theneverfox
So I went over there to try to hear their side of the story. Some of them are dicks, but in fairness you can barely go 5 comments in without seeing someone pop up tell them how they’re all terrible people
They’re into this weird dialectical idea - everything is in conflict with an opposing force, and they see the workers and landlords as in conflict. (I think it’s ridiculous because the universe doesn’t do things in twos, it does them in ones and many - there’s just people in a crappy system, they’re not opposed to us, they use us as the playing board for their little dominance games against each other)
But the centralization thing is based around a very optimistic “we need to come together and fix our world, and once we do we’ll figure out the step after communism”, not the authoritarian angle people are saying.
They didn’t deny what’s happening in China (which btw, is 100% a capitalistic country - it’s a form of regulated capitalism called “little dragons”, they’re authoritarian, but that’s a quality of their government system, not of their economic system), and they didn’t come to the defense of Mao or Stalin
Their main argument was that the US doesn’t actually care, and is exaggerating the issue with propaganda, which is very fair - every government has done terrible things, and the US is most definitely no exception.
Whataboutism isn’t an argument, but they didn’t push it past explaining why people are saying they’re denying what’s going on over there
When I gave my view that centralization is the great evil, they didn’t really have an answer except dielectrics… This is the part that made me skeptical of the claims against them (which I tried to find, but the source everyone is citing is a guy coming back and saying he changed his mind and couldn’t in good faith separate the artist from the art, and saying the posts were deleted and was pretty vague about what exactly he saw)
Organizations past the scale where the people making decisions don’t know each other have an alignment problem - they’re mostly a flawed meritocracy forced to promote based on metrics. In capitalism, that means there’s a perverse incentive to constantly, slowly push the boundaries of what is acceptable in the course of profit. No one has to be evil for it to do horrible things, humans base their morality off those around them “if I don’t do it, then someone else will”.
I really like the term malloc, the demon of game theory - once anyone starts doing something that benefits them but damages everyone, then everyone needs to do the same just to maintain balance
In a central bureaucracy proposed by Lenin, you can most efficiently distribute resources and better ensure sustainability. But you also introduce a perverse incentive - without capital as the metric, you have the effectiveness with which you serve a need - so the selection pressure is to stretch the truth to the breaking point.
And it’s not like people stop competing, it’s just not about money, it’s about positions of power. It’s a recipe for corruption, and they have no answer to why this same bad design would work if we do it again
Their ideas are a lot like Lenin’s - they have a nice goal and a rosy picture of the future, no practical ideas how to get there except “workers unite”.
BTW, if you read the community manifesto it says nothing about government - it does get very, very weird halfway through. He starts talking about communal possession of women, which is where Marx goes of the deep end
I’m working on an app, and it’s pretty straightforward - you just ask them what communities they have. I’ve got a screen that let’s you browse them (I added in mostly because the server page was too empty), but pawbs still doesn’t know about them
Most apps only connect to one instance at a time, because it’s way more complicated to manage… I’ve got big goals though haha.
It’s not exactly easy though - there’s well over 1k Lemmy instances now, and Lemmy.world federates with around 2k. Through the interconnects you can get kbin magazines if you know about them, but you’d need to use their API if you want to see all of them
And I don’t think Lemmy uses the normal API to federate, and probably pulls every community it knows about - both are very much solvable problems, but there’s more important things to solve first. It’d be nice for users, but ultimately it’d mean more federation, and some servers are having trouble keeping up
Finally, those 1300 instances? The vast majority of them are reporting 1-5 people, but they’ve got plenty of communities - many of them reporting no people and 1 or 2 posts.
If you throw that all at the users, it’ll be almost worthless - you have to filter them. But where do you draw the line? Most of the instances are probably private servers and don’t want too much attention, and what about ones that are just new?
They need to extend the protocol to handle communities better in many ways, but you can’t do that casually.
In the meantime, my app is almost ready to launch, but i was going to do it last night for the next wave of refugees, and everyone else apparently had the same idea.
I tried some out, and they’ve become a lot more polished, while I was going to leave optimization and fancy features for next week. My app wasn’t the fastest or the prettiest anymore… It’s not slow or messy, but I’m not sure I’d pick it. But I can make it faster and a little prettier with another day or two (I’m hoping someone here can give me some style advice after seeing the art here), but more importantly I can also add features that set me apart
So I can do fuzzy searching on your device for communities, so it will search the name, description, and sidebar for words. I can’t do the same for servers - it’s too much data. I need to write something to filter out smaller servers and ones in different languages, and even then I’ll probably be limited to the address and maybe name before it gets slow. I might also have to strip out the servers with closed registration
So you can find servers by name, maybe look through the top 100 and more data on them. Then, I can grab communities on them one server at a time, or I can let you use their search bar to find them by name
I could also take the top 5 or 10 servers, and let you search through the top few dozen communities on each
Hopefully that made sense…
So walk me through how you envision this feature, tell me various ways you think you’d use this, what frustrates you, and I’ll do my best to build it in
I’m also open to whatever other suggestions to what would make Lemmy better for you, practical or not
Huh … Out of curiosity, if as an individual I made something that did it for you, how would you feel about it if I charged a cut, and what percentage would you feel good about? Let’s assume it works through Patreon or something, and I never touch the money directly?
I’m trying to build apps and things that I think would make people’s lives better, and I kind of hate money. I don’t like spending it, I usually don’t like getting it, and I really, really hate asking for it…but I’m quickly draining through my savings, and I think I’d feel better if people were happy to offer it to me because they want to support what I’m doing.
I looked into ads since that would spread a slight annoyance, and I’d keep them subtle and with no tracking, but they kind of suck…I was thinking of ads with a paid option with no ads and little extra features like turning Twitter links to nitter, and clean builds hosted on 3rd party app stores for free for people who care about privacy.
There’s also the subscription option, and I was thinking that was asking a lot, but after reading your post maybe I didn’t factor in the convenience
I’d like to hear your take on all of it
I think everyone donates sometimes, the whole system works because a chunk of the population is like you, and sees the content and immediately feels “I need to support this”
It’s always wild to me when I see fans hounding creators to hurry up and set up a Patreon
No, it’s not free speech until we’re entirely unable to avoid hearing it, we bots stop trying to suppress his speech by calling him an elongated muskrat, and he freely demands payment to be seen by our own subscribers
Someone here doesn’t understand free speech… But only he has a billion dollars, and here in America, our courts discovered that money is actually free speech
We need to come up with a slur for billionaires…
Could be both. Lots of languages have loan words, and they sometimes drift a long ways from the original meaning
Now I’m wondering if it’s a legit language, I hyperfocused on language theory a while back for a speech synthesis project. There’s hard, testable requirements, and a surprising amount of math to it too.
Like pig Latin is a code, not a language, but crows, dolphins, and orcas have full symbolic languages and regional dialects that you can plot on a language tree
UwU has grammar (maybe stricter than English even, anti patterns are language rules too)
Phonemes that make up the various sounds - check. They have a consistent replacement of certain English ones too, as well as shortening of certain words. Which is pretty consistent for a dialect
The only other thing that comes to mind, probably because it’s so wild to me, is that human language has a consistent speed of information transmission across languages. Languages like Spanish and Japanese have more phonemes per unit of information, and so they’re spoken faster. English, being three languages in a trenchcoat, has more sounds and way more words, so you get the same meaning across with a slower transmission speed by having higher information density.
There’s a standard test you can do, it’d be pretty great if someone published a paper on it
I mean technically, if you get blocked, you say that’s BS! I don’t even know what an ad blocker is! And it turns out your son installed it because you shouldn’t let sites in your browser without protection, you’ve felt you were falsely accused, but the accusation wasn’t false.
It could also be read as you feel your falsely accused, and it turns out Google had a bug, you were falsely accused, and you also felt that you were.
This entire thing is being done in an extremely hostile way though… They teach you to use clear, concise, neutral, and non-accusatory language as part of UX best practices. The proper message would be “if you feel this is in error”.
Instead of cutting the video until you turn off your ad blocker (as is the standard and looks a lot better if you), they’re using threatening sounding language and putting it in press releases. Instead of neutral terms, they’re using legalese. Instead of saying you should remove unlock because ad blockers can cause problems (which is technically true, if very misleading), they’re giving people messages saying that it slows down your browser, which is entirely untrue - blocking a dozen requests is cheaper than sending one and reading the response, let alone rendering the ad. The only way it slows down your browser is if chrome sees it in your add ons and starts Bitcoin mining in the background
The whole thing is very strange, especially since historically Google has been pretty delicate with the issue. They’ve blocked the video if the ads don’t show a few times, but quickly backed off when people made a fuss.
They also have been signaling “were going to push ad blockers off chrome” for like a year now, they announced this basically when they started doing it
I guess it’s a new age, where tech companies have given up on even pretending they respect us
The second Internet is dying, long live the fediverse
Here’s my theory - Musk met with trump in 2020, and while it seemed like he started simping for the guy, it actually woke him up to the danger the world is in.
I used to praise him because not because he was a visionary - he’s not. Rather, because he read a lot of sci-fi growing up, and got the public and investors to get excited about important tech for humanity.
He also watches anime, and in Lelouch, a sci-fi anime, Lelouch dethrones the tyrannical emperor, his father. He starts as a populist hero, starting a grassroots resistance. He frees Japan, then works his way to the emperor enthroned in Britain .
He keeps going, taking the last few countries still free from Britannia though incredibly ruthless methods. He takes over the world, and starts to act like a tyrant, uniting the world in hatred against himself. He then arranges his friend, a popular war hero, to very publicly assassinate him
The world is now at peace - he demilitarized it to “secure his rule”. The people are hopeful, they’re finally free from tyranny - but they remember it well. There’s no leaders and they’ll need to organize, but not under an individual.
He became a symbol to take on everyone’s hatred, a powerful reminder of the dangers of giving away authority. And while it seemed like he was destroying everything in his way, everything he did removed threats that would make it harder to build a kinder, better world.
It’s called the zero requiem - and I’ve been joking since Musk was locked into buying Twitter that this is what he’s doing.
But damn if he hasn’t followed that script - not only is he going down along with Twitter, but he managed to convince all the big corporate networks to turn on their users too.
When he announced they would remove blocking it started to be less of a joke, that sounds dumb on every level… But this isn’t just killing the cash cow, this is doing it with explosives so no one can even use the meat. No way no one ran the numbers against metrics and told him just how crazy and stupid this is… He’s weaning the users off Twitter even as he makes it even more user hostile
