This is why federation should have a standard that needs to be followed. Been saying that for a year now.

Instance level administration/moderation has an effect on the democratic system that is the backbone of the entire federation. We can choose not to federate all their actions, but it still has an effect on instance A when something isn’t visible on instance B and instance B visitors can not not vote on it. It skews the outcomes for everyone.

So there should be a standard for federated instances to administer and moderate fairly and honestly, in line with established and public rules.

Agreed, but let’s also be honest about this:

The smaller, less visible alternative communities seldom grow. It’s the classic case of the biggest and oldest trees getting all the sunlight, while the saplings in their shadow are stunted.

We saw this on Reddit, too. Alternative subreddits, usually born out of protest of the moderation on the original, popped up all the time and never grew. Some did, some even overshadowed the original, but that was rare. The algorithm and search results would always funnel visitors to the old one.

Unless there’s an effort made to give more visibility to the smaller and less established alternative, there’s a good chance it goes nowhere.

So in reality the user choice you’re describing is less about choosing between two communities, and more about choosing between a community or a DND group that gets together once a week, but half the people flake out anyway.

Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies too?

Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.

And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.

Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.

But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes. If admins can’t put aside biases and commit to the idea of federation, then it isn’t going to work, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, while making this whole thing less useful and even more confusing for new users.

I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.

Give Summit a try. It’s got all those search options, and it seems to work well enough any time I use it.

If you liked RIF on Reddit, it’s far and away the closest I’ve found.

Can it be set up so you never have to worry about account switching? Unified feed from all accounts, then if I load up a Lemmy.world post, it defaults to the Lemmy.world account, but if I want to post to Dbzer0, can I set it to shift to that account automatically?

I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.

Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.

But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.

Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.

I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)

But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.

Bad enough I have to let Microsoft constantly run on my phone, no way Adobe gets that privilege too.

Affinity Photo is on another planet compared to photoshop.

Other than 32 bit, what else have you got that actually sets it apart?

Because the single purchase license thing doesn’t look like it’s sticking around.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

Other problems include newpipe having an old material interface

That’s a selling point for me.

Aside: when I can no longer download videos to avoid ads, I’ll stop watching YouTube videos.

Why do people keep saying this like it’s a “fuck you”? They know, and they don’t care. If you’re not watching the ads or paying for the subscription, they don’t give a damn what you do.

I mean, I agree with the sentiment, but the way people keep spitting these words out with such spite and aggression is just funny to me.

“If you stop me from watching YouTube, I’m going to stop watching YouTube. I’m fucking serious.”

They said they are an iOS/Mac person.

Which is also hilarious because they linked paid software as a method of getting around YouTube ads.

Yes, nothing is exactly like Nova. But lots of other stuff is good too.

Then they aren’t good alternatives, they’re passable.

Seems crazy to me that the software that’s owned by an analytics company is also the one focused on giving the user the most customization options. None of the FOSS alternatives have the same mentality as Nova. They’re all focused more on minimalism, or evoking Pixel, or pushing a specific niche type of interface of their own design. None of them provide anywhere near as many tools to the user.

If I have to use a closed source app provided by an analytics company just to get a launcher that actually empowers the user, so be it. Maybe more of the FOSS alternatives could start taking note of why Nova is the most popular.

I think they’re talking about Nova.

It is significantly less than Nova. People keep suggesting it but it’s not a true replacement for those that were actually using Nova to its full potential. They’re frankly isn’t a replacement right now that goes all out on providing users customization options. That’s not in vogue anymore, apparently.

Agreed. Lawnchair was highly recommended, and when I tried it, I realized it’s recommended by people who were never actually utilizing Nova’s full potential. It’s basically just pixel launcher with more bells and whistles, and that’s not what I want. I use Nova because I wanted to make my own launcher that looked and worked exactly the way I wanted it to, not just be pixel launcher with some minor customizations.

People care about organizing their interfaces more than you, is that hard to understand?

The chances of some data being leaked is always possible but I’ll roll the dice if it means getting to keep using a launcher that’s not god awful or pixel-based until some other launchers become more mature.

If we’re were talking financial information or something, sure, the chance of leaks is a huge problem, but some usage analytics leaking is more annoying than anything else.

You didn’t have to yet.

Nova Launcher 7.0.57 is clean. It’s Nova 8 you want to avoid. Find an APK of 7.0.57 and it’ll work alongside the Prime app.

+1 for Tracker Control, though I will say updates are pretty slow. I’ve noticed a few things making it through every now and again.