Damn I loved that Star Trek episode - it was so great! It’s so easy to just keep doing the same old thing - e.g. to explore the stars, but to join a card game - THAT would be a NEW adventure, surely.

But as for the possible, one idea would be to make a hard separation: let’s say a PieFed user joins a new community XYZ. As of that very moment, all newly made posts along with all votes come in, and everything that can make it there through any federation networking issues are reflected in that posts, BUT all old posts do not show up - even if new votes or comments are sent, those are simply discarded - and perhaps a message is displayed “there are no more posts available from this community”. So everything NEW is fully there (to the extent possible/feasible), while everything OLD is fully missing (it would have been only partial/misleading information anyway), and this way there is nothing in-between.

At least, it’s a thought:-). Surely it would not please everyone, but it might be a least worst option?

Part 2 of 2.

That said: I thought that we have a problem that Lemmy does not: we allow users to pull in older posts. But your linked example seems to disprove that - do you know how they got those posts then, even though they are “old”? Or perhaps I am misunderstanding something: we CAN get older posts, but we usually choose NOT to, UNLESS someone specifically requests the pulling in of such a post. Damn it does get complicated:-). In general though, I hope you see what I meant to convey: if we can only get new posts and cannot get old ones accurately, then perhaps it is better not to try to get those old ones (except as ghosts/shortcut links)?

As for existing backfilled posts - yeah, it is unfortunate, but it is what it is and I don’t think “backwards compatability” to existing entries is our primary concern right now? If it were, they could perhaps be deleted - if we could even figure out which ones they are? - or left alone. A year from now they will confuse the heck out of people… but that can be an adventure for them to puzzle over, so long as things work properly from here forward - do you agree? :-D

Anyway it’s just something fun to think about:-).

Part 1 of 2.

In the past I have used the rainbow-colored Fediverse icon for things like a quick short-cut to the original instance, to check things like the community or instance rules, but mostly ever since Lemmy started being able to read the static.wikia types of images, I haven’t needed it anymore, now that all instances display more or less identical content for a given post.

With the exception of that known Lemmy.World federation issue. What happened there, from what I hear, is that the Fediverse was never meant to have a singular server holding 80% of the entire userbase, and to have every community be joined by someone on every instance (which Blaze has been doing with his army of alts, to aid newcomers who couldn’t figure out how to join a community that nobody else on the instance had already joined yet). Read more here: https://aussie.zone/post/13429731 (github issue linked from there). TLDR: the issue is already solved (probably) but is in the 0.19.6 version, which Lemmy.ml is testing but until Lemmy.World upgrades to it this issue will continue. I’ve seen it happen on piefed.social, but also startrek.website, discuss.online, and other servers as well.

But in general, I was not asking to be able to view every single post from its original server (though again, that would be somewhat useful, occasionally), nor even being able to pull in a post when it is not there, but to make the pulling in of a post be either full or else none. Here is a simple mathematical equation that may perhaps help: 1 + 1 = 2 is true, and 1 + 1 = ? could also be true, but 1 + 1 = 1 is not. The first one is fully and precisely true, the second is vague and unsatisfying that someone doesn’t know the answer… but at least it is still technically correct. Whereas the third answer is just flat false.

It sounds like from what you and others are saying that it is literally impossible to be able to get the answer of “2” via the current methods of Federation. Okay then, well that seems to inform our answer: if we absolutely cannot get the proper answer of “2”, then we should put “?”, but in no case should we (imho at least) show “1”, just b/c after we pull in a post it receives +1 upvote. “x+1=1” is invalid for nearly all values of x, except the one that happens to be true, and yet ALL of the others are false, hence we should not shorten x+1 to merely say “1” as if 1 + 1 = 1 were a correct statement.

Alternatively, which depending on interrelation with other reasons might be the better way even, perhaps we should simply disallow the pulling in of posts altogether - if they cannot be done “properly” then perhaps to avoid misleading aka false statements, it should not be done at all?

Still further alternatives could be to (1) pull in “ghost” or “shortcut” versions of the post, which are displayed VERY noticably different than “real” ones, and which when clicked go to the original server, and which also have something like “?” or “n/a” rather than a vote count; or (2) similar to 1 but which when clicked show all of the comments, those having been pulled in via some other means (API?) but there too the vote count(s?) should not be displayed, unless they are known to be accurate.

Other matters also interrelate with the above though. e.g. I notice that piefed.social has defederated from hexbear.net (https://piefed.social/instance/hexbear.net does not resolve and https://piefed.social/instances?search=hex&submit=Search looks empty) - so if any votes can from that instance, those should not be counted. Web scraping would include them though, and others e.g. those from people who piefed.social (or any PieFed instance, just picking on that one:-) has banned. Perhaps this is a minor point, but it does touch on how those vote counts are interrelated to other matters, which if brought in via “alternative” means will make it harder to figure out what to display for them. And… oops, I see that you already got to the reverse of that point, where Beehaw would add vote counts, beyond what e.g. web scraping would be able to pick up. Well, nothing is fully perfect, but I did want to suggest that we avoid any KNOWN sources of misinformation. Some corner cases like that… can be saved for perhaps another day when further developing this ActivityPub implementation makes more sense, compared to other more urgent things that need to be worked on in the meantime. i.e., especially if something is also a problem for Lemmy, then it seems understandable to me that if it is likewise a problem for PieFed, then there is little “expectation” that we would do better than them, in every single possible way?

Damn, I’ve hit a space limit.

Oh I never replied to this - I must have gotten distracted, sorry for ignoring you (unintentionally I assure you:-).

I agree that it is nice to “view” a post in its entirety from another server, but what is the benefit to pulling the post into here? Lemmy solves the former issue by adding the rainbow-colored federation icon to everything - posts, comments, users, all of it will go to the original instance. PieFed makes it quite difficult imho to do all of that. There is an EXTREMELY buried “View community on original server”, which actually looks like it is somehow tied to the list of moderators, and only found on a community page. There is no way afaict to go directly to an original actual post though, or comment. There is also a way to go to a users’ home instance, but not to the actual user account itself, again afaict.

I would love to see a retrieval function that puts the post into a temporary location and allows someone to “view” it for awhile, before discarding it later (a week? a month?). But there isn’t much benefit to this, since even without an account you can view any OP from its home instance already - so it’s a lot of work for very little gain.

But to have it “here” - I think the benefit would be that you could respond to the comments within it? Yes, that may be worth the disadvantages that I mentioned. Perhaps then it could be indicated with an icon, or a horizontal separator between it and the other more recent ones, to distinguish it as something pulled in specially rather than having arrived the usual way - e.g. if you look through a community and see posts from, let’s use a hypothetical scenario, “the last 2 months”, and then all of a sudden there is a jump and a single post from “2 years ago” appears, it may help to show that discontinuity? But anyway yes, being able to respond to comments in it does add functionality, so that I like.:-)

(Edit: except if the vote counts are off - that could be quite damaging? e.g. a post with -2 total score is VERY different than one with +998, so it tells an entirely different story in terms of community receptivity to that idea. I would rather see no score at all, like literally perhaps an “n/a”, rather than see incorrect values there. Lack of information is fine - so long as it is labelled - it is misinformation that is what causes the damage in terms of how a message is received, differently than what was intended originally to have been conveyed.)

Ah sorry for the silly report wasting your time. I went through my extensions disabling then one by one and found the culprit. Unsurprisingly (in retrospect) it was a dark mode renderer (Firefox’s “Dark Reader”), which most websites seem to have ignored so I was surprised I had it active, but disabling it restores full functionality of PieFed.

Thanks for your quick reply!:-) I’ll leave the post intact here in case it helps others with the same issue.

We are already experimenting with Lemmy, daily. The Rexodus happened, bringing an influx of users to this platform, and that crowd now wants different things than the prior one. And normies would want still more divergent matters. Though it matters little what people want, and more what people will expend effort to build.

Yes but… while they are greedy MFers, part of the problem is that they did need to find a way to make the whole affair profitable, not only for that goal by itself but also so that it could be sustainable. A lot of the controversy is in how he tried to accomplish that goal, not that he needed to do so - bc any company needs to be sustainable.

Reddit is likewise far from the only tech product that has been enshittified by chasing after profits to the exclusion of all else, so there’s that too. And I’m not even going to go down the rabbit hole of how much of this chases back to some changes in USA governmental policies at the time (Republicans were in charge of basically everything in ~2019).

Ultimately, Huffman has set himself up as the fall guy - the effigy to hold our attention and hate despite how he merely carried out the will of his masters, the venture capitalist bros behind him. So fuck spez, but also… not just him.

Though his ideas and execution of them were really fucking spectacularly BAD, so yeah, maybe him more than capitalism even. e.g. the Musk is really dumb, but then along comes Huffman who worships at the guy’s feet, thereby making himself somehow even dumber!?!?

So yeah, all their changes were designed to get profits. They didn’t work bc again they are REALLY dumb, and did not understand the slightest thing about humanity their userbase, but that didn’t stop them from trying to fleece people of as much money as they could. i.e., their stupidity was only outpaced by their greed. 😞

I came late to Reddit myself but even I noticed that happening during the pandemic. The decline was rather speedy, sharp, and extensive (affecting all subs).

And we could even track some of those to specific implementations or lack thereof of features by Reddit. Like how their search feature sucked so bad, thereby encouraging people to write a (still yet another) post to ask rather than look up an existing highly crafted and well-researched answer that even if posted a mere week prior still would not show up in the algorithmic feed pushing all the latest noise to the absolute tippy-top. And mods were forbidden from pinning more than two posts. And even those only showed up when sorting by Hot. And maybe not even then in some apps. And you couldn’t consolidate ones bc the moderation tools sucked so damn hard, e.g. posts made by Auto Mod could not be edited later by the very same mod team who requested that the post be made. Every damnable one of these things increases apparent engagement metrics like “number of posts”, but at the expense of actually connecting people with the information that they wanted to receive. :-(

To which we can say “fuck spez”, but it’s deeper than that bc of the chasing after profits to the expense of all else that led to that, as in if it wasn’t him that did it then it would have merely been someone else instead.

Fwiw, this might be a special time around the launching of the Loops service, which I heard will be placed underneath PixelFed. I know nothing more than that but thought I’d offer that much:-).

Right but the problem is that there are no “good” solutions.

Blocking Lemmy.ml and thereby much of the Russian propaganda can be a significant boon for some.

That’s a great point about beta software though.

Though if someone wants to block such, and they don’t want to use single-admin instances such as Lemmy.cafe or quokk.au, or non-Lemmy solutions such as PieFed or Mbin, then their only hope is an app. Which also offers the benefit to not have to migrate to a different instance. Though I don’t know which ones offer that.

At this point, the only way to implement blocking is to switch instances, it would seem. Or at least get an app, though that is the part that I know the least about. I switched instances myself specifically for this feature - and we’ve been saying how superb Discuss.Online is even, all the more notable for a smaller instance! - but I’m not sure how many others would think similarly. Still, they could be told that it’s an option. Or perhaps [email protected] is almost dead at this point, with so few posts? Then again it’s not the number that matters, if the content is relevant.

Oh, right, “from the top 20”. What about Lemmy.cafe - I’m curious about that, especially since they are rocking 0.19.6-beta, they might be doing okay actually, for a smaller instance?

Well I don’t know if “wise” would quite apply…

I started gathering some thoughts to make a post - I had intended [email protected] but it could be cross-posted, or whatever - about ways to block an instance. I got stuck with Mbin but finally have what I need there. The thing is: I lack the knowledge of which Lemmy apps will allow you to implement user blocks - and I mean the full defederation kind, not just the mere “community blocking” that does not block the comment replies of users from those instances. Do you know more about that? If you could give me a paragraph or table or link to point to or some such, then perhaps this weekend I could try to write that post.

Is there anything that they can do about it? It’s not that I am against telling them but… why complain about something over which they have little to no control?

Also, at some point it had seemed to me to be caught up, but indeed perhaps I missed something, or maybe another issue started after I wrote my reply above.

I see posts missing from there, from PieFed, and much more rarely but it happens, from Discuss.Online. It’s common, it’s expected, and at this point, I think that no instance other than Lemmy.World itself has any “expectation” to be fully up2date, specifically wrt content that is on Lemmy.World itself?

However you want to phrase that - the federated model is struggling, going through a rough patch specifically while we await 0.19.6 - it seems beyond the control of even admins?

Yeah that, but also the humans there too were a bit much. The entire culture is like “entertain me, while I shit on your efforts to do so”. People (don’t) wait to speak rather than actually listen.

Here we are allowed to have an older crowd of people - who use Linux btw - and do more to step up to be the change that they want to see in the world rather than merely vent like children.

I definitely would have left Reddit regardless of whether Lemmy existed to come to or not, so I get why so many content creators left Reddit - it just became not fun anymore. (And yeah, the chasing after profits is what originally made it that way, but also the sheeple consented too.)

Well now I don’t want you to feel left out so… this is for you:

Okay, but don’t say that I did nothin’ for ya m’kay!?

Here it is just for you:

Welcome! People are kinder here, overall. You’ll find yourself less defensive, more willing to engage, less snarky, easier to be around irl - man, Reddit was (is?) toxic AF, and whether or not I came here I was definitely leaving there.

Remember to block early and often here - back there that was almost pointless bc a never-ending stream of Reddi-trolls was ready to take their place, but here that actually works!:-)

Check out [email protected] for many more tips. You are going to like it here:-).

Also, since you mentioned PixelFed, check out PieFed as well as a Lemmy alternative - it has e.g. “categories” of communities rather than making you find and subscribe to each one individually, so it’s a whole different style compared to Lemmy where you have to browse by All to find new content. I’m speaking to you from it right now.:-)

But either way, I find that (most of) the people here are more worth talking to than Reddit:-).