It is objectively a lot more male than Reddit or other social media. Reddit has many issues, but lack of women is not one of them.
That Lemmys’s not too different from Reddit.
Clickbait/ragebait gets upvoted to the top if it makes people feel good; hardly anyone even checks the source. Getting called out in the comments hardly affects it.
Niche content gets absolutely smothered by this, too, and the niche posters eventually give up.
These are structural problems Lemmy/Piefed software can improve, but that doesn’t seem to be the development priority :/.
I’d argue this is a larger issue of the Fediverse, too. Devs are unintentionally copying structural issues, prioritizing other things when unhealthy attention patterns could kill the whole system. Like it has for previous social media alternatives. Lemmy feels more and more like Voat to me, which has got me really worried.
What are your ideas?
I’ve been meaning to make git issues, but in a nutshell, one is “community taxononony”
Instead of being pigeon-holed into a single community, every community would be part of an inherited hierarchy, like a class system in programming. /c/thelastairbender might be part of /c/animation, or /c/television; perhaps both?
Organization would be mutual. Moderators of each have to approve to join and remain in the hierarchy, though the “initial structure” of the community could be set up by admins I suppose. The sub community inherits “global” rules from their parent communities, but can have their own rules as well.
And what’s the point of all this, you ask? Well, way I see it, Lemmy has a “niche” discoverability/attention issue, where big engaging communities like politics crowd out smaller niches. But being a sub community would show all its posts in the communities up the hierarchy as well, getting them the visibility of a “big” community while remaining in the niche. It would allow focused communities to exist, but users browsing bigger communities to see them as an appropriate topical thing. This aggregation is user configurable, of course, but I think it’s very important that this visibility be the default.
And in terms of programming, I think it would be feasible? Admittedly I don’t know the architecture, but it seems like it would fit with existing paradigms.
Another idea I have is a replica of Twitter’s “community notes” feature. Perhaps if a comment gets enough upvotes and is flagged by the comment writer as a “community correction,” and fits certain criteria (like being below a word count, maybe a certain percentage of upvotes being from the host instance), it’s automatically displayed below the original post’s title.
This would allow, for example, clickbait or questionable sources to be called out, or misleading titles to be clarified. Or perhaps the source of original reporting can be hyperlinked.
Theoretically this is a mod’s job, but I feel that:
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Mods don’t want to be heavy-handed
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They’re often overworked/short on time.
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And frankly, let a lot of clickbait/ragebait posts slide anyway.
And for all of Twitter’s failures, this particular feature is a good idea.
Again, it ties into the idea of “attention control,” to try and give information hygiene a chance over people’s impulses.
Mind you, these are very rough ideas. They probably need to be peeled apart, but I do feel strongly about the gist of what they are trying to correct.
I think these are good ideas speaking broadly, but are quite extensive in terms of implementation and getting them right.
Organization would be mutual. Moderators of each have to approve to join and remain in the hierarchy, though the “initial structure” of the community could be set up by admins I suppose. The sub community inherits “global” rules from their parent communities, but can have their own rules as well.
What do you mean by this part? That if I as a mod of television@piefed.social incorporated another community into this hierarchy they’d essentially be a feeder community and I’d effectively be a mod of that community?
You’d (as moderator of /c/television) have no moderation power over their community, but you would have full control over which of their submissions are visible in yours. You control default visibility within your community, but can’t take down their posts. They’d be subject to whatever the global rules of /c/television are (which are distict from “local” rules for /c/television), and if there’s some unresolvable dispute, the “subcommunity” could leave, or you could kick them out. Mutual consent is required.
Perhaps (to help small-community mods with sheer volume of moderation) “parent” communities could optionally moderate sub communities? But this wouldn’t be default. Ideally moderation permissions would be granular and configurable.
though the “initial structure” of the community could be set up by admins I suppose.
By this I just mean that, practically, instance admins should probably set up some default heirarchy for the most prominant subs, for an “initial” structure to their preference, and let mods work it out from there.
hierarchy
Check out piefed
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Not nearly enough cats.
May be, but I also appreciate the flying cat equivalent (superb owls)
Unsolicited photography tip: your phone camera’s sensor has a 4:3 aspect ratio. By setting it to something else, it crops the short side of the image, which is probably not what you want in this case (the cats barely fit in the frame, but there’s lots of background on the top and bottom).
That is an abundance of cats! 😻
😻
So floof! 😻
Must touch them all day
Blessed day.
Unsolicited photography tip: your phone camera’s sensor has a 4:3 aspect ratio. By setting it to something else, it crops the short side of the image, which is probably not what you want in this case (part of the cat is cut off, but there’s lots of background on the top and bottom).
Haha you are right
😻
I do kinda miss having a total karma count. Not that it ever really meant anything, but number go up is fun
People actually paid attention to that number? I don’t get the point.
The only time it matters is when you create a new account and can’t post anywhere due to low karma. Losing my points whenever I made a new account never concerned me one bit.
It was kinda nice to gauge how controversial a user tended to be. i.e. if someone had thousands of posts and comments but their total karma was basically zero, you could assume that they either just posted in very niche communities and noone saw their posts, or that they were a shithead who farmed downvotes regularly.
Actually now that I think about it, lemmy’s public modlog is a way better system for that haha
No particular complaints regarding the people or topics, but I wish we could do more than just up or downvote a post. In other online communities you can 🤣, or ❤️, or even 🤡 a post and that makes the experience much more enjoyable IMO, lol.
I think piefed allows that and you can interact with all lemmy posts.
I’ve been hearing a lot about this piefed business, time to check it out in earnest, maybe. 👍
There’s also a vocal minority of just really pessimistic people on here. Politics I don’t mind as long as it’s a discourse about not only what is bad but what can be reasonably done about it.
I’ve been in several discussions where I add “look at community, we are strong together” and it’s immediately beaten down with “the world won’t change things are shit and always will be, be mad and angry about it, I’m mad and angry at you”.
It’s the internet, I’m not surprised. But I’ve definitely had to disconnect myself for a bit some days after severe reactions from people just to remember it’s just strangers on the internet.
It’s not all the time, but for some discussions that promote inclusion and understanding to be met with the hard “I don’t agree so you are human garbage” can be an awful whiplash sometimes.
I was gonna say something similar, like the amount of times I’ve wanted to look into some political topics and seeing comments encouraging violence make it hard for me to feel motivated just to stay informed. I get being angry, but damn, cue Mr. Rogers “what do we do with the mad that we feel?”
reading the top comments on this post, strikes me they reflect the founders of lemmy
maybe we’ll get more joy from the piefeds
I don’t know, pessimism seems to be the norm. IRL I live in one of the richest zip codes in America… and pretty much every convo I have or overhear is people whining about how life sucks and how hard it is and how mean everyone else is to them.
We live in a ‘victim hood’ culture these days. People aren’t proud of things anymore or optimistic, it’s an arms race to see who can the most pessimistic and whiny.
The only time I hear or interact with people being positive it’s mostly them talking abotu self-help crap or whatever ‘therapy’ they are using to ‘help them cope’.
Fewer places to talk about fun things.
The default web interface is ass. Voyager kinda sucks too.
I love leminal.space’s interface.
Try Blorp
People keep supporting socialism when it is painfully obvious they don’t know what the word even means.
Not every positive thing the government does is “socialism”
Social programs instituted by the government are not “socialism”
What you’re actually supporting is democratic socialism and has nothing to do with communism or socialism as a philosophy.
Aka the most useless argument that gets repeated on lemmy over and over. It has about as much use as “I’ll join the revolution as soon as some other people start it.”
Without others you’re just a lone gunman fighting for your own opinions and values, like Ted Kaczynski mailing bombs. Some were for his “cause”, some were for personal revenge. If you publish your manifesto ahead of time you’ll probably get caught, if you publish after and it turns out you’re a selfish nut-job there’s no movement (except for maybe a handful of other nut-jobs). Even if you do succeed, realistically your targets are easily replaceable cogs, not the clockmakers. And the clockmakers are a bureaucracy, even the masters are replaceable, the entire factory has to be torn down. Is it that difficult to understand why we’re not yet at the tipping point where people are ready to abandon their jobs, family and social stability, and possibly lives to fight in the streets? It currently risks everything and gains nothing. Some of it is keyboard warrior talk, but I’d wager there’s a steadily increasing populace slowly preparing themselves for drastic action, they just want it to have real purpose and hopefully achieve something if it’s going to potentially cost them everything.
THANK. YOU. You put it more succinctly where I struggle to.
Right now most even-keeled folks can agree we’re all very upset, but it’s the same with trying to start a union and march up to the boss’s office: Oh sure, everybody enjoys a good grumble in the breakroom but are they gonna back you up? Worse, are they gonna rat you out?
Whether out of ignorance, desperation, hopelessness, or all three, we have a large proportion of people that just wanna “keep their head down.” and “stay out of trouble.” Even if it means suffering.
Our culture is also pathetically fractured sometimes. Once we get over the “should we do something” hurdle, the question becomes what, who, and how. And everybody’s seemingly got a morally-superior position to everyone else, and budging is not an option. Unfortunately while we’re all scoring zings on each other, organizing and running roughshod over everyone else comes much more easily for those with an authoritarian bent.
Nah comrade, I want to seize the means of production!
My main complaint is the bad search system of Lemmy. You can only search for community but not specific topics using specific keywords.
Heck out piefed
The clashing ideologies makes it hard to gain traction for the fediverse. Since no one ever agrees on things, it ironically turns into the politics people complain about with the republicans vs democrats always being at a stalemate.
4 times the same post in 4 different identically named communities…
I want a global feed, communities can federate with in a sort of sub-lemmy.Probably the federated nature of it… i know the whole point of it is decentralisation but with the likes of reddit or discord at least you could attempt to have all your content salted or deleted (whether it actually is is another story) from a single server. Knowing anything and everything you post on here will stick around forever no matter what you do, by design, makes me uneasy.
I agree. My politics, thoughts and feelings change over time and it makes me uncomfortable to be potentially judged for things later and not be able to delete that isn’t ideal, even if I’m the only one reading it.
What I don’t like is that so much content is spread between so many different places, this along with the complexity of it all as a new user is intimidating.
I think we’re asking a lot of non technically minded people to use the fediverse and that is hurting adoption.
Having said that something I like about it is that it’s smaller and people actually “communicate” with me here which isn’t really a thing on reddit anymore.
it makes me uncomfortable to be potentially judged for things later
“I’ve changed my mind on that and I no longer think this way.”
Things don’t stick around forever here. If a user gets deleted or banned from their home instance, all their posts are gone. Deleted instances also take their content with them.
I still don’t understand how to navigate the ins and outs of Lemmy and I’ve been here since RIF was killed
Lol same
The AI hate is almost like medieval witch hunting. Someone says, “It is AI” (which translates to “witchcraft and the work of Satan”), and the rest seem to run and grab their pitchforks and torches, ready to burn the author at the stake.
Interesting equation. Yes, AI is like an evil spirit. It promises to help you with your homework, and then helps you plan your suicide. It offers you knowledge, but at the cost of your intelligence. It tempts you with sloth, greed, lust, it says it’ll make your job easier, earn your company more money, be your girlfriend. And then it takes your soul. It saps your independence and creativity and isolates you from your family and kills you.
I haven’t picked up my knitting in ages, but I guess I could…
