Plus, the bones are good - it doesn’t do everything, but what it does it does surprisingly efficiently and robustly. And there’s the rest of the fediverse for most of it - Lemmy doesn’t need to handle messages, there’s matrix for that (there’s even a matrix ID on the user definitions)

There’s definitely more to be done, like user migration and modtools, but a lot of the shortcomings are in the client. And now that it caught so much attention, you’re going to see a lot of apps and different web interfaces very soon

It’s kind of incredible what you can do on the client side too since there’s no company trying to keep you reliant on them. I’m building an app, and while I’m prioritizing getting it out ASAP, I’m looking through the data and imagining what I can build on top of it. Especially when the rest of the fediverse is taken into account.

It’s like a new Internet built on top of the one stolen from us

Here’s the thing - we’ve been raised from birth to think “people don’t make things, companies do”.

Most people have never used software that isn’t company branded, they’ve never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they’ve never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It’s learned helplessness. They don’t have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they’ve tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball… Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you’re just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn’t bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it’s going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it’s going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it’s important to remember we’re animals, and we’re not just trainable, we’re the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It’s going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they’re going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I’m working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I’ve got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I’ve been at it for 30 hours now, but I can’t shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

I’ll add that I think another aspect to this is: if the site declines quietly, you’ll end up with users shrugging and either continuing to use it or not. Most people don’t understand why this matters at all, and if the post quality declines it probably will be a lot like Facebooks decline. People knew it got worse, but the prevailing narrative is “that’s just how social networks work, the kids are always jumping on the next thing”.

By doing this, it makes it very clear that the mods and power users are pissed by actions taken by Reddit. People are starting to hear about it, but it’s not common knowledge.

If people hear “Reddit users protested then left because of Reddit corporate”, investors are going to be pissed, advertisers are going to find it less attractive, and (most importantly) when discord or YouTube consider their own anti-poweruser moves (which they’re currently talking about) they’ll remember “we need to be careful with changes or we’ll have a reddit moment”

I think this all started with Musk and his instance that despite pissing off users left and right, he’s made Twitter more profitable than ever and only kicked off bots and scammers. It’s absurdly unlikely (not like he’s releasing numbers and they are deciding to not pay bills).

But by creating that very attractive narrative, other social media companies are looking for their own ways blatantly grab cash

No, I think it kind of goes against what we’re trying to do here - if a list like that became popular, it would supercharge the growth of certain communities

There’s a lot of people pushing for that because it would make the site a straight Reddit replacement, but the promise here is a lot like the original promise of Reddit - give users a single place they can go to access a bunch of small forums

If someone makes a community for that purpose or a community wants to draw in all the Reddit refugees, I have no problem with that, but I think the growth would be healthier if people find them organically rather than putting a centralized list somewhere

Sites will start to pull in a community if any of the members on that instance sub to it and there’s talk of adding the ability for communities to band together in multis

It’s like when you let kids vote on what to do for the school faire.

Not only will the teacher and school change the result if they don’t like the winning suggestion, you also can’t vote to do nothing or protest the event

It’s just a way to give you the illusion of autonomy to boost engagement. It’s only a choice between the decisions they find (more or less) equally acceptable

Well, if you start one I’d join.

I’ve been looking for the next thing for more than a year, because the things that made Reddit a (relatively) healthier form of social media were being eroded. I tried out tildes, and the community was much more friendly, but almost too friendly. It was like they were overcompensating out of fear of the community becoming toxic… It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t comfortable - it felt like meeting strangers who you really want to impress. They’re also somewhat anti-growth, which isn’t a bad idea, but they were well below the sweet spot

Plus, I never loved the old school Reddit visuals, and it’s design principle is html only and had no app or dark mode… All in all it’s a great place for a specific group of redditors that didn’t include me

Then I made up my resolution to leave Reddit when my apps go down and started looking at making a custom app to collate RSS feeds, and I started hearing about Lemmy.

I liked it enough that I’ve dropped everything and started building a better app. There’s a lot missing, but there’s so much good energy.

And the design principles of the fediverse address many of the fundimental problems with social media and the Internet as a whole. This might really be something important

Because humans are barely sapient animals with limited understanding of ourselves and little to no awareness of the long-term consequences of our actions.

We don’t operate in our own best interest or the best interest of the group, we’re built on the assumption that the environment and our local community will moderate our actions. There’s natural limits to physical actions, natural repercussions to social ones when everyone knows each other

Technology doesn’t have these limits. Things made of code can scale past human comprehension in seconds. And it changes it’s users

Part of the ethics of software development is to carefully consider the ramifications of what you bring into the world.

The public can’t make an informed choice, because they lack both the nuanced understanding of the tech, and every choice has a cognitive load. It’s up to you to make it safe and healthy or to inform them of the consequences, and you can’t just put up a 26 research papers on the psychological and solciological considerations for hitting a button… No one is going to read that.

You also can’t have booby traps - anything a user can do inadvertently or accidentally shouldn’t have serious consequences.

There’s some room for debate, but it all comes down to this: you’re responsible for how an average user is going to use your technology. You should do all you can to make it easy to use the tech safely, you should add covers over the buttons that do something with consequences, and things with deeper ramifications should only be available to power users who presumably have the technical knowledge to make an informed choice themselves.

So onto this situation. Say you make this button “sub to /c/_____ and all sister communities”. That’s not really a choice - it’s like you go to McDonald’s and order a burger, and they say “for the same price, I’ll give you 3 additional burgers with different options”. Some people would say no, but they wanted a thing and you offer them more of the thing. If they haven’t tried them before, there’s fomo - what if one of the other burgers is better? And it’s not like they couldn’t just stop eating.

The majority will accept 4 burgers, because they don’t see the hidden consequences. There’s no world where the average person sits down with 4 burgers and eats less than they would if they had 1 - it’s human nature, studied and documented… Giving someone more food leads to them eating more, because we judge the amount we’re eating in large part visually. Put it on a larger plate or pile it higher, and we underestimate how much we’ve eaten. Put it on a small plate, and we eat less.

Sure, there’s people who understand this - those of us who’ve struggled with weight or food scarcity are either not going to accept the burgers, or we’ll set 3 aside for later. There’s people who might benefit from eating 4 burgers - someone who burns 10k calories a day needs that kind of intake (even though they’d be better off with more variety).

Good or bad, you’ve increased consumption based on how you’ve presented this choice. The outcome was a statistical certainty, but technically it was a choice. It’s just a choice that every human would naturally answer the same way if they went in blind - do you want only the thing you asked for, or that plus more free stuff.

So if you make this a button, it’ll overwhelm the single sub option. And there’s a game theory aspect to this - I’d likely hit the button too, because individual choices here don’t matter, it’s a matter of speed and volume of users subbing and unsubbing

I think this was the proposal - but problem is still doing this automatically.

It’s not posts I’m worried about, it’s comments. Comments are where the discussion takes place and the culture develops

Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

I liked GTA V, but I spent my whole time with rdr2 just being like “everyone loves this game, what am I missing? Maybe if I make it to the next act it’ll open up more”.

It was beautiful, the world felt alive, the mechanics were good, but it’s like instead of making a game with the wonderful foundation they built, they decided they’d rather tell a story than make a game.

I loved the hunting, the bounty quests were kind of ok, the gunfights were ok even if they were so repetitive they felt procedural, but I just couldn’t care about the story they shoved down your throat.

I wanted to build up the settlement and have to run around robbing trains to come up with money, I don’t want to do a 5 minute ride while the characters give exposition through dialogue, fight a few waves of enemies, then ride off - rinse and repeat.

I wanted to grind progression through upgrading weapons and gear, but the upgrades are minimal, new guns are linked to story progression, and while hunting was fun the legendaries were just tedious jumping through hoops

I like multis and I think discoveribility is a bottleneck, but I’m very wary of this idea. If you merge communities together like this, you essentially multiply the users in that community. Moderation isn’t 4 small instances anymore - it’s one large one with 4 separate mod teams each handling a quarter of the posts

I think this is more likely to lead to polarization and eventually echo chambers than if you kept them separate - outrage drives engagement more than anything else, and explosive growth is a great way for a fraction of the group to dominate the first few pages of comments, which turns off moderate voices, which works like confirmation bias to make the outraged believe they’re the prevailing voice of the community, which again drives them to post more incendiary comments, and the whole thing spirals

If you want to avoid echo chambers, the best way is to throw a small group together and make them get along through mods that are involved in the community

But then you’d probably end up with most members of one community slowly joining the rest, which is a healthier growth model, but still not great

My intuition is that the ideal solution involves encouraging users to join a single smaller group, but being exposed to top posts from sister groups to avoid fomo. Possibly through something like the way Reddit handled crossposts, where you get the post but not the comments, and a small link to the discussion in other communities. It could be automated if the post crossed a certain threshold of votes, keyed to a certain deviation above the daily average of the original group and optionally with a minimum up/down vote ratio.

This would help keep moderation ahead of participation, and hopefully build a tighter knit community - people are less willing to be jerks to people they recognize than strangers you get in a larger population. By encouraging users into one small random group instead of shopping around for the one that best fits their view, I think we could resist natural grouping by beliefs.

To go further, if this works we could consider a mechanism for “mitosis”, a splitting of a group when the mod team feels the culture of the group is getting past their ability to manage in a nuanced way

The goal is decentralization after all, not distributed centralized groups

I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

Nah, it’s more than that. It’s a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.

It doesn’t start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you’re suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs

Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.

At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place

There’s also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you’re going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don’t want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they’re going to ruin things

I mean, there’s also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they’re not cut off from the network, but the instances don’t talk directly to each other anymore.

And while we’re very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.

I’d like to see science and technology go in that direction because I’ll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it’s easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization

I think you’re 100% right, but frankly this issue is more important than just a nice home for us

Social networks are being pressured to start extracting value with interest rates no longer being nil, and their efforts aren’t just inconvenient, they’re bad for mental health.

And how long until they start selling control over debate to the highest bidder? Musk has pretty explicitly gone over plans to do exactly that - he wants to charge per-user to send out tweets to your subscribers. He says there would be a large limit before you have to start paying, but this is a great way to control voices that rise out of the crowd

Social media has been a disaster, but there’s no putting it back in the box - it’s the primary way we communicate. It’s terrible for mental health and can be leveraged as a tool of control, so a decentralized system is very important right now

That being said, I think it’d be great if the fediverse encorages fragmented groups instead of a main subject monolith and refugees in fringe groups - smaller communities are just healthier and more fulfilling

So there’s plenty you’re leaving out there, like the fact he didn’t start spaceX or Tesla (although he sued the founders to not mention that publicly), and the Hyperloop is a great sci-fi idea that the math just doesn’t work out on (at least not in Earth’s atmosphere)

It totally supports what you’re saying, the only credit he deserves is as a hype man and for securing government assistance. Nothing he says or does convinces me he’s a smart or even slightly self-aware person, but…

Not a day after I posted, musk announced he wanted to remove blocking people on Twitter. That’s an idea a 7 year old could tell you is dumb.

Sure, the presence of the mute makes the platform worse rather than unusual, but still, holy hell Batman…

I agree with what you said, and the evidence supports you. But here’s where a very small part of me drifts to…

Let’s say he’s been trying a zero requiem since the beginning. He’s measurably advanced key technologies. He’s positioned himself to have the ear of very powerful people. He’s gained the respect of many of them for growing his wealth to become one of the richest people in existence. They listen to his methods if nothing else.

Now he tanks Twitter in a very public, blundering way. He expressed privately (in now public text exchanges) an interest in getting together a bunch of rich people to buy out social media, because it’s an possibly existential risk.

For those watching critically, it certainly looks like he plans to use Twitter to turn money into influence over the population. He keeps insisting moves that are killing Twitter have actually made them profitable. Other social media, like Reddit and discord, took notice and started flirting with these user-hostile ideas.

The most likely result is social media platforms splintering their user bases as they flee elsewhere, while the billionaire held up as an example of why billionaires are actually a good thing becomes hated by large portions of the population (particularly on the left, the side more critical of billionaires and capitalism)

Again, I think you’re probably right. I believe he’s just a spoiled asshole who read sci-fi and dreamed of being Tony Stark. I’m also deeply concerned about how he started getting political after meeting Trump.

But if he’s actually doing it all on purpose to become the symbol of a billionaire that needs to be reigned in, it would probably look a lot like what we’re seeing

So what I think you’re talking about is called deep links, and it’s certainly a challenge in this scenario

I’m pretty sure it’s solvable with some effort, I’m working on a Lemmy client now and will look into intents that could be sent from the Lemmy front end. My main concern is just recognizing the links in-app robustly as people learn how to format them - if the client doesn’t kick you into the browser, it solves half the problem and I’ll worry about the other half

I mean, I think it’s deeper than that, in our culture we have this idea nailed into us that without a clear hierarchy, people will go around killing each other and stealing their homes. No one would ever do work, and if you were being murdered on the street no one would care or do anything about it

Most people fundimentally aren’t equipped to understand how humans self-govern - but it’s how most of the world lived for most of history, and we had worldwide trading networks just based around distributed communities trading with their neighbors

So you try to explain a decentralized network to them, and they hear “distributed”. They don’t get why people would band together to make servers, and they don’t get how it won’t immediately collapse into chaos without leadership

It’s worth trying to pound the concept into their head until it gets in, because the more people who understand, the more we can improve our society across the board with structures that are more aligned to us by nature

And along with that, like you mentioned there are people who see everything as an enterprise - something that ultimately draws in money or power. They tend to be the entitled, because in their mind “I’m the customer and you need me”. They’re going to have even more trouble understanding, and I’m more willing to let them go. Even if they’re made to understand, people with that worldview tend to see growth as a virtue and sustainablility as a marketing term

My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through

He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?

I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.

Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?

Same. I like it, but it belongs in more shitposty communities IMO. I like a small percentage of my feed to be shitposts, and when I dig into it it’s just people repeating twists on the same stupid jokes.

Sometimes it’s actually clever, a lot of the time it’s just people wanting reassurance they belong.

It’s annoying when it overflows and floods everywhere with the exact same joke (like Google en passant). In r/anarchychess they were constantly workshopping new jokes, because it definitely got old