• Some of the biggest communities like r/pics, r/aww, and r/GIF decided to post John Oliver pictures and GIFs. In a tweet, Oliver approved this move.
• In the case of r/aww, the community is also allowed to post pictures of Chiijohn.
• r/iPhone decided to post pictures celebrating “dashing” Tim Cook.
• r/Shitposting banned posts with the letter k.
• r/Wellthatsucks is now a subreddit about vacuum cleaners.
• r/Nofans is now a passive PC cooler subreddit.
• r/Interestingasfuck removed a lot of all rules apart from asking members to not break site-wide rules.
• r/Memes is allowing only Medieval / Landed Gentry memes. This is in response to Huffman’s “Landed Gentry” comment about protesting subreddits.
• r/PokemonGo is now allowing pictures of John Oliver, Pikachu, or Spark.
• r/Horny is now a “Christian Minecraft server.”
• r/Steam members are posting about actual steam.
• r/HarryPotter is now referring to Huffman as Voldemort.
• Some subreddits such as r/Showerthoughts are determining close days for the community.

Glorious.

I like what /r/pics did.

We – the so-called "landed gentry" – appreciate that Reddit is made great by its users. Uncompensated contributors populate the platform's many communities with their content, just as volunteer moderators keep spam and bigotry at bay. Since neither we nor Reddit would be here without you, it was only fair to let you determine what /r/Pics should include... and you overwhelmingly chose to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. (Seriously, the final vote was -2,329 to 37,331.)

As such, /r/Pics will henceforth feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.

It's great, have a scroll. No intent to derail, here's the thread on !reddit@lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.world/post/206467

I wonder if a similar stunt would have been possible for /r/antiwork. Any ideas? How about: "You must rest on weekdays. Posts and comments are only allowed on weekends."

if Google or Meta wants to join they should to us not us to them so if they break federation we should not care and continue implement our stuff

As I understood the article, the danger is that large actors like these are too important too ignore. Too many users, too much content to neglect. So while in theory you are obviously right, in reality there will be a temptation to cater to their needs, because it seems so worthwhile.

Yes, I think that's what they tried to explain. If you do not unsubscribe from a community on an instance which has defederated your instance, you will only ever meet lemmys from your home instance in this community. This probably gets stale rather quickly, hence the recommendation to unsubscribe.

If you want to interact with lemmys from other instances, unsubscribe from communities from instances which defederated your instance.

"There is no such thing as a free lunch", they said :(

To pull more of the article into the comment section:

The Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) on Wednesday released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party boldly declares its priority to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, from the School Lunch Program. Why? Because “CEP allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”

Of note is that the CEP is not even something every school participates in; it is a meal service program reserved for qualifying schools and districts in low-income areas. The program enables schools that predominantly serve children from low-income backgrounds to offer all students free breakfast and lunch, instead of means-testing them and having to manage collecting applications on an individual basis. As with many universal-oriented programs, it is more practically efficient and, as a bonus, lifts all boats. This is what Republicans are looking to eliminate.

It’s the kind of provision that many would want every school to participate in. Why not guarantee all our children are well fed as they learn and think about our world and their place in it, after all?

Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals.

So good :D

No one was saying cost was not an option but it was a ludicrous cost

Yes, the "fuck you price" as a vlogger recently called it. A price you put up if you actually don't want to make business with someone, but can't say that openly without losing face. So you put up a price no one in their right mind is willing to pay to get what you want (they leave), without technically excluding anyone, so you don't lose face. Glad how this backfired.

If Meta plays dirty, defederate them then. Now is just too premature.

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore. If you let them gain that much ground, it's too late to isolate them without doing even more harm to your own network.

Also Meta is not a startup with unknown reputation. Meta plays dirty, that's a given.

I know that I am not back. And I won’t be back, and I think a lot of people are staying away as well. That the traffic is now normal seems a bit sketchy.

I'm afraid that's just bubble bias. Most people just don't care or haven't found a viable alternative yet. These +43k active users on Lemmy are huge for Lemmy, but not even a scratch for the other site.

After the initial exodus at the start of this month, you could see more and more comments demanding returning to business as usual.

I mean ...

That's active users last month. Roughly +50% or +10k in less than a week.

So the data seems to strongly speek against it; lemmy gets more users just fine despite being so difficult.

One question is how many of those will leave again. And obviously, we should strive to make it more user friendly. I fully support your proposals. I just don't think it's right to paint them as a necessity for growth, they evidently aren't.

relatively homogenous

Some may be surprised by the cultural diversity this rather small country packs:

It has four main linguistic and cultural regions: German, French, Italian and Romansh. Although most Swiss are German-speaking, national identity is fairly cohesive, being rooted in a common historical background, shared values such as federalism and direct democracy,[15][page needed] and Alpine symbolism.[16][17] Swiss identity transcends language, ethnicity, and religion, leading to Switzerland being described as a Willensnation ("nation of volition") rather than a nation state.[18]

Due to its linguistic diversity, Switzerland is known by multiple native names: Schweiz [ˈʃvaɪts] (German);[f][g] Suisse [sɥis(ə)] (French); Svizzera [ˈzvittsera] (Italian); and Svizra [ˈʒviːtsrɐ, ˈʒviːtsʁɐ] (Romansh).[h] On coins and stamps, the Latin name, Confoederatio Helvetica — frequently shortened to "Helvetia" — is used instead of the spoken languages.

I also think the local traditions differentiating down to single villages are more important and alive than in other countries.

But yes, "national identity is fairly cohesive", maybe you meant that.

I think it makes sense to pour oil in the fire while it lasts, and only leave as you propose, once nothing can be won anymore.

The downside of leaving early is that it skews the picture. The apathetic remain, and their voice to return to BAU becomes disproportionally louder. It's also what the company counts on, that it 'will pass'.

But I also spend like 99% of my time here, and only visit the old site for a few minutes every other day. In the end, everyone will do what feels right for them, but arguments can be made either way.

The idea is that every instance is basically responsible for their own users.

It's correct what you say, but the idea bugs me the more I understand it.

It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance. These other users can have nothing in common with the causing users, or might have even opposed them in their wrongdoings.

There is also a level between users and instances; communities. Maybe the problem was with one specific community, yet all other communities who happen to live on the same instance feel the same consequences.

Defederating individual communities would feel better for me, but ultimately I think a problem caused by individuals should be solved with these individuals, not with groups which are more or less meaningfully associated with those individuals.

Sorry for being unclear. What I meant is:

These actors play nice until they are too big to ignore [as a presence in the fediverse].

When they run the most and the biggest popular communities on their instances, do most of the development, offer the best tools and services in the fediverse, they have become too big to ignore.

If they then start playing dirty, it is too late to defederate them. They will play dirty. Let's not make ourselves dependent.

Seems like the fedi way to solve these disputes 👍

If you found a community, for example via https://browse.feddit.de/, but get a 404 error when visiting it:

Try searching for the community with a bang prefixed: !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

This will "discover" the community for your instance. When coming from a big instance like lemmy.world this is probably rarely necessary. Only one lemming has to discover a remote community to unlock it for all other lemmings on the same instance.

But someone has to be the first, and that lemming must bang it.

I like the way threaded comments are colored in the default scheme. Makes it very easy to see which subcomment belongs to which parent.

With a bunch of vertical lines, I quickly lose track.

But I very much appreciate all the crafting and tinkering going on! It's nice to see things grow.

They are, I get results. My worry is they are not aggregated/unified. Some lemmy instances don't have 'lemmy' in their name, and I'm not sure if they would show up in a search "X + lemmy".

"And, as Putin said yesterday, one of the tasks was to demilitarise Ukraine. In fact, this task is largely completed. Ukraine is using less and less of its weapons. And more and more it uses the weapons systems that Western countries supply it with."

Ah, the subtle differences between demilitarization and upgrading to NATO standards.

If his statement had ever anything to do with reality. Probably just feel-good words directed at the domestic audience.

Why would the Beehaw admins make Beehaw a Lemmy instance? Would it not be easier to achieve what they want through an old-style bulletin board or literally any other forum software?

https://the-federation.info/node/details/25274

The instance existed for about 2 years with less than 100 active users in the rolling last 6 months. That's not a blip, seemed to have worked for them, for whatever reasons. Maybe they made a lemmy instance because they could? Nothing wrong with that. Maybe they enjoyed cooperating with other instances, but within limits which they felt were crossed now.

The good thing is, we don't need to agree how instances should or shouldn't be run, for what purpose, for what reason.

Interesting to see the interplay between power and civil disobedience.

It was naive to expect reddirt to bow down (which is why many thought the protest was pointless), but still the right thing to continue the protests.

What it does is, it forces the power to show face, and it creates a dilemma. Do they

1. let the protest continue? That's an option, if the protest can be ignored. If the protest is too much of an obstruction, this is not an option.
2. give in to the demands? Clearly the worst option, else there wouldn't be any protest
3. use force to remove the protest? A good option if enough people don't care, the best option if people even condone the use of force.

Maybe you already noticed, I'm talking about something else, something bigger.

(1) Is why regular demonstrations (in themselves) have little effect; they can be ignored. They must be a stepping stone to further escalation, else you get statements like "this one will pass as well". The people protesting must be committed and follow through.

(2) Must be won in battle. There will be no gifts. It has to be the least painful option for the authorities, and remember it was their most painful option at the beginning.

(3) Very much depends on solidarity. With which side does civil society solidarize itself? Does it favor the force-applying authorities, because they remove an annoying obstruction to business as usual? Are the protesters the good guys, because they are fighting for a just cause and a better future?

Neutrality on this stance indirectly supports the stronger part, usually the authorities (which are in a position to use force). Using force has no real downsides (oversimplified), unless society heavily condemns it. By 'condemning,' I mean supporting the protests, ideally through participation.

Maybe after experiencing this with your once-favorite social media provider, you can see the next climate protest / civil disobedience with different eyes.

The good thing about redundancies is, they make the system more resilient.

If everybody flocks to one singular community/magazine for a topic, and the instance hosting that c/m decides to defederate your home instance (or vice versa), you're cut off.

When that's just one of many c/ms, it's less of a loss.

Unspezzable.

**Thank you **for the excellent and detailed explanation in both post and this comment! This helped me so much to better understand how lemmy works and what the implications can be. It is especially useful and interesting to see it demonstrated on a current example, although that's a sad circumstance.

I have only one last question. What happens if they ever decide to re-federate? How will these desynced threads merge? Will votes merge? Will users know content is merged or will that be another cause for confusion?

Post saved, great resource. :)

The European Union isn’t a big player in cutting-edge AI development. That role is taken by the U.S. and China. But Brussels often plays a trend-setting role with regulations that tend to become de facto global standards and has become a pioneer in efforts to target the power of large tech companies.

The sheer size of the EU’s single market, with 450 million consumers, makes it easier for companies to comply than develop different products for different regions, experts say.

It's called the Brussels effect. Wish we would utilize it more for climate regulation / carbon pricing, although that's another topic.

Is this the offical website for the act? https://www.artificial-intelligence-act.com/ Yesterdays's signing does not seem to be covered yet in their timeline.

Riding a bike to work for me would take 3 hours. Not everyone fits in the same mold.

Then we are mostly talking about other people. Most car trips are so short in distance, they could easily be done by bike.

Interesting that it's possible with RES. But it requires the user to copy paste some code.

A better automated approach:

PowerDeleteSuite. Smooth process, can recommend. AMA if you have troubles or questions.

Also allows you to replace posts/comments with another text, for example hints where to go instead.

Aside from emissions, cycling is also healthier, safer, more pleasant for everyone else.

I see it less of a question of "where to put the blame?" as more "in what environment we want to live?".

Cycling puts also less money in the pockets of bigger polluting companies, and you can still blame them on the ride for all the good reasons.

Freedom of the press never extended to the front lines of an active war zone.

Autonomous reporters (even if they only are that, which isn't safe to assume) wandering around on battlefields can cause all kinds of issues for everyone involved.

Whenever you see inserted words, please imagine an awkwardly moving but very colorful parrot squawking it.

The ability to find and make these connections prrrofits is incredibly important to many people ourrr sharrreholders, and ensuring that active communities are able to remain [a] stable and active (and open) source of prrrofits is very important forrr us!

Our goal here is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward into exile and make sure your subreddit is usable for the community company which makes its home monnney here.

There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy’s user interface design.

The first step is a UX disaster: https://join-lemmy.org/

Only 2 clicks / pages down the road you can start registering an account, and you don't see what the experience might be before that. Instead, you're being presented tech talk about servers.

You might argue it's not actually lemmy but just the landing page. I argue, it's so good at being a scarecrow, most people visiting lemmy haven't seen anything else except for that page.

The inner lemmy is pretty fine, I agree. Some parts are still confusing. For example, most people will not figure out they can search for content from within a specific community by carefully configuring the drop downs in the general search form. Most will look for the search directly attached to the community.

What interests me is that there is still a gaming@beehaw.org community on lemmy.world. Locals can post there, see new stuff, etc. It’s not “dead.” Maybe no alternative will rise because no one notices.

You could just as well create gaming@lemmy.world, to be able to interact with lemmys from other instances again.

After the moment of defederation, you will not get anything new in communities coming from beehaw except posts and comments made by users of your home instance.

So you can still see old posts and comments of beehaw users, but everything new will have to come from your home instance exclusively. You won't see new posts or comments made by users from beehaw or any other instance in communities originating from beehaw.

I started using Visual Studio (not Code, wtf were they thinking when they named these things) around 15 years ago.

Back then, it helped me a lot learning C# through excellent (= mostly very fast) code completion/suggestion and lookup tools (peek definitions etc).

I still use it (mostly for Unity), but maybe there are now better IDEs of which I am not aware of.

Currently, I still love the code completion and lookup features, but it became pretty overloaded with features and takes very long to load on my old laptop. Once up and running, it's fine.

That's fine, they can try? Just as anyone else can have different goals and pursue them.

I really like this openness of the fediverse in arguments like these. We don't have to agree, it's alright.

Update:

Dear r/anime_titties community,

As many of you are aware, we recently held a poll to detrimine the future of this sub in light of Reddit asking to reopen. While most of you voted in favor of making this sub for actual anime titties, the original post was not a traditional poll post but instead a restricted post where the vote was decided by two comments, one for literal anime titties and one for returning things back to normal. And since the return to normal comment was hidden due to negligence on my part where I replied to myself instead of making two separate comment threads, it made for a really lopsided vote. I offer my apologies for this. Since the sub was under restricted mode for a bit and I was enjoying the glee of the moment, I didn't stop to think about whether or not the voting system was fair. You all can get mad at me for this since I deserve it. And now we are going to attempt an actual poll post with the two options and third option of returning to geopolitics and world news but marking it nsfw to reduce avenues for Reddit to get ad money. The poll ends in 48 hours so make sure to vote

View Poll

if they closed registrations on those instances, lots of the new users would end up confused, and go post on reddit that lemmy isn’t allowing new registrations.

I think anyways the registration process should be dumbed down. Simple version:

• User sees no instances or servers during registration
• When they click on 'register', a random instance (which allows new registrations) is chosen
• There is a small link 'advanced options' which allows users to see and choose instances

This would balance the load between instances and make it much easier for newcomers to join.

I realize we were talking about slightly different views. You had a scenario in mind where people try to join a specific instance (for example because someone promoted that specific instance somewhere else), I was talking about https://join-lemmy.org/

YouTube: Not Just Bikes - Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)

how do we make winter more amenable to cycling?

See chapter 5: 'Second: proper winter maintenance'.

It would be possible to do this study without contamination by using completely unknown and newly-released songs

When writing songs, I always wondered if that genius idea is actually just something I heard 10 years ago, but don't remember consciously. Similarly, I wonder if I like a catchy tune because it is catchy in itself, or because it reminds me of something which I cannot recall consciously right now.

Sometimes, I had these moments later when the dots connect, sometimes not. With what confidence could I conclude something is new and original?

I guess that's just another task for future AI.

That's great! Coming from a game designer / UX perspective, these were exactly my thoughts. The current process does not put the new user in the center, and the experience suffers accordingly. If lemmy wants to grow, this is one major aspect to improve (and I want it to grow!). The sign up process has probably the biggest impact on growth.

1. Sign up: Yes, make a basic default version and a less visible advanced option. Side benefit: Lemmy can choose where new users should (not) be registered, which allows some lemmy-wide load balancing. This can be achieved decentrally by individual instances accepting new registrations or not. Also do not talk about setting up an instance on a page directed to new users, who mostly just want to register an account. Make this option even less visible. People willing and able to set up a server will find the info. People unwilling and unable to understand advanced registration will be overwhelmed and put off by server talk.

2. Subscribed/Local/All: Also agreed, 'local' is the least useful option (is it even useful for anyone besides instance admins?) and should not be the default. I have worries making 'all' the default; people could get the impression their subscriptions do not work. How about this: Make 'all' the default for users with 0 subscriptions, and 'subscribed' the default for users with > 0.

3. Links between instances: I wish this was simpler and more usable. Currently I don't understand all the options and cases and cannot begin to describe the problem or propose a solution. I wish there was a non-techie way to post a link which works out of the box for anyone, no matter what instance they call their home.

Edit: I think I understand now how to make instance-independent cross-instance links to communities. Say you want to link to https://midwest.social/c/cats.

1. transform into "email-syntax": cats@midwest.social
2. add /c/: /c/cats@midwest.social
3. use it as a URL in a link: lemmy does the magic

I wrote: [lemmy does the magic](/c/cats@midwest.social)