I wrote this before

I spotted Dessalines posted literal propaganda on some community I joined

gotta be honest that does not sit well with me

Because, in my experience, LLMs are pretty unreliable. You know how it likes to “hallucinate”, or in other words, make up stuff

It’s because Lemmy can’t fetch YouTube thumbnails. I swear it used to fetch thumbnail and title automatically before, hmm

Gonna go out-of-topic from the post but I need this to get this off my chest:

Do you know what prompted me to contribute to PieFed’s code?

Recently, a developer of Lemmy straight up posted a link to a website to a China propaganda in a community in my Lemmy instance. Yes, a propaganda.

Tbf, slrpnk.net receives a lot of China-related posts, and that’s due to China out-competing other countries in many sectors (EV, for example), and in those post OP usually critical enough to acknowledge that while China achievement is good, the crimes Chinese government has done shouldn’t be ignored.

But the post is different. From the domain name, the “About Us” section of the website, the bias in the article. Clearly this was posted with an ill intention. A developer of a platform uses the platform to spread propaganda. Disgusting

I downvoted said post, but I hesitated to call it out. Because, I’m gonna be honest–I’m genuinely scared of interacting with those kind of people. And I don’t want to have a deep discussion about politics or propaganda anyway. I’m not that kind of person.

This made me realize, I also don’t tell people I use fediverse or don’t reach out to other forums to open a community in Lemmy. This is because the fediverse, or at least Lemmy have a bad reputation: tankie.

There is a saying in my country that says “One person ate jackfruit, everyone got the sap”. The genocide deniers ate the jackfruit, and everyone got the sap. The genocide deniers ruined fediverse’s name and everyone else got the consequence. I don’t wanna recommend people to use softwares made by those terrible people, and I doubt most people want to use softwares that has a reputation of being a genocide deniers playgrounds.

Honestly OP from the link in the post (https://feddit.org/post/4920887) kind of made a good point.

At this point, I would prefer just quitting Lemmy altogether.

But I remembered, the fediverse is an open source effort. I use open source software a lot. I feel like I need to give back something. And I have a community that still needed moderating.

And recently I found PieFed that is still in early days but show some great promise. I happen to understand HTMX (I use it in my personal projects) and Python (I learned it way back in junior high). Seems perfect to me, so I contributed one.

Honestly, it feels kinda unfair to me that software made by a genocide deniers gets the funding, meanwhile a software made by a good person (PieFed) has to be a hobby project.

As a software engineer…

Don’t just say “just Google it”. Guide them to the documentation. Ask them about the detail of the question. If it’s an bug, try asking them if they can reproduce the bug.

This reminded me of the time I’m looking for how to do certain things in a software. I found a reddit post asking about the same issue and this is the reply OP got:

Here is the link: https://old.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/mupjsf/how_to_showhide_i3status_bar_taskbar/

Imagine. You search the issue you have. Found the ONLY reddit thread that talks about this, and the ONLY thread that talks about the issue have NO USEFUL ANSWER and, worse, the only reply is TELLING YOU TO SEARCH IT YOURSELF. This got upvoted too 😭😭😭.

Luckily, I found the solution (tbh the solution was there in the docs, but the wording wasn’t clear and it makes it hard to search) and I end up replying the OP the actual answer.

So, this is a PSA for the fediverse: be nice. It’s free.

While we’re still young, we have a chance to become a better forum.

Also possibly an unpopular opinion: you shouldn’t downvote a question, even if it was asked multiple times. Guide them to the answer instead