My personal view is that you should always be wary of people asserting “this is how it is”. We’re in a science sub; we know that the purpose of a hypothesis is to rigorously attempt to disprove it and find counterexamples.
To discuss an area that I know some specifics about and can be more confident on: the historiography of the French revolution. Starting with George’s Lefebvre, the Marxist historians had a clear idea of what the revolution represented: a movement from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist, and so while their work is incredibly important and academically worth studying, they also tend to go into their work with a clear idea of what they wanted to find. So when the revisionists (starting with Cobban) come along, they find a lot of inconsistencies; the facts of the period don’t directly align with what the Marxist narratives wanted it to be (e.g. Cobban’s disagreement is that he thinks the feudal mode was near extinct by the time of the Revolution, and that it was more a political conflict than social).
Bringing it back to your question: I disagree with the narrative I put because I think reductive narratives aren’t helpful, and cause us to miss a lot of nuance. The nuclear family was dominant in England from the 13th Century onwards, but to leave it there misses a host of interesting social structures and changes (e.g. the role of the church and monasteries as social institutions that exist wholly separate from the family). Moreover, I don’t think it’s helpful to use the past as a suggestion for how we should build our future. The ‘return to tradition’ that’s suggested often has an idealised view of the past that misses all this nuance. The narrative around ‘ancient greek masculinity’, for instance, conveniently misses off their ideas around pederasty, which we perceive as abhorrent today.
As for reading, Foucault on how we like to categorise everything is quite interesting. If reading isn’t your cup of tea, the Thinking Allowed podcast from the BBC has an episode on Foucault that covers him that’s worth listening to.
OH sorry I read your comment too fast lol. For that I used lemmy migrate on GitHub, I have about 5 accounts across different instances and they all have mostly the same communities subscribed. I just go in and resync if I’ve subbed to any new ones lately, and it’ll tell you which ones don’t sync (like if one’s defederated or blocked or something in other instances).
I’m a nobody, but I’m officially supporting this decision of the devs to remove karma (user score aggregates) from the API. Because karma brings on a plethora of problems¹:
It is gamification of the system. As hinted by their PR, this is not healthy.
It leads to less varied and less interesting content, due to the fluff principle.
It feeds echo chambers, by giving people yet another reason to not confront them, even when moral and sensible to do so.
It shifts the focus from the content to the people, detracting from the experience of what boils down to a bunch of forums.
It is yet another reason for people to congregate in oversized and unruly communities, instead of splitting into smaller ones.
Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter.
A lot of those issues will affect negatively your user experience, regardless of you using the karma feature or not. Simply because other people use it.
And it’s also the sort of "lead acetate"² feature that makes clueless users annoy the shit out of interface developers, until they add it. “I dun unrurrstand, y u not enable karma? Y u’re app defective lol l mao” style. With app devs eventually caving in.
As such, “leave it optional” is probably a bad approach.
Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.
This is a poor argument. It has some merit in Reddit³, but not in Lemmy.
You aren’t identifying trolls by karma. You’re assuming that someone is a troll, based on a bad correlation. Plenty users get low karma for unrelated reasons (false positive - e.g. newbie user unknowingly violating some “unspoken rule” of the local echo chamber), and plenty trolls get past your arbitrary karma wall³ (false negative).
So relying on karma to decide who’s a troll is not as effective as it looks like, and it’s specially unfair to newcomers, thus discouraging the renovation of the community. IMO it’s a damn shitty moderator practice.
Since trolling is mostly an issue when you get the same obnoxious troll[s] coming back over and over and over, under new accounts, to post gaping anuses again, and mods have no way to detect if the troll came back, mods should be upstreaming this issue to the admins of the instance of their comm - because the admins likely have access to your IP⁴, and can prevent the user from creating a new trolling account every 15 days.
And, if for some reason the admins are uncaring or uncooperative, the mods should be migrating the comm to another instance.
What Lemmy needs is not to enable shitty moderation practices. It needs better mod tools to enable good moderation practices:
the context of the content being reported should be immediately obvious, no clicks needed
there should be a quick way to check all submissions/comments of a user to your community
there should be a way to keep notes about users, and share them with the rest of the mod team
some automod functionality. Such as automatically reporting (not removing!) content or replying to the user based on a few criteria defined by the mods.
e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.
IMO this is also a shitty moderation practice. Should I go further on that? [Serious/non-rhetorical question.]
NOTES:1. Since this is already a huge wall of text I didn’t go deep on each of those claims, but I can do so if desired/requested. 2. It’s sweet but poisonous. 3. Because in Reddit you can’t “migrate your sub to another Reddit instance”, and the only instance there happens to be administered by arsehats who give no fucks about you or your sub. It’s a dirtier situation that warrants dirtier solutions. 4. Anecdote exemplifying this claim: from 2020~22 I had multiple trolling accounts in Reddit, to shitpost in cooking subs (for some puzzling reason they’re cesspools). Guess how many times this sort of “you need more karma to post here” barrier locked me out? Zero. It’s simply too easy to comment some shitty one-line in a big community (I used r/askreddit for that) and amass 500, sometimes 2k karma points in a single go. 5. If instance admins do not have access to the IPs of the users engaging with their instances, regardless of where they registered in, that should be fixed.
I honestly think we need to revive many communities related to questions, interesting topics, and overall “lets-have-a-chat-on-something” (preferably not related to what I mentioned above, or at least that touches a broader audience).
Have you subbed to the various AskLemmy/Ask[instance]/NoStupidQuestions/Out of the Loop communities across here?
To my own amusement, I found sh.itjust.works has several question communities that I tossed some posts to here & there.
Also although I haven’t sorted out what I might want to post in them, there’s these chat communities for other discussing other topics besides those you highlight getting plenty enough discussion:
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing "premium features" for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, "superlikes", gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don't deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
I really, really suspect that the big Lemmy instances are being run by Reddit admins or spooks or some-such. They’re moderating their instances in the exact same way Reddit did minus the profiteering. The censorship is the exact same.
It’s just the reality of online content moderation. The good mods/admins are people who are passionate about a topic and want to provide a space for discussion and community building. When it comes to the “power mods” or whatever, like those we saw on reddit who moderated 100+ subs, they’re just in it to stroke their own egos.
That doesn’t work, though. If I add posts and comments to, let’s say, a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu community on Lemmy, that’s just one more number. That isn’t going to improve.
Reddit had a huge boost from Digg, and even then, it was a different time when fewer numbers were fine, and people were more willing to engage in social media at lower numbers.
If Lemmy instances are to grow, that engagement needs to be directed. It needs popular communities to be highlighted, and once consistent interaction is there, growing communities need instance owners to direct traffic/engagement their way. That’s how subs like /r/soccer got off the ground, and it’s probably the only way it’ll happen on Lemmy.
Many of the subs I spent a lot of time posting on are completely dead, bar maybe a few people that contribute 90% of all posts and comments. Others simply don’t exist, and given that they were quite niche (local subs, anime subs) there’s absolutely no way that they’ll ever get noticed on Lemmy if something like pro wrestling has next to no posts/comments.
IMO, the only way this will improve is a combined effort from Lemmy instances to highlight great communities, and to drive people towards ones that are growing.
Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
Yes, you’re completely correct. There’s something to consider though.
CPU encoding gives the best results possible, in terms of quality and size. Decoding, unless you have a very weak CPU, isn’t necessarily the bottleneck it most transcoding applications eg plex, jellyfin, etc.
So you can do things to make the media as streamable as possible for instance encoding your media in AV1 using the mp4 container rather than mkv. If you make it web optimized aka ATOM upfront it makes playing the file much easier and less resource intensive. Now when a client that can’t use AV1 requests it your transcode can do SW decode and HW encode. Not as efficient as pure HW but IMHO it’s a worthwhile trade off for the storage space you get in return.
You can make things more efficient by disabling subtitles and/or burnin on the media server side. If you have people like myself who need subs in everything then you can burn them in while you’re encoding the media to AV1 or only using formats like UTF8 so you can pass through them as m4v/mp4 doesn’t support subs like mkv does.
That’s essentially what the optimized versions do on Plex. Only it sticks with x264 rather than AV1.
If your media is only 720p then none of this would really make a difference for you. If you’re using 1080p+ rips then this will make a SIGNIFICANT difference. It’s made such a difference that I’ve started redoing my rips in 4K.
Unless that is you got a SAN in your closet and free electricity that is…
Hi there, I’m quite new to this digital hygiene thing. I try to avoid apps on my phone that tracks useless data for their initial purpose. How do you guys read news ? Would love a “respectful” app that doesn’t track too much data, but I’m open to any solution. Would like to browse international and french news.
NetNewsWire supports multiple methods for accounts – local, various cloud services, and self-hosted. And it is free. I highly recommend someone interested in RSS check the app out and subscribe to a few feeds.
Hosting your own FreshRSS instance is totally optional, and is absolutely a proper option for someone privacy-focused. It doesn’t have to be a big, scary monster – simple options exist, e.g., using fly.io to host FreshRSS, as someone wrote about on this blog.
ive been using kodi (xbmc was better moniker) since google killed sagetv. i recall attempting plex, but it seemed to lack some open/extensibility (its been awhile)....
Because I paid for a lifetime sub like a decade ago and my parents and a few friends connect to my instance. I can’t be arsed to move myself and everybody else to a new system when this shit just works.
give it time, people will come to their favorite instances with time. The best thing you can do is make your own posts to your favorite subs and cross post posts you see to other subs they fit into as well.
It needs more memes and less edgy teenagers screaming about politics (that they clearly don’t understand and take way too seriously).
Seriously I come to websites like this to get a mix of news and humour, not get yelled at by children who advocate for totalitarian regimes to “own the libs”, I am on the verge of changing instances because lemm.ee won’t let me block all of the two offenders at once, and I have to constantly remove every bullshit new sub they create, not to mention them infesting the comments section of anything news related to scream about “libs”.
Literally they are indistinguishable from reddits T_D crowd, they act just as hateful and use the same language, they seem more concerned with “the libs” than any other political group, and they worship mass murdering dictators while being holocaust deniers / apologists. They can call themselves leftists as much as they want, all I see from them is hatred so they might as well be Trump Qanon Cultists.
Could have swore I saw a few posts from “BuildAPC” on Lemmy the other day, and it looked like it was the Reddit sub moved over to whatever instance it was on.
But PCMasterRace and PCGaming can also assist with this.
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
I figured that out too, I usually start off with my subscribed feed for interesting discussion and news articles (but you have to sub to the right sublems), then I might hop over to the all feed for memes and random pr0n and anything that maybe I missed or new popular communities. Then I jump over to another account on a smaller regional instance and hit the local feed there. I get plenty of interesting discussion and articles… and I think it is way better than reddit has been in the last 10 years. It reminds me of reddit when I joined 15+ years ago. So I’ve had the direct opposite experience as @Pmmeyourtoaster , the discussions here have been exponentially better than reddit has been for a long, long time now.
I will say that for like the first day or two I spent a good amount of time searching out and subbing to different sublems. I also used multiple different tools to find them. Two of the main ones being the built in Reddit Migration tool in Voyager, another being sub.rehab
I was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”...
As the sole admin on a [very] small instance I’ve seen had no reports, and the only thread that I did see getting toxic it was shut down by both the users and then the mods.
I guess, mostly sub’d to tech type communities there is less opportunity for open hatred.
@ada, is there a good community like r/twoxchromosomes that doesn’t mind a [almost] 50 y/o straight guy lurking?
Some German speaking instances heavily swing towards Last Generation/Just Stop Oil/Extinction Rebellion/etc. to the point that you observe heavy downvotes and brigading/mob behavior on any comment that shows the slightest opposition towards them. To be clear: it’s not a left right thing. They call anyone not on board with glueing themselves to things in protest “right”. Not the nicest climate for civil discussion over there (pun!! badumts!). And it reminds me of why I left the German speaking internet over a decade ago in an extreme form. But I also feel like it’s important to have just a little bit of sound insulation in that echo chamber and see some differing opinions, even though I suspect many middle-of-the-bell-curve lurkers might feel like not staying around too long.
Tl;Dr: political topics are indeed as enflamed as ever. More so in the subs I’ve spent time in.
Genuinely I don't understand the issue? You can search the Fediverse from one instance using the Magazines tab in Kbin to find places to sub, or sub to communities you find in all feed etc? Is the issue to do with the duplication of communities at present and lack of clarity which ones are more active?
For me at least the federated set up works well, but I need more visibility of total community sizes when searching Magazines. The search shows me the number of users subbed from this instance, where as I'd also like to know the total number of users subbed across the fediverse to guage how big that community is overall.
Also as you mention, it would be good to see duplicate communities merged across instances - but some of that is the reddit migration with 1000s of new users creating the communities with the same name on multiple instances in a short amount of time. Consolidation will take time (and sometimes there may be a good reason to have two separate communities with the same name) but long term there does need to be tools to allow communities to migrate base from one instance to another or merge; otherwise there is a risk a community could die if an instance falls over.
But I'm not switching between instances - I was initially and realised it was pointless. I have chosen to be on 2 instances - Kbin.social and Feddit.uk, deliberately to keep my UK and generic feed separate for now, and also to have a Kbin and Lemmy experience. I personally strongly favour Kbin at the moment. I don't get the analogy of tabbed browsing or separate forums; you can see the whole fediverse from one instance (barring defederated instance like Beehaw). What am I missing?
Apologies for any typos or bad formatting, I ran up against the 5000 character limit, and tried to edit down - and the 'more' popup actually pops under the next comment in my browser. I'm sure I could fix it somehow, but I believe everything is still intelligible.
No worries, it's intelligble, and I get it as I got hit by the same thing.
I disagree with your latter point.
Okay, but I don't think you've adaquately explained why.
kbin.social has hit a reasonable mass of users to have a strong local community and become a platform unto itself, running on kbin software.
But it can also join with older, more established communities on lemmy instances like lemmy.world and the two can share content with each other. From a kbin.social account I can fully participate on lemmy.world bar two exceptions (owning a lemmy.world magazine and being a lemmy.world admin), and the reverse is equally true. Hence why I view lemmy/kbin as essentially a single platform.
In your case, "local" seems to mean central to the server. But why is this an inherently important attribute?
I'm not interested in a smaller community.
Again, the point of federation - the different parts (instances) merge into a single platform and community. Each instance hosts a smaller part of the whole community, instead of needing a megacorp capable of hosting the entire one on a single set of servers. Ideally, seamlessly, but in practice I admit there are still some rough edges to work out (e.g. multimagazine support).
There might be a point here when dealing with magazine fragmentation - but reddit has the same problem to a degree and we can borrow their solution (multireddits/multimagazines) to resolve that issue here as well.
I joined Reddit because it was the largest single-site community on the Web. I want the monolithic community, and I accept the costs that incurs, including ads or ad-first design.
Yes, but why? This is the part that is yet to be explained. I think the dangers of single-site centralization have already been demonstrated (e.g. loss of 3rd party apps, mods losing their subs when protesting, folks getting permabans for no apparent reason or for obviously incorrect reasons, etc.)
I don't care about the difference between Mastodo, kbin, & Lemmy. They're web software which are trying to replace a monolith, and have seen imited success.
Following this to the extreme, you shouldn't want to use either twitter or reddit, because they can't talk to each other. Right? (Okay, single sign on is possible, but after that you still have to interact with their websites and apps separately.)
The fediverse lacks the first mover advantage of being born in the ninties or early aughts and also lacks big megacorp backing, but it has seen bigger growth than single site replacements like Squabbles or Tildes, and I suspect federation is a big driver of the difference there.
Right now, the fediverse is just fragments at the foot of the tower of Babel, each speaking a separate tongue, even if some are intelligible to others.
Except that they all speak the same language (ActivityPub) and differ from big monoliths like twitter and reddit that can't talk to anyone else. So from an intelligibility perspective they are a step up.
I don't care about political leanings. I'm talking about a UX issue. If you want to defed from a site, and receive no more content, then so be it, that's the right of an Admin.
It's been great 4 days here on fediverse for me. But I started to notice that there is barely any content in form of videos or gifs. Every content is just static in form is images or text. This is what I am really missing here compared to reddit. Is there any particular reason behind it?
IPFS is basically fancy torrents. Pieces of media are accessed by the hash of their content and some metadata. It's neat, because it can be linked as a URL/URI similar to stuff hosted on the regular web. But, and the main website doesn't really make that clear AT ALL, all content is only available for as long as there are people interested in it. You access a file and distribute it to others from then on. After a while, people move on and old data is deleted from their cache, etc. Unless you 'pin' a piece of content and STORE IT YOURSELF, there is no guarantee it will still be available even 5 minutes after you delete it from your device.
In short: The website makes it seem as if IPFS is this big black hole of infinite and immutable storage when it actually is highly fragile. It can be great if used correctly though, for example if instances decide to keep an archive of successful posts and thereby share the load of storage and distribution. But because every IPFS member is also a distributor, the same legal problems that arise from torrent use will rear their heads again. So better not watch movies or browse a sub with illegal bits if they are hosted on IPFS. IPFS is not built for privacy either, but that's a problem many p2p projects have.
However that etherum instance would have communities/"subs". You can "join"/subscribe to those communities to see them from your original instance.
You can see in my screenshot some posts. You can see that Raleigh has posted to Diggit. You can clic on that "Diggit", and you'll get to this : https://diggit.xyz/c/diggit
This is the Diggit community from the Diggit.xyz instance.
You can join that community by going to your instance search, and putting this link in the search : https://diggit.xyz/c/diggit or !diggit@diggit.xyz.
That way you will join that community.
By doing so with each community you are interested in, you can join the different communities from that instance, post to them, and interact with them.
Why do you have to do that? Because lemmy/kbin... Are hosted on different servers, which don't directly scrap all the communities on all the servers.
So until someone on that particular instance has subsided to a community, that instance won't see the community.
Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it...
Quite enjoyable and, since seeing the sub.rehab site someone else posted, even better. I've found quite a few subs that have made their way over to Lemmy.
My only gripe is that quite a few have made their way to lemmy.world, and it's buckling under pressure. I can't sign up on that instance, nor can I remotely sub to communities from my own instance. Once that's resolved, I think I'll definitely be happy to call Lemmy my new home.
Let's goooooo (mander.xyz)
I just realized /c/piracy is the most subscribed community in the lemmyverse! (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
lemmyverse.net/communities?order=subscribers
Is Sync for Android worth the cost?
R5: just started checking it out. It’s cool and has some advantages of others. It’s hella expensive. Thoughts?
Please reconsider removing user aggregate scores from the API (github.com)
Is your proposal related to a problem?...
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org
Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
Oh no ... (jlai.lu)
rules for thee, but not for me (lemmy.ca)
To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously 😛....
those ppl... (feddit.de)
Library Rebuild Suggestions
Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
Suggestions for an iOS News app (or way) that doesn't track (much) data ?
Hi there, I’m quite new to this digital hygiene thing. I try to avoid apps on my phone that tracks useless data for their initial purpose. How do you guys read news ? Would love a “respectful” app that doesn’t track too much data, but I’m open to any solution. Would like to browse international and french news.
i gotta ask... why so many plex over kodi users? (moist.catsweat.com)
ive been using kodi (xbmc was better moniker) since google killed sagetv. i recall attempting plex, but it seemed to lack some open/extensibility (its been awhile)....
Don't get your hopes too high (lemmy.world)
What do you think about Lemmy, so far?
I happen to like it very much.
Which community in lemmy is similar to r/buildmeaPC?
Soon I’ll need help building a new PC. Thanks!
Be honest, do you still use reddit?
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
Have you had any bad experiences with people on Lemmy?
I was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”...
People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role? (kbin.social)
On Reddit at reddit.com/r/redditalternatives, people are talking about a "Reddit 2.0." What do you suggest?
I don’t understand people who say they can’t figure out Lemmy or KBin
Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt....
Why do I not find any video/gif content here?
It's been great 4 days here on fediverse for me. But I started to notice that there is barely any content in form of videos or gifs. Every content is just static in form is images or text. This is what I am really missing here compared to reddit. Is there any particular reason behind it?
deleted_by_moderator
How has ur lemmy experience been so far?
Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it...