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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).

    People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.

    So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.

    And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.

    Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).


  • Generally speaking, all the major instances are federated with all the other major instances.

    The differences are the super tiny instances (which are generally effectively zero traffic) and the controversial instances (mostly tankies). Said controversial instances don’t want to advertise that nobody can stand them and the rest of the instances don’t want to deal with the bullshit from bringing it up again.

    I think it would be a nice novelty to visualize this. But I don’t think there would be much actionable information coming out of it and , because this is The Internet, it will likely lead to harassment and brigading.


  • Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.

    And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?

    I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin’ A.



  • Again, how does that work if c/linux is “the same” on every instance?

    Will comments and posts exist on the world view of c/linux but not the zip view? At which point… what are we actually getting over the status quo? Because you can bet that anyone who has hexbear unblocked would see two different versions of every single thread because nobody else would see the hexbear posted thread.


  • There have been a number of articles (pop and scholarly) about malicious code being social engineered into codebases over the past few years. And, in this case, the malice is “expected” from one of the long time developers to begin with.

    Also: We got INCREDIBLY lucky that Andres Freund detected it when he did. Because that was hitting right around the time a lot of the major distros were preparing their major releases (Fedora basically escaped by the skin of their teeth).

    Malicious manipulation of open source projects has always been a concern. And the vast majority of us do the equivalent of signing whatever form we are given because “oh it just looks like a standard contract”.


  • What you are describing is basically Mastodon (or, if you like porn and hatespeech, twitter… non-consensual porn because a lot of Mastodon instances are REALLY horny).

    The moment you aggregate communities across instances you remove the ability to moderate them. Because maybe a hexbear mod wants to remove all mention of the Uyghur people, an ml mod wants to remove all mention of genocide against them, and a zip mod wants to remove all the comments about why genocide is good in a thread about god damned Bluey.

    Do they all get to delete everything across every instance? Do you start having different views of the same community depending on your home instance?


  • All moderator elections would do is let chuds stack the ballot. Look up shit like the sad puppies debacle.

    The answer is that a site needs to decide what its rules are and then moderators need to enforce those rules, regardless of how the community feels. Which, ironically, is what ml is doing (even if they don’t publicize those rules). And if the community dislikes the rules, you disassociate with them.

    The issue with the fediverse is that you need to defederate or else you are tacitly approving of their bullshit.


  • You… should probably pay more attention to the news.

    It is very possible for bad actors to inject malicious code into an open source project. And it is very probable for people to not notice because the vast majority of developers never read a single line of the open source code they claim to value so much.

    “Any bad code will be detected by the armies of people who do rigorous code analysis of every single pull request” was always nonsense.




  • World grew MASSIVELY around the time of the reddit mod strike.

    In the time since? A lot of those communities are basically full of people who can’t stop talking about their ex while constantly re-posting everything they see there. And… the lemmy world admins made a few controversial decisions and their method of removing problem/“problem” users made a lot of us uncomfortable. Piss off an admin and your entire comment history is wiped in an instant and your ban reason is unverifiable.

    Whereas ml already had communities that existed to talk about the topic of the community rather than what reddit was talking about.


  • The hexbears realized that EVERYONE blocks them. One particularly humorous youtube even did a “One of the great things about lemmy is that you can block particularly problematic communities. Let’s use hexbear as an example. Please follow along” gag to show how to block an entire instance at the user level.

    Since ml was generally sympathetic to tankies, if not full of the idiots, the hexbears basically just joined that en masse.

    But yeah. Caught a ban for racism/xenophobia because I questioned what positive benefit accelerationism would have for the Palestinian people. Reminded me way too much of attempting to interact with hexbear so I used that as an excuse to just start blocking any .ml community that I see in my feed. Not QUITE at the point of blocking the whole instance but… I expect to be there by the end of the month.


  • Make Lemmy a place worth hanging out and having a discussion rather than desperately trying to recreate the shit hole that is reddit?

    People weren’t “organizing” to convince users of digg to migrate to reddit For The Greater Good. It was instead obvious digg was a mess and people went to the better site.

    And everyone acknowledges that mastodon is much healthier than lemmy (… damn that is a low bar). And that is because there aren’t swarms of people constantly trying to convince kylie jenner that she should post on mastodon instead. Instead, there is very much “This shit isn’t twitter. Twitter sucked long before dipshit bought it” and it is building its own identity.

    Whereas… a lot of y’all feel like the ex that sends texts a year later about how you bought a new shirt or you lost weight. And I am sure a few of you are looking to pick up some strange to show those jerks at reddit that your new boyfriend has an even bigger dick and knows how to use it before tearfully calling in the morning about how you are still in love with him and want him to take you back.



  • No, it doesn’t.

    At the core of the various fediverse solutions is the idea of choosing who to federate with and who not to. Mastodon should not be forced to “federate” with lemmy. And

    I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders,

    Is about as good a reason as possible to not want to touch something with a ten foot pole. I know that I like Lemmy and Mastodon, but I have a VERY large blocklist on lemmy.

    But the other aspect is: As influencers learned in the 10s, the kind of content that makes sense on mastodon/twitter doesn’t make sense on cohost/tumblr or lemmy/reddit or whatever else. All cross posting does is make for a lesser experience on the secondary platforms.

    That said, I do think there could be better support for the decentralized nature of each platform. It would be really nice if I could specify what mastodon instance I use in lemmy and what lemmy instance I use in mastodon so that links would automagically convert. Which would make linking to posts a lot less awkward. I don’t want things to be mirrored, but it would be nice to link to an interesting topic or a fun post from a developer or artist.


    As for why mastodon is more successful: Because people are actually making content on Mastodon. I like Lemmy, but too many of these boards feel like “race to copy links and comments from reddit”. It IS nice to have fewer nazi chuds but… it feels like there were tankie seat fillers waiting in the wings.

    But that also extends to interactions. I like to shitpost on lemmy and rant about my various bugbears but… I have yet to have a “meaningful” interaction. Whereas I have had at least a dozen solid exchanges and discussions on Mastodon. And… it is baffling that the twitter-like feels more like a community and less like I am shouting into a crowded room.

    And a lot of that boils down to “why” people embrace the sites. Lemmy… feels like going on a date with someone who just got out of a long term relationship and can’t stop talking about their ex… and then tries to send a dick pic to show that they are over him.

    Whereas twitter is still in a mess of “Well… I don’t like nazis and transphobes but all the brands and creators I like are on twitter so I am going to protest and stay on twitter”. And blue skies and the other one very much feel like a twitter replacement whereas Mastodon (and, sort of, Cohost) feel like a “Twitter sucked. Let’s actually do better”. To go back to the dating metaphor, it is like going on a date with someone who will unabashedly order the whole fish or the ribs because life is too short to pretend you don’t like “ugly” food or messy food or whatever.

    If Lemmy can actually build its own identity? Then I don’t think we would need to worry because people will naturally want to link to discussions. But until it does? It isn’t worth it.


    And peertube is just a stupid idea that means videos can’t be monetized (so creators have zero incentive or justification to put time and effort in) while also providing a hefty cost to instance hosts because video is expensive.


  • Eh. It takes a bit more work/experience but it is perfectly fine for any cut of beef that doesn’t depend on the sauce/cooking liquid to hydrate it in the first place.

    I personally wouldn’t do it for a rare steak (and generally prefer a pan and butter basting regardless), but for medium rare and up it is perfectly fine and the char you can get from the grate provides a texture/taste differential that is pretty much impossible to do in a pan.


    And just because people always get shitty about it: Plenty of studies have been done where, with blind taste tests, people tend to prefer their steak one grade more done than they claim. But also, something like a ribeye REALLY needs to be medium-rare to break down some of the fat and tissue and ensure that that beef bomb is melt in your mouth good.

    Obviously not all steaks benefit from a bit of extra cooking time… and if the word “well” is at all in your doneness preference you are a monster. But people who insist on blue/rare steak for every cut of meat are just depriving themselves.