Watching this man’s trainwreck is so mind boggling. I mean just a decade ago he had every single one of us believing he was real life Tony Stark. I mean even pop culture sci fi like Star Trek mentioned him along Sagen and Einstein… He really pulled the wool over our eyes.
Hey, not every one of us. I disliked Elon Musk before it was cool. I thought he was always obviously just another obscenely wealthy self-centered guy with good PR.
I occasionally eat one as a “meal replacement” when I can’t get normal food.
Came here to say the same. I would not eat a candy bar under normal circumstances, but I keep some Snickers handy just for the rare occasion when what I really need is a meal’s worth of calories that I can eat in under a minute, or carry with me and take up only a little space.
From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.
This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.
You’ve got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they’re supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don’t see the humanity or the nuance anymore.
You’ve got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it’s the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they’ve been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team’s ability to keep up with the mod queue.
And you’ve got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.
And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you’ll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don’t know how one keeps these people out, once they’ve taken an interest.
I think there are some things that can help. I’ve seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn’t so involved and won’t burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)
But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it’s just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.
Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.
Most likely yes, I’ll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.
I’m definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I’d like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.
For example…
One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.
And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance’s users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.
The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.
As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.
And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don’t want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.
I am also partial to “lemmings”
Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.
The lemmy.ml instance federates with lemmygrad.ml, the collection of Marxist communities. It blocks lemmygrad.com, which currently redirects to the forum of choice for President Donald J. Trump. The latter does not seem to be hosted using lemmy and I think could not be federated with in any case? But presumably this was once the domain of a similarly-minded lemmy instance.
Some instances other than lemmy.ml do block lemmygrad.ml. Besides being a place for Marxist communities, the instance is also home to some very radical and very hostile users. I haven’t been around long enough to really know the situation for myself, but I have seen mentions of lemmygrad.ml communities engaging in brigading in the past.
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.
But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
You got yourself a new sub. Thank you for sharing!
I keep getting logged out every time I visit another sub-lemmy page? I’m trying to subscribe from the button but then I get taken to their site and logged out. Logging in takes forever as well. When I copy and paste the ! Link into the feddit.uk search I get no results as well.
I’m really not sure, but it sounds like these could be issues related to feddit.uk? I suggest asking about this on a community there, or messaging an admin of that instance.
Currently yes. If you wanted to be in full control of which instances you can see, then you will need to administrate your own instance.
Hopefully this will change in the future!
Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:
Huh. I hadn’t heard of this one before, but I think I’m going to have to try it out.
In the meantime there’s nothing stopping community mods from making pinned posts or sidebar links or whatever (I assume)
Well… Hopefully in the near future the UX for linking to communities can be improved, since right now the way things work makes it a pretty crappy user experience for anyone on an instance that hasn’t synced that community yet.
Hah, that’s what…four rival gamedev communities now? At least 😄
No need to compete! I’m self-hosting my own instance in any case, so I thought I might as well make communities for things I’m interested in. I’ve also subbed to every other gamedev community I’ve come across so far…
It would be really neat if there were a lemmy feature to easily co-promote related communities, maybe even give users an easy way to see them all in one feed.
Hm, that’s surprising. I didn’t expect mobile Chrome to work like that when copying links. Try copying and pasting the link text instead, e.g. !news@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com? But be aware that it can take a moment for the sync to happen and anything to show up, as well.
If you access them like regular links you wont be able to sub to them since your account is in another instance.
That’s actually not true! If you format the links like this: /c/news.pineapplemachine.com, like I did, then anyone who clicks on them will be brought to the community on the same instance they’re viewing the post from. (At least, assuming that the community has been searched for and synced on the instance already.)
How do I access these links in Chrome browser to subscribe?
If the communities haven’t synced to your instance yet, then you can prompt the instance to sync them by copying and pasting them into your instance’s search page. Unfortunately lemmy doesn’t do this automatically when you visit the URL, at least not yet.
Once the communities are synced, then you should be able to just click the links to visit them and subscribe from there.
I could see value in having an option to the effect of “I’m the age of majority and I want to see adult content” in user profile options which is turned off by default, and if it’s turned off then the UI would show a warning about the nature of the content and the user’s current setting in place of posts or communities that have been marked as adult content.
Is there any benefit to joining an Instance closer to your location (e.g. An Australian hosted instance vs one in Europe)
There is! Lemmy instances are generally going to be hosted from one geographic location, unlike a major corporate website like reddit that is likely to be hosted from multiple servers around the world. The closer the lemmy server is to you, the snappier and more responsive your experience will tend to be.
But there are other and larger factors, too. For one thing, if an instance is overloaded with more users than it can really handle, then that will more than outweigh the benefit of geographical proximity.
As things level out, though, and the increased traffic that lemmy instances are experiencing right now reaches a stable level, instance hosts should be able to adapt and overloading should become less of an issue. In the end I think you are likely to have the smoothest experience if you joined an instance whose server is located closer to you.
The instance I host is small and I can’t make promises about its longevity, but at least it’s not currently facing load issues.
If you’re interested: lemmy.pineapplemachine.com