MentalEdge

A part of it is concern.

System administration on a system you’re planning to use remotely over the internet must be done right. Not being sure what you’re doing is how we all learn, but you really should be sure before exposing yourself to the internet.

It’s not like experimenting with linux on a laptop. Self-hosting is usually about providing some sort of service for yourself, which if accessed by someone malicious, can be used to really hurt you.

You’re confusing my use of the word community in its literal meaning, with its meaning as a term in the context of lemmy as a piece of software.

I do not think that sorting people online by where they are from would help.

In fact I think sorting people online by where they are from could even be harmful, and potentially dangerous.

That the change you would make is small, does not change my opinion that it would be for the worse, nor that your reasoning for wanting to make it, as I understand it, seems faulty.

My proposal concerns servers, not communities.

What’s the difference? Servers are communities.

encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues

There’s that false dichotomy again. I think what instance someone is on has very little effect on what content they engage with. And if it does, this change would be detrimental rather than beneficial.

Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.

We must be using different corporate social media. Of course facebook, twitter and tiktok show different content depending on every factor there is. The thing is, they wont confront you with people from your town that have a different opinion. They are tuned towards NOT changing whatever opinion you already have, unless you’re pre-disposed to going down dopamine-laced rabbit holes.

Meanwhile, the fediverse does confront people with differing opinions. That it doesn’t necessarily do so locally, is a feature, not a bug.

I don’t agree.

You present two things as if they are mutually exclusive, when they are not.

The very starting point of your argument seems to be that current niche communities can only exist at the expense of local geographic communities.

As such, you seem to suggest sacrificing existing communities in favor of hypothetical “better” communities based on physical proximity.

Such communities are useful in terms of political mobilization, but they aren’t very fun. People don’t bond over tax rates, they bond over tabletop rpgs, cats, music, movies, etc. And you can’t engage in those bonding activities in local communities until they themselves are big enough to contain such niches within them.

And all of these things can exist simultaneously. In fact I completely reject your view that niche online communities do more harm than good.

Boiled down, your view seems to equate to seeing a bunch of people having fun, and telling them to go do something useful, while completely dismissing that it doesn’t matter whether I learn empathy from my neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world.

What you’re asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.

TikTok is even worse about it. The one time I gave it a chance, it was 90% content local to me. But it was mindless trash. At worst, it was xenophobic rhetoric. Local, doesn’t mean meaningful, or good.

You saw it on reddit all the time, how people from the US often didn’t even realize they were talking to people across the world. Because it’s a foreign concept to them. Say what you will but it is the one corporate platform that doesn’t care where you are from. Everyone discussing something gets pooled into the same communities and threads, regardless of age, sex, or even timezone.

That is a good thing. We need more of that, not less. Because online and real-world communities DO overlap. But you seem to be asking them to match. That would isolate them, not empower them.

Online communities today are the one way that authentically bridges communities of people across the world. If online communities matched offline communities, why would I ever develop a desire to understand not just my neighbor, but also people across the world?

How would I ever go and find out for myself, how people across the world think and feel? Whether my government speaks true about the threats around us, or if there is more to it?

If you overlap a bunch of circles, they all become connected. If you match them, you get bubbles.

That is how corporate social media has been functioning for over a decade, and it needs to be stopped, not propagated. If we sort people into only one group (like where they are from), you isolate them.

But when you sort each person into least two groups or more, you connect everyone to everyone, by virtue of almost every group having members in common with every other group.

That issue being two years, I’m not sure what the current state of things is.

But servers did move towards EU to combat the problem, and haven’t moved back for what I know.

It wasn’t just a problem. It was literally impossible for them to keep up.

Re-locating the server was the only option, as opposed to skipping events or shutting down until the problem was fixed.

Please do not condescend.

I know it doesn’t have to work that way, but for a time, it did.

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

And yes. It led to instance relocations.

It was either don’t federate, and wait for an update with unknown eta, or move closer to the big instances.

Here is one of the github issues on the problem.

Was not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.

I haven’t checked. I may have been already.

As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic. It’s its own wierd mix of dictatorship with the option for the community at large to wrest control away from current leaders, should they want to.

As of now, preferring “going local” would hinder more than help with irl democracy. There just aren’t enough users. If you divided them you’d end up with a ton of tiny inactive communities, rather than a bigish pretty lively one.

And it’s not an either or. Or you can have big communities AND small local ones.

Smaller communities are also something that happens naturally, and is already happening naturally. The reddit exodus was the spark for a ton of new niches on lemmy hitting critical mass.

There is also plenty of non-english, more local activity already. You just might not be seeing it due to your language settings.

Agreed. And it’s not a zero-sum game.

The fact I’m on english speaking fediverse doesn’t mean I’m not on the finnish speaking fediverse.

And what instance I’m on has absolutely no bearing on which one I spend my time.

There currently aren’t many of those.

Due to the rate of federation being limited by latency, instances have actually been re-locating to mostly Europe, so they can more easily keep up with each other.

Basically, every federated event needs to propagate, but the next one can’t be sent out before the last one is received and an aknowledgement comes back.

That means a higher latency makes an instance federate at a lower rate, causing it to fall behind. Eventually, some instances were having activity from .world show up with days of delay due to being on the other side of the world.

But since your point is mostly ideological/cultural, that doesn’t really matter. You’re talking about identity, not infrastructure.

Which kinda defeats your point. Geography doesn’t matter. You can set up a finnish community on a swedish instance and vice versa.

And I’m not sure what you mean by “reviving democracy”.

The fediverse is explicitly NOT democratic. It’s run by a large group of benevolent dictators (admins and mods) who maintain the environment they and the users of their respective instances and communities desire.

They are kept in line not by votes, but by the fact that any one of them can be defederated by the rest, and they can all be supplanted by any one user with the desire to set up their own instance or community.

The reason Lemmy doesn’t have local communities, is not structural. It’s size.

There are some finnish communities that can just barely be considered active. But if you further divided that down to cities, you’d have maybe one post a year.

That’s not what I’m saying.

Obviously not everyone needs to code. Once I write a bot, it could potentially be used by anyone.

Only a small percentage of mods need to also be developers. But since that group isn’t big enough yet, the solution is growth.

Not asking the platform devs to do even more. They too, are volunteers.

I’m not against any of that.

What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It’s a nice-to-have.

Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.

As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.

Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.

Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)

Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven’t shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.

Indeed.

My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.

Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.

After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

By now I’ve written four bots using the lemmy API.

Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven’t. Several communities and instances already have them.

Honestly that’s how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.

Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.

Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.

If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.

Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.

Yes.

If you always direct-play, the only bitrate you can use is original.

If you ever need to watch on a slow connections using a lower bitrate, that will require transcoding.

You literally do, though. You just said you do.

No I don’t and no I didn’t. I don’t get downvotes and reports and go “yesss, views and engagement”. Each time I have, I’ve reconsidered my posts in an effort to not have that happen again.

Your apparent assumption that I don’t care whether content is seen by people who want to see it, is entirely on you. I do care.

But the only way to ensure no-one who doesn’t want to see it, sees it, is not to post. So yeah, I’m ok with some minority of people being put off.

Okay, but then can you stop trying to use people talking about communities which include the ones you don’t want to engage with as a way to dismiss their claims as blown out of proportion?

Do you have an example beyond the one I made it clear I’m aware of? I block these too. They’re not popping up every day, which was your point.

I have the courtesy to marking my NSFW as NSFW

Did you miss the part where I said I do the same? I’m simply do not agree that there is any level of sense in filing the entire ecategory of anime content on lemmy, under nsfw. That is completely insane. It’s an art medium, not a pornhub genre.

beyond that I think the culture of ridiculously exploitative depictions of women in anime being defended as “not technically porn” is the root of some incredibly toxic aspects of modern culture, which is a completely separate issue I admit

I’m not sure where to even begin unpacking the prejudice towards anime-fans here. Sure there are issues, but come on. This isn’t argument. The only reason to include this thought is to reveal how little you think of me because of something I like.

it’s just bizarre how hostile people are to being asked to use the one tool we have to separate content.

Because it doesn’t work. The NSFW toggle is used to tag porn, spoilers, nsfl, and many other things, yet at the same time a ton of people use and expect it to work the way “not safe for work” implies. It’s a mess. We need arbitrary tagging.

In the meantime using it more than necessary DOES slow down the already glacial growth of federated social media. That’s a fact, not an opinion. Suggesting it should be applied to an entire fucking fandom is not far off wishing that that the entire fandom not be allowed on the fediverse. And no, “it works fine for porn” is not a counter-argument. People looking for porn aren’t going to be avoiding the nsfw tag. They’ll head straight for it. Would you like to guess what they do if they find one of my communities instead of actual porn? They downvote.

also you’re trying to conflate adult-targeted content with a long and entrenched history of sexism with music preferences, and I know you know that’s a false equivalency

What long entrenched history of sexism? Weeb=sexist now? It seems to me you genuinely hate us. As a whole and individually. You want me hidden more than necessary because apparently the things I’m into make me sexist or worse. And/or my sharing the things I’m into, spreads this sexism, and worse.

Seriously, are you actually claiming that having to view a couple anime girls before blocking the relevant communities, for which a convenient list is provided, is so dangerous and corrupting that it warrants the “warning label” that is nsfw being applied to every single related post?

Engagement is any interaction, including viewing, from a user.

I don’t maximize for that. The only “engagement” I actively look for is the positive kind. You think I wouldn’t start marking things nsfw if it got a ton downvotes when I didn’t?

Currently, the reality is the other way around. Pointlessly tagged posts receive significantly less votes, because people looking for porn don’t vote, and people browsing normally, are less likely to check a post tagged nsfw.

Why is Thighdeology marked nsfw on reddit, yet still a hugely popular subreddit, but somehow that would be a deathknell for it to be the same on lemmy?

Critical mass. Tons of things are a death-knell to fediverse activity simply because it is tiny. Reddit can support a shitload of duplicate communities any one of which outweighs the single equivalent fediverse community by orders of magnitude.

Your list includes none of the many AI-specific anime art communities that are out there, I think you need to be a bit more proactive in your browsing.

I actively refuse to engage with AI content. There are active communities besides !share_anime_art@lemmy.dbzer0.com that aren’t on porn instances?

Asking people to specify every word they don’t want to be exposed to is absurd, when there’s already one single and very easy to append word - NSFW - that you are ardently rejecting on the basis that it would damage your interactions.

Finding a common word used in content you don’t like is no harder that blocking. The feature becoming generally available would allow us to implement arbitrary tags. Why does this suggestion offend you? It’s a genuine win-win solution.

if you don’t want sexualized (but arguably non-explicit) images of anime girls in your feed, you’d have to go through and view a bunch of them before you can block it. Surely you can see how that’s… pretty ridiculous? Potentially very demeaning?

That’s true for any category of content. Are you saying anime girls are somehow inherently bad or damaging to users, as compared to for example sports content?

I blocked music content from my feed this way. Should I feel demeaned for having been made to see things other people enjoy, but I don’t care for?

don’t want to see that content as worth less than the people who do

Why are people who want to see the content worth less than the ones who don’t? Anyone can block content. No-one is likely to find content they don’t even know is there.

why is engagement more important to you than curating an appreciative audience

What is the difference between engagement and an appreciative audience? I aim to minimize the number of people I offend, while maximizing the people I reach. What’s wrong with that? What more can I do?

The only certain way to offend no-one, even if I marked every single post nsfw, is to stop posting entirely.

given how many new highly specific “anime moe tiddy thigh-gap colored hair” communities crop up daily

I keep seeing this argument. What new communities? With a couple exceptions, I run them! I haven’t made a new one in over a year, and I’ve only recently had to add half a dozen new entries to my list.

even just bringing out a different tag that isn’t blocked by default (which god, we really need even if just for spoilers) is a perfectly valid request.

Several clients offer word filtering. Asking for the feature in lemmy itself is fine, and something I fully support.

I run a ton of these communities.

And I care about the fediverse as a whole.

Marking an entire category of content as nsfw because a tiny minority can’t be bothered to block it themselves, without good reason, will immediately kneecap community and content discovery.

I saw this in the numbers immediately.

I do still use the feature. And I calibrate the line of what is and what is not, based on votes, comments and reports.

One, single, upset person, is not reason enough cut off dozens or hundreds of people from encountering content they might like.