YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".locked

fubo@lemmy.world to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 2305 points –

Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you've been invited into.

It has been said that "if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product."

It has also been said that "the customer is always right".

Right here and now, you're neither the customer nor the product.

You're a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.

You're using a service that you aren't being charged for; but that service isn't part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you're participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.

You've probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it's one of the most popular websites in the world, but it's not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don't imperil the service itself.

The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They're not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they're also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.

Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.

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Quick question: I have an account on Lemmy.world and kbin.social.. When trying to post on Lemmy.world it just spins and posts.. so I bopped over to my kbin account and one thing I noticed is that Kbin says it has 39 comments, but Lemmy.world this same post has 139... how do I square this circle?

There is sometimes a delay between the time when you make a post or comment and the time it gets synchronized by all of the federated instances. Depends on the instances in question, and their bandwidth and server load and etc.

Furthermore, comments made by a user whose instance is federated won't show up. A little in depth on this one:

Lemmygrad.ml is full of obnoxious tankies and is not federated with most instances. But they are federated to lemmy.ml. So users of lemmygrad.ml can comment on posts to lemmy.ml. But as a user of lemmy.ca which is federated with lemmy.ml and not lemmygrad.ml, if I go read that post on lemmy.ca, I won't see the comments made by users of lemmygrad.ml. basically it's a Venn diagram.

Beehaw.org is defederated from a few of the larger instances, so you won't see comments from lemmy.world users on posts hosted on beehaw.org.

It's weird, but it is a feature not a bug.

Well, it's all about a compromise in the end, but it's better than to depend on single actors, I think.

Exactly. Lemmy might give you the warning "This may be incomplete, view on the original instance", but if the only posts missing are ones from defederated neo-Nazi instances, not seeing them is indeed a feature rather than a bug.

I think a Black Arrow off the top rope would get you the three count

I think you might have responded to the wrong thread.

Nope. Dude said "square the circle" and the subreddit for pro wrestling is "r/squaredcircle"

Can't say anything about the kbin side, but Lemmy has a known bug that syncs are only attempted once and if the target instance isn't available (e.g. due to maintainance downtime or due to being overrun by thousands of users), the sync is lost.

There is currently no workaround, except of maybe editing an unsynced comment, but the devs know about it and it's in the pipeline.

Theething problems. Overload hasn't ever been an issue until two weeks ago. I'm honestly impressed that Lemmy still works at all.