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Oh uh… I was gonna say “don’t allow an over-reliance on any technology that could be hacked (by Cylons) and thereby become unreliable at any time”, but sure, we could add that one too! :-P

How quickly we forget the lessons that Battlestar Galactica tried to instill in us… :-D

I suppose it depends on your goals - for a child or pet, is it okay to lie to them or simply force the issue, whereas for an adult human, how far should someone go to remove from them the consequences of their own actions?

Interesting article about the changing language surrounding climate change. Like now it’s starting to become climate emergency/breakdown/crisis, but before any of that it was global warming, and in the 80s apparently it was “inadvertent climate modification”.

Never forget that behind the mobs is a controller.

If you say that 1+1=2 and they say that 1+1=3, what should be done?

The inverted Turing test, it would seem.

Beep boop I am smarter than you… 🎵

Bleep bloop you seem to me dumb as rock… 🎼

That’s why I worry, not (just) about who will win the next election, but how we are going to survive the next one with project 2029.

When you’ve started playing Russian Roulette indefinitely, you’ve already lost.

On the bright side, Trump won’t last long enough to see that.

Correction: against Hillary anyone on the “other” side. Repubs can do whatever they want and their base will still support them, bc they are portrayed as “better” than the other side.

Same for Dems too. Even so, despite how they both lie, they are nowhere close to being the same. But they are similar.

The devolution into a 2-party system is absolutely deadly to a democracy.

My first link used the dropdown menu. Fwiw, discuss.online says it is using “BE: 0.19.3”. So if I type e.g. exclamation-mark then start typing “newtolemmy…” it will fill in to [!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca](https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy), and then iirc someone told me to remove the exclamation mark and… omg, it looks like *I* am the one messing these up!? Removing the exclamation mark results in newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, which takes me away from my instance, but leaving it in allows it to work properly.

Regardless, that is still NOT intuitive, like AT ALL, b/c the URL makes it visually look like clicking it should go to “https://lemmy.ca/c/newtolemmy”, so what difference should the click-here text make - whether I call it “I am the very model of a major general” or !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, the URL is what governs where a link goes, literally everywhere I’ve ever seen in the entire internet? (and the [whatever text here](URL goes here) format definitely presents itself as a “link”, not “code that will change the URL endpoint later”)

Even so, it seems I have been spreading a bit of misinformation, and I apologize for that.

Most especially for this reason and for so many others, I appreciate you so much, for taking the time to think about and correct me on this score - that is so very helpful, THANK YOU!!!

Edit: Whoopsie - some of this is incorrect, see Blaze’s extremely helpful answer below. Many things on the Fediverse are still not intuitive, but I was mostly incorrect in stating that one of reasons is particularly wrt the dropdown menu.

Try it - you can use me + this back-and-forth as a test platform, or really at any time you can do something and click the “Preview” button to see how it will render before you send it to someone else (I do this anytime I have even the slightest encoding - it really helps to spot e.g. a backwards parenthesis that would have displayed a link rather than the link text:-). Ofc clicking it would destroy your message, so make sure to select open in a new tab, to test how it would work:-).

Basically: yes the dropdown menu appears, just as for usernames, but if you choose the item from the dropdown that you see, the Lemmy UI will do the wrong thing. My first link was made using the dropdown, while my second ignored the dropdown and just used the exclamation mark. Notice how my first link takes you to an entirely different instance? But the second link goes to the version of that community while keeping you on your same instance.

Btw, here is a post that describes all of the variations that you can try - there are more than just these two - and the relative merits of each. I highly recommend that !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca community overall btw!:-)

Oh that reminds me: there is also no possible way to share “post” or “comment” links that will auto-adjust to allow you to remain on your logged-in instance, unlike username, community (despite the dropdown route being broken), and instance links. So what you can do is on your instance click the search button / magnifying glass, then paste in a link, and that should take you right to it.

Except ofc when it does not, although with you being on a major instance there’s an extremely good chance that it will… but not guaranteed. The reason is that there must be someone (else?) from your instance who has subscribed to that community first, for you to be able to see it. And that person must blaze the trail, not merely by clicking around on an existing link, but by piecing together a URL in the proper format (c/communityurlname) and then clicking subscribe, and then waiting for the list of posts to populate over the next several days. Once the first person has blazed the trail, it should work for everyone else much more smoothly, but that trailblazing process is not automated or anywhere close to streamlined. Furthermore, reasons that that might not work is that the “community url name” is not always the same as the “community long-form name” that is displayed at the top of it - those can be different. e.g. an example is “Dungeon RPGs” (a community that I just happened to see one day in the right-hand sidebar of my own instance, discuss.online, and btw it’s not a terribly popular community - to this day I’m literally the only one who has ever posted to it:-D), although the url for the name is not “dungeon rpgs” or “dungeon_rpgs” or some such, but rather “drpg”.

On the other hand, I mentioned that there’s a good chance that it will already work - this is b/c of some seriously irl actual fucking heroes who go around making alts on every major instance, and keep very long lists of every single community that they can find, and subscribe to them. Except… not drpg, so if you attempt to visit https://lemmy.world/c/drpg you will get an error, as if that were an invalid community. It is a valid community though, it is just on a tiny instance that such people have not included in their nets - not that I’m complaining or whatever, just using this as an illustration (the top community on this instance has only 67 users per month, and its url at lemmy.world does not work either, and then the next community after that has only 18 users, and is for a small town:-D so this is a tiny instance, with virtually no actual communities).

Most of these activities, from what I can see, are done by one person, these days at least - Blaze - but like, what if they ever get sick, or lose their job, or get hit by a bus, will all such things on the Fediverse cease functioning in such a horrible scenario? I did see a post asking if people would like a bot that would do this… but even once this particular issue is solved, by a bot, it still will only be a solution for a subset of the issue. e.g. what if someone spins up a fake community, calls it “Kamala Harris rules”, waits for a month and then fills it with child pornography? This sounds like a joke, but people do these kind of things, on purpose, and laugh and laugh about it. But I am not joking when I say that full-on, actual federal fucking agencies - of far more than merely one nation - will find it no laughing matter.

The whole concept of “federation” is exciting… but not terribly polished as of yet. The Lemmy UI comes the closest, having the bulk of the development efforts so far put into it, yet even here it is telling that something as foundational as choosing the dropdown menu for community links results in a URL that takes you away from your instance, when the aforementioned post explaining the URLs makes it look naively to me like a 30s change would have fixed it? (but maybe I’m missing something, if e.g. changing “example.com/c/community” to “/c/community@example.com” would indeed fix it, as it says). Notably in relation to the devs prioritization incentives: if you are a member of lemmy.ml and click a community that is also on lemmy.ml, then you are not affected. Everyone else… can wait until the developers decide to get around to it, one day. Maybe they already have even, and it simply hasn’t made its way around to the rest of the Fediverse yet. But even if so, that still points to how these very foundational matters, about “whether communities show up on your instance or not”, and “sharing a community link” have been broken, all this time. And again, sharing links to individual posts and comments likewise does not work - this time there is no dropdown, there just simply is no possible way for it to work (afaik, and confirmed by e.g. Blaze), without UI changes in the code.

People coming from single-instance platforms - Reddit, Facebook, X/Twitter, etc. - do not expect to see this level of complexity. This is not “intuitive” that you see a URL in your browser, yet when you try to share it to someone else, it does not work as they expect. Mind you, that is understandable - Lemmy’s version is 0.19, notably very far aways from 1.0 - I am just saying that realistically, we have a ways to go for things like that to happen.

(1) I don’t know for some of them, possibly not

(2) I don’t know if you’ve noticed but… Reddit has changed from what it used to be 😜

(3) One I know uses Reddit, but argued that the niche subs over there are fine - like maybe ones dedicated to a single game. Those likely escaped much of the controversy that we over here talk about happening in the big subs. I still left mine - bc fuck spez, and more importantly what he tried to do to 3rd party app devs, plus what that means for the platform in the long run, but if we are talking “mainstream” people here… they stayed, and like it more than they don’t like it. It takes all kinds, to fill a world social media platform.

(4) “political” aside, I’m talking about extremist content, that advocates for literal murder, see e.g. some comments in here, which you may ofc argue that “it’s only joking”, but (a) no, it’s really not, and anyway (b) that’s besides the point bc it’s more about how people are receiving such messages, and deciding to leave Lemmy rather than stay (more commentary here)

Not everyone is tech savvy, e.g. creative writers who know how to work the English language rather than coding ones, like maybe poets.

And no I don’t think the exclamation mark followed by community name syntax is intuitive in the slightest (edit: whoopsie, see below, but TLDR I was half-wrong i.e. not correct on this point) - for one thing it runs entirely counter to how username tagging works, and for another if you allow the UI to guide you then it will give the wrong answer, so these “pitfalls” act as barriers to learning, which imho are the polar opposite of “intuitive”, for this matter. Instead, I end up memorizing three rules (usernames are like so, community links similarly are… NOPE, that’s a trap!, and instead here’s how community links actually go…)

Excellent point about the non-Lemmys - those have different barriers I believe. e.g. if you visit the Sublinks demo, there are no posts from sooner than 5 months ago (plus ironically sorting by New shows zero posts, so it seems broken:-). I doubt people are wanting to contribute to a project that isn’t released yet, but then again I can’t ascribe motives to everyone, it just seems to make sense to me that having to learn Rust would be one type of barrier (although not even the major one, since many people may want to do thus for their careers - Rust is arguably the hottest new language right now?), and a project not being able to be used is another type of barrier.

99% of the time when I would get the most batshit insane replies to a comment, they would be from three instances that mine had not defederated from. i.e., instances are not just like emails - not entirely - but instead there is a whole culture associated with each, made more complex to learn bc people lie about them, especially each of us about our own:-).

Also links to communities are totally broken in the web UI - e.g. unless you happen to have your account at midwest.social, clicking lotrmemes@midwest.social will take you away from your instance, where you can’t vote or comment and your preferences are all ignored (!lotrmemes@midwest.social will work fine, but there are zero indicators for that in the GUI, you have to know the secret knowledge and trust the process, or flip back and forth between the Preview button and editing).

But the codebase for Lemmy is in Rust so… not a whole lot of contributors to fix such things. Plus most people seem to simply lurk anyway, based on the differences between upvotes vs. comments in most content.

we’re waiting on Reddit to piss their users off about something

Except that’s already happened, multiple times - stuff has happened with mods, with bots, with server outages, with stock pricing, and more. I’ve seen a couple new people but server stats for Lemmy report roughly the same, and remember people will leave here too, as e.g. hopes do not materialize, and as political season in the west approaches a peak and people need a break, but apparently don’t want to block, etc.

We may not even have enough people here for sustainability, much less growth. Plus I for one keep user blocking gigantic whole entire instances, which is a further limiter of content for anyone who does likewise.

So there are some major challenges facing the Fediverse, and I am no longer so hopeful for it as I was, seeing the evidence that we aren’t really doing all that much to face those and attract additional users who may post high-quality content. On the other hand, seeing things like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks that will show content across multiple streams is highly encouraging, if we can see content from both Lemmy and Mastodon that way.

38% installed

That sounds like a superb band name.:-)

fr fr no cap skibidi rizz yolo fam, strenk whoie.

One of those words I just made up btw… but only one. Though it happened to already exist, meaning “fruit or seed of leguminous plants” fwiw.

Take a look at the numbers - they aren’t exactly leaving so much as staying right there.

Reddit has become like YouTube (or Twitch, Tiktok, whatever) - it provides a never-ending stream of “content”, albeit most of it made from AI these days after they pushed a large fraction of the human content creators away. And the users seem to not care one bit if it is a repost made from a decade or year ago, even copying the comments section line-for-line. It’s not like anyone is really “listening” anyway, they are simply waiting for their opportunity to speak - “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe”, etc. We might despite such, but they seem to enjoy it? (which is good for us, as it contains them over there:-P)

And Twitter, well, you can see for yourself. It could work itself up to offering full-on Nazi propaganda - oh wait, it already has!:-P - and those users won’t mind. “It’s where my audience is”, they cry - ignoring how that is becoming less & less true, but also… isn’t it? Why aren’t they moving their content to Mastodon? It seems to have too many systemic problems, hence is losing ground already before it has even really started. Some users might go to Bluesky though.

Perhaps we’ll see a situation like TV where every provider offers “exclusive content” - the Fediverse being one, the Twitterverse (or whatever) being another, Reddit still yet another (with zombie resurrected content that people deleted, but it managed to scrape before that could happen, now reposted as bot-content under a thin guise of “no I’m a totally really real human, trust me bro” - plus, can you prove it, since despite you recognizing your words 100%, did you keep a copy of it, plus anyway they can trot out their legal claim to it in any case, hence whether they win or not either way you lose).

When I joined Kbin.social, I used to hold out STRONG hopes for the Fediverse. But then the former started dying, I moved to Lemmy, made the mistake of making a comment in ChapoTrapHouse, and another somewhere in Lemmygrad.ml, the feedback from which caused me to almost quit social media entirely… and now I no longer think that Lemmy will end up being very popular, i.e. burst out to include a more mainstream audience (certainly not a single person that I have recommended it to irl has anything even neutral to say about it - even programmers - and instead every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but… perhaps that’s not as fun for people, especially those not used to systems-level OS management tasks i.e. those who don’t use Arch btw:-D). I hope we are okay with that - definitely some people seem to prefer it that way even - but either way it is what it is. Though cross-platform aggregators like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks may hold some hope.