Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it’s a terrible design for people that aren’t the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.

Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.

Can’t speak for the other apps, but on Jerboa, I get a “Network Error” every time I try to post. The post will go through, but from my end, it looks like it didn’t go through. A lot of people are getting similar messages, hence the double posts. All growing pains for a site not ready for the mass migration into Lemmy.

That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.

Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.

Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.

Before they killed Reddit, I frequently made new accounts for privacy reasons, as recently as maybe a month or two ago. Email was not required.

I’ll be honest: that’s a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don’t want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that’s the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it’s called is dead on arrival.

Top Day is probably the best sort option so far, but I wouldn’t mind something that updates a little more frequently (e.g., Top for the past 4 hours). Additionally, I wouldn’t mind adding a decay mechanism that gradually pulls posts lower as time passes. As things stand now, if a post is immediately popular within the same hour it gets posted, it’ll remain as the #1 post on Top Day for the next 23 hours before immediately falling off the page altogether the second the post becomes 24 hours old. That leads to stale pages, and if people see the same posts every time they check this place, they’ll assume it’s a dead community and never come back. By implementing something that more gradually cycles content, if I check the site once at lunch and again a few hours later on my train ride home, I should get different content.

The problem with subscribing to communities at this point is the lack of content. I subscribed to a few different baseball communities, but none of them have anything other than maybe a welcome post or a few gameday posts without any comments. Communities are duplicated on a bunch of different instances too, which makes things a million times harder than it needs to be. I have no idea if one of the half dozen baseball communities I’m in now will make it big, if a new one entirely will make it big, or if they’re all doomed to never have content.

Define “intentionally inflammatory.” Reddit was always very left-leaning politically, so I assume the userbase here is similar. I suspect conservative memes/links/etc. would be considered intentionally inflammatory here in a way that leftist memes/links/etc. would not. It’s not really possible to define a one-size-fits-all definition: One person’s inflammatory is another person’s ideal content.

Additionally, define “spamming links.” The biggest problem with Lemmy so far is lack of content. If I go to the baseball subreddit, for instance, I see a bunch of highlights from the games that took place last night, a bunch of discussions on World Series odds, a bunch of questions about stats, etc. Over here, none of that exists yet. A few people have tried to build individual communities by posting similar content over here. It probably looks like spamming a bunch of links to MLB’s website for highlight videos. However, without someone spamming those links, the community is basically dead with nothing to comment on. We probably need a little spamming at the outset to grow the community to be large enough to sustain itself organically.

In the early days of the pandemic, I got a low-tech version of that: I had one of those electric desk fans that move from left to right and back again to keep a room cool. I took an old wire coat hanger and bent it to attach one part to the fan, and one part to my mouse. As the fan moved, so did my mouse, so I always appeared active in Teams.

Software solutions like powershell scripts are neat, but they can be detected by IT. They can’t really detect a hardware solution without a lot of digging though, and as long as I’m still getting my work done, they have no reason to dig.

I quickly stopped caring about it though. Like OP, I go inactive for long periods of time, but fortunately, my manager is smart enough to recognize that my work’s still getting done, so he doesn’t care at all. Same thing for my direct reports: As long as we continue to meet deadlines, I don’t care if they’re working 40 hours / week or 10 hours / week.

The idea of Shreddit takes me back to when I first joined Reddit in 2011. At the time, I was in my mid 20s going to rock/metal concerts pretty often. A friend of mine encouraged me to sign up for Reddit and to check out the Shreddit community. It took me ages to figure out she was talking about /r/metal.

I bring that up to make the point that community discovery in my early days of Reddit was pretty difficult, but I eventually figured it out. In time, I’m sure the same thing will happen with Lemmy.

The “Top Day” sorting option does this, but posts fall off a cliff rather than falling off gradually. My understanding is that they’ll remain on the page from hour 0 to hour 23, but then completely disappear starting in hour 24.

Instead of that, it would be ideal to implement a mathematical formula that pushes pages higher into the rankings with every upvote, comment, or view it gets, but pushes posts lower in the rankings with every additional hour passed. You have to tweak the specific parameters of that formula to get it right, but it essentially forces posts off the page after enough time has passed, while introducing new posts to replace the old. Unlike the “Top Day” sort where things are a step function, the idea with this is to make it gradual so that a popular post falls from #1 overall down to #2, then #3, etc. over the course of a day.

Agreed. Something like Top for the last 4 hours would be super easy to implement because Top for the last day already exists (just change 24 hours to 4 hours in the code that fetches comments). However, for those that are used to checking the site multiple times in a day, you don’t want to ge served up the same content every time you check. Top for the past 4 hours would seemingly be a decent balance between giving posts that have some type of traction while not giving posts that are stale.

I think it’s because a few of the posts appear at the top for everyone, so people keep adding comments to those, which “bumps” them to the top of the feed like it used to work with forums back in their heyday 15-20 years ago.

Looks like a huge drop in user counts a few minutes ago too: Down to 75K as of the time I made this comment despite the chart showing a much higher number immediately before that. I’m guessing there’s something off when it comes to counting the different instances.

Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?

In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.

Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.

It’s similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.

Interesting article. I appreciate that it included the example of a couple in Jersey City, NJ being forced to move because of increasingly exorbitant rent. That article could have been about me personally. I lived in a shitty overpriced apartment that overlooked the Holland Tunnel. Rent was around $2200/year, but they wanted $2700/year for us upon renewal, and after we said no, they upped it to $2900/year when offered to the general public. This was June 2022, and a quick look on their website suggests similar units sell for $3300/month now. I make a decent living, but that increase was way too much for me. That was the final straw to get me to move out of NJ entirely. It was similar for many of my neighbors. The NYC area will always have a special place in my heart, but there’s only so much you can take before you begin looking to alternatives.