Seven years later, Kyle’s argument is that AirSpace has turned into what he now calls Filterworld, a phrase he uses to describe how algorithmic recommendations have become one of the most dominating forces in culture, and as a result, have pushed society to converge on a kind of soulless sameness in its tastes.

Phanpy releases Catch-up, a new easy way to catch up on all the posts you've missed since the last time you logged in. Threads' ActivityPub development continues.

Hello!

I am sunaurus, the head admin of lemm.ee. Ever since I created my instance, I have been following a lot of public and private discussion channels between different parties involved with Lemmy. As I’m sure many others have also noticed, the discussions in such channels sometimes get heated, and in fact recently, I feel like there has been a constant trend in these discussions towards a lot of demands, hostility, negativity, and a general lack of empathy between different participants in the Lemmy network.

I am writing this post for a few reasons:

1. I would like add a bit of positivity by expressing my gratitude towards every single person who has helped improve Lemmy.
2. I want to speak up in defense of different people who have been receiving negativity lately.
3. There are a few false rumors spreading on Lemmy, which I would like to try and counteract with very simple evidence.
4. I want to remind everybody that at the end of the day, all of us care about building and improving Lemmy. We all have the same goal, and it’s too easy to lose sight of that.

I will split up what I want to say in this post by different user groups - users, mods, admins and developers. I understand that many people belong to several (or even all) of these groups, but I just want to highlight the value of, and express my gratitude to each group separately.

Users

At the end of the day, Lemmy would not be worth anything without the users. Users bring Lemmy to life by posting great content, getting involved in discussions in comments, helping surface interesting content for others through voting and even keeping the platform clean through reports. I am extremely thankful for all the users who have given me so much enjoyment on this platform.

I believe that users often get treated unfairly on Lemmy based on what instance they are participating from. I’m sure so many of you have noticed comments around Lemmy along the lines of “Oh, another user from , I’m going to completely ignore your stupid takes”. I’ve also many cases of people treating users as second-class citizen if they are not on the same instance - for example, I’ve seen users who are active and valuable participants in communities on another instance receive comments like “why are you participating in our discussions, go back to your own instance”. In my opinion this is completely counterproductive to the whole idea of federation. On a human level, I can understand it - you’re far more likely to notice or remember what instance somebody is posting from if you have a negative experience. As a result, as time goes by, people tend to develop negative views of each instance, despite potentially having had many positive interactions with other users of those same instances. The message I want to put out here is that instances, especially bigger ones, are not monoliths - do not judge users based on what instance they are browsing Lemmy from, judge them by their actual words and actions.

Mods

There are some excellent communities already on Lemmy, and these communities are all continuously being built up and maintained by mods. Mods put in huge amounts of their free time and energy in order to provide spaces for all Lemmy users. They form the first line of defense against bad actors, they keep communities alive and often receive no praise, only criticism. I am very grateful to everybody who has dedicated time to building communities on Lemmy.

Users rarely notice the lengths mods go to in order to keep communities running smoothly - mods more often than not only get noticed when users disagree with some mod actions. I believe mods deserve a lot better than this. Constructive criticism can of course be useful to improve communities, but it must be balanced with empathy and kindness towards people who have been putting in effort to provide something for users. Remember that there is another human being reading your words when you start writing about the mods of any particular community. Users who are not happy with mods of a certain community always have the opportunity to start their own community and run it as they like.

Admins

Admins provide two main key functions for the network:

1. Taking care of the actual infrastructure of Lemmy
2. Working as a higher level defense against bad actors, in cases where mods are not enough

I can tell from my own experience that being an admin of a bigger instance requires constant energy and attention. I don’t believe that there is a single medium-to-big instance where the admins have not put in hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of their free time, as well as in many cases, probably their own money. This is a service which admins provide for free, and it is necessary in order to keep the Lemmy network healthy. I have endless respect for anybody who is willing to put themselves in the position of a Lemmy admin.

I have seen awful messages towards admins from all the other groups listed here, including other admins. These messages range from condescending and rude, to downright hateful. I have seen admins treated as useless and their work taken for granted. I have seen people getting frustrated with admins for not spending every waking minute on Lemmy. I have seen some users consistently spreading provably false rumors about particular admins in an effort to tarnish their reputation on Lemmy.

Before you take out frustration on admins, please remember that they are also humans who have been working tirelessly to improve Lemmy in their own way.

Also, a reminder: the absolute best feature of Lemmy is that users are free to pick their instance - and as a result, users are also free to pick their admins. Even more than that, users can always become their own admins by spinning up their own instance. Yes, this requires dedication, effort, and research, but that’s exactly my point. It’s not easy running an instance, and mistreating people who do this as a free service is completely unacceptable.

Developers

Lemmy development has been lead by a few key maintainers, with a massive amount of smaller contributors. The software is constantly being improved at a very good pace, and everybody is able to benefit from this effort at no cost whatsoever. I am extremely grateful to everybody who has participated in the development of the Lemmy software, and other related software, as without you folks, none of us would even be here now.

There seems to be a huge amount of people with very little appreciation of the work that has gone into the software. I’m sure many of you have seen countless messages where people express that the devs should be doing more in one way or another. “They should work faster”, “they should prioritize this obviously most important feature”, “they should be available 24/7 to offer support”, etc. I just want to take a moment here and acknowledge what core maintainers have already done for Lemmy:

• Years worth of work on the code itself
• Offering support to the community and other admins
• Reviewing literally thousands of pull requests on GitHub
• Acting fast in stressful situations where the Lemmy network has been overloaded
• Not abandoning the project in the face of constant hateful users
• Sacrificing literally hundreds of thousands of euros in missed salaries which they could have been getting if they were working for a tech company instead of working on Lemmy

I also want to take this moment to discredit some rumors which I have seen repeated too many times:

1. Rumor: Lemmy devs do not accept outside code contributions

This is completely false - the maintainers are completely open to (and even constantly asking for) contributions. When somebody starts contributing, they will receive support and code reviews very quickly. I can tell you that I have experienced this myself several times, but that’s anecdotal, so let me also provide evidence:

a. Contributors list for the Lemmy backend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors

b. Contributors list for Lemmy UI: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/graphs/contributors

Both of these lists include 100 different names, and that’s only because GitHub literally caps these pages to 100 users. Actually, the amount of different contributors is even bigger. If Lemmy devs did not accept and encourage outside contributions, then there would be no way for these lists to be so big.

2. Rumor: Lemmy devs work too slowly

This is an extremely entitled and frankly stupid claim. I try to keep on top of the changes made in the Lemmy repo, and let me tell you, the pace of improvement is very good.

I very firmly believe that if the network started downgrading to Lemmy versions from ~8 months ago, the whole network would just collapse, as none of the instances could keep up with the current volume. That is to say, we have come an extremely long way since last summer alone.

Let me provide some more evidence. Take a look at the Pulse page for the Lemmy backend on GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pulse. As of writing this, Lemmy devs have merged 18 pull requests in the week leading up to this post - that’s an average of 2.5 merged PRs per day. This is extremely good for a project with a small underfunded team.

3. Rumor: Lemmy devs do not prioritize the important issues

There are two sides to this. First of all, there are endless users who turn to the Lemmy devs with what they believe is the most important issue and should immediately be prioritized - the problem is that almost none of these endless users have the same view of what the most important issue actually is! In that sense, it’s literally impossible to please everybody, because everybody wants different things.

On the other hand, even when Lemmy devs do prioritize things which some users have been desperately asking for, I have on several occasions seen a dismissive response along the lines of “too little too late”. Basically, the demands made are often unrealistic and impossible to meet.

If you are somebody who feels like Lemmy devs are not doing enough, I would ask you to please take a step back, look at the actual contributions which they have made, and consider how you yourself would feel if after making such a massive contribution, you would still need to listen to countless strangers on the internet tell you how you’re not good enough in their opinion.

Conclusion

Lastly, I am very thankful to anybody who took the time to read to the end of this post. Again, my goal is to try and defuse some of the hostility, as well as to put out a message of gratitude and positivity. I am very interested in the success of Lemmy as a whole, and that is much easier to achieve and maintain if we all work together. Thank you, I hope you're doing well, and have a nice weekend!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12904730

It seems they’re not far from finishing and have the first few chapters up for early access and feedback. It could be the go to text for learning the protocol.

Highlighting the recent report of users and admins being unable to delete images, and how Trust & Safety tooling is currently lacking.

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623718

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713

I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.

Announcement of an Open Science Network. NodeBB joins the fediverse.

Anyone aware of a conversations fork with support for unified push notifications? Or a similar xmpp android app with omemo (just the same as conversations' support) and unified push notifications support, available through the official f-droid repor or a f-droid repo if not available from the official ones?

BTW, I noticed !xmpp@lemmy.ml community was locked. Any particular reason for that?

Also, Converstions requests to set unrestricted use of battery, to use battery under background without restrictions. So it seems unified push notifications would help, though this github issue sort of indicates unified push notifications wouldn't help, so it just tells me there's no intention to include support for it on Conversations, but not that it wouldn't help save battery.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/5772572

The current state of moderation across various online communities, especially on platforms like Reddit, has been a topic of much debate and dissatisfaction. Users have voiced concerns over issues such as moderator rudeness, abuse, bias, and a failure to adhere to their own guidelines. Moreover, many communities suffer from a lack of active moderation, as moderators often disengage due to the overwhelming demands of what essentially amounts to an unpaid, full-time job. This has led to a reliance on automated moderation tools and restrictions on user actions, which can stifle community engagement and growth.

In light of these challenges, it's time to explore alternative models of community moderation that can distribute responsibilities more equitably among users, reduce moderator burnout, and improve overall community health. One promising approach is the implementation of a trust level system, similar to that used by Discourse. Such a system rewards users for positive contributions and active participation by gradually increasing their privileges and responsibilities within the community. This not only incentivizes constructive behavior but also allows for a more organic and scalable form of moderation.

Key features of a trust level system include:

• Sandboxing New Users: Initially limiting the actions new users can take to prevent accidental harm to themselves or the community.
• Gradual Privilege Escalation: Allowing users to earn more rights over time, such as the ability to post pictures, edit wikis, or moderate discussions, based on their contributions and behavior.
• Federated Reputation: Considering the integration of federated reputation systems, where users can carry over their trust levels from one community to another, encouraging cross-community engagement and trust.

Implementing a trust level system could significantly alleviate the current strains on moderators and create a more welcoming and self-sustaining community environment. It encourages users to be more active and responsible members of their communities, knowing that their efforts will be recognized and rewarded. Moreover, it reduces the reliance on a small group of moderators, distributing moderation tasks across a wider base of engaged and trusted users.

For communities within the Fediverse, adopting a trust level system could mark a significant step forward in how we think about and manage online interactions. It offers a path toward more democratic and self-regulating communities, where moderation is not a burden shouldered by the few but a shared responsibility of the many.

As we continue to navigate the complexities of online community management, it's clear that innovative approaches like trust level systems could hold the key to creating more inclusive, respectful, and engaging spaces for everyone.

Related

• Grant users privileges based on activity level
• Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
• Federated Reputation

If Stack Overflow taught us anything, it's that

"people will do anything for fake internet points"

Source: Five years ago, Stack Overflow launched. Then, a miracle occurred.

Ever noticed how people online will jump through hoops, climb mountains, and even summon the powers of ancient memes just to earn some fake digital points? It's a wild world out there in the realm of social media, where karma reigns supreme and gamification is the name of the game.

But what if we could harness this insatiable thirst for validation and turn it into something truly magnificent? Imagine a social media platform where an army of monkeys tirelessly tags every post with precision and dedication, all in the pursuit of those elusive internet points. A digital utopia where every meme is neatly categorized, every cat video is meticulously labeled, and every shitpost is lovingly sorted into its own little corner of the internet.

Reddit tried this strategy to increase their content quantity, but alas, the monkeys got a little too excited and flooded the place with reposts and low-effort bananas. Stack Overflow, on the other hand, employed their chimp overlords for moderation and quality control, but the little guys got a bit too overzealous and started scaring away all the newbies with their stern glares and downvote-happy paws.

But fear not, my friends! For we shall learn from the mistakes of our primate predecessors and strike the perfect balance between order and chaos, between curation and creativity. With a leaderboard showcasing the top users per day, week, month, and year, the competition would be fierce, but not too fierce. Who wouldn't want to be crowned the Tagging Champion of the Month or the Sultan of Sorting? The drive for recognition combined with the power of gamification could revolutionize content curation as we know it, without sacrificing the essence of what makes social media so delightfully weird and wonderful.

And the benefits? Oh, they're endless! Imagine a social media landscape where every piece of content is perfectly tagged, allowing users to navigate without fear of stumbling upon triggering or phobia-inducing material. This proactive approach can help users avoid inadvertently coming across content that triggers phobias, traumatic events, or other sensitive topics. It's like a digital safe haven where you can frolic through memes and cat videos without a care in the world, all while basking in the glory of a well-organized and properly tagged online paradise.

So next time you see someone going to great lengths for those fake internet points, just remember - they might just be part of the Great Monkey Tagging Army, working tirelessly to make your online experience safer, more enjoyable, and infinitely more entertaining. Embrace the madness, my friends, for in the chaos lies true innovation! But not too much chaos, mind you – just the right amount to keep things interesting.

Related

• Post Tags
• Advanced Search and Tag Filtering
• Filter for Hiding Unwanted Content
• Comprehensive Tagging System
• Post tags
• Request for Comments: Flexible Tag System
• Booru-Style Image View, Search and Tagging by Users
• Grant users privileges based on activity level

Just wanted to share this interview we just put out with Jaz Michael-King, the guy that founded IFTAS. They're doing some really wild stuff trying to wrangle in harassment, spam, objectionable content, and CSAM, and are looking to provide tooling for the Fediverse, as well as trauma resources and training for moderators.

Really fascinating interview, I learned a lot by talking to him.

Interesting thread that summarizes it well.

https://disroot.org provides several decentralized federated services, as email and xmpp, besides other cloud services as well... But not sure if asking here is right or not, but don't know anywhere to ask either...

Is it having a license issue, does anyone know about it? Any status updates?

Websites prove their identity via certificates. LibreWolf does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for disroot.org. The certificate is only valid for p1lg502277.dc01.its.hpecorp.net.
 
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

But also:

disroot.org has a security policy called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which means that LibreWolf can only connect to it securely. You can’t add an exception to visit this site.

The issue is most likely with the website, and there is nothing you can do to resolve it. You can notify the website’s administrator about the problem.

I also tested with ungoogled chromium and pretty similar thing...

Anyonea aware, and also about disroot saying on this?

Edit (sort of understood already, no issue with disroot at all): The issue only shows up under the office VPN. It seems like disroot is not recognizing the office's cert...

Edit: Solved. Yes it's the office replacing the original cert with its own, as someone suggested. Thanks to all.

Point A: There is a lot of trolling on weekends here on Lemmy, it's pretty blatent. It usually starts on Friday and lasts through Sunday morning.

Point B back history: I posted something in Lemmy.world on fediverse pointing out some weird half deletes or a kind of shadow banning. The admin started trolling me and now I'm banned from there. I could use another alt, but I don't really want to be there anymore anyway, I left Reddit abuse for a reason. But it got me to thinking about what they're doing over there.

My partner was thinking about joining lemmy.world a week after I did, which was at the great escape from reddit time, and my partner said it seems like they're advertising to get more people. Now that I'm banned from there and most of the communities are on there, most people can't see what I comment on. It's a lot of control of what's being seen. We don't know who runs these instances, it could be anyone or any corporation.

Point B, the trolling: Occasionally I post on world by accident or just need to type something out, lol, and I came across this thread.

Comparisons, with no person blocks (hopefully world doesn't change these threads, screenshotted in case):

https://lemmy.world/post/12424866?scrollToComments=true

https://sh.itjust.works/post/15188582

One is straight up reddit trolling, Russian style. The other has a bit of trolling, but nowhere near.

Conclusion: I know it seems like I'm picking on world, but it could happen to any instance. Also, I'm not seeing the trolling from shitjustworks either, is there a policy that extreme negatives are banned here? World is the one I've noticed it on, there could be more (or not). Just be aware and think about trying other instances occasionally.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12409937

I know there are a ton of iOS apps for Lemmy. But what are they missing? What experiences would you like? It could be quality of life or big and ambitious features Many of you often have really good ideas and feedback, I’m looking forward to responses.

This sounds like something Lemmy would also really benefit from.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/10361406