Aa!

This is a great argument for using a pwa in Firefox rather than a native app. Your “in-app browser” can have ad block

That’s not even supported by the enterprise version. You’re going to need a special agreement with the iseven people to support numbers like that

What do you think people are not understanding?

I wanted an account on a Lemmy instance, and Lemmy.world is one. Since then, I’ve been pleased with most of what the admins are doing with it.

And they haven’t gotten bored and abandoned the instance like a lot of the smaller ones have gone.

iRobot […] soon to be facts

Beware the sinister Roomba, what are they doing with all the dirt they steal from our floors?

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:

• Algorithms pushing content to benefit advertisers rather than the best end user experience
• Forcing UIs designed to satisfy advertisers rather than UIs end users want
• Admins/moderators making moderation decisions that users disagree with

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

At the same time, the way I understand issues and connect with people is to try to relate to them and bounce that back. It helps to make sure my understanding is correct, or identify what is missing.

If that includes something that sounds like solutions, sometimes that’s just the natural course of conversation, and people should be just as understanding about the other side of the conversation.

It begins to come across that someone is not looking for conversation, just an audience, and that’s not a happy feeling to be on the end of either. It makes us feel just as ignored. After enough of that feeling long term, we can’t help but feel like we aren’t getting the connection we crave either.

This is a two-way communication issue, and when there’s a breakdown, that’s not always on us as listeners.

Mmhmm

ActivityPub has nothing to do with privacy. It’s explicitly about publicly sharing everything you share

I already know that! What was the point of this post??

All I see is a lot of Rogers

My cousin named her daughter Chastity.

Chastity attended her parents’ wedding.

What did I miss?

It mentions Daniel Radcliffe, is that just a vague reference to Harry Potter?

Louis Jordan - A Man’s Best Friend is a Bed (1947)

Spyx Family sounds like a slur.

The drawback to this is lower new user engagement.

Face it, most people who come look at Lemmy aren’t looking to block several dozen accounts and communities to make the feed useable. Most don’t even want to look for communities at first, they just want to see what the vibe is on the main feed, and judge from there

If we want to draw in more users and increase engagement, we need to cater to more than just the people who are ready to customize everything before judging. There’s a few possible ways to go about this, but it’s very clear that “just block things you don’t like” isn’t going to be enough.

I realize the drawbacks to any solution here, but as it stands now, even when I block the bots I don’t like, there’s not enough real content and discussion, and my own engagement is decreasing. The solution is probably not to ban all these bots, but leaving it alone as it is isn’t working well either

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_knot

That’s more or less the way I would do it