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OpenStars

@ OpenStars @discuss.online

Posts
17
Comments
1622
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

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  • As the developer himself states, and me as someone who uses it as my primary daily driver concurs, it is not quite ready yet. e.g. a good fraction of the Notifications I receive end up being dead links to posts that don't exist anymore, or to users that I have blocked, etc. Also user tagging is not implemented yet and searching often does not retrieve things that you can find much more easily using Lemmy, plus tools for moderation of remote communities remain very primitive.

    Soon now, it will be user-friendly enough to recommend to people, but for now it's primarily for beta testing the software and those of us prepared to use an early adopter mindset when using it - e.g. switch to a Lemmy alt to do things that PieFed cannot yet.

    Though more features get added seemingly weekly or at least monthly, it's so exciting to see! I love the new inline comment feature, though inconsistently applied e.g. not yet available for edits. But it's coming!

  • Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

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  • There is just an absolute ton of nuances involved.

    SOME types of Federation issues is due not to the local instance but rather Lemmy.World and overall lack of distribution of users and communities across the Fediverse (some of which is better now than the past, but not nearly enough).

    Other types involve the instance, and in turn its hardware and even more so its number and skill of admin support. Like if you have to wait several days for a manual sign-up procedure (people say quokk.au was this way, at least sometimes) then you may have already moved on elsewhere.

    Some of the issues have greatly improved - like I switched from Kbin.social to Star Trek.Website and for super frustrated with how often I would try to do something - like vote or comment - and so switched to discuss.online, which I have been exceedingly happy with. The thing is, Star Trek.Website's technical issues got WAY better (still not perfect) in the past year, and also I still have had issues with discuss.online - again, most often I would guess that Lemmy.World's lack of updates to the latest Lemmy software was to blame for that (even though I understand that there are a whole bunch of reasons for the delay).

    Yet people also report that Lemmy.World itself can be quite slow to access from some parts in the world like Australia and the USA. I don't know how much that has to do with method of access like an app vs. the web UI, and even then, would an alternate front end app like https://photon.lemmy.world/ further affect the speed?

    A simple score isn't going to come close to describing any of this. But if it would, uptime % might come the closest? Especially in conjunction with other factors like avoiding recommendation of an instance that has only a single admin.

    Discuss.online is tried and true, and I unreservedly recommend it. Anyone who likes can make an alt or two and see tor themselves how good the experience is in comparison between them. Also the admin is quite responsive, both in reacting to requests and remaining on the ball proactively before even being asked - see e.g. the pinned post on that instance.

  • Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

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  • Hehe go for it then:-).

  • Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

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  • Yeah, and while it may not solve everything, it could still help!:-)

  • Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

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  • And then only with deeper knowledge of how the Fediverse functions under the hood - like how "instances" relate to "communities" and specific moderator names, especially when working from a remote account on a different instance than the community structure... Hey, where are you going? 😯

  • Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

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  • The hard part is that for some people, News and Politics is actually what they are looking for. Others want only Memes and never not that, while still others want content types like Gaming or Arts and Crafts, etc.

    So when Categories of Communities and/or Topic areas is implemented, this issue will be solved, but until then these are merely a best guess about what an "average" user desires to see, rather than allowing them to choose their own experience.

  • The Search for Kirk

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  • You... don't want to know.

    Okay so I had a little accident where I was walking in the dark and bumped into, you know what, just forget I said anything, m'kay?:-P

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Agreed.

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • I made such a post, but ironically federation issues prevented the vast majority of people from seeing it (except those I sent explicit links to as part of other ongoing conversations) until several days later, at which point it got buried in the past posts and wouldn't have shown up even in New.

    And that experience convinced me that essentially this is Lemmy. The apps are not always such, and PieFed and Mbin are like the apps: they work to communicate with "Lemmy". Content is hosted at places like !tenforward@lemmy.world, which is "Lemmy", even if you access it from Mbin.

    It will not always be this way, especially if Lemmy.World switches to Sublinks (or PieFed?), but it is now. I still would like to use a more inclusive term, but I am not sure what it should be.

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • I never saw an announcement to that effect, though I don't have an account on sh.itjust.works. Elsewhere in that thread other admins voiced strong support for Lemmy.ml so there may be quite strong push-back to such, even being easily reversible, even for strictly new accounts, even though it makes the issue opt-in rather than currently where the have to expend ENORMOUS efforts to opt-out. Also iirc the issue of site content warnings came up and took focus in the conversation to see how that might play out in the then-future.

    People have been asking for such tools for 2 years now - here's a post from ml itself asking for finer-grained controls. And another that said not yet, but given all the things they listed seems like it would say the opposite today (e.g. suppression of anti-ccp views appearing on ml, which I suspect was happening even back then too).

    Despite that, no major instance has wanted to separate itself from ml. This is their software, apparently it's their network too. We don't even have a name for the part of the Fediverse that isn't either Lemmy or the Threadiverse that would by definition include Meta's Threads (Mbin and PieFed are too small, and Sublinks non-existent yet). And a Google search of the word Lemmy pulls up ml as the first instance hit.

    Ofc if we're changing that now, then I think that's awesome.

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • The top reasons people avoid coming here iirc seemed like (a) "tankies", (b) lack of niche content (Reddit legit has more...), and iirc c) toxic interactions (which, really, I personally think Reddit is far worse in this regard? probably the lowest end is the same across both Lemmy and Reddit, but the niche subs there are more chill, mostly, compared to like r/all; also if a right-wing person were to come here and act like a Redditor, then yeah they legit may feel unwelcomed!:-P).

    Defederating with the big 3 would mostly take care of the first issue (though there's always more e.g. whenever a new person downvotes anything from the admin of Midwest.social and gets banned as a result they'll have to discover that whole thing on their own; there's only so much that can be done to create a walled garden effect). There's little that can be done about the second issue - although bringing people in is likely to help with that longer-term. And blocking the political communities including memes masquerading as such is likely to help with the toxicity effect, ofc there's always going to be people that refuse to control themselves and need to be blocked.

    I agree, this looks interesting. It would require some effort. 💪

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Yes, but your message here is far too kind. Maybe throw in a KYS or best of all "well ackshually"... 🥴

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Sorry, I must be too tired and focused on the "caveat" rather than the fact that we are in agreement on everything, so ofc in true Reddit style I had to write it as it I disagreed, I suppose? 🤡

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • In reading through all of these comments, I hate to keep saying it, in case it comes across like I'm harping on the point or some such, but genuinely PieFed already does most of it.

    Want politics? Click Topics->News and Politics. Don't want news or politics? Click one other ones: Arts & Craft, Technology, Science, Gaming, Health, Hobbies, Music, etc.

    Okay so memes is problematic yeah, but you can also unsubscribe from communities too, as well as block any instance of your choice without requiring admin support to do so. Then reverse your decision at any time, then re-do it again later, back and forth as you choose (unlike defederation where you would miss all messages delivered during the period of defederation). Though most are not nearly so bad, like Arts & Crafts.

    You can also subscribe individually to something like !upliftingnews@lemmy.world and have it show up in your Subscribed feed. I barely used the Subscribed feed in Lemmy as it didn't seem to offer much in comparison to either All or visiting specific communities that I wanted to go to, like !fedimemes@feddit.uk that regardless of how well it competes with the more popular meme communities, I still enjoy more. But on PieFed I use the Subscribed feed all the time, it works for me better there. Also I have notifications sent to me for the smaller communities that nonetheless have the primary content that I want like !tenforward@lemmy.world or !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world, though we saw earlier how Favorites or customized Categories will likely be coming in 2025 and that will be an even better way.

    Right now some of the foundational aspects of PieFed suck, especially searching for content. Then again, Reddit's search sucks even harder so... how much will that matter to people? Tbf, Lemmy's search feature is nice, and I saw somewhere a plan to allow searching strictly for post titles rather than keywords in them - that effort is appreciated!

    I hope that the code being written in Python will help it grow faster. You might ask Rimu about some of these ideas mentioned here like a Trusted and Hesitated set of instances, if showing the former and by default at least blocking the latter for new people or those without accounts would help allow a better glimpse into the Threadiverse (minus Threads).

    Otherwise, if Admiral Patrick is willing to add this capability to Tesseract, then any instance willing to run that could gain that feature, though at the enormous cost that someone using an app would not be able to take advantage, I think? Btw did you see this post discussing adding Tesseract to sh.itjust.works?

    The OP idea sounds really cool too, except it would require someone to do it, and also I thought there were some major administrative issues with defederating from lemmy.ml, particularly in relation to communities. But if jgrim and m_f are on board with that... then that sounds wonderful?

    I do wonder how widespread the desire for it would be though. You and I might enjoy that, but how many others, really? Probably more than a few, but less than a lot? 😁

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • "Please introduce me to Marxism (and Marxist Lemmy)", but get this, from this URL: https://startrek.website/post/18021528.

    That's the thing about how "federation" works -> it's their content, but unless a place is specifically added to a defederation list by name, it's also our content as well - in this case, Star.Trek.Website's content.

    Here's another interesting proof of concept: the farewell message from a server that died 10 months ago, but their message is preserved on the internet forever for others to read, if you know how and where to look (this particular one took more than a little bit of digging to find).

    You don't use All, but especially if you did just prior to an election - of pretty much any Western nation I would guess - oh the things that you would see....... yes, even from the Star Trek instance (Garak voice: especially from the Star Trek instance?:-P)

    Important context here: the USA and Israel do genocide to Palestinians, whereas Russia does not do that to Ukrainians, China does not do that to Uyghurs, North Korea does not do that to its own people, etc. - just so you know. Ofc if you disagree, you will be banned from every community located on Lemmy.ml including those you've never even heard of, and in some cases reportedly without ever even interacting with that instance in the first place somehow, but based on a conversation elsewhere. Oh, but these rules aren't like, written down or anything helpful like that, no...

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Not necessarily. Here is a discussion with a mod of sh.itjust.works who provided an alternate idea:

    something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

    Edit: it still would not block actual users from those instances though - only defederation, PieFed, or the Sync or Connect Lemmy apps can do that.

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Some interesting facts:

    • the release date of 0.19.3 was 2024-01-24
    • also one year ago, when Lemmy.World defederated from Lemmygrad.ml, they said "Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances."
    • two years ago this post also mentions "Unlike Mastodon, Lemmy does not provide a feature for individual users to block an instance (yet). This creates a dilemma where we must either defederate [or]..."

    Fast-forward to today, and Lemmy still does not offer the ability to block users from an instance. Or for reports to federate to moderators on remote instances. The pace of development is quite slow, and shows little signs of speeding up. Furthermore, why would those same admins of lemmy.ml be in favor of sharing the same power that they wield on that instance with everyone using this software?

    Rust is not a language conducive to making many changes to the codebase. I predict that one year from now there will be little change in the Lemmy software, with people still begging for features that they hoped for two years ago already. To be clear it's not the fault of the developers, but of people having too high expectations and hopes.

    So yeah, the OP idea is a good one, but I'll cover that separately and here just wanted to say that the slow pace of new features is by design of the language used, and people must simply get used to that.

  • Idea: having a political-free instance for new joiners

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  • Except instance blocklists don't really work much, and are too controversial, and some kind of community sourced user blocklist also is far too controversial. Libs blocking tankies, tankies blocking neolibs, so many in the middle blocking neither, or perhaps both I dunno:-P.