It depends where you go - e.g. the entire purpose of chapotraphouse is to dunk on people, and the users on that instance constantly crawl out from under their bridge and harass innocent passer-bys in other communities. But if you block a few notable places, which sometimes your instance does for you (I note that yours in particular does not though), then overall the Fediverse can be quite a pleasant place!:-)
Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful....
It would be preferable if lemmy.ml were an opt-in feature rather than one that someone has to learn how to opt out of, on top of trying to figure everything else about the Fediverse at the same time.
I am now strongly hesitant to recommend Lemmy to people irl bc of all the heavy mandatory curation that must be done before someone can have a pleasant experience. After accidentally responding to a comment in chapotraphouse, and another in lemmygrad.ml, I almost left the Fediverse entirely rather than put up with the barrage of many tens of responses that continued for weeks despite me not responding to them anymore, and I don’t want people to associate that with me. i.e. it is a bad look for us all when the “we” includes “them”, and it hurts our growth overall. I strongly believe they should have the freedom to be however they want… (even though they do not reciprocate that thought) but that doesn’t mean that I want to help bring new people into their audience for their amusement.
I too have been somewhat of an agitator in this. In my defense, data getting removed from the modlogs sounds indefensable to me - as in, incompatible with the principles of the Fediverse where we are supposed to “trust” the instances that are federated together?
In Dessalines’ defense, that may very well have been real yet merely a bug in testing the newer features of v0.19.4? Only an instance admin would be able to dig deeper into that, and even that requires some bit of coding or data wrangling skill to either constantly monitor the differences in the modlog before vs. after the alleged edits, or as was suggested to have happened, be caught purely by chance (as one person claimed).
I am not volunteering to spin up an instance to test though, so I will drop this matter and give lemmyl.ml the benefit of the doubt on it. i.e., Lemmy.ml having been in the process of upgrading to 0.19.4-rc.6 wasn’t widely known at the time, but now that we know that, bugs may be more expected than not during such a process?
Even so it does not change how hearing about (or observing first-hand?) such heavy-handed moderation practices as nahuse described will drive people away from the Fediverse, thereby lowering overall content for us all. Saying that it is their instance to do with as they please is like saying that it is fine for porn to appear on porn websites - which it very much is! (or should be, imho) - but my goodness, please label it so that people do not walk into it unawares!!! Similarly I am not… entirely happy that hexbear.net has a community dedicated to dunking on people (Chapotraphouse; maybe it is therapy for them?), but now that I know that, let them feel free to be however they want, but oh my, please WARN someone before letting them just walk into that hailstorm of comments!!! (which continued for WEEKS after I made some comment about President Biden doing better than I expected in some small matter, long after I stopped responding but my consent to continuing the conversation no longer seemed to matter to them; and then the next week I similarly walked into a lemmygrad.ml post and had the same thing happen)
The very concept of Federation makes that significantly more complicated b/c “we” choose to show that content in “our” spaces, so it is both theirs, and after it comes over, ours too. Fortunately, the site.content_warning in v0.19.4 will allow such warnings to be delivered, though I am not certain how it is implemented (it says prior to showing images or viewing a community, but what about a post from a community? e.g. !memes has a great deal of content that can be… off-putting to people). Note that it says that the warning will only be delivered the first time a user triggers it - though again the details remain to be seen, e.g. will a cookie remember that past a session for the same login?
So I personally would like to see an option “f” added that would use the new site.content_warning ability as/if it rolls out with v0.19.4. Though I have no say in this as a non-member of sh.itjust.works, so I say this only to explain my thoughts in case they were of interest. The tricky part about that might be how to implement it: the temptation would be to do so only in the more “controversial” communities, and yet the admins of lemmy.ml are doing blanket bans among many communities, e.g. !memes, despite people never having commented in them before. So they seem to think that the entire instance is one big community in that respect - or else how can that be justified? - hence the warning should be to anywhere across all of the instance, not just each community, should it not? (and again, whether that is even possible, or if it would have to be applied to each individual community plus all future ones created, remains to be seen)
There is also the site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 to consider - many of the details were not immediately clear to me from that page (is it just images and visiting the community, but what about text-based posts from a community? it says the warning will be delivered the first time a user triggers it, but will a cookie allow that to persist for a user across sessions or need to be re-done each time?), but it does seem a promising avenue to explore.
I liken it to porn - if you enjoy it, then have at it, but at least warn someone prior to it showing up unannounced, or regardless of the fact that it came from elsewhere, people will judge us for having brought it to them. People will ofc complain about being labelled - and fascists will complain the loudest of all (despite their own heavy-handed practices, yet realizing that we actually care about such, it is a tactic that sadly works far more often than it does not) - but honestly it’s just a thing that they could/should do for themselves, akin to how people of consideration will add warning/apology labels for e.g. a long reply to a comment, to let the recipient know that perhaps the read-through may be easier to postpone until a more opportune time for it. And there is nothing preventing them (those people whose content would become labelled) from being included in the process of designing what the precise text of that label would entail? Though if they refuse to participate in good faith then as you suggested, there are ways around dealing with the situation that are just as effective. And maybe the latter solution using tried-and-true methods needs to be done regardless, while the labelling option is still in the experimental stages (especially if the code developers drag their feet making it work in a manner contrary to their philosophy - i.e. they simply remove content that they don’t like, not label it but leave it up, as we are talking about here).
TLDR: opt-in offers maximum friendliness + welcomingness to people and will increase our overall content submissions, whereas out-out turns people away and therefore lowers that.
I did not even know that you were an admin - and would have written a much shorter reply had you not mentioned it - but since you have some ability to influence things for the good of us all, then I thank you for your consideration to actually implement some solution or another to aid with these matters that many of us care so much about: growing & maintaining a healthy Fediverse, even between people with such disparate ideals!:-)
Midwest.social might be another one, though it gets more and more complex b/c they’ve mixed in “leftism” with “being in the midwestern USA”, so a lot of their users and communities there don’t realize what that means, i.e. they think leftism = liberalism as in Bernie Sanders, not = Marxist-Leninist communism except scratch that, outright fascism just using that as a thin veneer to cover their true authoritarianism. And now they hold those users and communities hostage to anyone that would threaten to defederate from them - though they are currently still small(-ish).
Also, you can tell fairly easily when individual users shift over from such an instance to one that is not defederated - the rules they play by on their own instances is one thing, but what they can get away with on other instances is also the very same thing (“my way = the only correct way, and if I have power then I will enforce that, while if you have power than I absolutely dare you to use it”). Hence while defederation solves some issues, it also merely shifts the issues around to have to deal with some other way at some future date… or else as you say we simply allow it to choke the life out of the whole endeavor entirely.
Which is already happening. We who choose to come here tend to forget: there are a whole huge class of people that refuse to use the likes of Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Threads, and even Reddit, b/c they cannot stand “social media”, as it contains such toxicity. Their solution to avoiding such rudeness into their lives is to simply not partake at all. They read books, play games, solve puzzles, touch grass, etc., and since coming to such a place is not fun, they simply… don’t. When I was on Kbin.social, I started recommending the Fediverse to such people irl, b/c it seemed poised to be different than Reddit et al., though now that I have come over to the Lemmy side and experienced firsthand the likes of Chapotraphouse on hexbear.net and anything at all on lemmygrad.ml and now more and more things on lemmy.ml (which I just blocked yesterday), I can no longer in good conscience recommend the Fediverse to people. Like administering your own Linux machine, good experiences can be had, if you put in sufficient effort to curate your experience, but that is not what the vast majority of average people are looking to do.
So we will grow, or we will die. Thus I would be in favor of defederation if that were the only option, though now I think that there are other alternatives to provide a more “opt-in” - rather than mandate an “opt-out” - experience, e.g. as InEnduringGrowStrong suggested elsewhere in this thread, have new user sign-ups automatically block “those” places on the list, and have a bot send them a message about how to remove those blocks if they wish. The site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 is another option to consider heavily - like porn, perhaps we should not be in the business of banning everything, when merely labelling such experiences would be sufficient as to warn users that it is there? (or both:-)
For those of us who read developer code better than PO/PM “english”, indeed code is the documentation, or at least can be. Ofc when the code is thousands of lines long, split between multiple files, interacts with networked resources that you’ve never heard of, sending signals that do who knows what downstream, upstream, sidestream, flipstream, or whatever… yeah documentation can be important too:-). Also when the code is in some other language that you don’t know quite as well.
By “testing” I should clarify that I did not necessarily mean things like user or unit testing - though that stuff has its place too - but rather even more foundational “verify that your code does what it is supposed to do” kind of testing:-). One could argue that that is just straight-up “writing code”, but then too writing documentation could be folded into that as well, e.g. having things like human-readable variable names, Pre & Post conditionals for functions and the like, so it all gets a bit fuzzy here.
And if we are being pedantic, a “quick call?” could save a month or year’s worth of time “writing code”, to ensure that you know what needs / desires to be done. Likewise, updating Jira could save someone else SOO much time, or even yourself down the line when you wonder about something that was never mentioned. So I assume that OP was not taking this all that seriously, and just joking about “yeah, meetings are less fun than writing code”, and we all ofc have to pile on with our further opinions about what’s fun:-).
It’s an extremely bold assumption to make to presume that we even could? Like Ukraine wanting to not be invaded, or Rome wanting to not fall, or someone wanting to not die of cancer, or perhaps the best analogy: never exercising a day in our lives + eating however we feel like in the moment, yet wanting to not suffer the negative consequences of obesity, hardened arteries, etc.
I take the approach of the stoics: we brought this upon ourselves, allowing ourselves to be tricked by the “Don’t be evil” slogan. I do not own Google - I have no stocks in the corporation, they are not running their server code on my machines, they use none of my electricity, I do not own the land they park their buildings upon, etc. - and therefore I have no call in how they choose to go about their business. They chose to enshittify, and I am not offered a say in their choices. Therefore “we” cannot “fix” this. Only they could, and only if they want.
But maybe we can build our own LLMs so that we never need to use Google to search for anything ever again, directly? For now, I use DuckDuckGo whenever I can, Google when I have to, and perhaps most important go directly to the site that I want if possible - e.g. wikipedia, wiktionary, stackoverflow, Reddit if I absolutely must, etc. We lived in a golden era of prosperity when we were allowed to “have things”, but that is over - we did not take care of it properly, and it was taken over from the inside, as it was always going to be, our delusions to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, maybe we can be more realistic about our expectations moving forward.
Do you want to know something that can handle subscripts? And superscripts too? MSO!:-) That’s why it’s hard to replace - it just does so very much, it has solid foundationals, even if like you said every tiny little aspect of it can drive us nuts.
Oh the actual UX is horrible, and ironically I confirm what your colleague said that it used to be better than now. It has suffered from the enshittification process the same as everything else these days in our terminal stages of capitalism. Imagine if there was actually competition! Instead, Microsoft went around purchasing any competing product, and rather than absorb the new features simply remove it from the market - bc one implementation of the evolutionary strategy of survival of the fittest is to be better than others, but a far cheaper move is to simply kill off everything else so that you are all that’s left. In the authoritarian sense that “you’ll take what we offer and like it”, it works, bc people are unwilling or unable to put in the time & effort to do better, with FOSS.
Ironically for an unbloated editor for quick stuff, I use gVim, if I am on my own machine.:-) Wordpad would be good if you have to be on a generic Windows machine though - I think it can even do bulleted lists?
Furthermore, on a Mac the implementation of MSO is even less optimal, especially irt battery. So it’s not even like I “like” it, it just seems the least horrible option available:-(.
That is precisely what I had in mind, yes! Fire 🔥 & Thunder⚡were also both involved, as well as both a sword and a whip, oh and a staff⚕️ … (though some say that it was a mere walking stick), and somehow it involves travelling outside of space and time - you know, it may be best to just listen to the entire tale directly, do you have a moment for that? Ahem:
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton…
A video titled “This Video Will Make You Angry”, by CGP Grey, about how memes evolve in the same manner as living organisms, though in this case those most successful tend to be the ones that engender anger in their target audience.
Do you prefer Reddit or Lemmy?
[Discussion] Let's talk about lemmy.ml
Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful....
Got no time to code (sh.itjust.works)
no really how do we fix this?
we don't talk about powerpoint (mander.xyz)
Fuck Kai Winn
I know it’s been posted before, but I’m rewatching DS9, and man, fuck Kai Winn.
Even stuff that's really important sometimes (lemmy.world)
Mic check (lemmy.world)
Voting in Harmony: A Wisconsin township sets itself apart and has a knack for picking winners (apnews.com)
Since 2000, Harmony voters have sided with the winner in all 13 presidential and gubernatorial races....
School Zone (lemmy.world)
It's offensive, Aragorn (lemmy.world)
Memes live in your brain (youtu.be)
A video titled “This Video Will Make You Angry”, by CGP Grey, about how memes evolve in the same manner as living organisms, though in this case those most successful tend to be the ones that engender anger in their target audience.
Discussion about lemmy.ml admins abusing Fediverse moderation tools (with proof) (lemmy.world)
lemmy.world/post/16211417...