I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
Personally I don’t care if I’m talking to millions of people vs hundreds of thousands as long as there are enough people to make it feel alive and like a community.
Exactly. I don't give a fuck about Reddit any more. I'd rather be in a niche community with (some) quality content than on some huge site with mainly reposts. We're not in competition with Reddit. Were trying to be a better alternative.
I don’t need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.
It should behave as a viable and threatening adversary for reddit. As long as reddit carries on doing as it does and lemmy’s communities carry on building, we’re winning by blocking Reddit’s monopoly on mainstream forum-type social media.
I agree. Just give me some decent posts and discussion. For niche things I can go to a big platform with all the users. For my daily browsing, I appreciate a small but active community.
That actually tracks, since lemmy is supposedly populated mostly by “older nerdy males”. I mean they have a point, the quality of discussion is definitely better – for now. That could end with an Endless September event.
Exactly. I don’t want or need to build another McDonalds or Starbucks; I just want to go to the Mom and Pop down the road without worrying if they’ll tank.
Exactly. Well said. We have all the time in the world to grow. What we needed was a good start, and we got it. Just keep creating content, volunteer to mod somewhere, and don’t look back.
I tried a few different apps but I settled on just using the mobile website on my phone. The interface is solid even there, which I think is a great feat.
I’ve only just been able to log into this account using private mode, I only just realised that emptying the cache would’ve worked or something - but the weird thing is my account wasn’t working on mobile apps either so I didn’t think to empty cache on desktop…
I’m truly not being a negative nancy but the last time I checked reddit had 400M user accounts. We should be comparing active user numbers, but either way, this is a drop in the bucket and reddit rightly does not consider Lemmy a threat to its supremacy at this point.
Even when considering accounts across all lemmy instances, it still only combines for a total of 2 million. But overall I’m optimistic about lemmy’s trajectory too.
I mean, it’s more of a threat than it was. In all likelihood, this won’t be the last time reddit does something to really anger it’s userbase. There is a much higher chance of people leaving in future incidents if there is an alternative platform with enough users to actually have the content people want.
No, what we should be comparing is Reddit year 1 numbers with these. They’ve had 20 years to grow organically. I bet Lemmy’s start would look a lot more promising than Reddit’s. And Reddit also had much larger competitors when it came out, if you recall.
It’s a hard habit to break, because we’ve been trained to think this way for years, but try to remember: we don’t need to attract millions of users to be valuable. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. We don’t sell advertising. We don’t measure success by the number of eyeballs we can promise paying customers.
What matters now is the quality of conversation. In fact, that’s the ONLY measure of any consequence. It’s strange, because in the past, someone’s often tried to use services like this as a way to make money, or as a way to make something else they were selling more attractive. We expected it. It was always in the back of our heads. It even got to the point that if a company did something that wasn’t an effort to increase profitability, we criticized them. Generosity, real generosity, was alien to us.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that people volunteer their time and money to build and maintain the fediverse, simply because they want us to be able to communicate. That’s it. There’s no hidden agenda. There’s no quest for profit at our expense.
I’m perfectly fine with the fediverse growing slowly. I don’t want it to be strained beyond what the mods can handle. Bigger isn’t necessarily better.
Coming from the non-profit world, it is never that easy. Even when there is no one officially making any money, there are people who will see it as a way to make some bank. There is also a drawback in that not making money can and will affect the amount of time people can put in unless there is a fair way to get them compensation. Volunteering also brings a huge amount of interpersonal and inter-organizational drama. That is why grassroots organizations and movements have a habit of fracturing into smaller groups.
At the same time, there is power in goodwill and being non-profit. You just really need to be careful in vetting your instance and keep an eye on issues in a way people not used to this type of world are not familiar with.
But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a belief that it could be successful enough as a community. I also wouldn’t have been working in the NGO world for the past decade if I didn’t believe in that. But let’s not have too rosy glasses on. Growing slowly will also give this community a chance to work out the kinks and not die in a blaze of fire.
In the case of social network like this, bigger generally is better for the users. The thing that made Reddit great was that whatever your niece interest, there was a community of thousands of other interested people. There was so much information and advice on whatever obscure topic.
There’s a reason why there’s only around 10 really popular social networks and it’s certainly not that those platforms are any good. The network effect is important.
Agreed on the need to adjust mindset. Initially I behaved similarly to how I did on that other site until I realized that Lemmy is different and that’s ok. It’s a lot smaller and federation has its advantages and drawbacks and we’ll see it in action soon enough. Many seek the comfort of the familiar and are not always finding it. Start by appreciating the hard work that has allowed many of us to transition here quite easily. Take a deep breath, look around and realize that we are now playing a different game.
I personally don’t derive any value from high quality conversations about topics I don’t care about. That’s why I need these millions of users, so that there are people I can talk with about topics I care about. I’m willing to go on a limb here an say that your interests and mine don’t fully align.
I kinda don’t agree that that would provide any valuable insight unless you factor in the ease of access to the internet and speeds and availability of smartphones and computers across the world.
It would provide more insight than comparing their current figures. When Uber started, if you compared the number of people that got taxis in those first months to Ubers numbers you’d have bet on Uber to be out of business in months.
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
I did rm -r * / the first time I ever jailbroke an iPhone by spazzing and hitting enter before I’d finished typing the full command. (I’m terrible at mobile typing.) I’ll never forget the full body sweat that put me in immediately.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Woof. I’m glad I’m not the only one that’s done these things!
I want to say that you’re right, but I’m not NEARLY as familiar with *BSD or it’s history as I am with Linux. My understanding, though, is that iOS/macOS are based upon Darwin, and that Darwin derives a fairly significant portion of its code base from BSD. So, in part I believe the answer is yes.
As a total side note: do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try? I’ve tried probably 15 Linux distros, but never made it to BSD-world!
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
On a user-driven platform, not all users are created equal. Lurkers bring little to no value to the platform beyond clicks. There might be a huge engagement difference on a per user basis.
Moreover… I just want my niche communities to be active. We will never have Reddit’s archive of content, but we can get to a point where the Lemmy’s corpus of knowledge grows to at the same rate as Reddit’s. I don’t know how many users it’ll take to achieve that; 500k? 1m? 2m? 10m? No one knows that number, but to me that is the number to beat.
To be fair, that probably is a REALLY nice broadcast-grade CRT like a SONY BVM-20F1U or something… which most people did NOT have access to back in the day.
Hell, my wealthy buddy’s family had a “flat screen” (meaning the CRT didn’t have a curved face) SONY WEGA CRT in the mid-90s and I know it had S-Video, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t even have a component connection, let alone the quality aperture grille/shadow masking, or the contrast ratio that the BVMs did (because those things were at local TV news stations running 24/7).
In reality, there’s a bunch of differences with connection types providing various levels of quality and CRT display technology , but the accessibility that new TVs give us all to astoundingly good picture quality at a pretty reasonable price means we are living in a golden era for retro gaming if you know what you’re doing.
I’ll take my gigantic 4K OLED hooked up to a MiSTer with some great shaders rendering the sub-pixel effects a real CRT has to emulate this visual effect with run-ahead to minimize the latency + input lag over anything except a BVM-20F1U in near mint condition almost any other day of the week.
TL;DR - you can emulate those sub-pixel CRT era display technology display artifacts with a decent shader on a good 4K OLED, and probably spend less than you’d need to get almost the exact same visual effect with pretty much none of the pitfalls you get with old CRTs like massive electricity use, having to carry a 150-250lb CRT, hope it has no burn-in, decent remaining bulb life, etc.
@JDPoZ Most people not from that time think that CRT look is just bunch of clean black lines overlapping the image (keyword scanlines) without anything else to consider, and call it a day.
Man I’m such an old fart I prefer my emulated games appear using different era CRT shaders to accurately reflect the sort of TV connection I had access to when playing. Like emulating shittier RF for older NES games, S-Video for SNES - N64, and then component for PS1 - PS2 era.
Like… I enjoy playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out using a shader that makes it look like a shitty RF connection with inaccurate desaturated colors bleeding, interlace jitter, etc. I’m actually kinda wistful when I can’t see the preview channel 3 TV guide blending through the crappy connection. I almost want to see if someone has made a shader that could render in a YouTube stream of retro late 80s to early 90s TV at like 5% opacity to get the same effect I saw as a kid sitting 2 ft away from my old 16” Magnavox.
@JDPoZ (I'm not sure why your reply does not appear in my view, but only if I look at your profile... Guess Kbin does not work correct at the moment?)
Me too! But where I live we did not use RF connection for NES, but had composite through RCA connection. I have different setups for the kind of system I am emulating. For NES and that time period my Shader choice is "composite" cable variant, SNES era "svideo" and "rgb" (or for you known as "component") connection. There are many more configurations for other systems and handhelds as well. Handhelds in example aren't CRTs, but LCD displays.
Nah, those phosphor strips of that screenshot on the left are plenty coarse to be achievable with a consumer grade CRT. Throw in the fact that European sets pretty much all had RGB and it’s pretty realistic. Although most of us only heard about RGB cables with the advent of chipped PS1s and pirated NTSC discs (they oftentimes only displayed in black and white and RGB cables were the widely known fix for that).
EDIT oh by the way, the community CRTgaming also made it over here to Lemmy :-) I’ll have to post some content there…
My man. Now THIS person knows about CRT gaming. I’m merely an old man with limited time to research all this. Anyone talking about phosphor strips and halation and magnetic interference /gaussing probably knows their 💩.
I just know I like wearing the nostalgia goggles that add those artifacts my old eyes still hazily remember and weirdly prefer.
If you have the space, I highly recommend just getting a mid-sized CRT for the lulz :D It’s such a fun hobby. I went down the rabbit hole a little too hard in 2016 and have to downsize now. But I’d still get one to play around with while they’re still available for a couple of bucks (I hear it has gotten harder in the US already).
@Elektrotechnik Here in the EU/Germany we was used to SCART connection, even on the SNES (and upwards). MULTI-OUT/SCART supported composite, Svideo and RGB. The image I had was cleaner than what I emulate nowadays!
YES! Please join us! I don’t want our community to be full of elitists, play how you enjoy playing! But I happen to really love the look and nostalgia of playing on CRTs. Everyone is welcome to come and post about CRTs, or even CRT filters and masks in emulators to get that authentic experience!
Oh the MiSTer is awesome! It’s like an emulation device, but instead of emulating with software it uses a thing called an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). the short explanation of what that means is that the chip reconfigures itself physically to mimic the hardware of old systems, which results in super accurate, lag-free emulation. It also allows for both digital and analogue output, loads from mass storage like an SD card or USB hard drive, and works with the oldest systems up to things like the PS1.
Play how you enjoy playing! I will say that this looks like a consumer-grade pitch, and that there is some value in consumer-grade sets today, even with something like composite, since the mixed colors were used on many occasions, Sonic’s waterfalls are the classic example.
Personally I enjoy playing on CRTs when I can, but I also love filters on modern displays! I think the biggest gap right now isn’t playing things like SNES on a 4K OLED with filters, but things like GameCube that we can get on those displays with GCVideo adapters like the Carby and EON Mk2, but then they are pretty limited in options for scaling and filters. RetroTink 5x Pro of course is an option, but they add up! It’s so easy to get a cheap or free CRT to enjoy lag free without spending hundreds on scalers and hardware mods.
A really great hack for retro gamers who dont want to have a CRT tv hanging around the house is buy a cheap 1080p projector and project it onto an unprepped painted wall. The slight blur and bleed really smooths everything out.
I bought all those rerelease retro consoles and Metal Slug on a 3 meter screen is pretty badass.
Tell that to my cat who does anything and everything in her power to drink out of mugs and half full glasses when she has a nice wide fountain full of fresh, clean, filtered water 5 feet away.
When my cat was a tiny kitten learning to drink from a bowl he would always dip his face in too far and get a nose full of water, causing him to sneeze. He learned to always dip his paw in the water first to see where the surface is before putting his face in. He still does it every single time. It’s pretty cute.
Sorry, but this is pseudo-science bullcrap akin to healing crystals. Whisker fatigue is just some BS a mom group on Facebook came up with to sell products. It has zero scientific backing and frankly I would appreciate not spreading false information like this here. Leave that garbage on reddit
My cat will only eat from a bowl when there is Amethyst and Rose Quartz crystals arranged to promote calmness, love, and emotional healing. It is literally science.
I remember not knowing what, like, 40% of the shit on a given screen in a video game was meant to be because it was all a blurry mass of pixels. Important shit looked better than background stuff (in a decent game, anyway) and the characters were always the most detailed thing.
Now I can play the 17th iteration of a game series that went from the above, to being able to count the individual fibers of a berber carpet.
Decent games still highlight important stuff. But usually in a very mild way so you, as a player, don’t notice the difference, but still can feel what’s important and what’s not.
That's a good policy to have even if it's something mundane like an abandoned house. It prevents people from breaking in and wrecking up the place or getting hurt/arrested
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