HarkMahlberg

masimatutu , 6 months ago to fediverse en-gb

Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse

I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.

Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.

But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.

The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.

And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.

The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.

P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.

Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.

@fediverse #fediverse #threadiverse #mastodon #lemmy #kbin

HarkMahlberg , 6 months ago

@tigerjerusalem Not for nothing, but kbin has both a thread-side and microblogging-side to it. Ernest even introduced an aggregate view very recently where you can see both on the same page, formatted to their respective types of posts. You could use any view you like best. I think that flexibility is a great feature.

@feditips @fediverse @FediFollows @masimatutu

WhyNotZoidberg , 7 months ago to random

Okay so datamining of models suggest that the details of cims are way overworked with 40 000 polygons or more for details you cannot see in the game (you can't zoom in that far).

The performance of the game is... not good for a lot of players that struggle with framerate dips down to <10 fps on 30-series NVIDIA cards.

I don't know much about gamedev or 3D modelling but this seems like an odd choice.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/17kmzfh/40000_polygons_for_a_single_human_here_more/

#Gaming #CitiesSkylines2 #Gamedev #gamedesign

HarkMahlberg , 7 months ago

@moondog548 Scuttlebutt is that Life By You, Paradox's The Sims clone, is planned to be integrated into Cities Skylines 2, so they outsourced the creation of all the CS2 cim models to another company, Popul8, and they were tasked with making models that would work in both games. My guess is there was a miscommunication between the two companies on providing some LOD models for CS2 so it wouldn't have to try and render all of the "The Sims"-level details. But that's all just "big if true" speculation.

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago to gaming

30 hours into #baldursgate3 and I'm convinced that playing Sockem Boppers is the best strategy.

#gaming

HarkMahlberg OP , 10 months ago

My friends are making fun of me for not having found Gale yet. Doesn't matter, punch everything into bottomless pits.

pbloem , 10 months ago to showerthoughts

I'm starting to find some of the cooler aspects of the wider fediverse.

For instance, Lemmy is a Reddit clone that is picking up some migration after the recent hooha or at Reddit.

The cool thing is that it's federated (same as mastodon, different instances and everything).

This means that you can subscribe to any community on Lemmy, for instance

https://lemmy.world/c/showerthoughts

through its fediverse address, right here on your mastodon instance:

@showerthoughts

#fediverse

HarkMahlberg , 10 months ago

Hashtags map to Magazines (magazines are kbin's "communities") but it's a little wonky since it's still in development. Kbin doesn't seem to support hashtags with special characters in it: #gaming-on-linux may just take you to #gaming, #news+politics may just take you to #news.

neuraltimes , 11 months ago to programmerhumor

Entirely Automated AI Powered News Site

For the last few months our team has been working on an entirely automated AI-powered news site. I am excited to announce that v1.0 is finally being released. This version includes full coverage with every article generated from 2 left leaning, 2 right leaning, and 2 neutral sources. We have also added an anonymous commenting system for people to share their opinions freely. Our servers are now running 24/7 so that new articles appear as they happen! Let me know what you guys think, as well as any comments/concerns/questions you have!

Here's the link: https://www.neuraltimes.org/

HarkMahlberg , 11 months ago

You posted this to programmerhumor, am I to assume this site is satire? The site doesn't look like it, so if I'm taking you at face value, I couldn't disagree any harder about your mission. What makes you think anyone wants "2 right leaning" sources? Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax, New York Post, and Fox News are all pushing fascism narratives, to say nothing of the mockery you are making of professional journalism. You gonna start writing articles with them as your sources?

Shut your doors.