TLDR: some don’t like the moderation here, which is done by a single mod, and have gone and made their own community over on lemmy.world.
If this drama was real and the instance admins knew about it, I think I’d be happy to conclude that the instance admins did a bad job here given their status as a star trek instance. If there was a split amongst Risa people and its mod, then create another community (with TenForward being a great name for it) with a different moderator and let them co-exist as part of the same federation.
Now there’s probably some unnecessary fracturing (which is fine, that’s what the fediverse is all about in the end) … and I can’t help but wonder if the admins here are maybe a tad too much used to a reddit culture of allowing mods and admins get away with things … which is of course me being rather quick to judge, I can only speculate here clearly, but still … kinda funny to see.
Yes you can follow users on kbin, which you can’t do on lemmy, and this applies to both users on mastodon/mblogs and lemmy/kbin.
However, from what I can gather, kbin is still community/magazine focused. For instance, I don’t think you can get a feed of just the posts of those that you follow, as you would on mastodon. You can select the subscribed channel and then look microblogs, which can get you close, but is really a view of all the posts from the people you follow and that have the hashtags for all of the magazines you follow (I think). THe important bit here being that kbin puts posts form mastodon/mblogs into magazines based on hashtags, where each magazine can defined what hashtags it will “scoop up”. And so “subscribed microblogs” includes all of those posts tagged with hashtags scooped up by the communities/magazines you follow.
I have no idea what kbin’s road map is for this, but for me personally, who has a mastodon account on an instance I’m rather happy with, as well as this lemmy account, it doesn’t offer something that would prompt me to migrate as a user.
One thing I’m probably missing here is whether one can more easily post to both communities/magazines and one’s mastodon followers from kbin. I don’t know enough about whether that is so and why and how far lemmy would be from achieving the same, but at this point in the fediverse’s development, it’s a not insignificant factor, as, IMO, so many are on mastodon and other microblog platforms that bridging that gap is vital to creating a sustainable and healthy ecosystem of platforms on the fediverse.
And Star Trek was never about human ingenuity coming together to make near-magical technology work? Stamet’s DNA changes weren’t recorded? They weren’t studied and replicated or had the essence of their effect distilled into an interface that mimicked the physical effects?
This all seems like clutching at very untrek-like straws … which kinda encapsulates the whole issue that some have with Discovery.
I personally don’t mind the idea of a mycellial network, or more broadly, some sort of futuristic bio-physics phenomenon/technology. I just think Discovery didn’t land the handling of it. I think there are plenty of possible reasons for the spore drive not being used by all of the federation that are more interesting than these “lucky, only one person got the DNA so I guess it’s over now” reasons … reasons that would actually contribute to the Sci-Fi of it all. Like, just shooting from the hip … it has an immune system that learnt to kick out foreign starships.
On lemmy the default is Active, which basically boosts any post that still has some recent chatter going on but is otherwise “stale”. In the settings though you can change the default sort. I’ve gone with Hot, which is I think the default sort on kbin too.
Can you change the default sort on kbin? I could work how to.
A big general problem I have with the fediverse (as do others I’ve spoken to) is that it affords not real capacity to foster both private and public spaces with good and convenient means of moving and connecting with people between them. From the lack of truly private DMs, to no private group chats or local only spaces … the whole idea of private spaces for when people want them seems to be absent from the fediverse creators and it’s a significant gap IMO.
In the case of lemmy, I can imagine private communities being rather useful and pleasant. That is, communities visible only by people who are members or who have subscribed, with membership being optionally open or closed to being invite only or requiring approval or something similar. Having both federated and local-only versions of these would also probably be nice.
The useful part would be that you could meet people/accounts in private spaces and then see the same person/account in public too, which should only foster community creation through personal connections and discovery.
Then, whenever people need a quieter and more private space for a particular conversation or topic, they can take discussion out from the public and shield it in private. While you might argue that this would stifle discussion (and I see your point), I think there’s a relatively natural equilibrium between our needs for public and noisy engagement and quiet/safe/private interactions. I think people would naturally move between these spaces as they need.
I feel like lots of thinking like this or adjacent to this is going on around the fediverse, and part of the problem we’re all encountering is that many or even most of us don’t really understand this “design space” of homely/kind/safe/wholesome/fulfilling online placed particularly well. And so we’re either reaching for established models (reddit/twitter etc) or expecting too much of new technologies (decentralisation and federation).
In the case of holiday meals and beehaw, while reading your post, my immediate thought was how it’s simultaneously a fantastic metaphor and an inapplicable one for social media. A holiday meal, I’d say, is defined by its rarity and specificity. Once a year, family members and close friends gather together for the purpose of being together. I don’t see that mapping onto online social media … like at all … however desirable that demeanor and vibe is desirable.
And while being kind and open etc is obviously a good aim for a social media space, so long as it is social media, which means open ended discussions/topics, (relatively) open membership, relative anonymity, constant activity, and, let’s be honest, some expectation of providing some form entertainment to lurkers … the personal bonds and purpose of a holiday meal just can’t exist. Which is a problem, IMO, that goes beyond ActivityPub, because the moment you make a social media space more closed or exclusive while trying to still be a form of social media, it will become quieter, duller and less compelling to users (for better or worse) and eventually fall into relative disuse and so seem to fail at social media.
If you then want to recast social media, you then, IMO, need to think a lot about formats, UIs, media types and framing and how people are presented and interact … like to a large extent … because this whole “sending text messages to each other in a public space” can only go so far (which is a big problem I personally have with the fediverse).
I say this not to dismiss your and Beehaw’s goals … but really just to say … “that’s great, but underestimating how hard this stuff can be would not serve you or beehaw well IMO”.
Hope it goes well though and will be curious to see what happens to beehaw!
Yea I started watching the MKBHD video on it and turned it off at the part where he was kinda justifying how sophisticated the metal pressing process had to be because it has some elasticity or something and was hard to get consistent … the upshot of which was, as MKBHD admitted, that the panels were inconsistent and you were going to get random gaps in the plating. He kinda showed some examples, and to me, even over YouTube, it just felt cheap and I no longer understood how someone could feel ok spending the money.
It was always a part of it though … travel times were always there and relevant, the delta quadrant was very far away, getting to the battle in time wasn’t always possible, being alone when in trouble was almost always the point … space hadn’t been reduced from a final frontier to an irrelevant playground.
a single ship having it
Well this was part of the contrivance … once Discovery made it work why wouldn’t the whole federation be running spore drives ASAP? Security wise they’d be nearly unstoppable.
I think this goes on some list I’ve started of old-style fecking awesome web pages that represent exactly what us old timers are talking about when we say the internet has lost something vital. No frills, community driven, information rich and dense web page producing long lasting value. Just compare this to some recipe page with flocks of ads.
Wow. I’m kinda impressed that that’s already in the works.
I’m rather pleased with how many developers have gotten involved with the project. Looks like the work might not be finished yet on this feature, but it’s definitely on its way!
I haven’t seen anything. Hopefully nothing tragic happened. Otherwise, there’s obviously a bit of scope for this, for a single admin to just walk.
I think as communities/instances get to be more of a big deal, we as users should ask for multiple admins and moderators and multiple contact points (eg a mastodon account) so that there are fail safes and clear signals. So, if a single admin walks, there’s someone else with the keys. Or at least if the instance goes dark we have the alternative contact to at least get a signal about what’s happening.