I did mention that it was only tangentially related. I did not realize though that programming.dev was not all that old. TIL.
I did mention that it was only tangentially related. I did not realize though that programming.dev was not all that old. TIL.
Tangentially, there’s a whole bunch of issues going on with the programming.dev server for one. See at !meta@programming.dev. Lemmy’s upcoming upgrade to 0.19.6 should help - see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623 and https://feddit.org/post/3524876 discussing it.
Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.
Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.
And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.
Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.
And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.
Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).
Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)
Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof:-)
Except then you have to know the proper community name, which can often look very different from what is displayed. e.g. !world@lemmy.world is an entirely different community than !worldnews@lemmy.world, and damn, that example did not work bc both end up as “valid” links. Well, theoretically sometimes the feedback on having gotten the name correct could be helpful I suppose.
Also I note that what you are saying can seem in contradiction with the help docs. If you start a post or reply and click the help icon in the web UI, it will go to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html, which does not mention the word “community” at all, but does show link syntax. I am more inclined to believe you than the help docs! Especially when we can see the resulting behavior in front of our very eyes - except where it may pertain to other methods of access - but I am pointing out here again that for a new user, finding out such things is currently a terrible process! Even Arch Linux has at the very least man pages, as well as the wikis!
But I’ve been on the Fediverse since the Rexodus, and since I don’t use apps other than the webpage UI (I tried Voyager but while it looks nice, it doesn’t seem to function well, maybe that pertains to accounts on instances other than Lemmy.world such as mine - e.g. I would reply to someone but no amount of refreshing or clicking around would let me see my reply until I force-quit and restarted the app), Mbin, PieFed or Sublinks (or Tesseract), I don’t know myself what the “preferred” method of linking is. I just see what works (or not) for me. And again the help docs are of no help here.
So since you are saying that this 11-month old post is outdated, if you know the details of what would be better practice, perhaps you can write a newer post explaining that?
I’ve had situations where that doesn’t work for me, or like where I will start typing and it won’t expand quite properly - e.g. typing !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca expands not to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca but like to !newtolemmy!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca. The latter repeatedly happened to me on a desktop Chrome. Also if you user-block an instance, then the name expansion process no longer works.
There are actually two types of expansions - one done after you post, another while you are still writing. Neither of which I have ever seen written up in any guide anywhere, other than release notes from as you say like a year ago. Similarly I have not seen guides to cross-posting, in e.g. the Getting started guide.
Edit: oh, and this is the first I am hearing that the former expanded links won’t work - do you know when that happens? Maybe apps, or perhaps non-Lemmy Fediverse Mbin or PieFed? This is the first I am hearing of this iirc.
Finding out how things work on Lemmy, for those of us who do not use Arch btw, is a terrible process for new users. I was thinking, it sure would be nice if there was not just a single post here and there such as Lemmy.ml’s What is Lemmy.ml (that is the exact link that appears in their sidebar though), but an entire community somewhere where such guidance could be posted. If not this one, then somewhere else - but this is the only one like that that I have seen.
Edit: if you know more about when links won’t work, perhaps you can post the thought in that community?
Except some instances like hexbear have downvoting disabled, which tends to encourage people to comment more.
For things such as how to make a proper link that does not take people away from their instance, see !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca.
Indeed it is good to think ahead, rather than make rash decisions:-).
I mentioned elsewhere, to the developers of PieFed that I will switch to, that Dessalines is still an ally in the flight against for-profit corporate control over everything, e.g. Reddit, Facebook, Threads, X, etc. But while I have ENORMOUS respect for having offered the Lemmy codebase, the way he runs his personal instance… it’s not all good, nor all bad, but definitely does have more worrisome elements than most Lemmy or Mastodon instances.
The lack of transparency in governance in particular, as well as how heavy-handed it is, and again the fact that the unwritten rules are so hard to guess at, and could change at any time. It leaves people feeling insecure in the situation, which seems to make it unreliable, unless you constantly dance to his tune, which he never states quite what that is. And even if you never so much as mention e.g. Ukraine or Uyghurs or Gaza, the fact that someone else in your community could, and therefore mandatorily become booted from the community (along with the entire instance), is not ideal. The rules merely state that Lemmy.ml is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but there’s far more (politics) going on besides that.
At least Reddit was more honest about Huffman’s opinion - “you are landed gentry and I will harvest your data and no longer allow third-party apps unless they pay my exorbitant fee”. Okay… good to know I guess.
Anyway, if I helped any then I am glad ☺️.
Yeah that’s what I am starting to realize over the last couple of days - that while Reddit was bad, in some ways at least, they were less bad than Lemmy, or as you say at least lemmy.ml.
The key ingredient there is the transparency: Huffman may be a dick, but at least he is upfront about things: “you are landed gentry, under MY dominion, mu-wha-ha-ha now all will bow before me” indeed, but contrast that to claiming that lemmy.ml is for “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but did you get banned for spouting paid software? Or for violating privacy? No, or at least doubtful (I didn’t look:-). Look at the four rules - which ones did you break, that would warrant a site-wide ban? Some people get banned for none, e.g. for claiming that they have Uyghur family members staying with them who have experienced discrimination and potential genocide and… BAM, ban hammer. Bc neither Russia nor China can ever do any wrong - it is the USA that is “evil”, that is “capitalist”, and “democratic”, and “doing genocide”, but again, not precious Russia or China that does so.
I am looking heavily into alternatives that will allow banning lemmy.ml users across the Fediverse. One is lemmy.cafe, another is the Tesseract UI as implemented e.g. on dubvee.org, and another is Mbin (maybe, unless a bug no longer allows that? I saw one report of such anyway, but don’t have an account so cannot confirm), and I am leaning heavily towards joining PieFed, bc it’s so exciting what it is positioning itself to become in the future. Sublinks too but it never seems to be updating anymore, so I guess it’s stalled somehow.
Dessalines can do as he pleases. If we don’t like it, we can leave Lemmy. Those are our options.
The virus will affect us all… whether directly or indirect.
It tends to come from… ah… certain sources though.
Yeesh. Things are not perfect in the USA but it does sound a bit better than that - until/unless Trump wins and then the gap will close a bit:-(.
I wonder where I will end up myself! I even wonder if I should take a break from social media altogether over the next couple of months, but that seems doubtful (if only bc it would take quite some effort to replicate the various functions, e.g. research a good RSS reader). Lemmy - like everywhere else - seems likely to become a shitstorm until the election is over.:-(
Though dropping lemmy.ml and hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml should help a ton.
Yeah it seems like there’s barely anything here for Mexico, which I guess uses just the standard sources. There is !mexico@lemm.ee, but… you see how empty that is. There is https://lemmygrad.ml/c/latinamerica but… fuck no, not on on that instance!:-P
Yeah I see !trees@sh.itjust.works at lemmy.cafe, though I don’t see trees@lemmy.world so perhaps nobody there has subscribed to it yet, anyway ymmv. And I see !animepics@reddthat.com, but you may want to check your specific communities.
Damn, lemmy.cafe is somehow even running 0.19.6-beta.9. Is this too good to be true - is this a trap?:-) Or is the instance admin that much on the ball?
Click “Blocked” at https://lemmy.cafe/instances - they barely block anything except those big 3. Unless they do it without it appearing there, which is possible, but highly doubtful. In any case it looks awesome from that perspective.
Also the welcoming messages at the top of the server are amazing - “Have you installed ublock origin?”, “check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca”, etc.
Mbin I think doesn’t “block” even places such as Chapotraphouse - or at least Kbin did not - but it uses an entirely alternative voting scheme with “favorites” rather than upvotes and “reduces” rather than downvotes. That means that the popularity of something is only determined by the people on other Mbin/Kbin servers, with the upvote information still visible but not used by the sorting schemes. Also, the identity of people who use “reduces” against you are visible, so you can block them rather than have to suffer in silence, if they are super annoying about it e.g. reducing everything you’ve done without regards to its content. But yeah, I don’t know about actually hiding messages from people from particular instances - that’s what we are wanting here, and I imagine that if it is not doable now then it hopefully would be in the works?
I also don’t think I want Mastodon… or maybe I do? But anyway I don’t think we need it from the same account. Lemmy is topic-based rather than person-centered and that seems to make the most sense to me. Likewise Discord and Slack, but those are more unwieldy e.g. not indexed by search engines (such as DuckDuckGo, what else would I mean by that?:-P).
PieFed sounds the best in theory due to high integration with all those other services. Unless I end up not using or wanting those other services? I haven’t so far… then again they’re all so brand-new.
Sublinks sounds really exciting - you can even view a working demo - as it has been for the last half year with no updates that I’ve seen. Perhaps any day now… maybe…
And until my instance upgraded from 0.19.3 to 0.19.5 I enjoyed the Lemmy web UI. Now I dislike it - for a long reply (as I am wont to make myself:-D) up and downvote counts can be multiple (and variable!) screen rolls / pages away from the buttons on the bottom, and sometimes are on the right of the screen while other times on the left, having been wrapped around by a long name - go home UI, u r drunk! 😜
dubvee.org has iirc a single owner, which is usually not a sign of stability - but damn it is impressive! https://dubvee.org/about he did it all, then doesn’t even accept donations for it and guides people to give to other projects instead - that’s the opposite of capitalism, not just making fun of capitalism as people do on lemmy.ml constantly but rather living one’s literal and actual life according to one’s principles. Also I think he’s stated somewhere that he’ll switch to Sublinks rather than Lemmy as the backend when it’s ready. So… it’s a strong option as well, if a bit outside of the Lemmy ecosphere, and yet fully within the Fediverse and fully compatible with Lemmy, plus like PieFed additional multimedia enhancements of its own.
Sigh… yup. Much of that has been traced back and shown to not have originated from inside the USA, but it does not matter how it started bc it’s endemic now. And regardless of the rhetoric the news itself is pretty violent, with all the reporting of mass shootings - you know, bc they actually happened, except most of the time the for-profit news media doesn’t bother anymore, and instead prefers to sell something sexier than all the needless deaths of children.
But you can’t wake someone up if they refuse to come into the door in the first place - that is what I meant about labeling content to make it more acceptable to a mainstream audience, so as to boost subscriber counts and thereby increase the overall health of the Fediverse. Being okay with stagnation seems unwise to me, bc it predicates a fall.
Well said.:-)
And younger ones too!
Oh… then yes, ofc.
But if we can’t stop it, then so be it. Nothing is perfect, but you try anyway.
Wikipedia has some nice ideas about trusting people incrementally to increasing degrees depending on the outcome of previous manually curated efforts. And PieFed is bringing some of those thoughts into the Fediverse: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.
But part of it is not merely bots vs. humans, and rather different styles of what human psychology tends to gravitate toward: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. e.g. people saying things like “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “And my bow”, etc.
Lonely people just wanting to be heard… but unless emoji reactions are provided, how else other than to write a comment? And/or upvote an existing one that says what you wanted. Therefore… “^This” it is then indeed, none of us are immune to such, and any system that relies on people never falling into that trap is going to be vulnerable. The same way that news organization in the West were vulnerable to being bought out by the wealthy - it was always going to happen.
Anyway, wishing for something doesn’t make it happen - that requires effort, like the PieFed approach, imperfect as it may be.