Kio estas la verdo?

I don’t think anyone doubts that Jesus was a historical figure?

Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure, and the idea that Jesus was a mythical figure has been consistently rejected by the scholarly consensus as a fringe theory.

-source: Wikipedia Historical Jesus

But anyway I mostly agree with you. “Heroes” are something that cultures invent to lift up whatever it is that in that moment they want to espouse as being good. I wanted to make a point referencing the enormous differences in which people or quotes get mentioned & encouraged now vs. a year ago by political leaders in the USA, but that would run afoul of Rule 8 in this community so we’ll have to keep it superficial: what gets remembered over time is what is beneficial to cultures to want to remember.

Which makes Jesus an extremely pivotal point in history, e.g. overturning millennia of oppression of women (“husbands, submit yourselves to your wives…” - and vice versa too, so a more equal partnership even among differing roles like care-giver and bread-winner), which of course was spread along with Rome as its technology (e.g. roads & waterworks) also spread.

Worse, I find that Lemmy typically (vastly) under-delivers what was promised even. Like for many years people were promised the capability to do personal “instance blocking”, and for a long time after the Rexodus there were calls to avoid defederating places like lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml or even hexbear.net, because that feature was “coming soon^™”.

Then when that change did finally come, it only muted communities on that instance yet still left users to be able to reply in other communities, plus they could still vote on and thereby influence your content (hexbear is KNOWN for its brigading tactics). And then a subsequent bugfix opened it up still further to allow such “blocked” users the capability to send you a private DM, even pinging you with notifications - which on Lemmy (highly unlike PieFed) there is no way to stop that, even for WEEKs and WEEKs after you stop engaging… your consent to selectively stop such incoming pings does not matter, realistically (technically you could block every single person from an instance, one-by-one… but even there, you would have to bot that or do it the extremely tedious manual way, as the software provides no tools to aid with that). PieFed has offered the ability to block all users from an instance for over a year now.

The only counter-argument to the above is that software - especially FOSS (although Lemmy devs even get paid?!?) - takes time to develop. Which makes things like the bugs and inefficiencies that remain in Lemmy for years and years all the more disheartening. And then here comes PieFed, running around Lemmy in circles, it is almost no comparison at all.

And then I’m sure that I do not need to list out the rather LONG list of features that PieFed offers that aids community discovery - it’s quite amazing to see actually:-). PieFed is a game-changer for the Threadiverse, and might just keep it alive whereas it would otherwise have either died off or at least remained in obscurity forever known as a mere linux (& politics) forum. As things keep moving forward though, I think one day it could rival BlueSky, at least in terms of features offered, though whether a non-profit FOSS could ever overcome the strong network effect will remain to be seen… For that I think we would need a modmail, definitely notification upon content removal, perhaps better searching capability, maybe better modlog access, but not much else? (& 3rd party apps catching up to offer its features but that is not PieFed’s work anymore, now that so much has been exposed in the APIs)

Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power,

Btw, the minimum safe distance to stand from a nuclear destination is six feet. Also, it’s safe to microwave aluminum, and to eat razor blades in your pizza.

Hrm, somehow what this guy is saying does not match my experiences with AI… oh well, I’m sure it is I who must be wrong. After all, he says:

AI is doing 90% of the computer programming to build Anthropic’s products, including its own AI

so how could that possibly go wrong?

Yes you are right - it’s not immediately presented to people at the top, so easy to miss. On the other hand, like the page that I am on now replying to you, there is only your comment and this one I am writing now, so it is much easier to see the rules at the bottom of this page than if there were let’s say >1k comments to have to scroll past. Although if someone knows that the info is there, it somewhat makes it easier to find information from it while writing a reply or even just reading other comments - I’ve done that on YPTB for the more rarely used acronyms before.

More generally the more apps there are, the greater diversity of methods of access to the Threadiverse (starting with the underlying Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin, also Mastodon, Friendica, at some point nodeBB and flarum - if that plan isn’t cancelled now), and then all the 3rd party apps available for each platform.

Another thing that PieFed helps solve is when people scroll through All and downvote content without realizing what it is all about, a subset of the OP issue, but PieFed provides the ability to restrict voting to only accounts that are subscribed to the community, if the mods enable that setting (I believe it only affects PieFed instances though, since PieFed cannot restrict if Lemmy wants to federate an upvote or not). I like the idea of this since that would affect users regardless of what front-end UI method of access they use.

To be fair, some apps do virtually everything in their power to hide those behind multiple clicks, scrolls way down, and then more clicks.

Whereas PieFed’s web UI shows the entire community sidebar text on every single page below each post - see this example.

Some tools are just built different:-).

Perhaps part of the sign-up wizard then? Like add a new section to it saying that FYI terms are different here?

But yeah it could be good to use a different name, if a good replacement could be found?

Like at worst, even just the word “Def” as in Default search mode.

Sounds like they want a piece of that Reddit pie (revenue?), perhaps thinking that they could likewise sell user data, hence the almost exclusive focus on how it “looks” rather than back-end functionality like federation.

Maybe “Active” should be made the default for new accounts?

Although we have only <40k active users total (stats). I used to mod a “tiny” gaming sub on Reddit that claimed to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. There is no avoiding the absolute fact that we are tiny here, by comparison to the bad place!:-)

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given the makeup of those that stayed behind.

Then it sounds more like they want to be the European next Bluesky.

Like this post explains: https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248.

Well, they at least claim that they aren’t trolls.

🤔 Although isn’t that exactly what a troll would say?! I say, I’ve cracked the case! 🧐 They are trolls! Either that, or… they are not, or something else, I dunno.

If you go by the metric of “if not troll then why behave as troll would?”, then the answer becomes much easier to find:-).

we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to.

This right here. There’s a famous adage that goes “why would I want to be a member of a club that would accept me as a member?”, which encourages us to look within, but it’s undeniably true as well (however much we may want to deny it) that we are influenced by the actions of those who we choose to spend our time with. Echo chambers that act to funnel misinformation (or worse, active disinformation) are so incredibly dangerous. Yet it seems nearly impossible to escape from such - though we do get to choose our favorite flavoring of it.

I will note that making an account on PieFed does not represent any kind of “commitment” at all, and in fact has ancillary benefits such as reserving your username in advance in case you ever do decide to switch. Simply make an account on PieFed.social and you’ll get to see first-hand what all it offers! Do beware though bc most likely one glance at that sign-up wizard will make you fall in love 💕, and then more and more often you’ll find yourself using your PieFed rather than STW alt account. But is that a bad thing, to have options to choose from?! 😋

For a new member coming to Lemmy, my advice would be to:

1. Block instances
2. Block communities
3. Subscribe to communities (traditionally by scrolling through All)
4. Block users
5. Comment and Post

We need to move past these bare-bones basics. Which I don’t see much activity happening there on the Lemmy side to improve any of that, though I do see much happening in PieFed, hence I am placing my hopes for the future into it.

I just remember that it was very very much work curating my feed (and constantly needing updating as new communities came out needing to be blocked), back when I was on Lemmy, and then when I switched to PieFed it became incredibly easy. Tbf it did take me a few weeks to get used to it, but ever since I have almost never switched back to scrolling All.

Even then though, why downvote content simply for existing? Like I don’t live in [insert name of specific neighborhood/town/city/state/region/nation/continent/area of world], or follow [any sports team at all], but even though I don’t want to see its content (usually, I mean like on a daily basis, although perhaps rarely?) I do not begrudge such a community for its mere existence? In fact I celebrate it! I highly disagree with the philosophy displayed by people who downvote such posts that are not relevant to them, harming those communities that are just struggling to get off the ground. I don’t think that’s terribly productive.

That was a common problem even in the old/bad place, once a post reached r/All causing a flood of toxic newcomers (this one more about receiving toxic comment replies than votes I think). And actually PieFed offers a solution where if the mod configures it such, only votes from subscribed community members gets counted. That aspect won’t federate with Lemmy though, since the latter is only aware of the binary options for voting and can’t handle such nuances currently.

I presume that people already know about the older communities like [email protected] and all the communities listed in its side-bar, but also check out the newer [email protected].

(unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect)

Actually those are known to exist - see e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248 - though as evidenced by that same post, the admins tend to be pretty on top of shutting them down.

Below that though, at the level of communities, Lemmy has a moderation problem. Reports from one instance to anther do not federate (well, on PieFed they do, but on Lemmy they don’t) - although like everything else this is promised to be fixed “soon” (same as last year iirc, and to a lesser degree the year before that too, though probably more in the sense of just having put it onto the roadmap), which allows toxicity to thrive. Ironically it also encourages having toxic mods as well, seeing as they are the only ones willing to put up with the majority of the negative flood pushed at them.

And don’t even get me started on the lack of notification to someone that their content was removed by a mod - people tend to find out days/weeks/years later/if at all, meaning that they continue unabated, not even aware at all (or at least, at first) that they have been so censured.

Lemmy also is lacking is so many other ways, e.g. content discovery is often primarily achieved by browsing All, rather than lets say by browsing Topic areas (I am not discouraging the existence of the All Feed, just bemoaning the lack of many alternatives to it). So communities get “stumbled upon” much more readily by people not actively searching for something anywhere close to that content type, who might tend to emotionally vomit upon people rather than be genuinely interested in constructive dialog.

Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and even though the vast majority of the features rolled out over the last decade either ignored or actively went against what the userbase wanted, it nonetheless was a fully feature-complete product. e.g. it triggered notifications upon removal of your content, it had a modmail allowing you to communicate with the team to ask why, and posts removed from a community remained active to anyone possessing the URL, allowing people to continue discussions already begun, which personally as a mod of a small gaming community I used to explain to the OP why I felt their post had to be removed, and we could talk about it back and forth. None of that can be done here (although PieFed now retains deleted posts, rendering them inactive/locked but preserving their content to be read, so that e.g. a Q&A would preserve the A part even if the OP deleted their Q).

The Threadiverse is great for FOSS, not so much great as in overall terms. We make sacrifices to be here, and the benefits tend to be more abstract and harder to explain in few words (at least without needing all kinds of MAJOR caveats about what does not work). Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today, and until then it was primarily a CLI tool for all that time (gfx options often did not work as well or even properly at all, earlier in its development).

The amount of Karening aka entitlement that I’ve seen here (tbf it’s probably far worse in the likes of Reddit and Facebook by now) has shocked me. Mainly I mean: why would people downvote things simply for appearing in All… that’s literally what you asked to see, by choosing to browse “All”, and then you act like it has assaulted your delicate sensibilities? If you do not like it then block it and you’ll never have to see it again… or it’s even easier simply to scroll down.

Fewer here than there though (presumably).

Well damn, now I want to know just how good those cookies must be…

Also, username does not check out, unless there is cheese in those cookies, perhaps? 🧀

If it is Top, then that is what people are choosing to upvote. But you don’t have to browse by Top. PieFed even offers keyword filters, plus the ability to unsubscribe from all such communities while also allowing you to see them with just the touch of a button to go to a Topic Feed showing it when you (rarely) actually do want it. You could also replicate this behavior in Lemmy, but it takes having one account per Internet area and that’s a huge pain. Or you could just sort by New. Or block the users submitting such content. The list of configuration options available to you is practically endless, and nowhere explained in the slightest degree that would be helpful:-).

[email protected] does a pretty good job of keeping that stuff out.