Valdair

@Valdair@kbin.social
1 Post – 45 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

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On the contrary, the smallest communities are the most fun and enjoyable to interact in. The big ones are just good for making sure there’s always fresh content on /r/all every few hours. It’ll grow. This is just the first big migration wave, there will be more when the third party apps shut off and there will be more again once people start realizing it’s not just a tiny forum experiment no one cares about.

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Indeed, at least that's the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.

As a moderator of a small subreddit, when I checked roughly 75% of our traffic was from mobile. It doesn't distinguish beyond that but the mobile browser experience is so shockingly bad I think it's safe to say that is almost entirely app usage. Since there is only official app & Apollo on iOS, that means it's one of those two... but the way Huffman tells it, Apollo has less than 5% of the install base of the official app on iOS. If that's the case I don't really understand his argument that they're bleeding Reddit dry. But that's a separate issue.

But, based on the responses we had before the blackout and the responses we got in the last few days "after" in the discussions around opening back up, I can say he appears to be right. Most people just want to use the main app, don't want to learn anything about third party apps, don't care why they exist, just want everyone to shut up and move on.

I did find the total 180 very odd. Vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the protest beforehand. Overwhelmingly in favor of going back to normal after. But it was different people. And it wasn't just random one-week-old accounts that had never posted on the sub before, it was regulars, old accounts, or both, both times.

I'm proud of the properly big subs for continuing their protests. Our community was not strong enough.

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Transistor - really any Supergiant game, but Transistor in particular.

lemmy.world seemed to be the obvious starting point to me when I was first looking at it a few days ago.

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Unfortunately video hosting is pretty expensive compared to other formats.

I've tried Mlem and Memmy, and the biggest features missing as I see it are:

  • Once you have logged in, search all currently federated servers. See what their subscriber count is on their local instance, and across all instances. Sort by subscribers, posts/day, or comments/day.

  • A tab which shows you your subscribed communities so you can go straight to them (Memmy and kbin both make you go in to your profile to do this, it should be front-and-center)

  • Ability to subscribe to a community by looking at its main page

  • Ideally kbin communities would show alongside lemmy communities, I think this is a limitation of kbin right now though?

  • Swipe posts to upvote/downvote (right), reply/save (left)

  • Something which tells you the last time information was pulled from a federated server - sometimes it would be useful to know that I might be seeing a page which is 8 hours out of date vs. one which was updated 30sec ago

  • Something which tells you or prevents you from posting to a defederated community since the post will not behave as expected

  • Expose options for copying links to comments, links to parent comments

  • Ability to see your post history separated by threads/comments/etc., and messages; from a comment, go to the specific thread in question (i.e. direct link to parent or contextual comments in that thread, not just the original post)

  • Hide posts you've voted on already

  • I don't think any currently existing apps expose moderator tools. I'm not sure how much of this is present on the API side so far but will be hugely important as communities get bigger.

  • Content density. On Apollo I can see ~6 posts at once on any given page. On Memmy or Mlem I see ~2.5. Just a much more efficient display of content, tell me what the post title is, what community+server it's on, how old the post is, how many comments, what the upvote-downvote calculus is. If I want to know the user count or read the blurb on the post I can tap in to it.

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More news, more protests, porn on /r/all, but this seems pretty high. There have been a few oddly spiky days the last few days, seems like probably bots.

Idiots saw the explosion of speculation on crypto and a few people got lucky and got rich. They jumped on the next new buzzword in tech expecting it to have an equivalent speculative boom, which obviously never happened.

This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

I've never driven a manual car. I've had people be like "You can't drive manual?!" and then I would respond "So are you going to teach me?" The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn't be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you're buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that's great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.

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If anything it's probably ultimately better (from this, specific perspective) that the Reddit blackout was only two days and only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances and not 100k~1m. In general I don't think things are clear and digestible enough to start porting entire communities (even small ones), but I think with some stress testing and getting some QOL updates, apps, etc., we could be in that position in as little as a few weeks or months.

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This is my current biggest gripe. You have to have a four year degree in random smart home garbage to figure out what works with what. We have a guy like that in our friend group, but I still need four different smart home apps just to control a handful of lights and a couple cameras. The apps have constant problems (Nest app signs me out nearly daily), the aggregator apps like Homekit and Google Home are missing nearly all features for the lights we have aside from on or off and some simple color settings, Nanoleaf app claims to be able to do scheduling and automation but I've never gotten it to work. I bought a google home tied-in tablet at the recommendation of said friend to be able to check cameras and control lights from a device that didn't have to be biometrically locked, and it turned out it couldn't see the cameras OR the lights. Pending some future theoretical update which still hasn't rolled out. Insanity. Makes me want to throw it all out.

Considering how expensive the smart home items are, especially the lights, the user experience is horrendous for pretty much everything but flashy tech demos.

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I thought access would essentially be the same from the app's perspective, just the app builders would start getting MASSIVE bills in the mail? And they were shutting it down preemptively to avoid this.

I’d like for kbin/Lemmy to be a full substitute, but right now only meme subs on lemmy are taking off or getting significant traction. It’s actually sort of annoying and makes me not want to bother. Apps are rough, block tools are inconsistent, see tons of posts twice or more all day (would happen on Reddit too, but pretty rarely, when big news was relevant to several large subreddits). Until the smaller subs I frequented Reddit for in the first place start coming over, kbin/lemmy can’t realistically be a replacement. Just something I check for a few minutes to try to leave app feedback and contribute traffic where I can.

It will take a very good app and a couple more high profile niche subs (like /r/piracy) mostly shifting to the Fediverse to start a real migration.

Hahahahaha

Graphical fidelity has not materially improved since the days of Crysis 1, 16 years ago. The only two meaningful changes for how difficult games should be to run in that time are that 1440p & 2160p have become more common, and raytracing. But consoles being content to run at dynamic resolutions and 30fps combined with tools developed to make raytracting palatable (DLSS) have made developers complacent to have their games run like absolute garbage even on mid spec hardware that should have no trouble running 1080p/60fps.

Destiny 2 was famously well optimized at launch. I was running an easy 1440p/120fps in pretty much all scenarios maxed out on a 1080 Ti. The more new zones come out, the worse performance seems to be in each, even though I now have a 3090.

I am loving BG3 but the entire city in act 3 can barely run 40fps on a 3090, and it is not an especially gorgeous looking game. The only thing I can really imagine is that maxed out the character models and armor models do look quite nice. But a lot of environment art is extremely low-poly. I should not have to turn on DLSS to get playable framerates in a game like this with a Titan class card.

Nvidia and AMD just keep cranking the power on the cards, they're now 3+ slot behemoths to deal with all the heat, which also means cranking the price. They also seem to think 30fps is acceptable, which it just... is not. Especially not in first person games.

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This is what it gives me if I try signing in with the credentials of another server. I made accounts on a few before I realized what was what.

Unfortunately you can't just recuse yourself from society. You're still impacted by who the president is even if you don't vote for them.

You're still using public utilities. Driving on public roads. Interacting with people who went to public schools.

Acting like both choices are the same because they will always eventually do something you don't like is disingenuous and you know it.

Complete silence is impossible. At best only a tiny fraction of power users are the ones invested enough to care about the impact of what Reddit's doing, and are willing to do anything about it. The 99% of the platform who are lurkers, by and large don't contribute, and just want the platform back open and for everyone else to stop complaining are what's being fought over.

If you shut down enough of the platform - which the power users and mods can do by setting to private, restricting posting, or simply not posting when they otherwise would have - then the lurkers go to the site, see nothing to interact with and leave (or at the very least, spend less time on the platform as there is "less" to do). Over a long enough time span that would have started showing up in a big way. But it wasn't going to happen in two days. If anything, the blackout was so telegraphed and so much news got stirred up that it would make total sense if their traffic was actually not impacted or was even high for those two days (at least in terms of clicks and votes, not posts and comments). The lurkers are still valuable to Reddit though - that's where their advertising revenue is coming from.

People mass deleting their post history will hurt the platform. Some big subreddits staying private will hurt the platform. Some small subreddits staying private will hurt the platform. All of those things can bleed away users and diminish Reddit's usefulness and dominance. Really the ideal outcome is we scare them enough that they pull back to a more reasonable position and things can continue as normal. Maybe Huffman gets ousted and they plan a longer timescale and more reasonable pricing.

Same. Seeing an ad, especially an obnoxious one, is more likely to make me avoid a product or brand. Also listening to a WAN show a few months when Luke & Linus started talking about how Linus can't "see" ads kinda blew my mind because I've always been that way too. I imagine a lot of people of a certain age reflexively developed the ability to read pages full of ads and still manage to extract info from them.

It's going to be a long, slow process. The people who quit and deleted their accounts are part of it. The people who are just using it a lot less are part of it. The communities continuing to protest in their own unique ways to continue to raise awareness are part of it. The 3rd party app devs telling their sides of the story are part of it. People who get bored or curious when their communities slow down and go looking elsewhere will be part of it. The flurry of negative news is a big part of it. And the more all the other stuff continues, the more the negative press continues, and Huffman is doing himself 0 favors in any of his interviews.

Sweet void 🖤

This strikes me more as "this is literally what the rules say" rather than being targeted at anything specific. It would be insane to start actually ousting mods across the entire site for a couple days of a pre-planned, short-lived blackout. The community already seems to be angrily demanding the mods reopen, and most have reopened anyway, so there is nothing Reddit admins actually have to do.

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I'll be significantly cleaner than average I expect... I don't like cases, but a long time ago, circa when shiny black plastic was making its way in to touch screen phone design for the first time, a friend and I discovered if you keep your phone in a microfiber bag (like some sunglasses come with, particularly Oakleys we bought together at the time) it effectively cleans itself in your pocket. I still do, and I cycle those out and clean the bag once a year or so, or if it falls on the ground or gets something spilled on it. I have more now from different sets of sunglasses, laser goggles, etc.

I also happen to work in a clean room where you're expected to wipe anything you bring in, including phone, laptop, etc., with isopropanol-soaked wipes before entering so that's like disinfecting and taking off the oil every day or every other day.

No one else I know ever cleans their phone beyond wiping it with a shirt or something when the oil & smudges becomes too noticeable.

And hosting text, images and links on decentralized servers is one thing. High bitrate video, plus the network infrastructure to serve it, is kind of a whole different ballgame. I could see this system working for some kind of torrent/file sharing service that hosts video but not a YouTube competitor.

We really need a functional app for lemmy/kbin/tildes stat. There's lots of UI polish needed to get to the point where people can find and check their communities as easily as they're used to.

Also, as a mod, my biggest reticence around trying to bring my communities here is the lack of any equivalent for wikis. I think in a few weeks we could be in a place where it's a real replacement but by then the blackout may be forgotten and it might be too late.

There is already a space set up for RCT in the Fediverse! Come check us out at:

https://lemmy.world/c/rct

~

!rct@lemmy.world

~

https://kbin.social/m/rct@lemmy.world

OpenRCT2 is indeed the main thing happening in the community for the last few years, and just about everyone is playing it, if they're playing on desktop at all.

I've tried Mlem and Memmy and both seem to have a single fixed "Hot" feed that has not updated since the last time the apps updated. It's still showing me some startrek post from two days ago, as well as a bunch of posts from beehaw despite it being defederated. Active sorting has this problem of constantly shifting. Going to specific communities and sorting by "Hot" there seems to be the most tolerable way to browse, but only Memmy can even do that. It's rough but hopefully these things will get pretty good pretty fast. I wish kbin had an app but for now the webUI is actually pretty usable.

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Nice thing about Lemmy instances is you can pick and choose the communities across any random server and sub to them from kbin, without directly interacting with that server. Once an app comes along that lets you browse and discover across lemmy/kbin/tildes the same way you could just search subreddits I think it could take off.

Portal 1, as Yahtzee famously said, is perfect. The twist, structure, pacing, music, even how efficient they were with assets and the length of the game. All flawless.

Portal 2 is great and also does a good job for its length but Portal 1 would be my pick.

For best results, you should have the full game of RCT1 (Deluxe) and RCT2 (Triple Thrill Pack). Both can be bought on GOG or Steam, frequently on sale.

For a still-functional-but-not-ideal experience, you can get started with the RCT2 demo, or with RCT Classic. But again, above is recommended.

Need this, especially the in-line image expansion, for kbin STAT

It seems like if you have an account with the same name or email on a different server (lemmy/kbin/whatever) and try to log in, it won't work and will just spin endlessly. Accounts aren't shared, though you can browse and subscribe to communities on other federated servers with one account hosted on any of them.

How does the lemmyverse link get its numbers? When I go to any of those instances the subscriber numbers are vastly off. For instance, /c/selfhosted on lemmy.world is listed as having 5.1k subscribers there, 6.8k if I go there directly, and 300 if I navigate to it via kbin.social/m/selfhosted@lemmy.world.

Also the Hot feed on kbin.social for that community is 100% different from the Hot feed if I go there on lemmy.world... it's very confusing.

In the USA licenses are not contingent upon manual vs. automatic. No one checks what car you drive. So you would have to learn somewhere - someone around you has to own a manual car in order for you to learn how to drive one, and here simply no one does. No one in my entire extended family, none of my friends, none of my coworkers I'm friendly with, none of the 50+ cars I have any tangential access to are manual. So even if I wanted to learn, what are my options? Buy an entire car just to learn? Services like Turo won't let you rent one unless you can drive one already.

We have Driver's Education in high school but it involves no actual driving - there are separate paid/private courses you can take that might involve defensive driving or learning stick. I did one on controlling skids on wet or snowy pavement and demonstrating e.g. turning under braking with and without ABS. But nothing about manual.

lemmy.world has been giving me issues all day, it is acting like they defederated but I'm wondering if there is some kind of technical hiccup that can act like a defederation and never goes back and gets the missing posts and comments. I really hope it can be fixed because this is a huge problem, and worsening as more servers fail to show up in search results and are having strange behavior. If it keeps going like this everyone is going to be stuck on whatever the biggest platform becomes and we're back to square one.

I think one of the big 3rd party developers throwing their weight behind Kbin or Lemmy right now could get a lot of attention in this news cycle. I think they've all expressed they'd rather work on other things than just shift their app to a competitor though. Which is a shame, I'm really going to miss the polish of Apollo.

API discussion was definitely the catalyst. But the doubling down and response of the admins to the community was what finally sealed it. Hopefully the mass exodus of users to federated servers makes the news cycle too. When communities reopen in a few days then I think there will be a lot more awareness raised for them and there'll be another wave. We won't get to Reddit's 15mil or whatever active users in a week but the fact that we could be even 5~10% of that is insane.