Yeah I assume the reason there isn’t is because the general ones are US-centric by default and then everyone else has to have somewhere specific to go. But I guess if they want their own dedicated place too why not?
I don’t think hosting was ever the argument. It was always just that the vast majority of users were American.
Any site defaulting to English is going to attract users who predominantly speak English as their primary language, and then people who speak English as a sort of lingua franca are going to be a smaller part of that. Among native English speakers, Americans make up the majority, so that’s the prevailing default you are likely to see.
Even if Lemmy.world is hosted in Europe, I’d hazard that the largest user demographic is still Americans.
attract users who predominantly speak English as their primary language
I never understood this argument. Why do you think it’s important whether English is your primary language or not?
People in developed countries often speak English pretty much perfectly (and know the difference between their and they’re).
If you’re going to a web site with a mixed audience, you’re gonna use English, and if you’re going to a local one, you use your local language. No big deal?
Native English speakers have the advantage of not needing a different language to speak to their locals, but that’s all.
If somehow everyone agreed that Esperanto will be the default internet language, you wouldn’t expect the majority to be native Esperanto users.
I mean, I think I addressed that in my post. When the discourse is defaulted to English, you end up with users who are either native English speakers and people using English as a lingua franca.
In the Anglosphere, Americans make up the largest single chunk, and they accordingly see no need to “enclave” the way other groups may because being the biggest means their standpoint is effectively the default one.
When the discourse is defaulted to English, you end up with users who are either native English speakers and people using English as a lingua franca.
But that is the thing, this assumption is most likely not correct. The second half of it is (which you didn’t mention in your original comment), but the first part is largely untrue.
People who speak English as a second language are able to engage with a platform in which the majority of users speak English. People who only speak English or that and their local language are unable to engage with a platform where the language used is not their own or English.
More people are able to communicate with a shared language than with languages which are not mutually understood.
One other factor contributes: the U.S. has a large population which shares both a language and some culture. While multiple other countries may share languages, the populations which share a similar level of culture are smaller.
Then you have posts on social media being ranked in some way by engagement. One post may be relatable to 100k people, and five other posts are relatable to 20k each. The single post is ranked higher.
Your assumptions are incorrect. There never were a vast majority of American users, and English based sites doesn’t necessarily attract people who speak English as their primary language. The world knows (except for perhaps some Americans) that English is the lingua franca of our day, so English being used in a website doesn’t say anything at all about its geographical or cultural makeup.
It is a stupid argument anyway that fundamentally ignores the entire concept of the internet being global and universal. If a site is aimed at a global userbase it is mostly completely irrelevant (except for legal purposes of course) where that site was originally created or where the servers are located.
It’s americans assuming everything must be about the US and everyone they’re talking to understands US terms or even is from there.
Like using state acronyms with no context and assuming ppl will know what it means. Or random cardinal directions when there’s no country context. The whole thing likely exists because of the insane cultural bubble US education and media perpetuates combined with many people on the english speaking internet actually being from there.
Oh and also many of the people on reddit complaining about it were utterly unable to see when there was context implying it’s about the US so they weren’t really better.
Not necessarily, it is likely that a tourist is just not used to these specific pathogens. While the people living there are used to them. So their immune system isn’t better per se just more adapted to the environment.
Same sort of idea if you went to a small culture in a third world country who isn't used to eating any fast food, and gave them McDonald's. They'd be diarrheaing all over the place because they're not used to it.
Also “survivorship bias” sadly plays a part in this. The healthcare is low quality or nonexistent. Everyone seems to have an excellent immune system because most everyone that didn’t… died.
Not sure what country you're talking about but as someone born and raised in a third-world country with free, universal healthcare I can tell you I'm offended.
Man I really think this highlights how badly we need to stop using the word third-world. Thanks for pointing that out. It is antiquated and just used arbitrarily these days. I was trying to convey war-torn countries, countries with too much unrest to support a universal healthcare system, etc. Those descriptions are not descriptive of every third-world country.
Depends on what part of the 3rd world we are talking about. Majority of African nations for example do not have UHC yet. Asia is a better off in this regard but not the entire continent.
I find the OP’s question very intriguing and have kind of arrived at this same conclusion. My only tweak would be that they may, in fact, have more effective immune systems purely due to the fact that access to medicine or areas free of pathogens aren’t as common. Obviously, though, that would be compared to a person who exists in those same conditions but with access to good medical care which is a bit paradoxical.
The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
Maybe we'll move to a system where only upvotes from that home's instance matter. After all karma is meaningless anyway and is just used for short term discoverability, maybe kbin1.social doesn't care how kbin2.social votes on kbin1.social threads (or any lemmy example instance)? If you subscribe to kbin1.social then you hope that they will upvote their content appropriately the same way you expect them to self-moderate appropriately. Dunno, just thinking out loud
It’s not harder than what we’ve had to do with e-mail spam. Which has been enormously successful, with 99% of it not even getting delivered to your spam folder but just dropped entirely.
Instances will het as much visibility as they’ve earned through successful engagement across instances. The visibility of a new instance’s posts will increase over time.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought, and people still have it all the time. There are just so many fundamental things that need to go into a sorting algo. We’re not even talking about personalization.
E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I'd say it's not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.
This is why yes, there needs to be a feed algorithm. “Just show it to me chronologically” is the most naive thought
Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn't have it either for example, it's not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).
The trick is to find out how to leverage the community for quality signals, and just support that with good foundations.
Spam filtering is done by corporations but they’re not all mega tech companies like Google. A lot of it is done at the network level, too.
DNS has also always been the prime example of a federated service that works so well we can rely on it as a public utility. Why hasn’t it been taken over by bad actors rapidly recycling their identities? It’s not because big tech has thousands of human agents monitoring it at great expense.
I say we give each person one up or down vote on each piece of content. Then, people should be able to sort by the sum of those up or down votes (with up being worth +1 and down being worth -1).
I’m not sure, but I suspect a system like that might have content moderation built into its structure.
I think these problems might be solvable with auto blacklisting instances based on their age, how their users behave and what % of comments and posts of them are flagged as spam
Well non-federated forums can grow by word of mouth and similar. Being federated does lower the barrier of entry for interacting but it’s still possible to visit the instance the old fashioned way. You probably still need to rely mostly on word of mouth anyway, even if you are federated.
Thats the problem. It would be very difficult to get a new instance off the ground unless you were an insider or had inside connections. If you have a cabal of existing admins acting as gate keepers you could keep outsiders from abusing the system easily, but you are also walking right back into the centralized control federation is supposed to prevent.
One thing that is feasible is for established instances to give votes from new instances a lower weight. So, no blacklisting, but until they have been around for a little while to be able to calculate that their activity corresponds to their size and that nothing is off, upvotes and dowvotes could be ignored or given a lower weight.
Yes, age alone shouldn't lead to getting blacklisted. But if an instance is two days old, already 50+ accounts from there were banned on your instance for being bots and besides that there was no real contributions coming from that place, this might be a candidate for auto-blacklisting.
So I went to the website. It explains what it does, but not much how… Or maybe I’m too dumb to get it. Could you explain how the verification happens? How does this system work?
Hey one thing I learned while canvassing for a politician is that it can be really beneficial to repeat yourself when it comes to articulating a message, instead of articulating it once then passing copies.
The more times you write and rewrite the same explanation the better it will get.
and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
Will it? Even if we get to the point where there’s a whitelisting system, major instances will still be federated. There could be even a transitional small instances federation.
That part is the worst. I am sick and tired of websites breaking the back button! When I click back it’s because I wanted to see the thing that was there before. If I wanted it to just refresh from scratch I would reload the page instead!
It’s not just YouTube, by the way. Even Lemmy does that shit too!
YouTube had a solution not too long ago, when you hovered on a thumbnail it would show a little button that queues up the video on a temporary playlist while you keep browsing. But for whatever reason they hid that in a menu.
That’s not really the issue. The issue is that it doesn’t give you a proper URL with enough information to uniquely identify the set of results it loaded for you, so if you reload the page it re-runs the query and you get a new set of results instead of the same set you had before. That fundamentally breaks how the Internet is supposed to work: any particular URL should always go to the same resource.
The fact that Youtube also does lazy-loading infinite scroll bullshit makes it even harder to show examples about, so I’ll switch to Lemmy now. Take this URL, for example:
(That’s from navigating to page 2 of my feed, which is set to “all” and “top 6 hours”.)
If I go to that URL now, and then I go to it again, say, six hours from now, it ought to still show the same list of posts. But it doesn’t. Instead, it re-runs the query and shows me the new results from six hours in the future, which is an entirely different result set. That’s not what I want! I want to be able to keep navigating back and forth through the old result set until I explicitly ask for a new one e.g. by clicking on the instance logo or choosing a new search from the [posts|comments], [subsribed|local|all], and [sort type list] controls.
Just generally speaking, I think of this as “concreteness”.
Software should seek to mimic real spaces, in the sense that one step back takes you to the place you were one step ago.
One pattern that breaks this in my opinion is when a menu appears as soon as you scroll up. It’s just a minor inconvenience, but 95% of the time I scroll up on an article, it’s because I want to re-read a line of text that just disappeared under the top of my screen. This menu reappear crap means I have to scroll up like three inches to get something that’s only a quarter inch under the upper edge.
I think it’s a matter of mental health to have software that faithfully mimics real world causality.
It’s all very vague in my head, but I would love to articulate this fully into a design spec.
It’s kind of like Google’s Material Design spec in its idea, but it’s about the effects of navigation rather than just how UI elements behave.
It kind of relates to the concept of a State Function in math and science.
It would not fix it. I also want to be able to do things like send the URL to someone else and have confidence that it would load the same content for them, too.
You can’t store that info in a link without it being monstrous.
Sure you can, if your backend is designed reasonably.
How? You put a timestamp (or equivalent) in the URL and filter the search to only operate on the records that existed at that time. Assuming your search algorithm is deterministic, it should find the same results.
I agree with your point, but our algorithms are not deterministic and I doubt they ever will be again. Perhaps they could use a set of tags to create a deterministic result for a certain “genre” of results.
Make sure the LED bulbs you’re using are rated for use in enclosed fixtures. Heat is the #1 killer for them. My basement is equipped with a bunch of enclosed fixtures that had 3 bulbs each in them, and they kept killing LED bulbs because the trapped heat had nowhere to go. They were designed for incandescent bulbs that didn’t care about being hot.
I am using GE daylight and they say 13 year guarantee on the box. They are at least 2 times as much money as all the imported ones. I have used Walmart and similar and they never last. I tried OSRAM made in Germany and they sucked for brightness. All my lights are not enclosed. They are all open air fixtures with lamp shades and my ceiling fans all have 4 candelabra style. The longest I have gotten any to last is 3 years.
I’ve only had one led light bulb fail so far despite being an early adopter. And it failed by starting to flicker occasionally, not burn out. So the rest have lasted almost 20 years now.
Might be time to look into what you are feeding them. Check if your power is regular.
So ginkgo’s that do fruit. The fruit smells like dead fish, vomit, or rancid butter. They smell HORRIBLE and apparently that was a very attractive scent to the prehistoric animals and insects that did eat them. Yum yum.
Luckily most Ginkgo’s sold for landscaping these days are unable to produce fruit.
I have had the displeasure of smelling ginkgo fruit, because fun fact #2, a lot of cities decided years back they were very cheap and urban friendly to plant the OG ginkgo’s during city planning, but were unaware of the horror they would reek once they matured. Ginkgo’s grow very slowly. So something like 30+ years later, city planners realized their horrible mistakes and had to chop a lot down once they started dropping fruit. Still everyone in these cities would suffer a few years of the city smelling like a sewage dump every late summer.
I do not claim to be an expert ginkgoligist, but those are some fun tid bits I learned.
My local park has nothing but the female trees, and that fruit is stanky but still not as bad as a Bradford pear tree, which smells like a dead asshole.
Yup - I went to Temple University and the whole sidewalk from the train station to campus was lined with these. The leaves are beautiful but the berries are just horrendous. We called them shitberries. It was really hard to avoid them and sometimes you’d step on one, and end up apologizing the rest of the day because that stench sticks around.
I think they got rid of those trees. The students now don’t know what they’re missing out on!
Im still baffled that Seoul in South Korea has so many fruiting Gingko trees. They make the whole city smell like an open sewer and I couldn’t stand it.
This unintended consequences aspect is rearing its head where I live - they planted hundreds or thousands of gum trees that are now mature and each one drops shittons and shittons of spikey gum balls every fall - but about 20% don’t come out of the trees and just rot on the limb. You can’t even rake them out. And the 80% that do come down kill the grass and clog the gutters and drains. It’s a real shit show.
What’s fumny to me is I remember watching a computer show on TV in late 90s they where interviewing an Adobe representative about the new Photoshop 5.0…
The TV host asked what adobe though about pirated copies and the representative said on LIVE TV that Photoshop price was for professional who make a living out of Photoshop and that any hobbyist had nothing to fear about using a pirated copy as it only served to get more people knowledgable about Photoshop and if these started doing business in photography and neede Photoshop they would then pay for it so to not be unprofessional.
I remember this as well. Their whole stance was that they’d get everyone using Photoshop even if people had to pirate it. That’s part of how it became the industry standard.
Yeah, she deserves no piss. She’s been through, and going through, some shit and just mic dropped Paris from above without tearing up in a likely last major performance.
I think a large portion of lemmy is too focused on making lemmy popular. Fake engagement and posts that nobody cares about don’t create engagement. Instead, more focus on just enjoying lemmy would ironically lead to better posts and discussion. Likewise, people post the same articles to the same communities seeking engagement. It leads to dupilication which waters down the discussion, ironically, also leading to less engagement. I think federalised communities, as has been discussed would be a good solution. However, it strikes me that they don’t want to miss out on karma, for some reason. So, short term gain, for long term hassle of multiple posts. If some of the most prolific posters posted to the most relevant community and cross posted elsewhere, then maybe communities would coalesce more.
Coalescing into massive communities is a mixed bag. Putting all your eggs in one basket makes them more vulnerable to rogue moderators, sudden loss of a server, the need to defederate if the host server gets compromised, provides a more attractive target for bots, and other bad actor things.
Yes it would improve ease of use and make Lemmy more newbie friendly, and it can be frustrating to have conversation splintered. Lots of times I’ll comment on an empty story at the top of my new feed only to find a lively discussion a little lower. That’s all frustrating, I agree. It’s also, I think, the nature of federating.
If multiple different news communities are thriving despite posting pretty much the same content, there are reasons for that. People can pick just one to subscribe to, and they don’t all pick the same one. That tells me there is something about each one that makes them attractive to different people.
I think it can really hurt smaller communities, though.
I think part of this comes from wanting a broader base of content, which I agree with. The rest seems to come from wanting the downfall of Reddit, who is in my rearview mirror so I don’t care.
We are currently like old Reddit, a techy, mostly progressive, crowd. That means a lot of uni-topic content.
When there are 10,000 users, and 5 of them are into sewing, the sewing community is dead. When there are 100,000 users, and thus 50 interested in sewing, content starts to form. You can see where this goes from here.
An example of this that really bothers me: I joined several gaming munis because I like to talk about games. But there are people out there who feel that a gaming muni should be about the games industry, and so those munis are just a constant stream of gaming news articles, patch notes, and trailers. Mostly with completely barren comment sections. What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don’t care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.
I think less of an emphasis on having a steady stream of content and more on only posting something that you believe is worthy of discussion would be so much better. If people want to see literally every rockpapershotgun article, they can subscribe to their RSS feed.
The way I see it, people shouldn’t post things unless they have some discussion they want to have about that thing. They shouldn’t post just because it’s news. I’d be fine with Lemmy having far less frequent new posts if those posts were all created by people who were legitimately trying to share something rather than just generate content.
What I wanted was the social experience of chatting with people about games. I don’t care about (as a random example) the latest Helldivers 2 patch notes.
Please yes this. It’s good to see gaming related news but largely I just want to nerd out about the games themselves. Of course I should be told to just post my own damn content, but I have admittedly never been good about creating OC.
I don’t know what would get me to comment more than patch notes for an incredibly popular game thousands of people are playing. So either bad example or I have no idea what you want in a gaming sub.
Does a book club meet up to just talk about what their favourite authors tweet about, or what new book is coming out soon in a series they like? No. They talk about what artistic choices they like and don’t like in the books they read, what emotions those books evoke, what other books they remind them of, etc.
Ultimately a kind of uber cross posting that hides away the technical bits. I’d definitely love that. Or at least if I as a user could specify multiple communities for a post, and from a ux ui perspective it remains a single post.
Then again one could argue that subscribers should simply follow multiple communities and that solves the problem, too and it already works. So just avoid cross posting altogether.
XMPP is a protocol, the GPL covers software implementing these protocols. They could use their own proprietary XMPP client and server without any legal issues.
I don’t know! I doubt it. The one I had was pretty greasy, but that easily could have been preparation. I didn’t spend much time in the “eat guinea pigs” part of the world, so I only had one.
As a kid, I never got that concept because it seemed like being manipulated. “I dare you to do this dangerous thing for my amusement!” Uh. No? “Chicken!” Okay, whatever, dude.
This was also where “yo momma” insults were also invisible to me. Like, “You don’t even know my mother, you’re just saying that and it makes no sense.” It wasn’t a trigger for me like it was other kids. I saw it for what it was. I’d tell my friends, “they just say that to get you mad, don’t listen,” but they’d get mad anyway. It’s like they couldn’t help it. I think dares were in that headspace as well.
I wasn’t popular growing up. I was really awkward and non-athletic, so I didn’t bow to peer pressure as much as the other kids. I was going to be unpopular either way, so…
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