As a Linux user of almost 30 years, compiling hundreds of kernels over the years has given me a great appreciation of pre-build kernels, and a profound gratitude for those who package them up into convenient distros that work out of the box and let me get on with the rest of my life.
Well said. I originally compiled my own kernels because I thought it was something you just did to use Linux. I also compiled hundreds of them, probably. Now it’s stock kernel all the way. Not worth the effort and time and headache.
I used Linux for about a decade from the mid nineties then took a break for a few years. When I came back, every distro kernel was precompiled, it was glorious. There was never a day I said to myself “damn, I miss compiling a kernel”.
Absolutely! If you’re doing it to learn something, by all means compile your own kernel. Every Linux user should do that at least once in my opinion. But once the learning is done, the novelty wears off fast and it just becomes tedious.
Do you think a warrant canary would help? Basically post something ASAP that says “I haven’t been served any IP subpoenas as of today.” Then, update the statement every so often unless you get served.
All instances should have the donation links at the top of the sidebar tbh, and an infographic or something to show how far along they are to paying for monthly server costs.
I’m on mobile so can’t see the sidebar, but did you fix it so the donation is for something innocuous? Like I want to donate to you to buy your mom flowers or something, not to run a piracy oriented server.
It’s just to add a layer of protection for everyone around, including you.
Then I recommend upgrading your mobile experience to one that does. I personally prefer Voyager, “an Apollo-like open source web client for Lemmy. It’s a mobile-first app, but works great on desktop devices, too.”
I’m signing up for a recurring donation because I think you personally are the GOAT, but one bit of advice:
It isn’t obvious that the images are links to the donation page. I’m relatively tech literate and I read the sidebar three times looking for a “DONATE HERE” hyperlink. Maybe consider making it a bit more idiot proof so fools like me can more easily throw money at you. 😉
The “please help cover server costs” is not clear? Should I write also “press one of the icons below”? Before a couple of months it was just text Btw, but I changed it to make it pop out more
Honestly, I feel like such a dumbass for not realizing it was a link, but yeah, “click the pirate coffee mug below” would have saved me some confusion.
In any event, I’m more than happy to donate to you, and will definitely do what I can to keep us going. If you get in a jam, let the members know—we’ve got your back. Best instance in the Fediverse!
Much appreciated. Honestly I’ve been kinda stumped on making my efforts somehow rewarded. My liberapay projects lists is like 2 pages long, but I get less funding than most. I don’t know how others get thousands.
It’s awareness. If I’d really thought about it, it would have been obvious to me that I should contribute, but most mobile apps hide the sidebar, and “out of sight, out of mind” as they say.
I would find it interesting to see a sort of “state of the union” post every month or so where you tell us the cool FOSS stuff you’re working on, how the servers are evolving, and how well the donations are covering your costs. No need to beg, just let the facts of the situation be known and jog our memories that we all have to band together to keep this place running.
Honestly, this whole conversation has lit a fire under my butt. I’m going to make a Santa Claus run through all my favorite trackers and FOSS projects, and it is all because you made me think for a bit. I imagine there must be others like me who would love to help, but just get caught up with their own lives.
Do y’all hear me, fellow pirates? Our captains need us! Heed the call! Put your money where your FOSS is!
Edit: screw it, I’m going to triple my donation. You deserve it.
Hmm, I think you are right about those icons. I’ve just tweaked the layout slightly to make it more obvious what they represent with a text link underneath each one. Hopefully that’ll help others figure it out.
It’s a situation where there are benefits to either option but one probably outweighs the other massively in frequency. I schedule many more international meetings and make many more international calls than the number of times I’ve needed a global event time. And that’s kinda saying something since I’m a space geek that looks for astronomical events, which are all UTC. It’s fewer steps to look up the distant current time and do the math from my current time for a passive event than it is to have everyone be UTC, then look up a distant wake time or business hours, then do math to figure out what the functional time is for something requiring human input.
China is one universal time despite spanning from +5 to +9
Yeah but in your example, you wouldn’t need to look anything up either. You’re presumably very familiar with the offset of your time to their time? You’d also become familiar with their “universal time” versus your time. You’d just know what hours they’d be awake and asleep because you will have done the translation a few times.
In addition, I - personally - would find it easier to memorize times in a single system: e.g. remembering that people in China are awake from 9pm to 8am is easier for me to remember. I typically already do this in my own head. I’ll convert times to my own local time and then memorize that. Do other people not do that? I find it much easier to look at my own clock and know if I can reach out to someone internationally.
I don’t know, I’m not seeing how that’s different. You’re remembering how your clock maps to other countries, I’m remembering UTC offsets. I feel like the main thing I’m actually seeing here is really a DST issue and remembering partial-hour offsets. Neither of those would go away with abolishing time zones
If UTC is being used, I’m only converting once. If a time is given in UTC, I only need to convert to my time. If I’m looking for a time at some place (and not just looking it up directly) then I’d combine the absolute values of the offsets before doing a time conversion. I wouldn’t say my 9am is 2pm UTC and 2pm UTC is their 4pm, I’d just do my 9am is their (9+5+2=) 4pm.
Working with time zones makes it easier to keep times in your own perspective. You look up their offset and take a decent guess that their working hours match yours and you’d probably aim for something a little off from your start/end times and safely land towards the middle. To me, that sounds more reliable than hoping to find business hours posted without a distinct, clearly defined geographical divide in which you know the sun is going to shine there.
I suppose that’s where the “simplicity” really comes from in my above points: time zones give you tables of information about times elsewhere, UTC-only requires a map and interpretation. Would places refine their day time shifts narrower than an hour? A minute? A second? Look at the central time zone in the USA. Columbus, Georgia is EST at -5. Ladonia, Alabama is -6 in CST, just across the state border. 1000 miles away, Seminole TX is on the other border of CST and Lovington, New Mexico is across the border in MST at -7. With time zones, the whole region from TX to AL agrees what an 8am start time is, despite effectively being offset by a whole hour, celestially. But solar noon is only at 12 for people in the middle, at the east border of TX, 500 miles between the two city pairs above. So if everyone goes to UTC, how do you know what a place uses as their schedule? Would Marshall, TX, stay at -6 while the GA/AL pair use -5.5 and the TX/NM pair use +6.5? That 8am local start time would become 1pm UTC for Marshall, 1230utc for ga/al, and 130utc for tx/nm pairs. Would Dallas, between Marshall and Seminole, be -5.78 and start the work day at 01:46:48pm utc? Way harder to track. Hence, the railroads gave us time zones
Whether you realise it or not, there are two hours you are using here. Your local time that you suppose is automatically converted in your brain, and the international time that you can already use and is called UTC.
Learn to use UTC, problem solved.
Why do you want to create problems when there is a solution already?
That time means nothing anymore. Time is something real, not a mere number that’s irrelevant to reality. Midday is the middle of the day and the zenith of the sun, or close enough. Midnight is the middle of the night. Etc. It doesn’t need to be exact, but it needs to mean something. In France for example 4PM is the name of the snack you eat that this time.
So, let’s put it this way. Let’s say you have this nonsensical idea of a unique timezone for the planet. We’ll base it on UTC for simplicity.
You are in new York. It’s 1000. For you in new York, it’s the middle of night. You’ll wake up in a few hours. Your day usually goes about with wake up and work around 1400, lunch around 1800, end of work around 2200, sleep around 600. You can live you life with that. It’s merely a social construct. It’s completely stupid as a construct because it’s not setup for your actual day. The 0 means absolutely nothing. The 12 and the 24 neither. Why have a 24 hours clock for this? But a decimal clock would do nothing more.
Now you need to work with someone in the UK. Can you talk to him right now? Who knows? You need to ask Internet about the time delay between where you live and where he lives. You learn it’s +6. Or -6. Who cares. Now you juggle with 2 times at your work: your usual one, and your colleague one. Congrats, you made a timezone again. When you need to know when he starts work, you do the maths : 1400-600=800. He must starts at 800, unless there’s some cultural differences.
Now what you call 1800 is called 1200 for him. You made the same concept, the lunch time, have a different name depending on where you live, and that is after the translation.
Why even have a time at this point. It’s more confusing than anything. Let’s just have minutes.
You’ll have wakeup +200 for example. At wakeup +400, it’s midday. Midday +400 is the break. Break+400 is dinner. Dinner +400 is sleepy time. Now that would be much more sensible than your unified clock. There would still be problem with timezones interaction.
But there’s nothing to do about timezones. It’s and effect of the spherical earth and general relativity. In physics, there is a clock for each and every position, and a delay between each. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, so you use your local time. But when it does, you do timezones. Because that’s how the world physically works.
Now you need to work with someone in the UK. Can you talk to him right now? Who knows? You need to ask Internet about the time delay between where you live and where he lives.
In other words this has not changed either. So not a downside?
It is a downside, because with a time zone you know immediately if a time is suitable or not. For instance, if you see that in the uk is 4am, you know immediately that it isn’t suitable. If there isn’t a “standard”, you need to check every time if that time is suitable or not, and it isn’t as straightforward.
We already gave up the meaning of time when time zones where implemented. If it’s only going to be an approximation anyway then why bother with the added complexity of 230+ extra time zones?
Y’all are just mad that “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere” wouldn’t make sense as a jokey excuse for day-drinking anymore. =3
No, timezones don’t make sense everywhere, you clearly have not lived on the edge of timezones where the shift from what would be local time is notable.
And let the brits enjoy UTC+0 like nothing happened while the rest of the word scrambles to adapt to the new time system? This is tyranny! I demand a new system where my region is the one with UTC+0 instead!
You still need to convert in your head to “decide if usually awake at this time”. This solves nothing. Plus what if they’re somewhere unfamiliar on a trip?
Meanwhile stuff like world time buddy or other locations on clocks are very accessible tools
I lived in a tiny apartment with a streetlamp just outside my only window. Even with blackout curtains that room had no day/night cycle. I’m still trying to get back on a normal day/night cycle, fifteen years later.
I am too late. I knew this would be the top post, even though the arguments brought forth in the blog post are utterly stupid. I would even go so far as to say their arguments are presented in bad faith, because I refuse to believe the author actually thinks that’s how it would go. (They have some seriously awesome posts, I most highly recommend qntm.org/mmacevedo)
With time zones:
you Google what the timzone offset is (aka at which point in your local timezone the sun rises over there). Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
Without times zones: you Google at which time the sun rises over there. Considering this sunrise time you then have to make a judgement if your uncle would be awake now.
Ah yes, sunrise. That things that never ever changes depending on the time of year or location on the planet. Very dependable and memorizable thing, the sunrise.
I think the point is that people’s routine isn’t tied to sunrise. For example, in the summertime I start work about 4 hours after sunrise, and in the winter I start work 20mins after sunrise. The difference would actually be more dramatic without daylight savings With timezones and modern internet you don’t need to look up the offset at all, you just look up the current time in that zone and decide if that’s an appropriate time to call. Speaking as someone who deals with timezones a fair bit, both in work and personal life. And as someone who understands the headache of dealing with them in international computer systems, the time zone system is a very nice compromise. Though daylight savings need to die
Very dependable and memorizable thing, the sunrise.
Uh, yeah? Because it defines your circadian rhythm?
Ah yes, clock time. That things that never ever changes depending on the time of year or location on the planet. Very dependable and memorizable thing, the clock time.
The arguments are exactly the same. It basically boils down to the philosophy if you want the daily life to be controlled by clocks or by the natural sleep/wake cycle of the body.
Some prefer by the clock, because it provides a fixed constant, even if it may run counter to our very nature. You very well may prefer that. Others argue for a more natural sleep cycle, especially when it comes to school for example. Complaints about work starting too early are not exactly rare either.
You already have to Google for what time it is in another part of the world, and Google can also tell you when sunup, solar noon, sundown, and midnight are in Melbourne, so it sounds like you aren’t any worse off without time zones.
If you actually want to know if the sun is up somewhere else, then you want a world clock. At a glance visibility on the current position of the sun for every location on the globe, no time zones necessary.
This has given me an absolute aneurysm. I saved something to show the wife only for it to not be there when I went looking. I found the post the long way and sure enough it was still saved.
Maube it was a glitch…
Unsave and resave. still can’t find it. rinse and repeat.
Eventually found out about the saving order quirk and sure enough all the way at the bottom was the saved post in question.
I’d be curious how boost solved it. It is impossible retrieve saved posts/comments by saved date in the Lemmy API. github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3229
Well shit you’re right! I just tend to save things in time order anyway, so I hadn’t noticed. I just deliberately saved something out of time order, and sure enough it sorted itself lower down in my save list. Good to know. My bad
I think when people say to but high quality items, they mean to spend what they’re worth. Getting the most expensive thing doesn’t really guarantee a quality item, but cheaping out makes it much more likely that you’ll end up with something lackluster. Plus, something like sleep can be fairly complicated and is connected to your habits, what you’ve eaten, or schedule, etc., so expecting a single change (pillow) to make a huge difference may not be realistic.
I disagree with it being garbage though. It’s true, most of their merchandise isn’t the highest quality, but when you need a tool for just one project that you don’t already own and can’t seem to borrow from anyone it’s a great place to get that tool on the cheap, and for some oddball tools there’s may be no convenient place to track them down.
I was recently working on a small project I needed a router for. In this case I was able to borrow a router from a friend but he only had one bit for it and it wasn’t one I needed. If you haven’t priced out router bits recently, they tend to go for like $20-30 a piece from the usual big retailers.
I was able to get a set of 15 bits from harbor freight for about $30-40 and they did exactly what I needed them to.
I’m sure they probably won’t last as long as the good bits, but for how often I need a router these will probably last me the rest of my life.
Needed a rivnut tool for a different project a few months ago, and nowhere else around me carries them, beat waiting a couple days for one from Amazon.
Also have a bike rack from them that’s doing the job just fine, and a handful of little weird tools for various hobbies.
I wouldn’t trust them for anything my life or livelihood depends on, but for little incidental things I can’t borrow or find anywhere else they do just fine.
Both of the tools I tried from there failed hard and fast. The first was a rotary tool. I ended up keeping the plastic and using a motor from a printer instead until I bought my Foredom.
The second was a vibratory tumbler. After running it for a few hours, I walked into my garage to find it filled with smoke and the acrid smell of burning electrical equipment.
I took it back to the store for a refund and the manager threatened me, saying that he wouldn't let me make any more returns after bringing back an obviously defective piece of garbage.
Glad you had a better experience, but that place is definitely not for me.
Hand tools are fine 99%. Cutting tools–the part that actually does the cutting–are usually fine. Power tools are very hit or miss. Like, I would definitely not buy any cordless or corded tools there. Air tools are generally okay, but don’t work as well as other, more expensive air tool brands. OTOH, I’ve used a Harbor Freight flooring stapler that failed in under a day of use, while the Husky branded stapler did just fine for a few years. Impact sockets are good, although they’re limited on sizes (I don’t think that they have anything bigger than 22mm). I’ve been using a Harbor Freight floor jack and jack stands for a few years now without issue.
If you spend £400 on a bike instead of £200, it might actually be nearly twice as good, but spending £2000 doesn’t mean it will be ten times as good, when you’re in to bikes that cost £10k+ you’re talking about fractions of a percent better than the one that costs many percent less.
The top of the range items are good for enthusiasts, but almost always not worth it for casual consumers.
For a $200 bike, it’s never going to work the way it’s intended to work. ANY bike you buy at a department store–and many that you buy at general sporting goods stores–will be garbage. In 1995, the rule of thumb was to spend at least $500 on a bike to get something that you could realistically ride every single day; that’s about $1000 today.
I’m saying this as someone that worked at bike stores as a mechanic off and one over about 15 years; the cheap dept. store bikes someply can’t be fixed and adjusted to work the way that their owners expect.
(PS - yes, fixies are cheap and light. No, you should not under any circumstances ride them on public streets or trails. If you do, sooner or later you will have a serious accident that will involve stitches, broken bones, possibly surgery, and probably rehab.)
I concur with you, but I’d phrase it in a different way: if your budget is $200 for a bike, you should be shopping for a used bike-shop/reputable-brand bike on Craigslist or whatever.
Also, agreed about fixies, except that switching the flip-flop hub to single-speed mode and adding brakes makes it fine.
Well, that’s why I specified fixie rather than single speed. 🙂 I’m not a fan of single speeds since they’re inefficient, but they’re not inherently unsafe, and I’m not going to tell people that they’re suicidally stupid if they ride one.
Reddit is talking about hiding Reddit from Google. I hope they do that because it will let Lemmy start to replace Reddit as the go to source for non-SEO, real-human answers.
Except each instance has its own URL meaning ranking for ANYTHING is extremely hard since each domain’s rank will always be weak in the sea of others. Each is even being penalised by the algorithm if there are duplicate content mirrored between different URLs. It’s the weakness of the fediverse if we are to follow how search engines have worked in the last decades. Maybe it will lead to new search engines (I hope so) but right now it is not going to work well to replace for example Reddit … or rank well in general at all.
I wonder if there’s a way around this that we can create, instead of doing nothing or hoping google adapts.
Like a dummy instance that catalogues everything on all instances (but also links to the original posts) for the purpose of showing up on google search.
Since this instance isn’t for posting but for search engine indexing, there may be some otherwise undesirable micro-optimizations that can help improve its chances of showing up.
Yes, this would be possible (and not too hard technically either). But all instances would have to agree to link this instance as canonical.
You’d also want to add a feature where you can set you home instance where this canonical instance would redirect you (perhaps even automatically). Home Assistant does something like that.
What pisses me most about Lemmy is that each instance has its own post IDs which means that crosslinking and switching instances based purely on URLs is impossible.
IMO posts should have random GUIDs for IDs; that would help a ton with these kinds of issues. It’d then be trivial for Google to detect same content (if they wish) this way
At first I was thinking a GUID might be impossible because of federation, but a simple implementation might be to use the post ID from instance the community lives on
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !cats, !cats/1234444
The point of random GUIDs is that there are so many that it’s effectively impossible to generate duplicates just by random chance. They’d be perfect for this.
The initial instance picks it, and then the federated instances use it.
Would another option be like having every post have some kind of anchor of invisible text or something with “lemmy” so when I search for “best washing machine lemmy” it’ll show all posts across instances or something. Idk if that’s how SEO works entirely though.
Each post refers to the poster’s home domain as the canonical URL, regardless of which instance you’re viewing it on specifically to avoid duplication SEO concerns
Thanks, I didn’t know that and never bothered to look. But then you still have the (SEO) issue of all the domains vs one in the case of Reddit or Quora or Stack Overflow. But yeah, a few very large Lemmy instances will probably start to rank well once they have enough good content.
Didn’t know that’s the case, that’s neat though it doesn’t solve the redirect back to your home instance.
It’ll also probably lead to centralization because if you’re more likely to find a particular instance through search and decide to join Lemmy you’re probably going to do so on that instance.
One of the main reasons reddit mega turned to shit was due to far too many people joining and using it, granted this is due to mobile phones but is it really worth it to attract more and more people? These instances are run by average people not corps with money they can easily collapse under tuw burden of to many
It’s really not, when it’s been proven time and time again that more people doing something ruin that something it should become obvious that lots and lots of people is a detriment
The reddit front page is a classic example of that, the general state of the internet proves it too, beaches/music festivles are both great examples too
That’s not even thinking about the cost of everything and corporate meddling either
It is so fascinating to me there are people out there who really mistake their own subjective experiences as iron objective truths. Just a complete lack of self awareness. It’s like how babies lack object permanence.
Moderation is not the issue, the sheer cost to host the tremendous amount of data is very likely to be a reason an instance goes down, thats what I’m getting at
The cool thing about the fediverse is that if grows to much where and the moderation turns to crap on some instances, you can always defederate from those problem instances and avoid the trouble makers entirely. Instance admins can always turn off sign ups when they feel like they have reached their limits for moderation as well. And users can always self host their own instances and only let the people they trust sign up. The fediverse is more resilient than traditional corporate run social media
The department of defense instead of the war department
Land of the free ≠ most jailed population on the planet…by faaaar
Department of Justice…as much as you can afford anyway
Protect and Serve…they kill more Americans than any gang, steal more from Americans then all other theft combined and only protect the interests of rich white shareholders. To the point of guarding a dumpster full of food in the middle of a pandemic.
It’s already been ruled that once something is thrown away, the precious party has relinquished rights to it so they kept ppl away from food for funsies
You can safely assume everything said from authority in a liberal western country means the opposite of what they say. Orwell tried to warn us, but those fuckers saw it as a blueprint, not a warning, and clearly they missed the immorality of it.
I’m convinced you can’t be rich, or work in law, and even be moral.
Yea of course but we’re talking about piracy, so when we pirate proprietary software, they’ll of object with “nothing is free, you gotta pay”. It’s either we pay for that, or fundamentally uphold piracy as some means or some ends, or use and support open-source software. Not a lot of choices, really.
I think I get that as well. I used to talk quite a bit about open-source to my friends, but looking back, it seemed quite preachy (maybe because I was quite young at the time), and it never really changed anything. This is especially the case since open-source (or free software) is a philosophical approach to technology that many people might be unfamiliar with or simply don’t care about. I just simply use open-source software, supports devs/foundations, and only will talk the necessary bits if someone asks me about it.
@PixelOfLife@mafbar Copying data never equals stealing. Using that term is either laziness or falling for the manipulative spin of intellectual property holders.
That’s an interesting perspective actually, since it gets into all sorts of weirdness and trickiness of the intellectual property concept. Perhaps because of two factors: (i) we treat digital data as fundamentally different from physical objects, and (ii) theft intuitively implies that the original object is no longer with the owner, but with piracy, you’re simply making a copy-and-paste, rather than a cut-and-paste.
In the end it’s all just a linguistics game though - you’re profiting off the work somebody did, without paying the rate they charge for it.
But that’s exactly the kind of answer you’ll get in a community focused on piracy. Most people wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t already justified piracy.
I hear that everywhere in here, but it doesn’t make any sense. Do you own the electricity network? Do you own the maid that clean your house? Do you own the room in the hotel? Is it justified not to pay for those services?
When you steal electricity, someone else can’t use it, the capacity is consumed. When you won’t pay the maid, he can’t get his labor and time back to use elsewhere. When you squat in a hotel room, someone else can’t use it and it needs to be cleaned afterwards.
When you “buy” a piece of software or a digital copy of media, you’re really just renting the license to use it as long as the company that rented it you feels like it.
The difference is that when you make a copy of something digital, the original is still completely intact. The thing is not consumed, you can copy that file 10,000 times on your own machine and see for yourself.
Yeah, but that piece of software didn’t came up to existence out of nowhere. Someone invested time, or paid for infrastructure to complete it. When you steal electricity, most of the cost is because of the infrastructure you used, which you will never own anyway.
I agree information should be free, as long as the generator of that information agrees with it.
Saying that, I still pirate things, not because I think I’m entitled to do it, that’s a very poor excuse.
You are right, of course, the people who labored to make the things should be compensated if they want to be.
What’s at issue is that if you own something you can do as you please with it. Once the electricity has been delivered I can charge batteries with it or power lights or give it to my neighbor for free if we agree to do so. I should be able to buy a piece of software and back it up or give it to my neighbor, or any random person I choose if I own it. I would buy much more media if I could just own it and do as I please with it, but because of DRM and the greed of companies that distribute the media most times you can only rent it. Piracy is in resurgence because it is becoming so difficult and expensive to just pay for the media.
I pay for Netflix, so I think I am entitled to whatever is on the service. If I have a copy of a Netflix show on my hard drive in 4k, am I taking something from Netflix? What about when I watch that show in VLC because I’m on an airplane? What about when I let the man next to me have a copy so he can watch it on his device?
While I have plenty of disposable income these days to spend on media, they simply do not sell the product that I want, and if I did not have the other means of accessing that content I doubt I would pay for Netflix.
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I hope the tone of my comments do not come across as negative, I am trying to illustrate my thoughts on the subject, not argue, and I find questions more illuminating than just explanations.
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edit: i guess the OP was about software and this rant doesnt really apply
Software-wise I dont pirate that because I try to only use open source software, for mostly the same reasons of disliking DRM and prefering to own things.
I see no reason to use Matlab in education nowadays: both Octave and Python provide as many features, are as easy to use, and free. The teacher could have verified or made his class accessible through Octave with minimal effort, as OP pointed out. But they wouldn’t be bothered and required all the students in their class to buy a 70€ license each.
I mean, the content here lately is 15 year old memes.
A lot of the boom is people that were too lame to get karma on Reddit so they spam dumb things here now and get upvotes because everyone is still in “upvote everything to help the community” mode.
I think you hit the nail on the head, but personally, I stopped upvoting “to help the community” a while ago. Lemmy seems to be doing fine now so I’m not against downvoting at all either.
The people upvoting those crappy 15 year old memes aren’t against downvoting either, because when I mentioned how terrible the memes were I got downvoted.
I just checked Lemmy stats - how is it possible that we lost 400 000 users recently? If people check it out and leave for good, wouldn’t that still be counted in the user base?
Probably has a lot to do with the shitpost meme communities fucking up the feed. I’d bail too if I didn’t think that shit will dry up once the kids find something else to do.
On top of the other explanations, it’s natural that many, if not most, who decide to check out alternatives don’t stick around for various reasons.
They might not have found the right instance for them (or even realized they were supposed to).
They might not care enough about the new state of reddit to leave, after all.
The communities that kept them on reddit in the first place may not exist here so they have no incentive to stick around.
The bugs, growing pains, quirks, and rough UX might have outweighed perceived benefits.
They may have been put off by the model or culture for whatever personal/ideological reasons.
They might still be using fediverse platforms but isolated by fediblocks or by their own choice.
They may or may not reconsider in the future, or their usage of the internet may have changed entirely (so they’re out of the game, so to speak).
We should just keep doing what we think is best for the kind of communities we want to see emerge and thrive here. Growth for its own sake is not helpful or valuable.
I feel you. I still think it might be worth stealing what is worth stealing, if you know what I mean. There’s definitely still good content creators over on Reddit.
Maybe. I’m finding the Lemmy content and platform features lacking personally. Some of my favorite subs don’t have an analogue here, and the clones here are significantly smaller and therefore have less content. I see great potential though, which is why I think “stealing” content is a sound strategy to grow. I find it interesting also, because there are two reasons people use Reddit: The content and the platform. One of those things isn’t actually owned by Reddit. So Lemmy has the distinct advantage in that there is already a good platform in place, and all the good content of Reddit (and half of it’s value) can be moved over here.
I’m new here, and new to federated applications (and fit OP’s description perfectly). This federated stuff is going to remain niche unless somebody figures out a way to make it approachable.
Reddit first time:
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">> open app
</span><span style="color:#323232;">> choose some things I like
</span><span style="color:#323232;">> see all the things
</span>
Lemmy first time:
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">> open app
</span><span style="color:#323232;">> ?????
</span><span style="color:#323232;">> google how to use it
</span><span style="color:#323232;">> choose a... server?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">> ?????
</span>
What if we can’t make it more approachable? Should we forever rely on corporations and their unethical platforms to be able to communicate? Just because people aren’t willing to learn a few very basic things?
This is not a problem with the technology, but with people.
This is not a problem with people, but with UX design.
We don’t need a corporation to have usable interfaces. Right now, if you visit join-lemmy.org, the main focus is for people wanting to host an instance, which is only a small part of the advanced user base. The common user won’t care about the fact Lemmy is made with rust or that there’s a docker image.
I don’t think it’s only an issue with Lemmy, lots of open-source projects lack user-friendliness and onboarding.
Yes, Lemmy’s UI is very bad. It would be pretty easy to improve it, if only developers understood this. But I think the part that new users complain about the most is federation. At least I’ve seen many posts and comments saying that it’s too confusing.
I don’t think it’s necessarily the job of the developers, the main issue IMO is that there’s not enough involvement from other specialists such as designers in open-source communities.
Sometimes I try to help, but unfortunately not everyone is willing to listen. I’ve noticed there are multiple reasons why UI might be bad in a Free Software project:
developers are not UI experts and they don’t know better
developers are not UI experts and they don’t listen to experts or UI is not their priority
the UI code is so bad that changing it would require rewriting most of the application and nobody has the time to do that, so there is nothing that can be done (this probably doesn’t happen in web apps)
I believe in Lemmy’s case it’s mostly the 2nd point.
IDK about Lemmy devs, but point 2 is so, so common. Making a point about UX or accessibility in 99% of FLOSS project discussion spaces is incredibly stressful; you can have user research, industry best practice, and years of experience on your side, but you’re inevitably met with dismissal and argument. Devs often treat designers as though they’re a bunch of artsy crystal-healing crusties, despite the fact that good UX people base their work on actual research and theory grounded in human behavior and psychology. (Calling use of basic design principles “eye candy” for example) Of course, if a dev makes a decision on technical grounds, it must be treated as scripture as far as any remaining designers on the project are concerned. It’s no wonder so many FLOSS projects have abominable UX.
True. I feel like usually anything I say about UI is interpreted as just my opinion, which in developer’s minds is just as valid as anyone else’s opinion. It maybe kinda makes sense, since those developers don’t really know me, but there is nothing I can say to change their minds. So they remain stuck with a bad, inefficient design for no good reason.
GNOME desktop environment is a good example that having a good UI is possible.
In Lemmy’s case users are forced to take matters into their own hands: !plugins
Exactly. I once made a point about excessive indicators of visual / information hierarchy increasing cognitive load without additional benefit on a subreddit and got downvoted to oblivion. That was not my opinion; that’s what industry research indicates!
Got to say though, I think GNOME is pretty, but a usability nightmare.
It’s not based on the same 30 years old design that all popular operating systems are. So it might take some time to learn how to use it. Is that what you meant or do you think that it’s badly designed?
Yea, I think they make honest to god bad design decisions that hurt usability. A common thread is hiding features / reducing discoverability while making no attempt at progressive disclosure, requiring memorization to complete certain tasks with the interface. This isn’t only bad UX, it’s an accessibility issue for users with attention and/or memory deficits. Creating a new paradigm is one thing, but with that comes the task of building affordances that help users with the transition, like skeumorphism did back in the day (…and to an extent, skeumorphism should have never been abandoned in the way it was…), something that the GNOME project simply does not do. They also ignore common accessibility recommendations, for example, by using icons without text in their applications, and utilizing mystery-meat navigation methods like hamburger menus, and ignoring long-established patterns for even very basic tasks, like allowing titlebars to become cluttered with interface elements leading to confusion when the user wants to move the window and widgets are in the way. I don’t think it’s bad at all that the GNOME project is trying to build their own paradigm, but they do so without consideration for the most fundamental usability guidelines.
There are many options; it just takes a bit of creativity, and it’s better to involve the designer in the early planning stages to nail down what needs to be immediately accessible, and what can be revealed via progressive disclosure. I did a website for a beverage company a few years back that used a bottom-aligned series of pills for the navigation that scrolled horizontally - a shadow appeared on the side to indicate that it can be scrolled. (We used JS to add shadow to any side which had overflowing elements. See below for a very rough little wireframe.) Twitter, like many sites and apps, also used to have no hamburger menu if you can remember.
I see. I haven’t thought of that before, but when I look at Windows 11 file explorer, the one in GNOME seems way easier for me to understand despite it having the flaws that you mentioned. Maybe I just got used to it.
Yea, I get you. That’s why usability research is so important - these interfaces may be simple for you and I, but small issues / contributors to increased cognitive load make a big difference for the large majority of people who do not live and breathe computer interfaces. I get that not everyone can afford to conduct their own studies, but that’s why small orgs (and even modestly funded FLOSS projects) need to be making use of the work of players like the Nielsen Norman group who release their reports very affordably, even if they have an expert on hand. I always try to remember that every interface is contrived, so there is no such thing as an “intuitive” computer or machine interface; interface usability lives or dies with discoverability.
Also, I always have to have a chuckle when I see what clients produce on their own. Like, they’ll cheap out and produce absolute garbage that they’re somehow happy with, but the minute you, a design professional, submit a concept or mockup that is far beyond their ability to produce, the client is absolutely full of feedback: “Make the logo 5x bigger!” “Let’s use this barely visible shade of blue!”
I agree so much. I feel like your typical user does not need to know 1% of all that. Hell, I don’t even think that they need to know much about the whole instances shebang. Scroll through a feed, see a bunch of users from various federated instances say things, the end. The fediverse aspect is something that could be relegated to a help section or something along these lines. Complexity scares people away.
I seriously wish that Lemmy and the Fediverse in general would boom in popularity because this kind of “free” social media is what people deserve, but I just can’t see it happening with how things are now.
People need to know what an instance is. They need to know what defederating means too. They also need to know why the Fediverse is better than centralized alternatives, because otherwise they won’t care.
You are probably right about that. There are other UI improvements that we could and should do too, but Lemmy will probably always be more difficult to use than the centralized alternatives.
Can I ask you to educate me on why people need to know? I’m struggling to see your point. Surely people will benefit in some way from knowing how the Fediverse works under the hood, but not everyone needs to know, and as you can see this heavy emphasis on the Fediverse’s inner workings is, instead, turning people away.
People are just very used to having things magically work, and I think that it’s very natural for them to not want to deal with things that they need to make work. Many people never knew how Twitter or Reddit works under the hood, many never cared, but in the Fediverse it’s suddenly brought up as a necessary thing. And I just can’t see how that’s necessary thing to use such a tool. All I’m saying is that UX-wise, many apps in the Fediverse could feel more seamless.
I hear you on the Fediverse being better in many many cases, but I also feel like many of the Fediverse’s features are all but marketable to the average person. Add in the fact that people feel like there is a learning curve, and what you get is that people lose interest very fast.
In order to be able to choose an instance or change it in the future, a user needs to know what it is first. Maybe we could choose it for them randomly (would that be ethical?), but they still need to know where their account is hosted. If their instance gets defederaded by other instances, then they also need to know what defederation is and how it affects them. Those are just basics needed to fully use the Fediverse and the freedoms it gives you. I’m not saying that people should know exactly what ActivityPub protocol is and how it works. But they need to know the basics about how federation works. This is nothing complicated, so I don’t think I’m asking for much.
In centralized platforms users don’t have freedom, so they don’t have to worry about any of this. If they aren’t willing to learn a few basic things in order to have freedom, then there is nothing we can do for them. We can and should try to educate them, but many people don’t see a problem with being abused by corporations. This is not a new problem in software. It has existed for at least 30 years since the Free Software movement was created.
Lemmy has many UI and UX problems and they certainly need to be fixed. But it’s possible that decentralized platforms will always be more complicated to use than centralized ones. If people aren’t willing to learn how to use it, that’s a problem with them, not with this technology.
Okay, you bring very good points, especially on the “changing instance” one. I think I was seeing things from an ideal point of view, where instances just work and there are no reasons to defederate from other instances (but even though I’ve not been on the Fediverse for long, I’ve already seen I think two “big” such cases :( ).
I would say that choosing it for them is not the way, and assigning it randomly isn’t either as there are definitely problems associated with that as well. The best thing that comes to mind is to maybe have some “special” instance (or just an application, kinda like what Mastodon’s Android app does - at least with the new update) whose purpose is to guide users through sign up and choosing an instance. I think this would kill two birds with one stone. Guiding users through instance-selection, maybe briefly explaining what an instance is and eventually pointing to more user-friendly docs, could already be much more manageable for everybody, and could feel like a more seamless experience, similarly to traditional social media.
At the end of the day I feel even more like the Fediverse is almost inherently harder than centralized services, maybe it will take time before people settle with the idea of using something like this. People eventually got how to use the now traditional kind of technology, but I don’t know if it’s because enough time has passed or because it became a necessity (socially speaking).
The best thing that comes to mind is to maybe have some “special” instance (or just an application, kinda like what Mastodon’s Android app does - at least with the new update) whose purpose is to guide users through sign up and choosing an instance. I think this would kill two birds with one stone. Guiding users through instance-selection, maybe briefly explaining what an instance is and eventually pointing to more user-friendly docs, could already be much more manageable for everybody, and could feel like a more seamless experience, similarly to traditional social media.
That’s a very good idea. The website join-lemmy.org could have something like that or we could make a new website for it.
People are already adjusting to the decentralized services, but it’s possible that they will never become popular enough for most people to have to learn how to use them.
This federated stuff is going to remain niche unless somebody figures out a way to make it approachable.
And also make the layout attractive. I view Lemmy via a Web browser on my desktop (yeah, I know, my age is showing) and it is…I’ll be polite and call it “a work in progress”.
Yep, that is literally me. I am not particularly techy or whatever and I came here because RiF shut down and the maker said they would be on lemmy.world. i had no idea what that meant but i made it here.
Much googling was involved and after i made like 4 accounts on different instances, bumbled around, settled down and learned to subscribe to stuff, i subbed to communities specifically about the fediverse and finding new communities. I also tried like 3 different apps and aettled on Liftoff so far.
I still havent figured out how to reliably see mastodon or kbin stuff or if i even want to.
I can see how most people wouldn’t bother and have no idea why any of this even matters. I still find reddit much easier to use (and important for ongoing world events like the war in ukraine, where it isnt about what we can aggregate but where posters from that conflict put their content originally, a huge amount gets posted directly to reddit and they dont have time to sit around debating the finer points of internet usage), but philisophically i understand why the fediverse is important.
Also learning sbout the concept of defederation (as it regarded Beehaw) was a brainmelter and i felt like i was missing out on “content” be ause of how big it was. My other issue was around not undersranding who runs all these instances and quite frankly having no reason to trust they wouldnt do some crazy stuff themselves.
I still havent figured out how to reliably see mastodon or kbin stuff or if i even want to.
Lemmy is community-oriented, and I’m not sure it has a way to see posts that aren’t to a community. Mastodon users can post to a community by tagging it, and you’ve probably seen posts from Mastodon users without noticing. If you want to see some, here’s my photography account. Only posts to Lemmy communities show up at that link, but you’ll see more if you view the profile on the original Mastodon server.
You should be able to view and join Kbin magazines just like lemmy communities. Here’s one.
i felt like i was missing out on “content”
You are. It happens with email too; it’s somewhat difficult to reliably deliver email to gmail.com as a small server for example.
Yeah, this seems like one potential solution. But I think Fedheads (please tell me I’m the first person to use that term 🤞) will say this defeats the whole point of a federated platform. The official guide recommends avoiding the biggest communities and instead joining something smaller.
This perfectly illustrates the problem with the Internet as a whole in the age of smartphones.
Your idea of the “first step” is always “open app” but the Internet is not apps. The Internet is servers, and a web browser is the client app for most of it.
Since I know how to use the Internet, it was simple AF to get a Lemmy account going. I went to lemmy.world and signed up. Now I’m on Lemmy.
If all you know of the Internet is “open app” on your phone, you have a lot more to learn about the Internet as a whole.
I think most common people are accustomed to “being fed”, rather than exploring for themselves. That’s why most of the original platforms were just getting copy pastes from other platforms. Originality requires effort.
I personally have been looking at lemmy thinking what’s new… Only to realise that maybe it’s time “I” create that new. :=
I am a former senior web developer and head of a web-based software company, I know how to use the internet. That is not why I use apps. I use apps because they fit into my phone’s ecosystem much better than websites. The flow I’ve illustrated is the most commonly adopted, as others in the reply thread have pointed out.
As a backend developer I know that it’s all servers under the hood, but that’s not what the internet is. It hurts to say it, but the frontend matters more in that regard. Probably the most used frontend these days is apps, so the internet is apps. Websites are still widely used and indispensable so they are also the internet. Apps and websites are both the internet, just on different usecases.
I think federated software should probably be focusing on a web-first rather than app-first approach. That has to include an excellent mobile web experience, which Lemmy could use a bit of work on (the software is fairly young and this is not meant as criticism). Mainstream users do have an app-first habit right now. I don’t think that’s necessarily because people prefer apps to websites, but because companies are pushing apps and deprecating websites. I’ve read that app users are, on average seven times more profitable than web users.
It’s easy to figure out how and where to sign up when you’re linked to lemmy.fmhy.ml. When inviting people to Lemmy, it’s probably good to just directly link a server.
Do we really need 10s of millions of people here???!
Having gone through the time when AOL first allowed its members access to the Internet, the impression I ended up with was that it was exactly having the sub-culture of the time overwhelmed by the vastly larger culture of the AOL members that mainly screwed things up.
I think the desire for massive crowds is just a reflection of what we’ve become used to in the last couple of decades rather than the conclusion of thinking it through.
Mind you, I’m not saying that I have the answer, I’m trying to throw out there the idea that maybe in a forum of forums system “the more” aren’t “the merrier” because the sweet spot of participation to make a forum pleasant is somewhere in the middle rather than more always being better.
I think the desire for massive crowds is just a reflection
of capitalism. outsiders don’t consider you successful unless you have x amount of users or make x in revenue or are top 3 in your category. and even when you match the desired characteristics, it’s still not enough. what about this quarter? profits over everything. the solution isn’t to bend for other people, but to create something that’s authentic to you and be satisfied with what you have.
I reckon that many people’s expectation and even desire for what’s familiar (a natural human preference for the known and familiar which is often confused with actually liking it) that ends up as a desire expressed in these comments for a BIGGER Fediverse is due to the their constant exposure to big and crowded situations again and again, which in turn is because Capitalism tends to create those in all kinds of context (virtual or otherwise) as they’re more profitable.
It’s my very first day. There was a small learning curve, but then I just found memmy and it’s back to a normal Reddit like experience for me. Really not too hard at all.
His base are enthusiastically slobbering on his c**k, and most prominent politicians for the gqp seem to be lining up to holster it when his base are done. Not to mention the supreme crunchwrap court are in love with him too.
The joker isn’t the disease in Gotham, he’s the symptom. In a world where the effort of an individual results in proportional gains, where people have a home, family, and attachments to their community, there is no joker. The populace is innoculated against his desire to tear it all down, because they have a stake in “it all”. The few that are vulnerable to his views, are getting the support and care they need from trained staff, and the people around them are keeping the joker away. Batman isn’t in Gotham because of the Joker; the Joker can exist in Gotham because of Batman, a billionaire who spent his efforts and resource on violence, instead of outreach.
Plus, giving OSHA some teeth, and forcing corporations to compensate fairly for workplace accidents, and regulations requiring the inspection and certification of toxic chemical plants would have stopped the joker, and countless other tragedies, at a fraction of the cost.
At first I thought you were insinuating this post was corpo propaganda, but then it clicked that you were talking about Batman himself lol. I’d like to say that many if not most versions of batman is more gentle and forgiving than the police, his goals are simply to take an impossible problem to fix and reduce harm from it as much as possible, without all the sophistry of purely hypothetical philanthropy and political reform.
Not sure how Wool exploits animals, shearing sheep is good for their health as I understand it (keeping them from growing things, or getting too heavy/waterlogged to move and just… laying there and dying, amomgst other things.)
Sheep are selectively bred for their wool. Before humans started doing so, wild sheep did just fine without the need for shearing. So it’s pretty similar to milk in that if you don’t milk a modern dairy cow it will suffer, that doesn’t make milk an ethical product.
You would be right. I have the same packs. I don’t know if I bought old stock, but I bought the pack with the blue lid recently, the black lid pack is older.
The black lid pack contains bee wax and more water than the blue lid pack (64% vs 57% of the natural ingredients).
kbin.life
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