Rhaedas

Ollama.com is another method of self hosting. Figuring out which model type and size for what equipment you have is key, but it’s easy to swap out. That’s just an LLM, where you go from there depends on how deep you want to get into the code. An LLM by itself can work, it’s just limited. Most of the addons you see are extra things to give memory, speech, avatars, and other extras to improve the experience and abilities. Or you can program a lot of that yourself if you know Python. But as others have said, the more you try to get out, the more robust a system you’ll need, which is why you find the best ones online in cloud format. But if you’re okay with slower responses and lower features, self hosting is totally doable, and you can do what you want, especially if you get one of the “Jailbroke” models that has had some of the safety limits modified out of them to some degree.

Also as mentioned, be careful not to get sucked in. Even a local model can be convincing enough sometimes to fool someone wanting to see things. Lots of people recognize that danger, but then belittle people who are looking for help in that direction (while marketing realizes the potential profits and tries very hard to sell it to the same people).

You didn’t factor in the variability of federation vs. a single platform and how not only can it affect how long it takes for everyone to see a post, if they do at all, but also how many duplications there may be floating around. And I don’t know if you can predict that reliably, as we’re all still trying to figure it out.

I agree it can be used fallaciously, often found in the business world. My point was to include both good and bad honestly and not hide it, and people won’t shut down if they get the good first. It also depends on the subject - if they’re on the right track and your suggestion leads to better results, that’s not as negative as telling someone they’re doing something incorrectly and offering a different way.

In the end, how you say things is just as important as what is said.

On constructive criticism - definitely rule one is make sure that it’s invited first, but second, the best way to “sweeten” a critique and make it more appealing is to put it between compliments. Don’t have a bare remark about the problems or suggestions, tell them what you like first, then how they might change things, and then close with something else positive or simply thanking them for sharing it. Even if someone says they want to hear what people think, it’s normal to be defensive, so help lower that reaction first, and then leave them feeling appreciated even though you pointed out issues you saw.

I wish that commenting would automatically upvote a post. It’s far too late to fix the use of an upvote as approval of subject discussion and not just an agree arrow, but I often…no, I almost always forget to upvote the initial topic even after leaving a few paragraphs. One would hope whatever algorithm is used also considers activity and number of comments in a rating or suggesting it to others.

Looks like just posts from Lemmy instances. Now, are replies posts? I don’t think so, I think it’s original topics. But many replies from Lemmy users are going to be to outside sources, so there’s a lot going on!

Right. I don’t mind people wearing certain red hats. It lets me know right up front what to expect. Reddit had the same dilemma once upon a time where specific subs were banned, and that just forced the roaches to hide in unknown areas where once you knew exactly where to find them all.

Which is exactly what happened when things started growing quickly due to the first Reddit exodus. OP should try and set up their own instance without any filtering and if it gains enough users and attention they’ll see what full openness gets them. Have to remember, sometimes censorship doesn’t mean you’re being repressed, it just means most people don’t care for or are ignoring your viewpoint.

You would have been fun back in the day on Usenet. People are people, whatever platform is used. It’s funny how you can claim decentralized isn’t a thing the very same time the 196 craziness is going on. If that isn’t a good example of it, I don’t know what is.

Exactly my point, you’re tied to a specific server for your account regardless. There’s no shared federated user info that can be recovered if that happens. One solution is to make your own instance where your account lives, and then it’s just up to you to make sure it doesn’t get lost in a crash without a backup. But that’s more complex than the average user is willing to take on.

Same here. It still has the limitation of being instance-based though, so if you decide to move to another server or our existing instance shuts down, you can’t take your account stuff with you (like when I had to move from Kbin and “lost” the first few months). Which may never be possible given the design of federation. I recall the question came up pretty early when people were concerned about picking the “right” instance without any knowledge of anything, and some were throwing around ideas of a way to pass along user history from one account to another…but I don’t know the state of that.

Probably trying to mirror Reddit, which had /r/politics for US, and /r/worldnews for everything else. There was a lot of effort (probably wrongly) to try and copy Reddit over instead of finding new ways to do things. /r/worldpolitics was the original sub, but there’s an interesting drama story there.

If Lemmy and other fediverse discussion areas had developed slower and more naturally there might have been more of a country/instance symmetry, but anyone who was around when the Reddit implosion and migration happened knows that it was total chaos and a grab bag of where a new user should sign up. Lemmy and the rest were not ready for such a shift, and now that everyone’s been in a place or two for a while, short of a closure or blocking or whatever there’s no reason to move around to a matching country and instance, if there even is one. People mainly look for popularity, activity, themes, and engagement, and if that’s found on the other side of the globe it works.

The idea of migration and data preservation has been a topic since day one, since that’s a big reason why so many moved to the Fediverse. I still haven’t seen a perfect solution, and maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps just having a lot of redundancy (oh no, reposts!) is the only true way of protecting posts for as long as possible, and even then…

Ernest started things rolling with something that probably wasn’t ready for the demand, but it was there when the time came. That others forked off from it and kept it going is the bright spot here. I appreciate Lemmy and even have an account from the first days, but I like the kbin/mbin setup better so that’s where I sit.