Cool, I gotta check that out!
Replying inline… yeah I haven’t tried to do it for a hot minute so perhaps I was remembering something old. I did think there was something in there related, but that doesn’t help you much unless I can recall the other details 🤪.
Again, I am (Py-)loving how fast this pace of development is going!!!
Okay here is a follow-up answer with receipts.
Visit this link and notice how difficult it is to get to the comment. (I didn’t even pay attention at all to the content of this discussion, the only thing that matters here is the format structure). https://piefed.social/post/2284255#comment_12507777
First, it should take you to the comment, but notice how it does not scroll to it? (Who would guess that given a direct link to a COMMENT, that someone might want to… oh, I dunno, view that COMMENT, maybe?:-P) Now if you begin scrolling on your own, it loads ALL the comments - why? I have no idea, the link was to a specific one, but whatever. Next, it begins to scroll… though at least for me, it never makes it to its goal. Usually it’s just kinda down there around the area, but if you scroll up several to many tens of comment replies, you might see it, or more likely realize that you chose the wrong direction and thus need to go back to wherever it took you earlier and start over, now scrolling the opposite direction.
Notice also the lack of button to take you to the next/previous top-level comment - that would have been really helpful here.
Instead there’s a kind of highlighting, except it doesn’t seem to highlight the correct thing in particular, and just kinda highlights everything on the screen, then goes away, doing nothing whatsoever to help guide you to wherever you are supposed to be lead.
Now contrast that experience with this one: https://piefed.social/post/2284255/comment/12584179. I see that the link has a different format yet both links were arrived at by clicking the time (bc as we all know, the TIME that a comment was submitted should yield a URL that points directly to it… YES, somehow we ALL knew that, capiche!:-P), so while I see THAT their structure differs, WHY they differ I do not know. Anyway, notice how following this link does nearly zero of the things that happen above. This time, you ARE taken directly to the comment, except it does NOT scroll down for you, which neither did the one above at FIRST, but then later it DOES, but this one does NOT do that (not even later, after you begin to scroll). Nor does it do the highlighting thing either.
Arguably the second link is far superior, bc at least it takes you directly to where you need to go. But the first link does not do that (although you can see that it at least tried to?), plus the experience is extremely inconsistent between the two - the second link REQUIRES you to scroll, while the first link ALSO REQUIRES you to scroll, but then if you continue to scroll it will mess up the loading, and then when it finishes loading (which seems to have nearly 100% inaccuracy for some reason?), you are again REQUIRED to scroll further (in some direction that you must guess at). Keep in mind that when receiving notifications, or clicking on the time, I cannot control which format of link I am given for it. So even though the second format is superior, I only get whatever it offers me.
So from this we can see that one thing that would be cool would be to use a better method to copy a URL - something akin to the rainbow Fediverse button that Lemmy has. Maybe ask Dessalines and Nutomic if it would be cool to do identically for the sake of consistency? If not then do differently, but if they would be cool with it then… why not?
Another thing to learn is that trying to get to a specific comment can be quite difficult, to say the least! If you want to wait for Rimu to fix it, then that’s cool, I am only pointing out things that are currently borkne (sic). I didn’t bother Rimu with an issue request here bc it’s been mentioned many times before, and seems to remain an active area of effort, yet Rimu has said that he hates working on front-end matters, so need to rub it in, you know? But clicking on these links, you can see for yourself… this is the opposite of “polished”.
And a third thing is of course how inconsistent things are - whenever people get trained into doing one activity, like if they should scroll, or should not scroll, or whichever it is, then don’t elsewhere require them to do the exact opposite of that. There should be one consistent workflow that works across all modes of connection with the software. In the above scenario, it seems like an easy fix to just make all comment links be of the second format, when clicking on the time text? Whether the other way is somehow “better-er-est” or not, I would argue that it is better yet still to have just one way that WORKS than to have two that are working at odds against one another, as is happening here? (And in various forms, PieFed comments have always been this way - again it got significantly better but then when this ability to load comments later and separately from a post was released, it got significantly worse again, and has only improved slightly since - so these changes that I mention here, these are AFTER so many other issues have already been fixed!!!)
I should add that it’s a super hard job. Rimu isn’t perfect - nor am I - and while I wrote this in a very silly way, I mean no actual disrespect. It’s FOSS, and he works on whatever he wants to. So genuinely my respect is enormous. But this is a gap that could be worked on, as he himself has mentioned on more than one occasion previously (not wanting to deal with UI/UX issues, preferring to leave those to 3rd-party apps - except that the default web browser experience is what people who do not have accounts are likely to first see, when recommended to try out the Threadiverse? plus many/most 3rd-party apps lack some of the more advanced PieFed features - e.g. Voyager’s support for PieFed is only nominal atm).
Edit: oh, and another issue like this is when you try to respond to someone, and instead of that happening in-line as Lemmy does, PieFed takes you to a different page for some reason. You can press the back button, and then again to get to the original page, except then when it begins loading all the comments, you lose your place. So if there was more than one comment that you had wanted to respond to nearby one another… it’s quite a lot of effort to find your place again to find that other one. That could be fixed by making the ability to write comments in-line, which I thought sometimes might work, but other times maybe not? Again it’s that inconsistency thing. Also, sorry, I forget some of the details in this respect about what works vs. where it may not work, so if it’s all fixed now then ignore this! 😉
Excellent point - stability was purposely deprioritized initially, though at some point I think it should catch up? Which could arguably be now, as unlike a year or especially two ago, these days I think people are not longer treating PieFed as experimental and expect it more to work well, as a fully usable Threadiverse product.
Of course PieFed will continue to be whatever Rimu wants it to be - nobody is saying otherwise. And also highly relevant, each instance admin selects from that code what features they want to enable/disable.
And PyLova will have to make its own choice what priorities to aim for, especially in the short, medium, and longer term. So it’s relevant then that greater stability could be a real selling point for it, to distinguish from the OG PieFed?
Searching for one, though that’s a big project. I typically abandon PieFed for Lemmy every time I need to do a search.
Oh and speaking of, a feature that’s probably significantly easier would be to either search through comments, or else expand them all at once - to allow a browser search to work.
Otherwise it’s mainly UI things not being polished rather than back-end. I’ve been trying out 3rd-party apps for the last month so there’s a slight possibility that it’s fixed by now (I had made a codeberg request a long time ago related to it, but I can’t log into PieFed’s codeberg right now, and it seems to not allow anonymous read-only access. One thing that has been hella annoying for more than a year in various forms has been that a goodly number of links from the notifications menu don’t take you to what it is trying to point at. When the conversations get longer, when things happen to cause a comment to be collapsed (bc of being too deep in the chain), and especially when there is a large number of comments, the post page typically begins to load, then doesn’t always indicate that you should wait (causing you to get hella lost if you start scrolling, which you would normally do, except in this case it’s the worst possible decision), then finally loads the large number of comments, and finally takes you to the place that it is attempting to notify you about - when someone tagged or responded to you - except that it doesn’t. And then the hunt begins, like maybe you have to click to expand a comment first, or scroll way back up, or perhaps down.
It works a helluva lot better now than it did a year and a half ago - I used to have to abandon PieFed and go back to Lemmy just to be able to find the comment, by searching for my username and seeing if there were any replies I had missed. It got way better, but the method of loading comments after loading the page broke it again - which is just poor design philosophy, like if I click a link to a COMMENT (from a notification), then yes maybe I want the page to load the COMMENTS, perchance/mayhaps, hrm?
PieFed was initially being built up to work for the most usual and basic scenario. Being able to handle >100 comments where some are nested >10 deep I understand was less of a priority. But sometimes those are where the absolute BEST conversations are!!
Also, the post/comment preview function keeps randomly disappearing. I mean with regards to a particular PieFed version it will either always be available or not available at all, but between version updates it kept disappearing like it would work for posts but not comments, or more rarely might not be available for either. I guess I’m ranting here but this is the kind of stuff that I find hella annoying and I’m not sure what’s easy to fix vs. hard. Greater stability of this feature, maybe?
Lemmy may have significantly fewer features but in many ways it comes across as being significantly more polished. Until you try to write a long comment that is (in my Firefox on Android the screen keeps jumping around like it’s drunk! 🥴), and then you really appreciate how PieFed’s features work better, some of the times, while for general browsing and readability (like for lurkers) Lemmy can be better - e.g. its search tools. Another example: having the votes be above comments rather than below them is very helpful to me sometimes, bc they can become exceedingly long (like the one I am writing right now!) and sometimes at least (like when modding) it helps to know how well it was received by a community before reading through it all, so not having to scroll down to the bottom and then scroll back up to the top is helpful.
I think PieFed tried to reinvent the wheel and just be different from Lemmy for the sake of being different, even if the way was not actually any better?
I don’t know if I am helping at all here but wanted to get back to you quickly so hopefully these ramblings can at least spark something within you.
Obviously, you should spend your efforts working on something that gives you joy to do so!!
PieFed, and now PyLova, and also Lemmy (and Mbin etc.) are so fantastic! We may never fully replace Reddit but who cares if we can at least have something worthwhile here.
Wow, I am in awe of the rapid pace of these changes!
Live Posts : Mods can designate a post as a Live Post. A Live Post will continuously update with new posts coming through will sorting by new
Something is not right here though - it looks like either the first occurrence of the word “post” was meant to be community, or else the second one was meant to be comments?
I hope to see this pace of improvement continue - there are so many front-end usability issues left to polish! :-)
According to it, the median community replies to 74% of all posts, which doesn’t look bad at all imo.
No you misunderstood - it said “So this is the nine largest communities on each of fourteen instances, taken in subscriber order…”, meaning sorted in descending order of size. In essence then, it found out that even in the absolutely top most active communities across many instances, not all posts will get responded to.
Obviously it will from e.g. !politics@lemmy.world or !memes@lemmy.world, but from more niche communities such as Single-Board Computer Stuff@discuss.online (this is the #9 most active community per month on that instance), which only gets posted to perhaps every other week (and this exclusively from the sole mod, with only one exception that I presume is an alt of the AI bot here) and most of those receive zero or one or two comments, the likelihood of receiving a comment is very low.
Even in our most highly active communities, something like a quarter of posts still get ignored and not responded to. Which means that most of the Threadiverse is super concentrated into only a few communities that are exceedingly active, and then there is everything else that is… um… NOT that.
This is not a sign of health, rather it is a sign of poor community engagement.
If you presume that these posts were worth responding to. Which this bot’s aforementioned post did receive a (single) reply… though only to criticize the bot for having wasted their time by posting slop.
Edit: my guess is that the true medium reply rate would be zero. There are a metric shit-ton of communities that only have 1-2 posts in them period, and none at all from the last month or even year. Like here’s one: https://discuss.online/c/xterra. It supposedly has 61 subscribers, yet has never had a post, ever. The single mod likewise has never once made any posts, not just in that community but anywhere ever, nor commented, nor even voted it would seem (anywhere that hasn’t opted-out of lemvotes.org). It looks like the existence of the community is holding the name just in case someone wants to use it in the future, or even more likely since 3 years ago was the Rexodus, expressing a desire to start up the community, but then that never happened. There are TONS of communities like this, which only exist on paper as the saying goes, rather than in actual reality.
About Tesseract: Admins tend to move exceedingly slowly… but I would guess that at this point given the severity of the breach, most instances might be amenable to at least roll back to an older version before implementation of the hidden shadow list, or perhaps even to switch to using db0’s fork that removes it? Except that db0 is also antagonizing especially LW and possibly even calling for defederation from them at some future date, so I could see strong hesitancy to make stronger tie-ins with him at that point, especially given the sensitivity already surrounding the Admiral Patrick issue - so perhaps they would want to simply deprecate it altogether. It is a quite popular one though.
Most of the discussion that I’ve seen so far is merely bravado e.g. bragging about having made it into the list of shadow-banned users, rather than efforts to move forward to a positive resolution.
So instance admins might welcome such a discussion… perhaps after a cooling-off period first?
However, Tesseract is not a 3rd-party app - it’s an alternative front-end UI for Lemmy. So that means then that i.e. it’s not up to individual users to change the version offered, and instead is solely under control of each individual instance admin that offers that alternative.
Oh that’s so freaking awesome!!! 😎
On the wider scale, I am saddened about the fight between Rimu and you - but I get it, despite how he admitted himself that he did not handle things fully properly (afaik? not that I even begin to comprehend matters involving licensing), I understand if you are just so completely “done” with that whole situation.
I just wanted to say that from my POV I see you two as allies (even though definitely not friends) in the struggle against corporate enshittified platforms.
And I love seeing the development of features that apparently you both agree are quite good - hehe even good enough for Rimu to steal:-P.
Thank you for making your code available as FOSS, and thereby contributing to the growth of the Threadiverse. I’m losing hope that we will ever attract mainstream normies by virtue of continual in-fighting but that has basically nothing to do with you, and in fact PyLova seems actually a force that helps heal the divisions a bit by e.g. decoupling the OG PieFed code from certain authoritarian tendencies lately. Such as shadow-censoring of votes even from Lemmy or Mbin users delivered to PieFed communities, rejected (if I am understanding them correctly) due to the vote quotas that are never once explained to them as a reason for rejection - although tbf Lemmy also offers admins the ability to shadow-censor whole entire communities without mention of that fact either. No software is perfect, but you are continuing to pour your love into this project, which I find awesome and want to say thank you for.:-)
Lemmy most definitely has shadowbans, but they are applied at the level of whole entire communities rather than end-users. I remember being on the StarTrek.Website instance when that functionality was added to the Lemmy code, and discussing with someone my finding out that ChapoTrapHouse was no longer accessible from it, despite the fact the instance remained federated. No announcement of that fact was ever made iirc, it’s just that one day poof the behavior has changed, after Lemmy deployed a version that allowed for that.
Some few instances are very open about their hiding of communities - see e.g. https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/, listing in detail every one - but most are not, and the Lemmy UI has nothing at all like the list that it shows for (de)federations.
The Lemmy admins also can remove people even from the modlogs, in cases of severe abuse. Tbf it’s exceedingly rare and there is little evidence of this being abused (well there was one time, but the excuse that it was due to a bug seemed believable to me and most everyone else - Lemmy.ml quite often tests new versions of the code before they get rolled out to the rest of the Threadiverse, which is quite helpful actually).
Lemmy also fails to notify someone of their having been moderated. The various communities are FULL of stories of people asking where their posts went, or why they can no longer post to a community, or stating their discovery that they have an event in the modlog. The notification of moderation activities is exceedingly poor on the Lemmy platform.
Sadly, Reddit does a much better job at notification of an event, and also provides for a modmail to communicate with the mods to discuss the situation, e.g. to ask why, rather than leaving it to the end-user to wonder if they should DM each one listed in sequence until they find one that is even active much less responsive…
Lemmy is imperfect. At least Huffman is not in charge here, but conversely the tools have aways to go before we catch up even to what Reddit offers.
Yes that - the second one, as shown in your image - is what I mean. Lemmy offers the option to show upvotes separately from (& adjacent to) downvotes. PieFed’s tooltip approach fails to work for me something like a fifth of the time, at least on PieFed.social. At least a third of the time it will not work even if I click the number >10 times at varying cadence, although most of the time then if I zoom in and carefully hit precisely the number rather than the general area it is in it will work. Ofc that could be coincidence like a server connection issue that manages to work upon subsequent clicks regardless of how I approached hitting the number.
Regarding showing who delivers the downvotes - that can be quite useful sometimes as well. I just had a serial downvoter go through every comment that I had made recently, across a wide swath of communities from memes to Fediverse matters and news and politics etc. - ironically they had never once posted and only made 3 comments in I think it was 3 years, yet they had downvoted people sth like 20k times and only upvoted iirc <3k total, so I seriously doubt that I was the only one that happened to. I want negative feedback the same as I want positive ones, but like… delivered as an adult, using words (at which point others piling them on only adds assent & therefore weight to that spoken position), not this childish “I don’t like your politics so I am going to downvote everything you’ve said for days, without even telling you why”.
Voting really is an imbalance of power if someone can do things like that, but the recipients have no power to block it. It has a chilling effect upon social media bc people will either speak less often, knowing they will receive those, or else grow such a thick skin that even a veritable flood of downvotes affects them not in the slightest. I don’t like either of those options.
Though I suppose there is an argument that people could too casually block others for offering downvotes… or something? Honestly I don’t quite understand that - anyone can find out who it is, with just a little bit of effort (e.g. I could make a post in a community that I moderate, so then when my serial downvoter strikes then as a mod I can see who they are, even if not as a user; or ultimately if I installed my own server then I could casually inspect the votes of everyone on every post or comment everywhere), this information is not “private” and there seems little reason to not place tools into people’s hands to balance out this otherwise inequitable relationship?
But anyway I’m not pushing for it - I just hate to see how like powerful people (e.g. jordanlund) have all this ability to see and do things (e.g. see people who downvote and block them), but what can the common person do? Although some of this seems to be based on the misunderstanding that accounts that you have specifically blocked cannot still vote on your content, whereas now I think that they can. There seems nothing that can be done about that.
Btw Mbin shows who offers (links given for a randomly chosen example post): upvotes aka favorites, separately also Increases, now seemingly called Boosts, but will only show the total count but not who offered them for Reduces (I don’t know if a mod can see these, obviously an admin could but I don’t know whether via this same interface).
Impressive!
I did get excited thinking that it might show downvotes, but now I see that’s only for admins.
Do you plan to expose downvotes received on each post/comment to the user? I’ve been through every single theme and setting on PieFed.social and could never find a way to display those - although I don’t know whether other PieFed instances can already do differently or not (they definitely don’t show by default in places like PieFed.zip).
Fwiw I think people would be very happy to see their downvotes separately from upvotes, since e.g. +10/-9 is quite a bit different scenario than simply =1 overall (controversial vs. total lack of engagement). Technically this is already possible but the tooltip display is exceedingly janky and does not work at all a good fraction of the time, when when zoomed in like 10x (which helps at least sometimes).
Anyway it’s always neat to see a “new project”, even if as a fork this is only kind-of half of one, it still counts in terms of offering new opportunities to users, which is always a good thing.
Or alternatively: It shows that handle on one specified instance, e.g. always from your Mastodon home instance.
Fwiw, PieFed already translates URLs on the backend so that visiting content from a foreign source will take you instead to the local copy.
Also this post might be tangentially interesting: https://piefed.social/post/1285215.
Oh hey, that was you!!! Like I said earlier, I enjoy your contributions. Though so many other people - like PugJesus - keep leaving, and based on the number of empty communities in my subscriptions, nobody rises up to replace their level of contributions (well not nobody, e.g. there’s Lady Butterfly, tirelessly lifting up pretty much half to all of the most strongly encouraging communities:-).
I’ve wondered myself if I should help set up a community for comics. But there’s a legal liability issue, which I suppose is why I am able to enjoy older ones like Foxtrot and Calvin & Hobbes delivered daily to my Subscribed feed, but not modern ones like Nathan W. Pyle’s work.
So what I did instead was to create a community c/AskUSA. Virtually nobody reads the rules though - e.g. to avoid politics (there’s even helpful links directly in the sidebar to alternatives to post those to), and the reality of what is happening to the USA right now is too depressing to contemplate so… I became one of those people who abandons communities myself. Realistically, I just don’t think we have the subscriber base to support niche communities. Multiple times I have stumbled upon a community that someone created (to hold the name I suppose?) and became the exclusively sole poster to it, never to have been followed up with even by the creator of it themselves. Community discovery is exceedingly poor on Lemmy.
Hence I put all my hopes into PieFed instead, to be all that Lemmy never will… at least until PugJesus left due to the issue of shadow-censoring users contributions. That kind of thing is enough to kill off an entire project, causing communities to choose to not migrate there from a Lemmy instance or from Reddit, or to decide not to switch over their instance or open up a parallel one running PieFed (e.g. sh.itjust.works was considering that at one point in time, I am not sure if they still will now though…). My hopes that PieFed will “save” the concept of the Threadiverse are dashed - even though ironically there is now more reason to have hoped for it than ever before - e.g. Reddit has begun killing off old-reddit, which will cause many to look for alternatives to run to. They will not come here though, as my earlier link mentions in their very own words, nor can I argue all that believably that they should, when what awaits them is to be bullied here into expanding the base to receive tankie falsehoods and propaganda, and otherwise incel toxicity.
So I am choosing to listen rather than always only ever speak, and see if I can understand this shifting landscape better.
Oops, but here I wrote a novel along with that. Don’t worry - there is no expectation for me to receive one in return:-).
Time marches ever onwards. Each new generation (of posters) will figure out what it wants to use this space for, if anything at all, or not. In the meantime I hope it has been more enjoyable to meta-discuss these matters, or at least more so than to add to your already considerable pain.
Counterpoint: those will happen naturally and don’t need planning.
Sometimes those are fraught with frustration though. Like I remember really enjoying discussions with the highly controversial user FlyingSquid, who left Lemmy at least a year ago. My discussions were about Star Trek, and I had already blocked all politics themed communities as well as the largest meme ones. It turned out that within the politics sphere, he seems to have shown a bit of a different side of his personality to people who tried to post in the communities that he modded. Was he right? Are all the people decrying against him - many of whom I note are often proven liars in other matters - right? Actually truth is significantly more complex than that, plus not having delved in depth I honestly and truly do not know (though suspect a bit of both).
And people say likewise about PugJesus too. I was never on the receiving end of his wrath either - perhaps I never could be, since my aim is truth and he wouldn’t have to be firm as I would literally welcome correction where needed? But now he is gone too.
Most of the people that I enjoyed speaking with the most are either gone, or comment far less frequently than they used to. Or in different communities.
A lot of the communities that I do frequent the most - among those that still exist anyway - have barely anyone who comments at all. I tend to avoid the largest ones (I make an exception for this one we are in now due to the subject matter), bc that is where the toxicity is highest. But then the niche communities barely exist at all… e.g. !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev has only had one post in the last 4 months, !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca, oops that one seems to have died a year ago already, so I just unsubscribed, the last post in !dankmemes@lemmy.world was 2 months ago, oops I just noticed several places I am subscribed in were on lemm.ee so obviously those are defunct now, the last post in !dogsincostumes@lemmy.world was 8 months ago, one of my absolute favorites was !nathanwpyle@lemmy.world, but the only post other than one asking the content creator where he went was again from 8 months ago, and so on. There’s also just a WHOLE BUNCH of communities that have next to zero comments in them - maybe they are bot posts that people prefer to block? e.g. !publichealth@mander.xyz. Others are not quite as often fully zero but are still less than 5 per post, like !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !globalnews@lemmy.zip, and every single poetry community I can find across the entire Threadiverse.
Don’t get me wrong, some people like ThePicardManeuver and LadyButterfly are holding up a good half of the Threadiverse by super posting to many many communities. But people used to say the same about FlyingSquid and also PugJesus as well. Like see this old appreciation post: https://feddit.org/post/3602869.
So anyway, you aren’t wrong, but it’s not as simple as that, when a good fraction of the communities here keep turning into ghost towns, and those that remain are either the largest, which again attracts the most controversial crowds, or else super super tiny.
But I do enjoy talking with you wherever I see you:-).
Obviously, except that they CLAIM that they are leftists. So then they are “leftists” rather than leftists.
OP made clear the distinction by stating:
come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for?
North Korea obviously famously representing a brutal totalitarian regime that murders its own people “leftist utopia”.
The sheer amount of toxicity on the Threadiverse is a real issue. Multiple people have claimed to have been stalked irl (weirdly even incorrectly so, as in thinking they were someone else?) or received death threats (I dunno how credible but how relevant would that even be here?), over and above issues shared by Reddit mods.
My point is that it is incredibly draining. Add to this how ineffectual the tools have been all this time on Lemmy: no notification of moderation events, no modmail, no ability to continue discussing the matter on the very post that was merely removed from the community listing but not full-on deleted, and even no ability to bring on additional mods from another instance, where they can see the moderator reports (bc those do not federate). The upcoming v1.0 will help a tiny bit with very little of this, and the rest of the issues will remain. PieFed helps with significantly more of them, but not all - e.g. without a modmail, which mod do you contact on the list if you want to ask why your content was removed, especially when it is obscured by the modlog merely saying it was done by “mod”?
In all, this space is becoming simultaneously both less moderated overall, while also vulnerable to overzealous power-hungry mods who do things like preemptively ban people from communities that they’ve never so much as heard of, while using insults in the ban reason section (being protected by your admin means that you can say whatever you like, in the modlog - call people trolls, when you are a mod they have to let you do it, with no ability to stop you).
It’s a 4chan mentality, and it’s extremely unwelcoming to new users. It is entirely understandable to me why subreddits are refusing to migrate here, even as access to old-reddit is in the process of being curtailed (removed?).
Fwiw there is !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social, though with at best one post per week (or almost per month lately), and on the instance that has decided to shadow-censor votes even from other users of the Threadiverse like Lemmy and Mbin without disclosure of that fact. Announcement of the latter might have had a really chilling effect upon the community since this past month the number of posts has really dropped off a cliff.
It’s been really hard for people to be the change they want to see in the world, and to share the same spaces despite such major differences in outlook on life. And for all the criticism of their moderation policies (note I am not questioning the validity of that, especially since I don’t post or typically even comment in the political communities so have no direct experience there), each time a MAJOR Threadiverse user leaves, they take all of their posting efforts with them - I’m talking about the likes of FlyingSquid, PugJesus, and I almost hesitate to mention AdmiralPatrick since I’ve already been accused of being an alt of his:-).
I tend to not post often myself unless I really have something I want to share, as people either can respond negatively or else not at all, even for like a nonpolitical comic, and that can make it somewhat un-fun. (So instead I try to make the Threadiverse more lively by contributing comments:-)
Eternal September… except it’s fucking Groundhog Day now!!
Especially when they label themselves like “memes” and “comics” etc.
Consent should matter though?
Also, a poster of OC is a “content creator”, but just offering links isn’t really “creating” anything really, just spreading it around?
Kudos for trying to help. If you listen first before speaking then you may find your messages received better.
If you start your own instance, then no mods or admins can stop you from posting whatever you want. Even CSAM.
Though consent really should matter, and others could defederate from your instance if they wanted.
Mods are never going to change. Think what you could do differently to enjoy your time here better, and encourage people to like your posts more. e.g. label your account as a bot, and/or make a separate alt account for your human interactions, to allow people to recognize (and even block) based on the bot label if they want to? A bot that is properly labeled is no issue at all, it’s the lack of transparency that gets people upset when it seems one way and then they get disappointed at finding that it is something else. If you are empathetic to others’ sensitivities then obviously you would be better received? It’s more work for you, but far less than the cumulative efforts of all people who end up having to catch you individually.
You have a right to speak, but nobody owes you a platform, nor should others be forced to listen. The consent of the governed should matter! And it will, one way or another.