Googleproof

joined 1 year ago
[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

You're still right, though - talking about closest planet on average isn't very useful, because it's always going to be the closest planet to the sun. Asking "what planet can get closest to some [Planet]" is more interesting and enlightening.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Aye, it seems like a dumb thing to say out loud rather than just do. That said, they've been saying a lot of dumb things lately.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I had that issue to start, and changed my profile settings to type: subscribed, sort type: hot, and that made it much faster. Of course ymmv due to what you're subscribed to.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Spez is a symptom of reddit's problem, not the problem itself. Put someone in who wants to help the users more than the investors, and the investors will just kick them out. Which is why I'm more sympathetic to the Marxists around here.

So far as a ban list goes, it's better to be hard-coded than a database call for performance reasons, and if it stops 95% of bad actors, that'd be a good thing. Problem is that it won't, they'll find a way around the regex. So yeah, this is something that should be handled by mods or communities.

It provides a minor inconvenience to people wanting to set up alt-right instances, and makes them feel unwelcome, so maybe that's enough to justify it's existence.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I can get their desire to vet users before they can join their instance, but for me (and I suspect a lot of other people who are just starting with Lemmy, or just shy people) the effort of making a social interaction with a stranger was enough of a turn off that I went elsewhere. Beehaw still seems nice, I may still make an account there at some point. But, to figure out if a place suits me, first I lurk, then I engage by voting, then I engage by commenting, and eventually I may eventually post. I get applications, but they feel intrusive to how I use the internet.

I also get why they defederated, frankly there’s a tonne of low effort from the big new instances. However, everyone should expect low effort right now because users are antsy from having left reddit, and the low effort posts are the anxious laughter of people new to the party who don’t know anyone yet. So the defederation isn’t a good look, and will cause bad feeling with and within beehaw, so their mods have my sympathy. Better to have enabled downvoting and let the community handle the low effort posts.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Point on reddit being likely to shy away from NSFW stuff as much as it can. One day, there will be a mainstream advertiser that goes for an "edgy" brand image and allow for their ads on to appear on porn, and then all hell is going to break loose. I look forward to that day.

I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone who has dealt with moderating NSFW subs. Also the more sfw ones, like r/sex or r/bdsmcommunity, where they raise the hackles of conservatives in the US, but don't constitute as porn.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So far so good - sh.itjust.works was showing off a solid looking infrastructure (which is so far seamless), so I joined there.

It feels a lot like 2010 era reddit in terms of content, with a whole bunch of people trying to resurrect memes and communities that grew up organically on reddit. I'm not sure if it'll work that way, because there's a natural difference in userbase, but best of luck to them. I worry that the difficulty of getting NSFW content online is going to give reddit a perpetual competitive edge, but totally appreciate the legal/moral difficulties wherein.

It took a bit to figure out how to sub to new communities, and along with a lot of other newbs, I'm hoping that that's something that can be tightened up. Like, a browser extension or something that could recognise you're logged into some instance, and then create a subscribe link on the page rather than the weird copy-paste-into-searchbar dance that seems to be the standard at the moment.

Overall, great to see that this works and grows. My thanks to the instance hosts and mods.

[–] Googleproof@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I'm still using it because old.reddit.com still works, and until it doesn't, I probably will. That said, I'd rather the fediverse thrive than the increasingly corporate-beholden reddit does, so I'll favour what sparse engagement I make to a lemmy instance first.

I think what's hardest to replace from reddit is the absolutely monstrous archive of posts and discussions, which seems to be a bit of a two-edged sword for them (if the official statements are to be believed) - it costs a tonne in hosting, but makes them the most relevant source for real human discourse. This needs to be handled better, and ideally I'd want to see:

  • Some sort of archive.reddit.com. Minimal, flat html, ideally anonymised as much as computer-ly possible to help with the inevitable privacy issues this would raise.
  • Some sort of mobile.old.reddit.com, as they seem incapable of making an app without bloaty (both visual and bandwidth wise) "features". Call me a boomer, but if I can do something without a specific app, I would rather do it that way.
  • Separate i.reddit.com and v.reddit.com into different companies from the main reddit, reddit should be link aggregation and discussion, content hosting seems like a costly thing to try and monopolise.
  • If it really costs so much to run the APIs, I'd rather see more user-based rate limiting than price gouging to discourage bad actors. I do not think that is why they are price gouging, but am trying to assume good faith on their part for discussions' sake.

I know I'm an idiot, and some of these are possibly already done and I just haven't looked hard enough, probably some are impossible for obvious reasons I haven't seen. Though even if reddit as a company turned around and tried to become a curator of the discussions it holds rather than milk it's current audience dry with ads, I'd still rather see lemmy out-compete it. Protocol > Platform.