TIL that Natalie Portman has had papers published in two scientific journals. While at Harvard, she co-authored a study called “Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.”
old.reddit.com
Posted in r/todayilearned by u/the_one_below • 24,057 points and 393 comments

When we have a critical mass of people, we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way.

    • Mjpasta710@midwest.socialEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      If you’re asking in good faith… Most of lemmy.ml is a tankie echo chamber that silences or outright bans any dissenting discussion.

      Try bringing up the facts surrounding Russia, China, Cuba, or North Korea…

      Only lies and good vibes for tankies are permitted.

      • cowpattycrusader@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        I did not know this and posted a serious question on a thread dismissing starvation under Stalin as fake news. Ban was swift and responses were brutal. I thought it was just isolated trolling at the time.

      • 4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        Thanks, I honestly didn’t know! I’ve only really adopted Lemmy for almost daily use a few weeks back and mostly read tech related stuff and it’s been blissfully apolitical for the most part. Some of it is on .ml - I now understand the issue and will look out for it/support communities on other instances where possible.

  • Anon518@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics in an organic way

    1. In my experience, many of the people claiming to be experts on reddit are spreading misinformation. This goes for Twitter too, and probably most other large social media sites. People love to be seen as an authority on a topic.
    2. Reddit is anything but organic, and is getting worse and worse in this regard.
    • Keegen@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      The eye opening moment is when one of these threads touches on a subject you know a lot about and the top upvoted comment is spouting complete bullshit. See it once and you start to doubt the credibility of every other highly upvoted comment that looks legit but could be just as wrong, you simply don’t know enough to immediately disprove it.

      • actually@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 days ago

        I have a conspiracy theory that most users who are an expert don’t post much about that.

        For example I am an expert on two things most people find obscure; and for all my comments I just avoid talking about them. It’s too hard to wrap up an idea without lots of background information, there are no short posts or comments I can make about it.

        Almost all the highly upvoted stuff are short. Were I to try to make an expert post it would be totally ignored. So why bother for me when I can snarky about things I know nothing about ? More fun !

        I think experts who write short terse pithy comments that hit the mark, at a timely fashion, are rarer than hens teeth

  • MimicJar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    we can get random experts chiming in about interesting topics

    Lol we have that now… just be sure to phrase your question in the form of a Linux distro.

    But to be serious I do think we’re heading that way, but it’s going to take a long time, likely as long as it took Reddit (if not longer).

  • Fizz@lemmy.nzEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    The thing is that “normies”(I hate the term) weren’t on reddit when it was the size of lemmy. The only experience they have is joining it after it had 10 years of development reached critical mass of users.

    So we are stuck being compared to an impossible standard. When I compare Lemmy to old reddit lemmy hands down blows it out of the water. Old reddit had cp and racism on the front page every single day for years.It was hard to use and hostile to new users.

    I’ve seen lemmy pop up in search engine posts already which was cool to see. Ive also seen lots of high quality intelligent posts granted they are only tech related but we will grow.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        Read up on the saga of /r/jailbait sometime if you want to be utterly confused how the FBI didn’t show up and arrest everyone involved with Reddit.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      I guess that’s a fair point, but I’d rather shoot for what’s good instead of settle for “better than terrible”.

    • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      I tried to use Reddit for years and absolutely hated it. Finally after virtually every internet search for any question i had lead need too Reddit I decided to aquire a taste for it.

        • nocturne@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          Format at first, then user base. I then found you could subscribe to subs and see only that stuff. That made it tolerable.

  • Andrew@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    That comment chain demonstrates a real appeal of Reddit. Even for something like a post-episode TV discussion, a critical mass of people means that not only can you have the discussion in the first place, but there might be some extra info from someone who worked on the set, or attended an audience taping.

    You can click to see the rest of the comments to see plenty wrong with Reddit too, but it’s not like there’s any particular drive to prevent the elements of Reddit culture that I find annoying from coming to Lemmy too.

    I’d be surprised if there’s ever a critical mass of people on a federated app though. If there is, it’s more likely to be on something with the proper funding, that hides the details from regular users (e.g
    it’ll be BlueSky, not Mastodon). On Reddit, Lemmy has a reputation for being too complicated, for the mundane reason that is. Too much stuff that should happen doesn’t, and the answer to why are the stuff that ‘normies’ don’t want to hear (LW and PD instances are both a bit unstable atm), or they’re so unintuitive that that they’ll need answering forever (e.g everything around discussion languages, instance blocks, newly-discovered communities , etc etc).

    I’ve just seen a user accidentally submit the same post to the same community multiple times (the worst I’ve seen is 4 times). Preventing that is some real ‘web dev 101’ shit. Federated apps can be an interesting hobby for inexperienced devs (like me), and mildly diverting for anyone who wants to use them as a user, but a critical mass of users?! Forget about it.

    • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      All the others will get bought out and enshittified. The future is not there.

      The Fediverse has the potential to be the future. It’s gated behind open sourceheads not being all…open-sourcey about. Making it clunky to use and badly designed and then pulling the establishment economist “you poor schlub you’re just too dumb to get it” card, thereby shooting their own efforts in the foot.

      If they can make it open source AND easy to use/intuitive/well designed, then we have a solid future. If not, the future still won’t be those other places.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        It might though - don’t underestimate how much some sheeple prefer to simply be taken care of, rather than e.g. make a simple change to a config file. They will allow companies to sell all of their data, and not blink an eye. X is enshittifying for entirely different reasons (political ones), and Reddit for sheer stupidity, and Google as well, and… well but anyway, look at how many people are still on them, as opposed to here.

  • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    We are far too unwelcoming to normies currently. Many people on Reddit reporting coming here to check it out only to not enjoy it and remain there.

    100% of every single person that I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl gives me grief about how politically extremist it is. Like not just “no thank you, if you don’t mind” but “FUCK NO, WHY WOULD YOU SHOW ME THIS!?”. I mean, I’m no lover of capitalism but… if we want normies, we have to make this place more palatable. The likes of Facebook, X, and Reddit are grandfathered into the public consciousness - like it or not, convincing someone to come here is basically meaning to leave there, if only for part of each day (which Mbin is strongly helping with, by also conjoining Mastodon with Lemmy).

    As an experiment, go to Lemmy.ml and sort by Local. The very top post is currently this one: https://lemmy.ml/post/21925926. This does not make me feel welcomed, being a citizen of the USA. Mind you, I get that there is a certain degree of “Truthiness” to it - especially if you ignore all of the thousands of years of history that predated the very “discovery” of this Western-most continent (even by Leif Erickson) - but true or not, it turns people away. An admin account even specifically decries people not liking it:

    Judging by the downvotes, a lot of Lemmitors have no idea how the world works. Just living in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—must be nice.

    So, this post isn’t going to be removed anytime soon, although beware of downvoting it - you might be kicked out of all communities that exist on that instance, including those you’ve never so much as heard of existing (yes that’s a real thing, see MANY cases described in MANY communities across the Fediverse, e.g. [email protected]).

    Note I did not cherry pick that example. That is literally the first post that I saw. Every time I do this, I can always find such an example in <10 seconds and half of that is going to Lemmy.ml in the first place.

    I mentioned Mbin as being one potential solution. Sublinks is another (but in the meantime there’s Tesseract on dubvee.org if you like that). I switched to PieFed myself, though there are quite a large number of issues with it (e.g. zero new posts from all the super cool Star Trek memes made in the last 3 days from https://piefed.social/c/[email protected] are showing up here - tho tbf this is far from the only instance that is struggling to catch up to updates with Lemmy.World). If you want to remain tied to the actual Lemmy codebase there’s lemmy.cafe and quokk.au that defederates from hexbear.net and lemmy.ml (the former also defederated from Lemmygrad.ml). But so long as people keep joining e.g. lemmy.world or lemm.ee, they are going to have to discover how those instances are by themselves. Except they won’t, and based on my experience, instead they leave - and then blame me for even having mentioned Lemmy to them in the first place.

    We are fooling ourselves, to think that we can have our cake and eat it too. If you make fun of someone - e.g. people in the West including in USA, UK, Germany or other EU nation, etc. - then why would those very same people want to join in despite the “joke”? It’s really not that hard to understand: we either make the Fediverse more welcoming to normies, or we give up hoping that they will come in spite of everything. And based on the MAU (monthly active users) stats, this is basically peak Lemmy right now without much chance to grow further - and if anything we’re declining. I mean, I’m writing this to you from a non-Lemmy sourcecode-based instance right now.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      We should all defederate from .ml. That would be a huge step. We need to excise these extremists in order for the community to grow.

      • trainsaresexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        I still haven’t done that but have noticed a lot of calls to do it. It’s not all bad on .ml, I’d never make it my home instance but it’s no where near lemmygrad levels of CCP loving tankie trash

        • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          I mean… true but…

          There’s only so much Russian outright propaganda I can stomach at one time, so even if it’s “less” it’s still “too much” at the same time?

          https://lemmy.ml/post/21927716 - edit: to be clear I’m not talking about the post, but rather the comments within it.

          • trainsaresexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            6 days ago

            I think my user blocking has been effective since I don’t see content like that coming out of .ml. ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ should be a day 1 block for new users.

            I just checked and in the last year I haven’t had to block any instance except nsfw, which is surprising because I never see grad users in my feed. My lemmy experience has been more variable from low effort, snap judgement, or reddit-like comments coming out of .world.

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              Day 1 users aren’t taught who and how to block people. Instead, my personal friends have blocked Lemmy entirely. They are happy with the likes of Reddit, which tbf does have more support for niche issues, as this whole thread is discussing.

              It is a difficult problem to entangle: how to compete with Reddit, and what specific steps we could do to help. One way that I was suggesting is to better separate the “I hate the Western world” posts from… you know, the places that said posts are talking about. Bc while it is most definitely possible for someone to curate their personal experience on the Fediverse (especially those who use Arch btw, or at least are okay with popping open and editing a config file somewhere), it would sure be more welcoming to particularly normies if that wasn’t mandatory right out of the gate?

              • trainsaresexy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                6 days ago

                I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll try to spend more time in this community, it doesn’t pop up on my main feed that much but I usually find the topics interesting. I think there are a lot of directions lemmy could go and I don’t want to commit to one idea yet. Categorizing sounds like a big effort even if it’s automated.

                • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                  0·
                  6 days ago

                  Future updates to Lemmy already plan to include labels for communities iirc, although I am not sure about if instance labels would be included at first or not. And even if those are applied by instance admins, for maximum friendliness it seems like it would be good to reach out to the very communities that they apply to while making those labels. e.g. going from lemm.ee to Hexbear could perhaps say “come here if you aren’t afraid to get dunked on and we will argue deep points together, though be warned that people indoctrinated by Western socioeconomic capitalistic thought processes may be in for quite a difference of opinion!”. Lemmy.ml could be “we support older-style Marxist–Leninist thinking, but note that we strongly enjoy making fun of the West, so beware ye who enter here - we will educate you properly!”

                  Instead, visiting Lemmy.ml says “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”, followed by a link to “What is Lemmy.ml” which as you can see is broken, pointing to a post that appears to no longer exist.

                  Perhaps this is all hopelessly naive - but it could be tried before abandoning it? I have been known to throw a jab or three at the expense of my own home Western nation (USA) - though it definitely comes across differently when done externally, and also by people who very much seem to not be joking when they talk about literally murdering people. (I mean, I am aware that that never happens in Russia or China, where someone can fall out of a window, then shoot themselves in the back of the head, then fall down a flight of stairs, then shoot themselves in the back of the head again, then fall down another set of stairs, and finally out of a second window… but in any case, this vehemence seems directed at the peoples in the Western nations, and regardless of its degree of truthosity - a word I made up entirely just now but wish that I could use from now:-D - it scares away the normies for sure.)

                  Anyway there are only so many instances, and only so many communities, and most do not need such a warning, or possibly the instance ones could be automated as applying to all communities on that instance. So it’s very doable. As compared to now where it is full federation vs. full defederation, offering literally nothing in-between (unless you have an app that can implement a block of all comments from users on a specified instance).

                  Btw PieFed tries to avoid the need for all of that by an automated system of its own, applied to each user evenly across the board - e.g. if you have more downvotes than upvotes, then an icon appears next to your name (this system seems able to be gamed though, especially wrt such ideological differences where many would upvote while many others would downvote, each side having different ideals about what is to be considered worthy).

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      go to Lemmy.ml

      I’m gonna stop you right there, I’ve already found your problem. Try introducing them to instances that aren’t militant.

      But, since all of Lemmy is run by those guys, maybe just skip Lemmy altogether. I honestly don’t see a future for it with them in charge.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        I just said “Lemmy” and they went forward from there.

        Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

        Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole “federation” concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

        Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it… BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

        But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

        img

        Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven’t heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what’s out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

        And credit where it’s due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people’s dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that’s not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset… and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if “politically extremist” content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

        Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time

          You pointed out the biggest issue with that instance.

          If you have a better alternative (so blocking hexbear and lemmygrad, with a large userbase and managed by a group of admins), feel free to suggest it.

          Also, do not underestimate the importance some users give to low defederation.
          Lemm.ee is still the second largest instance for a reason.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            6 days ago

            Right, and for people who want that low defederation, lemm.ee is not just a good but a great option. Though for normies, it may be turning people away.

            But as you said, what other options are there? Lemmy.cafe seems so perfect in so many ways. Like their welcome messages are actually helpful, e.g. pointing people to [email protected], as opposed to e.g. “What is Lemmy.ml” that is just a broken link to nowhere, or Lemmy.World’s Getting started guide that doesn’t mention things such as cross-posting. But then again, normies especially wouldn’t like it when/if the instance suddenly has to shut down for whatever reason… I get you there.

            So who else defederates from the entirety of the big 3? (Btw lemmy.cafe defederates from almost nothing but these, and threads ofc, so still has e.g. NSFW and anime instances linked. And quokk.au likewise has only a single admin.) Or better yet allows custom user blocking? PieFed does, Tesseract on dubvee.org, and perhaps some apps (not sure which ones - and the trick is that some appear to at first glance, but it’s merely the same Lemmy back-end blocking that doesn’t block users, only communities). And I’m not clear about Mbin - I think not.

            Moreover, nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now. But we can’t just keep sending people to lemmy.world bc it’s the only one that always works for >80% of the content on the Fediverse? That would somewhat work, but be a purely short-term solution. Yet nothing else would work… e.g. I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days. Eventually I responded from a third instance involved - discuss.online - but federation issues such as this tend to have a cooling effect in terms of shutting down conversations. This stuff is going to turn normies away as well, on top of the toxicity issues.

            So there are problems with every instance. At least you get your choice of which issues you want to deal with:-). The toxicity issue though is particularly what has driven away 100% of the people that I’ve mentioned Lemmy to irl, so it seems to be the major one. Perhaps if not for it they might have joined Lemmy and then left it later, but as it is they refuse to even consider it bc they can’t get past that. So THAT is the one that I think we need to focus on to get more people. At which point yeah, perhaps add Lemmy.cafe to the recommendation list? Alongside PieFed that allows custom user blocking of whatever instance you want - and I mean the good kind, blocking not just communities but all comments as well.

            Perhaps the reason that people are mentioning the defederation issues is due to Mastodon’s heavy fragmention and inability to really search for content outside of someone’s initial chosen instance? (Though that feature seems to be coming “soon™”.) If so that would make a LOT of sense?! However, the difficulties faced by Lemmy are of a different sort. Not being able to search for content from any other instance is nowhere near the same as e.g. the Western world defederating from an instance that constantly mocks and disrespects everything that it does - and kinda vice versa btw bc there is much that the Western world does not respect about how the Eastern world (specifically Russia and China) does things as well, e.g. the extremely heavy-handed banning from all communities, and how the East is “not” doing genocide, fully and literally directly, even while the USA “is” (I mean it low-key is, but how does that justify the Ukrainian invasion or the Uyghur situation?!) - the whole “one rule for thee, an entirely different set of rules for me” thing is a real turn-off for people to remain in the Fediverse. So while I don’t doubt that people are asking for instances that aren’t defederated from anything, I do question whether that’s truly what they want, especially “they” meaning the majority of normies. It’s complicated bc some truly do want something like lemm.ee, while on the other hand I see some people leaving Lemm.ee wanting to go somewhere that defederates from at the very least Hexbear. It’s one thing to foster and encourage STRONG diversity of opinions, but it’s another to open the door to people who consistently argue in bad faith (and rarely if ever do not do such). The former makes dull conversations better, while the latter ends conversations entirely.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              I made a post from StarTrek.website to tenforward on lemmy.world and couldn’t see the comments (or votes) that people made to it for at least 2-3 days.

              May I ask you why you keep bringing that issue, when it has been solved in the meantime, and is a specific Piefed issue? Lemmy users on any of the top 20 instances are not experiencing federation issues, with the sole exception of programming.dev

              • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                6 days ago

                First, I hope nobody is taking any of this personally. We were talking here about how to reach out to normies, and whatever best way there is to do that.

                Second, you misread my comment. It is true that MANY instances are having issues with Lemmy.World. My own comment here said “from StarTrek.website” (to be most clear I mean https://startrek.website/c/[email protected] ), which itself is a different instance than PieFed.social, so I experienced these federation issues multiple times this very week, from two distinct places - i.e. I’m not continuously bringing up the same issue, I’m adding new ones to the pile, to show that it’s not just PieFed’s fault. And I don’t think I mentioned here yet that those issues also affected https://discuss.online/c/[email protected] - after a day or two the latter started to catch up but it was still a day behind lemmy.world. That’s 3 instances all struggling to receive that same content, none fully succeeding (at the time).

                If anything it’s Lemmy.world’s “fault” but only in the diagnostic sense of being centrally positioned in this debacle rather than blame being a “responsible” party to have caused it or being able to fix it. Though fortunately, 0.19.6 should help provide a fix for exactly this, and the Lemmy devs are currently doing their due diligence to test it out before deployment to the entire world:-).

                And I am far from the only one mentioning such - here’s one example and here’s another. Also, the issue with my personal post was just a few days ago, so even if these federation issues are intermittent they are still ongoing, and seem like they will continue until such time as Lemmy.world finishes its update process to 0.19.6.

                • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
                  0·
                  6 days ago

                  Second, you misread my comment.

                  I did indeed, but depends how much you define “many”. Has anyone reached out to the SW.website instance about this issue? What is their answer?

                  For discuss.online, they seem to be doing quite well federation-wise: https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=discuss.online

                  There was one peak at 2 hours, that was was a single occurrence:

                  For programming.dev, they seem to indeed have issue with their database. To be honest, the way it’s going, it would almost make sense to suggest people to switch to other instances, the issues have been going on for a while.

                  I am well aware of aussie.zone, as I made the meme above.

                  But that’s still the point: are 2 instances (aussie.zone and pd.dev) of the top 20 “many” (startrek is less active)?

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              nearly every instance other than Lemmy.world is having federation issues with lemmy.world right now.

              What do you mean? Having a quick test right now

              It does not seem like “nearly every instance is having federating issues with LW right now”.

              that defederates from at the very least Hexbear.

              It’s always the same issues, there is no generalist instance that fits the bill:

              You might have higher chances of convincing lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, lemmy.dbzer0.com, discuss.tchcs.de to defederate hexbear, than getting a small instance that does popular enough to enter the top 20

              Or you can convince lemmy.cafe to get another admin, and get a bit more “professional” (a la lemmy.zip)

              • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                6 days ago

                I covered the federation issues in my other comment.

                PieFed allows users to decide their own personal defederations without needing to depend upon an instance admin for that.

                Hopefully as the UI gets more developed, people will gravitate more to PieFed, or Sublinks.

                If the worst were to happen (another Ernst/Kbin.social situation) then any instance with only a single admin is indeed vulnerable, as is any instance that remains federated with it due to the inevitable spam attacks that will come from it.

                Though the issues with federation with lemmy.ml are also important too. See e.g. that recent discussion at https://lemm.ee/post/45248880, where the admins expressed a desire for OP to physically commit suicide, all based on an easily preventable misunderstanding about a situation that happened in a game. Just to underscore how ridiculous what we are talking about is, here is a mini run-down of the facts: one non-existent irl character kissed another non-existent irl character, who had been dating in the game for awhile btw, having reached a “hearts” level of 8 of 10 points so quite an established relationship showing mutual interest, whereupon the 2nd character had just given a bouquet of flowers to the 1st one, who then kissed the 2nd one in a surprised and pleased movement, which the ML admins described as “sexual assault” (mistakenly thinking that that did not happen until reaching 10 of 10 points), banned the OP, oh and in the process also told the OP kill themselves. This sounds like insane ranting on my part I know, but it all actually happened!?!?!?! And it’s not even something that we need to hear second-hand stories of, it’s all right there in the modlogs preserved for anyone who wants to see directly.

                It is because of events such as that - which KEEP HAPPENING - that I have stopped recommending Lemmy to anyone. Though I would love to start recommending PieFed as its UI improves a bit - and I will be helping that process along by submitting loads of bug reports to their team!:-) In the meantime, perhaps the downsides of instances such as lemmy.cafe being run by a single administrator do not seem so bad? After all, lemmy.ml has an entire team of administrators - but that did not stop SagXD from losing their account there, suddenly and without warning. Nor macniel or any of the others that we keep hearing about happening. That is why we are saying that having a single admin is bad right - b/c it is vulnerable to go down without warning? Afaik, I’ve never heard that lemmy.ml has offered a warning first before smashing the entire instance-wide ban hammer, even against a mod of a community there. Nor, again even for a mod there, do they even so much as tell them that it happened. Or explain what the cryptic modlog messages mean, which look at first glance as if they pertain only to individual communities, leaving people confused and having to figure out on their own what happened?

                So anyway which is worse: a community with a single admin, or one with a whole team that is unhinged and somehow even more likely to boot someone, and with a demonstrated pattern of doing exactly that whenever it suits them?

                And then ofc hexbear is a whole other thing too - who wants to be actively bullied, like why would that be fun for most of us, especially normies? If someone REALLY wants to be exposed to thus, then okay I won’t stop them, but it really does seem to me like it would be helpful to at least offer a WARNING to new users that it is likely to happen. Which afaik lemm.ee does not do. Maybe as you recommend lemm.ee you can attach such a warning?

                Possibly something like: “if you want an instance that is connected all servers across the fediverse, such does not exist but the closest seems to be lemm.ee, although be warned that it federates with known multiple instances known to encourage trolling behaviors; otherwise lemmy.cafe seems quite welcoming although it is small and with only a single admin so is less stable than others.”

                As you say, nothing is perfect. All we can do is try to help manage and perhaps mitigate this absolute shit-storm. Thanks for all your efforts there:-).

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          You’ve convinced me to try mbin. I had a kbin account and I really liked it, but federation with lemmy was soooo slow.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            6 days ago

            Great! I don’t really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do… and like that interface, then that’s wonderful. It’s definitely quite polished. I don’t think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I’m not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it’s a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other “control the conversation” tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler… or a Trump supporter.

            Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it’s not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?

              • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                6 days ago

                Ah that makes sense then, why one highly technical person would recall (presumably correctly) that it used to work on Kbin, while another person submitted a request to add that feature for Mbin. It’s nice to know that it is possible, even if not quite straightforward!:-)

                I would strongly hope that the Mbin codebase is being worked on by more than just one person, who is also administering your instance. That was what caused the demise of both Kbin and Kbin.social with Ernst trying to “do it all” without letting others help. I would love to see that project succeed and provide a fully viable alternative to X and Reddit besides Mastodon and Lemmy:-).

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          Yes, but rarely. And you won’t get banned from .world for a slight criticism of China.

            • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              Sigh… I used to be that way. But it does get exhausting, and I now prefer to spend my time in other ways.

                • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                  0·
                  6 days ago

                  No, it’s really not - see e.g. https://youtu.be/BFSe5-i1LoU and actually I cannot recommend that entire channel highly enough, it is amazing! It is like a mini college course in the subject, and describes how the Alt-Right movement in America (following patterns used in Russia for years) resorts to many tactics that are low-effort and literally designed to waste the time of the responder.

                  Imagine you had a PhD, specifically in vaccines, and you were arguing with a 2-year-old who no matter what you said then responded with “nuh-uh”, and occasionally threw in zingers at the level of “I know you are but what am I?!”

                  It is not important to refute the bullshit of people refusing to engage in good faith, and in actual fact it is precisely the opposite: by giving them the opportunity to continue forward you are merely playing into their game.

                  Maybe you pick your battles I’m not suggesting otherwise, just that in general I find it best to not engage with trolls. I tried that on Reddit, as a mod of two small gaming subs, and I learned my lesson: it was me who was changed, not them. Until I decided to leave Reddit entirely, regardless of whether I came here or not.

                  And now that I’m here, forewarned is forearmed, and I’m not enjoying having to go through that fight yet again, but it must be done by the only way is forward… towards whatever goal I choose, and for the I choose happiness rather than continually hitting my head against a brick wall:-).

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      It’s not just about the communities. We push communities a lot, and we do need more communities. But fundamentally we need a lot more PEOPLE.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        Hard disagree.

        A million empty communities simply makes all of lemmy look like a barren wasteland nobody uses.

        We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there’s enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.

        That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.

        Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don’t really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          I agree with you, but not sure if that’s what the person above meant.

          But yeah, centralization should happen. We could probably close 95% of the existing communities and regroup on the last 5%

          [email protected] for instance covers most of the needs for that sport

          • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            0·
            23 hours ago

            But yeah, centralization should happen.

            Fam, we are here precisely because we don’t want centralization.

            If you want that, Reddit and Facebook and BS are that way.

          • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
            0·
            4 days ago

            My read was ‘we need to make more communities, AND we need more users’ and I’m not sure why more communities solves anything since I’ve shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they’re all like ‘but why? there’s nothing there.’

            Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you’ll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that’s just a misleading and confusing presentation which they’re taking the wrong impression away from.

            I don’t think there’s a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it’s not just another “reddit killer” with lots of empty zones of nothingness.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              0·
              4 days ago

              My point was that needing more people is the root issue. So while I didn’t explicitly make your point, I do agree.

      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        Exactly! Yes!

        I get downvoted everytime I point out that a healthy network comes with users. Lots of users. Users of all kinds. Users you don’t agree with. Users you do agree with. I said that the userbase of threads being on Lemmy would be a culture clash, but it would be a sign of a growing fediverse concept.

        Everyone else says if the threads users federated with Lemmy, they would personally block the instance. Which just shows how much of a bubble the people here want to live in.

        I work at an airport. You will never see a more diverse group of people from a bigger selection of places than at an international airport. I don’t agree with all of them. I don’t agree with the majority of them. But I can converse with them. I can make small talk for 10 minutes.

        I treat the fediverse as I treat the real world. I wouldn’t look at these people and say “You’re banished from my existence for having conflicting politic or religious beliefs! Begone from my presence! You do not deserve to exist in my world!”

        But thats how people here treat “outsiders” or “normies”.

        I want the fediverse concept to grow. I want the idea of a concept that’s immune to corporate ownership by design to BE normalized.

        Because right now, it’s a niche interest that 98% of people have never heard of. Corporations want to keep it that way…if they’ve even heard of the Fediverse. They might to be too busy exploiting labor, and polluting the planet with their private jets and resource sucking plants located in places that already have water shortages.

        Yes I’m talking to you Nestle, and you Starbucks CEO. I don’t know how this comment turned into a rant against them specifically, but fuck Nestle, and fuck Starbucks.

        • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          But please remember that in order to enjoy such diversity of opinions as you mentioned… we must become intolerant.

          To the intolerant. There is no faster way to shut down conversations than to allow bullies to dominate everything within their reach.

          So long as conversations can be kept “fun”, there will naturally be many more to follow, but when they cross the line, then fun-time is over and the people go home. Unfortunately, modding efforts are in short supply here - not as limiting as content creation, but still a constraining factor.

        • Flamekebab@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          Perhaps it’s just me having different priorities, but I have no interest in making small talk with lots of people. There’s plenty of spaces for that already whilst the spaces for enthusiasts have been sacrificed to the general public.

          I’m not arguing this specifically about Lemmy, or trying to suggest policy, I’m just chipping in that there’s at least something to be said for not trying to make all social spaces for all people.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          I got shadowbanned from reddit before even making a single post.

          I’ve said it before, I like reddit users but I hate reddit the company.