Compassion >~ Thought

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2024

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  • An intriguing idea. It would include a link for attribution ofc. I am not certain bc it would depend on what people mean when they say that they want it “embedded”.

    Right now I click once on the preview and it opens it in Loops. Or if I see there are comments I click that, then a second click opens it in Loops. None of which is hard? It does get annoying when going to the post to see the comments makes the browser forget where I was at on the Community page and I have to change the specified sort from the default of Hot to New again - so if I remember then I’ll open the comments in a new tab, but that’s again a barrier to contend with. But a bot showing the video wouldn’t remove THAT barrier, only the one going forward to the actual Loops page, which is already not much of a barrier (I think?).

    So are people wanting to see these videos in like Tile mode, so they can watch one after the other, without having to leave the sorted Community menu? In that case, I suppose they/we could get a Loops app, which should be easier now that there’s an Android version (though waiting for a new account to be approved may still have a delay, perhaps? iirc I saw comments to that effect in dansup’s Android app announcement on Mastodon). If this is the case, then the only thing that would help with that will be a full integration into the front-end code of Lemmy. If you were interested in that, two suggestions to start with could be taking a look at how PieFed does its YouTube embedding - it seems similar? Also Admiral Patrick has done that in Tesseract (as e.g. implemented in dubvee.org) as well. Ofc that’s a different style of programming and you may not be interested, so no judgement if not, just sharing thoughts here.

    But if THAT is what people are wanting, then will a bot putting it into the comments be sufficient? If it took you 2 months to make the bot, and then in 2 more months the front-end embed came out, would you feel that you had wasted your time? But maybe it’s rather the work of 1 day?

    Sorry, I wish I were or more help here, but hopefully laying these thoughts out like this could be of some use? Perhaps if you want it but aren’t suitable with the coding language you could write a post asking someone to do the embedding for you - people may have thought about doing so already, but asking them may help them see a higher prioritization in that?


  • For me, the highs are higher here. The lows are lower, but also they are “labelled” i.e. if you block the big 3 tankie instances then your experiences on the Fediverse are improved >99%. That in turn affects the average person’s experience - depending on which of these have been defederated already or not yet, from a particular instance (e.g. Lemmy.World defederated from hexbear early on, but neither StarTrek.Website nor Discuss.Online that I have been on did so, until very recently).

    On Reddit, my every experience was one of snarky comebacks as if attempting to talk with a(n emotional) toddler. I’m not kidding when I say that I simply gave up, and after reading this essay that put into words the thoughts I had already started thinking on my own, I made the decision to leave. Not to come to Lemmy mind you, but to leave Reddit, even if that meant not using any social media at all. I’m sure there are good, solid subs there. But browsing by r/popular and a few more niche subs like r/OnePlus and some gaming ones, I wasn’t enjoying my time.

    Here I at least enjoy !TenForward@lemmy.world :-). And there are a few people who are actually nice here, who I stick around in order to converse with occasionally. I never found that happening on Reddit (earlier Reddit was different, but towards the end it had managed to chase away so very many, and/or convert most people into mere lurkers - including many of us here who have gone from lurking on Reddit to posting or at least commenting here), but the fact that that happens sometimes here is a huge bonus, IMHO.

    And again, the tankie instances can be filtered, making the overall average experience much more pleasant. It does generally take some effort to curate your experience though - e.g. I can only name 3 instances that are defederated from lemmy.ml. Anyway, importantly, when I say that the average experience is better here than Reddit, I mean having excluded that one. Otherwise… the comparison is not nearly so simple (but probably involves higher highs, higher lows, and an overall similar experience to Reddit, unless you include also hexbear or Lemmygrad and then it’s MUCH worse here - e.g. they constantly make fun of Western nations, and who enjoys being made fun of?).


  • I like !tenforward@lemmy.world and the newly created !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com, both often feature OC - not exclusively but being kinda known for a preference and offering of such. Maybe !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world too, but it’s far less active.

    But if people want to offer content, they will. Except often the environment is not welcoming, so it’s a bit of a cache-22 needing solid moderation first, but needing solid content even first-er, which leads to super power mods who know how having to do most of the mod work.

    It’s not easy, but we do seem to be growing, even as it looks like from the count of actual people we’re probably shrinking just a tiny bit, though those here are more active. Mostly in comments rather than posts.






  • PieFed already has such Categories of Communities, it’s a really nice feature. PieFed has a lot of such things actually - like hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without requiring admin approval, YouTube embeds, etc.

    Unfortunately PieFed is not quite ready for the masses as its more foundational features aren’t finished yet, like much of the times a Notification won’t point to whatever caused it for whatever reason, and it lacks user tagging, and search options.

    But it’s nice to see these kinds of features functional already!:-)


  • We have a toxicity problem here. Reddit’s is far worse but it’s also a far larger platform, which compensates somewhat. Enhancing the effectiveness of moderation tools may help.

    SO MANY people comment here sth like “I’d post that but people are so mean”. It’s really hard to please everyone, especially those who love and those who despise toxicity in the same space, and all the more so with tools that barely function.



  • Hint: it very much is - all the way up and down the scale, from why Reddit’s search function sucks ass and subs are only allowed to have 2 pinned posts that cannot be edited by a mod team - why promote listening when talking is what makes more ad revenue? - to making it harder to read a sub’s ruleset prior to posting, anything that would be a barrier to showing another advertisement to a lager group of people gets smoothed over, while things that promote human interaction and peace of mind get forgotten along the way :-(.



  • It looks like if you can somehow get the video file URL (Andrew’s reply to a different comment in this post) it works? So the trick could be to get that, to streamline the whole process.

    Edit: oh but I guess that leaves a lot out - the username, the little comment, the hearts or whatever they are (I don’t have an account), and the comments. Like embedding a YouTube video, it would need to provide a link to the full package as well as the video itself as just a preview.


  • It definitely could go either way.

    The toxicity needs to be discussed in order to deal, but what is the real benefit of doing that at the per-user level? To make a cross-instance blacklist? The affected users would just create an alt, plus what is “toxic” to some (“I want women to not be treated as people” is the epitome of grace and class to others - someFUCKINGhow?!).

    A complicating factor is that currently, moderator reports aren’t even federated across instances, and that won’t be added until at least 0.20 as Nutomic put onto the Lemmy Roadmap. Not that it should either hinder or accelerate the need for such a community, just that it seems tangentially related?

    I keep coming back to the idea of porn: should it not exist (no, I mean yes, I mean it should not be entirely banned, studies show that banning it at least correlates if not actually contributes to causing actual irl physical violence), or can it simply be labeled properly? The problem being that while the Fediverse does an excellent job of labeling NSFW content (and PieFed even adds a new category, on top of NSFW, for “gore”), it fails miserably at labeling most other things - e.g. you cannot criticize Russia, China, or North Korea on the infamous “community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”, which how would the latter have in any way implied the former, in its wording?

    Making porn be “opt-in” makes it safe to visit the Fediverse even at work, without fear of being part of the company’s “cost savings plan” (at least due to such a reason as this, assuming they even need a reason at all). Failing to label toxic users as toxic allows them to mix in amongst all the other users, with no distinction offered except to allow or deny, at which point the moderation requires effort to perform that task. Unless we try other ways?


  • it’s specifically targeted towards the people I’m addressing

    (1) That is not your call to make; (2) when people voted for Trump, was that solely their personal choice, or something that affects us all?; (3) when other people read toxic comments, it makes them feel unwelcomed, and entices the more introverted people, and those less desiring of controversy, to lurk rather than engage in productive conversations. Like a shadow in a forest that chokes out growth of the grass beneath it - why would you want to act in such a manner? Note I am not talking about those you are responding to, but the others watching that you don’t even think about at all.

    You seem to expect others to treat you “fairly”. Well then, treat them even BETTER than you expect of them! They will not always return the favor, but your conscience at least will be clear.

    Mods “own” their communities. Make your own, and then you’ll see how much hard work it is. Why go around making work harder for people who are trying to help? Please don’t answer this btw, b/c you aren’t there yet where I would accept any answer that you offer. Instead, just think about it?

    If a mod bans me from his communities, I just see their reasoning, which may or may not be bullshit. I don’t see the context that sparked that reaction.

    Both Blaze and I have mentioned how that is not true - well, it probably is on Mbin (unless there’s a way and it is simply that none of us here don’t know it?), but on an instance running any semi-recent version of Lemmy it’s quite easy to find out.

    You are feeling frustrated - I get it. So what: that’s no excuse to go around slinging insults at everyone left and right. Be better. Or expect to get banned - that’s just what happens, sure as night follows day, bans follow insults hurled directly at the admins/mods, surely that’s not too difficult for anyone to understand. Nobody “owes” you anything. Though I have tried to offer these explanations here.

    Also, I did not click it but the screenshots can also take you to your account’s entire moderation history, which would include a temporary ban having been lifted.

    Here I can’t even make an appeal, I just have to take it.

    Yeah that one is fair - we really need a procedure to handle appeals or at least communications. A lot of your bans come from “DM abuse”, which could mean anywhere up from you sending gore pics to the mods/admins or down to just sending them a bunch of requests that they are simply tired of receiving. A modmail shared between the entire mod team would be perfection! One day… one day it may come, but this software is still fairly early in its development.

    I can’t speak for the current state of Reddit, I left during the big protests so maybe the current conflict in Israel & Palestine had similar effects there

    I can all but guarantee that, plus seeing the state of Reddit as we left it, I would (naively) guess that it would have FAR more restrictions on what you can or cannot say than here, currently. But if you want to do a proper comparison between Lemmy vs. Reddit, you’d have to go there and look to find out? Simply claiming that Lemmy is worse than Reddit is insufficient to prove your point - especially when you are using Mbin that is quite a bit behind in its development compared to Lemmy, which has been around for a lot longer and so has a more fully-fleshed out feature set.

    I’ve seen so many calls for violence and genocide

    Sigh… yeah.:-( I hear that so hard, and yes I’ve definitely seen it. But calling them names like “dumb baby” isn’t going to help matters any. If use of that language offends you, maybe try blocking it, including that whole entire community? But if you call people names, then people will block YOU, and mods remove your comments and ban you from their instances when you inappropriately try to DM them to find out why (honestly I’m not sure what this means there - see aforementioned aspect of a missing modmail - that’s again more up to them to decide).

    If he bans me for calling out people who do, then I can only assume that he’s of the same mindset

    I’ve already responded to this: no there are many other reasons for him to remove your comment. Your comment is abusive.

    [about creating your own community] Hell no.

    Okay then. But you can only control yourself, not others, so you either play by “their” rules, or make your own space, or else I guess you can feel saddened by it all? But you CANNOT just abuse other people, and expect to get away with it. You will be blocked and banned, as you are seeing happening. If you are okay with that, then all is well, but in case you are not, I tried to explain some things here that might help.


  • Sorry to be unclear though: I did not mean that I ignore those users but that I choose to ignore those labels on the users. They aren’t ready to be used to ignore people yet - if ever that day may come.

    If it helps to go deeper: imagine the following scenario. A moderator is tasked by a community to uphold certain standards, like let’s say it’s an “art” community and some people very much dislike AI, while others like AI. Having a label (e.g. PieFed allows people to place “hashtags” onto posts - Mbin can do this too but I forget if that’s just when federating with Mastodon or if it can also do it for Lemmy as well) allows the people who strongly dislike AI to not have to receive such. By placing the decision away from the moderator into the hands of the individual users to set up their block lists, this represents a “democratization of moderation”. Power to the people! Why would that be bad?

    An example I more commonly use is porn: should it be removed, or allowed? Moderators can only do either one or the other - never both. Whereas if there is a label, rigidly applied, the end-user can switch it on or off at will, even while at work without fear of losing their jobs.

    But back to the democratization issue: the idea is that “moderation” is an authoritarian-style concept, where the Power (like shit) flows downhill. In contrast, allowing the voters to carry the day is democracy in action.

    And as such, it can be abused - e.g. if people could create 1000 accounts, and thereby have 1000x the voting power of a common singular person, or even just 2-5 accounts and thereby have 2-5 the power of 1. All the benefits, and all the detractions too, of democracy, applied to Lemmy.

    But we can also have the best of both worlds: moderation and user-defined thresholds to show vs. not show certain content. If I want to see more contenious content, I can relax the thresholds, or even get rid of them entirely (as I actually have done), but if someone else chooses to curate their view more tightly, then why would I judge them?

    One potential reason for the latter is when people duplicate content, b/c they don’t see each other’s. Thus, the “label” concept shows through even more clearly there: what if instead of “showing” vs. “not showing” content, we could have a whole entire spectrum like “here’s content we think you’ll REALLY like”, “here’s some other content that, fair warning, you’ve not much enjoyed in the past”, and also “here’s other content that, whoops no you aren’t allowed to even see this b/c it’s gone at the moderator’s behest”. Since 3 > 2, and choice > no choice, hence isn’t labeling “better”?

    I honestly do not know. But it’s a grand experiment to find out, nonetheless!:-)

    The scenario you described though, might just need a schism to form 2 separate (sub-?) communities. Btw, not to toot its horn too awfully loudly, but PieFed also has “categories of communities”, so that if they both were placed into the same overall Category, people wouldn’t even have to so much notice precisely which Community the content was in, except when posting. And side-note: that also dramatically speeds up the onboarding of a new account: you can simply subscribe to “Memes” for instance, rather than each community individually, although you can always leave individual ones - such as memes@lemmy.ml, for political extremism - at anytime later, or subscribe to new ones.

    And ask for commenting rather than merely voting: that much I agree - and at that point, why bother with the downvote even? Also, if a conversation should be happening, then shouldn’t it rather be UP-voted, for relevance rather than “I (dis-)like this”?

    Which reveals one trouble with voting: not only did it used to mean (I am told, though I was admittedly not on Reddit myself yet at the time) that “this content is less relevant”, but moreover, some people think that, while others simply use it as a “Like” button. The discrepancy between those two uses causes confusion - as you say there are conversations that should happen, yet they keep getting buried by using the “dislike” button (or worse, mod removal that likewise can be used to suppress dissenting viewpoints rather than content that is truly not worth seeing).

    So I am not sure that I agree with you in all aspects. But I am upvoting your comment for relevance all the same:-).


  • I’m still trying to figure out the other comment - I wrote out a long one but it won’t let me send it, and anyway people don’t want to read that much. So just responding to this one here:

    DON’T do that. You are better than this. Nobody “makes” you do anything.

    Also, you lead by example, not by arguing at people.

    A few days ago I took a break from social media. It was… much more difficult than I expected, even for just one day. That dopamine addiction is real yo. Be careful. When I say that you might want to take a break, I don’t mean that bc I actively want to shame you or whatever, but bc I legitimately think it may help. When you return, you will have a different focus - it will be fun again. Make sure to do something else in the meantime, like read books, touch grass, converse more with people irl. You won’t regret it - at least, I never do whenever I’ve tried. Use social media - don’t let it use you.


  • Isn’t slrpnk.net an anarchist instance? Or at least db0 seemed to think that it was, and I would believe that he would know more about such than I. So if it is not merely allowing but advocating for fewer restrictions about what can or cannot be posted, leaving the end-users to have to make their own decisions about valuation judgements, then that would not surprise me so much? As in, it’s not that the design of the places desires such content, so much as it makes it feel welcomed alongside everything else.

    100% of the times I’ve told peple that I use Lemmy I have come to later regret it. A Nazi bar - or in this case the leftist equivalent - is not something that generally speaking, one should advertise as desiring to go to. And it would seem that we very much spread the messages of the Alt-Left here, giving such content a pass b/c while “Alt-Right = bad, surely the opposite cannot also be bad?”, i.e. “I sure hope that these leopards don’t eat my face off?!”

    Yet as you say, what is the alternative - Reddit? PieFed isn’t ready for the masses, though I am so happy that you are helping to get it closer to being thus:-). In the meantime, there is also dubvee.org to consider, even though it’s marketed for a specific region inside the USA, it does a helluvalot to kick out tankies. Or, while I need to switch over to a standard Lemmy instance for so many things (to search for content, or find specific comments in a post that I just can’t easily do on PieFed), PieFed is getting halfway usable already on a daily basis (again, not fully, but for many tasks).

    It makes sense to me why Lemmy got that funding: it was first. The early bird gets the worm, that’s just how it is. Lemmy.World admins expressed a muted desire to potentially switch to another non-Lemmy software - Sublinks, although that project hasn’t seen many updates in the last half a year? - and they may consider switching to PieFed as well. Or considering how many people seem to want to leave it, an exodus may happen naturally. In any case, it’s simply not time for that yet, b/c there are so very many problems with the implementation atm - indeed it is earlier in its development cycle than Lemmy, with fewer resources to help speed it along too.

    Otoh, PieFed is in a language that more people know, and so if more people contribute as you have, it could easily catch up and even surpass Lemmy! (that uses Rust, which is reputedly significantly harder to learn even for people who already know C++)

    In any case, kudos for choosing to be a contributor - we all like to hear that!:-) There is no reason for Lemmy to disappear entirely, and rather it’s fantastic to have additional choices for a user to consider when we can see both of them fully functional side-by-side and pick what we think will work best for our own needs:-).


  • It’s a bit of a juxtaposition when you’re faced with repercussions for not agreeing with the “hivemind” or bubble or whatever.

    Believe me, I KNOW that feeling - I have made posts that are among some of the most heavily-downvoted in an entire community’s history:-).

    Yeah in that case, downvoting AND commenting is fine. I didn’t want to be too long-winded (although I did type up a MUCH longer reply, but then I deleted it all in favor of the above simplicity:-), but definitely there are cases where downvoting is appropriate: e.g. what about polls that say like “upvote if you agree, downvote if you disagree” - voting is mere participation there, not a sign of unfriendliness? And in Reddit there were certain communities where the voting metrics were SUPPOSED to be flipped from the norm.

    In general many downvotes means that you might not be a “fit” for what the community is trying to do? I dunno.

    because I know full well that its all the people who feel addressed by that comment.

    Not necessarily - some people may even agree with you, but not like the language (especially more puritanical folks), or some may prioritize the process over content, like react to your tone over your statement, or whatever.

    as a user, you don’t even know what happens to your comments or bans, unless you specifically look for it

    But that’s what I am trying to tell you: perhaps it is that way on Mbin, but it has not been that way for people on Lemmy for months now. Well, tbf it is for those on Lemmy.World that is still running 0.19.3. This information is now ONE SINGLE CLICK AWAY when you are at the comment. I’ll try to see if I can dig up an example, though it will come from one of my Lemmy alts.

    Anyway, do as you want, I guess I was saying that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but I don’t want to actually tell you what to do, just provide that as a thought so that you don’t feel so powerless: YOU can control what OTHERS think, to some degree, by altering HOW you state something. It’s a thought to consider anyway (e.g., did I just encourage you to think that, by stating it like that?:-).