Didn’t it already tell some teen to kill themself recently? It fits right in with the worst of the internet.

Well you were right. That definitely rubs the wrong way lol.

Thank you!

If you don’t like that, you’re really not going to like what they call downvotes …

Don’t leave us hanging like that!

API bullshit refugee here. Y’all are stuck with me.

Sorry.

Look on the bright side - we’ve made a good half-step of progress since then!

The Hippocratic oath kinda cracks me up, cuz we break it almost immediately at the start of most procedures by shoving a needle or scalpel into the skin.

I guess “do only necessary harm that will presumably heal in a way that results in a net positive” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well.

Anyway, we fixed your appendicitis! damns you to a life of poverty with a bill that absolutely destroys your financial health

‘point chasing’ e.g. karma farmers on reddit is fucking stupid, but I find the metric useful on an individual post. I think of them like an online extension of a facial expression: if I read a post attempting to explain something, and it’s got way more downvotes than up, the kinda tells me the poster is full of shit, which is especially useful in threads where I don’t know enough about the topic to actually identify the bullshit myself. Like a flat-earther trying to give a lecture to an auditorium of booing geological scientists - my clueless medic ass is going to be gauging the audience as much as the speaker.

Or, say I post some joke: if it gets a lot more upvotes than down, that tells me other folks folks got a kick out of it.

It’s just another tool to communicate - and communication is hamstrung right out the gate in a predominately typed medium, so I’ll take the crutch.

I’ve always thought, of all the options to warn us that clicking will put titties on our screen, that “not safe for work” was a bad choice.

Like, what if your work doesn’t care about titties? What about the tons of other times you wouldn’t want those to pop into your screen without warning, like when you’re on public transit, or sitting next to grandma?

I’d vote for “LEWD” vs “GORE” or something more clear - users can decide for themselves when it is or isn’t safe.

For sure - the point is I was clueless. My first steps navigating the fediverse boiled down to trial and error, even after reading a few posts attempting to unmuddy the waters.

Completing those little milestones was kind of gratifying tbh, but most potential users aren’t looking for a challenge, and will be turned off by a counterintuitive or nonexistent onboarding process.

New user here. I don’t understand code, but I like the sound of everything else.

In my “whatthefuck is the Fediverse…” stage of onboarding, I had a real hard time actually deciding where to start. Most of the advice I found was “It doesn’t matter - just pick any instance!”

…kbin looked neat, so I started there; but I downloaded Jerboa and couldn’t log in with a kbin account (which went against the whole 'you can use one chunk of the fed to engage with others!" spiel).

Okay, so I need a Lemmy account, of which there are still quite a few instances, but now I’m suspicious that my selection will actually work, so I just go with the popular one.

So, feedback from a newbie:

It would have been REALLY helpful to have a flow-chart (or questions I can click through) that started me out on deciding which platform best matched what I was after, and then work its way through the subcategories: do you like a social feed ala twitter? → Mastodon!; do you like topic-specific forums ala Reddit? → Lemmy/Kbin!; are you a waste of fucking oxygen? → exploding.heads! lol you get the point. Something to guide me through the TON of options that the fediverse represents would have been great.

Threats are easier to squash when they’re small. We’re a direct competitor to Meta and similar services - a tiny one at the moment, but the potential for growth makes us a target. XMPP vs Google was a comparable scale. They weren’t more than a blip on Google’s radar either, but that didn’t stop Google from destroying them, and that all kicked off exactly the same way Meta is currently setting the stage. We can learn from history, or sit back and hope it won’t repeat itself… my vote is for the former.

Their goal is to consume the fediverse. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

The fediverse needs to collectively defederate with Meta the second it dips its toes in the water. If we allow it to metastasize here, we’re done.