that we don't really have anymore.

In top of that, comment order being dynamic and based on popular vote byvdrfaukt can rob comments of context that is needed to fully understand them.

I don't actually think the content aggregator way is better. It just might not be worse.

How should I be using Lemmy?

With spez ascending the last few remaining levels of becoming an absolute wanker, it's about time I got more active and I have been wondering how should I be using Lemmy efficiently? Like many I migrated from Reddit and I was primarly using Apollo to browse through my subscribed subreddits....

Kichae,

Ah, I see. This is a common blind spot with respect to genocide. The word gets tied to the Holocaust and the massacres of Cortez, that it gives people an out when confronted by acts and attitudes that are very much genocide, but which do joy generate literal mounds of dead bodies.

And it doesn't change the dynamic with respect to service or product usage, because I can all but promise you that spez, and basically the entire staff of Reddit deny the ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples in North and South America, the ongoing genocide of the Roma in Europe, and perhaos - even probably - the historical genocides of these groups (with the possible exception of the Aztec).

I don't mean to come off as if I'm playing with whataboutism. I'm not. Genocides done here do not excuse genocides perpetrated by foreign cultures or regimes. It's just that if we apply the same standards to people who deny genocides being perpetrated by our own peoples and institutions, then we basically can't go anywhere or do anything ever. The only difference with that particular Lemmy dev is that they're playing rhetorical games about a genocide that most of us probably never would have heard of if not for the US playing politics with China.

Who owns the Fediverse? I mean who owns and runs the hardware that runs this system?

I've been talking to many people about the controversy with Reddit, why I left it and why I went onto Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon instead. Some of my friends have commented that the control is still a problem as other platforms and it is all dependent on who owns the software, who owns the hardware, who are the admins, who are the...

Kichae,

My Lemmy instance acts as a private forum for people I've met through a local recreational sports league. I use it to remind people of games and social events.

My Calckey server is just me. I set it up because I wanted to know how to do it, and now I'm my own admin and moderator. It's a good time.

If you look in the aftermath of the Beehaw defederation, you'll see a bunch of people whining about "rogue admins". One option for those folks is to just be their own.

Kichae,

Just to be pedantic about it, because someone'll bring it up eventually: They took money from Tencent -- and a lot of it -- which, indeed, had close ties to the Chinese government (and now it sounds like the government owns a significant share of the company, but it didn't at the time of investment). Tencent absolutely looks out for things that could negatively affect its relationship with the government of China.

I don't mean to overlook the role Tencent has in enabling an authoritarian regime and papering over their authoritarian acts.

But they took white supremacist and actual fascist Peter Thiel's money like 5 years before they took Tencent's.

Kichae,

If you already have a VPS, or are already hosting services locally in your home, you should spin up and instance for no other reason than to intuit the edge cases for the space. It's super informative.

It's just a little bit of a pain to get set up if you're not already familiar with the bits and bobs needed to do it.

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