Yep. The Fediverse has a lot of growing room in the QOL department and is hampered by the relatively small (and often part time) dev teams working on it. Meta comes in, builds a compatible platform, then starts offering meta-platform only 'improvements' that offer those QOL features. Rest of the Fediverse dies out because 'meta' isn't that bad and they aren't abusing their position (yet).
I get it. But I also hate how useless the internet has now become for me. Kept trying to do research on a topic the other day and kept ending up at private subreddits or reddit comments with nothing but deleted comments. It will take years (if ever) for that kind of knowledge to grow again. I'm just completely at the mercy of random SEO crap reviews or gut instinct now when I need to research stuff to buy.
Sims is pretty popular and the main version everyone plays is PC only, but can be run on laptops and other low end PCs. There are a lot of 'I only play Sims' people out there. Could account for some of the numbers
I think it's important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There's a grift that targets basically every personality type. There's grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for 'I'm so much smarter than others', for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there's something for everyone. If you aren't careful you'll be laughing at the other 'idiots' while you yourself fall into a different trap.
Honestly once you start paying attention it's really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I've clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
Yep the flaw is assuming that humans would actually select for constructive comments. It's a case where humans claim that's what they want, but human actions do not reflect this. We'd eventually build yet another 'algorithm that picks what immediately appeals to most users' rather than 'constructive'. You'd also see the algorithm splinter along ideological lines as people tend to view even constructive comments from ideologies they disagree with unfavorably
Same kinda logic as people who complain about ads saying that they'd rather pay for the service, instead of ads. The reality is only about 1% ever do pay. I assume it's similar for clothing, where most people naturally gravitate towards the clothes that look 'best', even if they don't have pockets.
The goal should be to find a way to destroy the subreddit without getting removed as mods. Which should focus on killing user engagement through draconian mod rules. Like an automod that bans everyone that comments.
People laugh at the John Oliver thing for a few days, but the joke will get stale, that's when they need to stick to their guns and keep running it into the ground. I'd also suggest limiting posts to once an hour or something like that. Mods need to focus on making Reddit boring.
To add more context, currently Lemmy doesn't offer great moderation tools. So if a relatively open instance like lemmy.world interacts with beehaw, beehaw ability to shut down the 'few bad apples' coming from lemmy.world is rudimentary at best.
At a certain point, admins just can't keep up and have to make a judgment call. Either accept that trolls and bad actors are going to get through or cut off the source of the infection, regardless of whether or not that impacts regular users.
Beehaw has already stated that they're open to reconnecting once they have a better way of moderating and dealing with bad actors.
Same. I signed up for the first instance someone mentioned positively. Seems fine, only about 5 minutes of research invested
Lemmy has fully replaced Reddit for my casual scrolling needs. But for research purposes for things like buying advice, tech support, etc I still find myself at Reddit. Lemmy may get there someday, but it's not there yet.
I didn't delete my account because I hate permanently removing information from the internet. I get annoyed when links are dead or information is lost. I understand why others are doing it, but I can't help but be sad at all the information we've lost and I won't contribute to that.
The only issue with your second point is that it can eventually become a quagmire when you do need to upgrade it.
I work for a very old company who held to that philosophy for many years. And while any individual component could be looked at and seen as running fine, when they did finally decide it was time to upgrade they were faced with needing to upgrade everything simultaneously.
All of the tech was too old, so no current tech had the sort of backwards compatible bridge that helps you move forward. It's like figuring out how to get your telegram system to also work on your WiFi network, nobody makes any interfaces for that.
Instead of slowly and gradually replacing components over time, they're faced with a single major overhaul that's put the entire company at risk because they have to completely shut down for over a month.
They just need to pull shorts out into it's own app. It's not very often that I'd want to freely mix short 30 second videos in between longer YouTube content. They're different use cases.
Setting up a world in which you are forced to drive and then making incredibly draconian surveillance of your performance of that required task is just cruel. Put this effort into providing me travel options that don't come with the risk of major injury, death or jail time.
Until TV is setup the same way Spotify/YouTube music/apple music is where you just pick one you like and listen to the same music the other platforms have, they'll continue to have pirating problems.
I currently pay more per month for the various components needed for highly effective pirating than I would for cable and that's purely because it offers a better experience. I can't buy a plex-like experience anywhere for any price legally.
Fix that and I'll go legit just like I did for music.
Reddit is a collection of people's thoughts and opinions. So no, I'm not sure that information is elsewhere. Where for example can I find a community like buy it for life? Or the home automation community? What Google served to me instead were corporate ads, not real user experience and opinions on products
A big hurdle of AI is the fact that they really can't 'learn', at least not like humans can, where we filter out bad data or go back and correct previous assumptions (not that we do this perfectly). Seems like anyone who's able to truly figure out how to teach AI without needing super-clean data sets will have basically unlocked something pretty close to the singularity. Which makes me assume that we're honestly no where close to figuring that out and that sample collapse is much more likely (with possibly the internet as a whole being effectively ruined, same as voice calls have been effectively ruined by rampant spam).
For a start, regulations that force any system with 'quick tip' buttons of 15/20/etc % HAVE to have a No Tip option as well. Can't force your customers to type out 0.00.
I honestly don't know how anyone manages without one these days. How would you even keep track of it all? Even if you go the 'same password for everything' route of horrible security, different websites have different requirements for both username and password. Wouldn't be able keep it all straight at all.
I personally use 1password, which is better than Lastpass for sure. Probably not as good as Bitwarden, but I'm too lazy to switch a second time.
My understanding from the beehaw defed is that more surgical moderation tools just don't exist right now (and likely won't for awhile unless the two Lemmy devs get some major help). Admins only really have a singular nuclear option to deal with other instances that aren't able to tackle the bot problem.
Personally I don't see defederating as a bad thing. People and instances are working through who they want to be in their social network. The well managed servers will eventually rise to the top with the bot infested and draconian ones eventually falling into irrelevance.
As a user this will result in some growing pains since Lemmy currently doesn't offer a way to migrate your account. Personally I already have 3 Lemmy accounts. A good app front end that minimizes the friction from account switching would greatly help these growing pains.
I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of these issues of structure I don't think need to be solved on content creator/admin side, but rather on the end user UI side. The fragmentation is good for the network as a whole, but as an end user, I want to group similar communities together into one. Let me bulk subscribe to cats, toebeans, kittens, etc. I'll do that action once. Then if one of those goes defunct, I won't really care. I also won't really care which community I'm posting to (except to ensure I'm following the rules), because ultimately most of the savvy users will be mass subscribed to topics as well.
This preserves control (I can opt out of toebeans if I don't like that community for some reason), while keeping the distributed nature. No one would truly 'own' the cat pics community as it would span across multiple instances and communities.
Just since I've setup a plex server (about 8 years now) midrange sizes have gone from 4->16 TBs. Personally I think the bulk of the issue is that HDD customers switched from a mix of enterprise and personal, to nearly all enterprise. Companies really don't care if a HDD is $200 or $500, so basically all high capacity drives are priced at B2B prices, not consumer
At best he was naive to think that you could ever actually prevent factions from forming. You can't block them, only guide them
Most likely the entire HBO streaming service wouldn't have taken off, because they offered little to no avenues to consume their content to an increasingly no-cable subscription generation. It's entirely likely that HBO would've died out along with traditional TV.
The concept you're looking for is called the 'missing middle'. People assume the only two options are single family home suburbs or inner city mega apartments.
What's missing are small mixed areas (which are illegal to build in most of the US) that have single family homes, duplexes, small apartment buildings, all mixed in with commercial spaces like grocery stores and restaurants.
Have to setup port forwarding to make it available outside your network.
I tried running it off my main PC for awhile, but it's kind of a pain and impacted my gaming sessions. Moved it onto a $400 Lenovo server I got off eBay to great effect. Used unRAID to setup a simple server for it. Lots and lots of guides out there for it with a great community. Have since upgraded beyond that server, but it was a great start.
Estimates of TPA users were pretty low. Like 3%. That said the majoriy of the content and moderation also only comes from like 1-3% of users as well. So it was always a question of how much those two small groups overlapped. You can afford to lose a large chunk of casual users. If you lost 50% of your content posters and moderators, they'd be fucked. Stale front page would be the death knell for most casual users. They aren't loyal. They'll jump to TikTok or Instagram or wherever to get their meme fix.
We shouldn’t have to pay for the content we use to train and teach an AI
Wait people think that sounds reasonable?
This. I'm happy with these content offerings, but it's weird to have them all mashed together. It'd be like if Lemmy randomly inserted book chapters in between other posts. It just doesn't fit with the platform and the use cases are wildly different.
I'm thinking when you hit subscribe, it presents a box of other communities that the community owner suggests as the same topic. Then I can also subscribe to those at the same time if I want.
If I run a D&D community I could suggest D&D 5E community as well and a TTRPG community too. Or also another D&D community from a different instance.
Less about structure and more about easing end user friction to get to content
Struggling to sort out my thoughts on this one.
I'm not really sure comparing AI to a human artist learning and being inspired by others quite fits. At least in the context of a commercial AI (one that a company charges others to use). It feels scummy for a company (for profit entity) to steal training data from others without consent, and then turn around and charge people for the product they built on that stolen content.
That said, existing copyright law allows for 'fair use', which includes educational purposes. In that light, AI companies could be seen as a sort of AI school program. But the icky part to me, is that AI is not a person. It can't choose to leave the school. That school can then profit off that student forever and ever.
I feel like the fair use argument for education applies to humans, not AI (at least not till they actually gain sapience). AI are machines that can be leveraged and exploited by the few and powerful, and that power should come without us subsidizing their development.
Though honestly it's sort of a moot point, because it's already done and we're very unlikely to ever properly charge them now. And now that they have the start, they have a leg up on everyone else. So the morality of how it was built no longer really matters, unless we want to argue AI should all be open source or public domain.
Many of datahoarders initiatives are pointless at best. Hoarding reddits data across a thousand personal hard drives that are inaccessible to anyone else is of extremely limited value. I've watched them perform the same action over and over, but most of the time that data never ends up in a new home. It just rots at someone's house.
Google as a whole has felt like it's built on top of a growing sinkhole. Everything seems fine on the surface, but I look back at the last ~10 years of google and which of their products has not been killed or gotten worse? When did I start to hesitate to try anything new from Google? And now all the sudden in 2023 we're comparing search engines again?
They've stopped the crazy innovation they were known for. They've continually eroded core products. Their 'ecosystem' barely functions together with bizarre limitations and multiple obvious tie-ins never capitalized on. If anyone was going to build an effective AI, I was sure it'd have been Google first. Why does it feel like they're last to the starting line?
I'm about a year away from just fully jumping ship from almost every google product. And my family/friends would be 2-3 years beyond that (many of them are fully Apple anyway).
I was more referring about impacts of non-local users browsing communities on other instances. Which instance handles that load? If I browse lemmy.ml communities on my lemmy.world account am I impacting lemmy.world or lemmy.ml? What happens when all 35k lemmy.world users browse a lemmy.ml community because it's the most popular one? Does lemmy.ml need to support all their own users + any non-local visitors?
I have little understanding of the technical details of Lemmy, but I'm having a hard time understanding how it can scale. How do you build something like /r/funny with 40 million subscribers when the biggest Lemmy instance seems to be suffering at 30k users?
As far as I can see while users can subscribe to communities on different instances, communities themselves are locked to a single instance. How could a multi million strong community grow here?
I guess my question is that you can't really control if a community grows to be huge or not. You can control who can create an account your instance, but unless you defederate, what happens if 20 million accounts subscribe to a single community? How is that load handled? Does it just collapse the entire instance under it's weight? Or is the fediverse just inherently built to stifle community growth past a certain scale?
Yep. This is totally good enough to outsource PR speak to AI. ChatGPT has this down pat.