Lemmy shouldn’t have avatars, banners, or bios
Yes, if you want to see Hackernews posts, get them from Hackernews yourself. Reposting to Lemmy just adds more posts with zero engagement that new users will see and be put off of the site for
Several months ago we had three different instances with their own Hackernews communities and their own repost bots posting the exact same things, with zero discussion.
Lemmy needs more actual discussion, and fewer bots adding noise to the feed.
A lot of people talk about the decentralization being a barrier of entry, but I don’t think it is.
Generally speaking, your average social media user won’t care about that one way or the other. You tell them an instance to look at, they will check it out.
Where I think it goes wrong is the general Lemmy attitude of curating your own feed. Your average Lemmy user will say the best part is that you just block the communities and instances that you don’t want to see.
Your average social media user on the other hand, doesn’t want to spend an hour or a month blocking people and communities to make the site useable. Most folks will come in, see a feed full of tech bros, repost bots with zero discussion, 30 different fetish porn communities, Star Trek memes, and bottom of the barrel shitposts, and they’ll just leave.
The only way I see Lemmy overcoming this is for instance admins to heavily curate the default experience so the feed is friendlier to new users. This would likely require some more tools in place to allow for this, possibly even a default block list that users can customize after they are already drawn in
Also the sorting could be better.
I was laid off this year. I’m a 25 year veteran programmer, and not to brag in the sea of tech folks we have here, but I am rather proud of my skills I have picked up over the years.
My first interview this year, they set up an online development environment and had me solve a fairly simple array sort problem, and I completely choked. Something about being watched and judged while I worked broke my brain.
I managed to ace my next interview, but they didn’t bother with the programming exercise at all.
In the 90s, the local Taco Bells in Portland had a menu item called “Mexi-nuggets” which were a Mexican spiced tater tot. In the combo meals, they filled the role of fries like you get in your burger combo (like the two tacos and Mexi-nugget combo)
I was quite surprised to find out the stores in Washington didn’t sell them, and instead of Mexi-nuggets, the combos just had… Another taco.
They were delicious, and I still think about them
Well as long as you’re doing yourself favors, try to go with water, and cut out soda for most of your diet.
But of course this isn’t really an answer to the question at hand.
This is why I don’t think the Lemmy platforms will really grow to Reddit size until we solve this problem. Most folks don’t want to curate their own feed when they first explore a social media platform. That usually comes later after they’ve been drawn in.
What Lemmy and kbin could really use is a set of default subscriptions that are curated by instance admins to provide the best new user experience.
For that matter, default block lists wouldn’t be so bad either
Probably the movie, if you plan to watch both. It’s very good, and I love Terry Gilliam as a director. But while it still holds up, it’s certainly a little bit dated.
But I would stress again, don’t watch the show as something related to the movie. They have completely different stories, messages, styles, and emotional impacts.
If that makes a difference to you, the show was written and pitched as its own thing. The network had them turn it into a 12 Monkeys thing because some of the themes were familiar (using time travel to try to stop a virus that nearly wipes out humanity), and the movie was so good
If you ignore the association with the movie, the show and characters stand really well on it’s own, despite reusing some names you may recognize
The show did a fantastic job of coming back around to all the mysteries, in some cases taking all four seasons to get there. I echo the parent post, this show does time travel better than any other show I’ve seen.
It’s a lot like my feelings on cryptocurrency. The dencentralized idea was interesting but it led to mostly discovering several reasons why it wasn’t as good as they thought. Some of the problems were solvable with future iterations, but overall it led to private exchanges that could just take all your money if they wanted, high transaction costs, etc.
With social media, federation addresses one thing: If an instance goes away, the content has already been federated elsewhere. For starters, this has never been a concern for me. I don’t treat any social media network as a long term data archive. If there’s something I need to refer back to, I will save the conversation myself or I am prepared for it to be deleted when I look away. Even on Lemmy, I don’t assume anything I post will stay, because moderator actions are federated, which will delete content from other instances anyway (when that federation is working correctly, at least)
On the other hand, we’ve already seen some of the negative sides of this:
First, users spam offensive/illegal content, which gets federated to all the other instances, leading to admins scrambling to a) stem the flow of this content and b) remove what is there. Ultimately they had to solve this with temporary defederation and user-created tools to help purge some of the content.
Second, federation is a (relatively) complex process, and there are multiple situations that can cause federation to an instance to fail. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen cases where if one instance’s keys are lost and certificates need to be regenerated, any instance that has seen that instance will be unable to federate with it anymore.
Now like I said before, these aren’t unsolvable problems, it’s just a case of the software and concept being relatively new, and needs to mature more.
Now when I switched to Lemmy, the complaints I saw about Reddit had absolutely nothing to do with federation and data availability. All I ever saw people complaining about was:
These are significant issues, and are worth leaving a service over. However, federation doesn’t address them at all. Lemmy certainly addresses the first two, but that has nothing to do with federation, that’s just it being open source and community-developed software.
So that’s what I meant. The one thing federation addresses is questionable, and the added complexity has brought about new problems that need to be solved still. I’m not against it, but it was never what drew me to this platform. It’s just a “Huh, that’s neat” kind of feature.
WSL has replaced my use of the command prompt in Windows for anything (and I used it more than most, I think).
In my job, I develop Linux applications to support industrial automation, and WSL is capable of building and running most of what I make. It isn’t a full Linux machine, and can behave unexpectedly when trying to do things like changing certain network configurations.
So it’s great for what it’s for, really. But if you want a full VM, this isn’t really for that.
Hell, I’m technically-minded and I do understand it, and I still don’t consider decentralization a particularly helpful feature of social media (yet).
Federation is technically interesting, but it introduces a lot of new complications that the software is still too new to have solved. The problems it does address, it doesn’t really solve very well yet. And I’ve always been willing to leave a social media network when it doesn’t suit me anymore, so centralization has never really bothered me.
What drew me here was the growing community. I would still be here if it was just one centralized service
I completely agree. This is a much better argument to make. For example, I generally concede that abortion = killing, but not murder. In the same way that killing a person is justified (for example, self-defense applies here), sometimes it’s justified to have an abortion, even if that is killing a baby. And because it involves such personal, sometimes traumatic territory, that should be between you and your doctor only.
But that’s a different argument than what you began with.
You’re still missing the point.
When a person sees abortion as murder, the view of abortion laws is the same as those of murder. If you say “making murder illegal doesn’t reduce the number of murders” anyone with any sort of a moral center will say “I don’t care, murder should still be illegal.” And that’s the perspective will not be changed no matter what the murder rates are. That’s how the argument gets reduced to “Why have laws?” To them, it’s basically saying “It doesn’t help enough, so why even draw that line at all?”
That said, let’s look at your proven fact for a moment. I don’t believe the data will help, because when you narrow the focus to the US, and look at reaction to legal changes, you see a very clear drastic rise in abortions in the 70’s, which didn’t begin to fall until the 90’s, and it fell at a much slower rate, and is still higher than it was in the 70s. ( source )
Which makes logical sense, if you increase access to the service, of course more people will be able to use it. At the same time, since Roe vs. Wade was repealed, there have already been multiple news stories showing that the strict abortion laws did prevent some (often medically necessary life-saving) abortions.
You may say these numbers aren’t statistically significant, but to a person who sees abortion as murder, preventing even one is better than not preventing it.
Anyway, all of this misses the major point of the abortion rights side to begin with. Which is that sometimes abortions are medically necessary and that should be between you and your doctor to decide when that is.
I want to say that the most effective argument is to show just how drastically the abortion rates fell in the areas where they increased access to birth control and sex education. However, when I showed my mother, she responded with a Youtube video that tells me how Planned Parenthood eats babies.
The point behind this is that your argument boils down to essentially “people still break laws, so why have laws?” That is a poor argument that isn’t going to convince anybody who believes that abortion is murder. Particularly if you are saying that the “murderers” in this case are just putting themselves at risk.
I say this as someone who agrees with you, that the best way reduce the number of abortions is to provide better sex education and access to birth control.
My mother has been an anti abortion activist for as long as I can remember, so I’m familiar with the thought process.
For me it’s because I don’t use YouTube for that. I don’t watch channels or personalities. If I go to YouTube, I’m there searching for something specific.
And when I find the video that shows me how to open my key fob to replace the battery, I’m not interested in a series of key fob videos. If I watch a video related to a news story, I’m not interested in all the reaction videos or analyses by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m most certainly not interested in any other video with a thumbnail of someone with their mouth agape at something
I don’t want it suggesting more of them, and I certainly don’t want it automatically advancing to some other video after it’s done. All I want is a video host that plays the videos I asked to watch. Everything else is just a reminder that the kind of videos they push are the exact kinds of videos I don’t want to watch.
They get in the way, they draw attention to the wrong things, and they encourage people to make more of the kinds of videos that get in the way of finding the actual useful information
Okay not precisely, but we have a bot (I think it’s the one at smeargle.fans) that reposts Reddit threads and replicates all of their comments, which nobody engages with
You are starting to sound like a gatekeeper.
Well that term just doesn’t apply. I’m not saying “Real Lemmy users avoid anything to do with Reddit” or anything along those lines. You asked for feedback, and I gave you my honest criticism of it.
I understand that you found a project that sounds fun to make, and it probably will be. This is what we engineers do, we get excited to build things that seem to have clever technical answers. However in my past few months on Lemmy, I have seen these ideas, and have seen the way they tend to work out so far.
The logic may be simple, but human psychology is rarely as simple as engineers wish it could be.
Feel free to build your project. All aspiring engineers should make things that they want to make. But if you ask for feedback, don’t argue that the feedback is wrong. Not all solutions end up working out the way you hope, and that’s part of the engineering life. And based on prior experience, this one is likely to get the same treatment that the other repost bots get.
Nobody wants to participate in a disconnected discussion. We have multiple instances with bots that do precisely what you’re saying, and they just flood the feed with posts that people won’t engage with.
Nobody wants to have a discussion about a reddit post. Nobody wants to have a discussion about a hackernews or slashdot post. If Lemmy just looks like a place to mirror Reddit content, people will see that and just go to Reddit and engage directly.
We need more people posting to Lemmy. If this is just a place for bots to have discussions with themselves, nobody will stay here very long.
So did Big Bang Theory
Sometimes it’s intentional. I have seen both of these cases as well:
Gotta get more impressions, right?
I mean it should be fairly obvious, but sometimes a person is at home while browsing, and might like to see these. Other times they are at work while browsing and could actually get into trouble for viewing them
This is about the “not safe for work” tag, isn’t it?