Absolutely no surprise there. When you keep the barrier to entry low and throw in an algorithm to increase “engagement” via outrage, the soup turns to poison quickly.
This is why every time someone says the Fediverse is “too confusing,” I just smile and nod. That attitude of petulant, lazy, self-imposed gatekeeping is what’s keeping the Fediverse a much nicer place to be.
If the “hot” and “active” filters continue to work as expected and bots get reasonably moderated or blocked, I don’t even think Lemmy needs a high barrier to entry or petulance. The most important thing is to not optimize any recommendation or sorting algorithm on session duration, ads seen before closing session, and revenue per user.
This is so true and people seem to have a really hard time seeing this. The cultures on other social sites are far more manufactured than we’d like to believe. I think the human driven systems of Lemmy and Mastodon are brilliant but the true killer feature of the fediverse is going to be an open content recommendation algorithm. A collectively developed non-profit driven algorithm would undoubtedly be better at surfacing positive impact content than either system.
Actually yes and I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Sentiment analysis is not a hard task nowadays. If overused the site would become a bunch of artificial positivity, but I think there could be a place for this. Could be part of a mod toolkit too.
I’d imagine if it uses the sentiment as a weight but not a gate when selecting what content to boost that would probably provide a good balance. Especially if you get some controls to adjust the weights in the settings panel
I definitely don’t think something like that should be used to only show one emotion though. If AI were used to control content based on how it makes people feel it should try to balance, not control how we feel. Give us an equal amount of everything.
It’s not good to cloak ourselves in only feelgood stories and lies that sound nice and ignore all the bad stuff just because an algorithm wants us to feel nice and cozy. If no one cares about the bad stuff, the bad stuff gets worse.
It’s been noted on the GitHub. It seems the bug is amplified on small instances. I’ll regularly get posts from two weeks ago with no comments on the top of All/Hot when using this account.
This this this. The fediverse being “confusing” keeps the idiots, boomers, trolls, and overall horrible people away. Having to learn something new is too much for those people. Lemmy/Mastodon and so on are “nerd” platforms, and I really like it that way.
Easy on the boomer stuff. You just lumped “horrible people” into the same group as regular people that happen to have lived more years than you. If you are looking for a “nerd” platform, you’ll do well to remember that there are a ton of extremely nerdy boomers out there and you just helped turn the soup to poison for them
Man I’d love that. I feel like we will soon honestly. I just hope the lemmy/Kbin apps bring these other federated projects inside, so we can do it all on one app too.
Wasn’t IRC itself pretty much federated, just maybe not calling it that yet? Networked I think they called it. You’d have a bunch of servers in a network and users could join channels and chat with users on other networks. Every now and then you’d get a server split where some subset of servers would lose connection with the rest and a bunch of people would all leave the channel at once. Then, it would resolve, and they’d come flooding back in.
Yes. For example, you’d have a collection of servers that federated to create EFnet. DaLnet, etc. Joining any of those servers would get you onto that federated network. You could be banned from one server but you could always choose another to still get into the same network. And yes, netsplits happened. A lot.
There’s also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it’s possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?
The Matrix but they use the Matrix protocol on a The Matrix themed Matrix IRC channel talking about talking about The Matrix in the Matrix protocol in a The Matrix themed Matrix IRC channel (woops sorry that is the Matrix 2 I think my bad)
My first instinct would be to say, “This is the 21st century, learn to use a damn computer already!” But then I think of the long term and WANT people to think it’s too hard to join Mastodon or Kbin, just to keep the average IQ of these sites above room temperature.
IMO if technical difficulty is the filter, it would actually only select for people good at computers. There are otherwise dumb, shallow people who are good at tech.
(I’m not saying its difficult using lemmy, just replying to the idea in general)
I don’t really think it’s fair to pretend that, before two weeks ago, anyone under god had any idea what an instance was unless they were already heavily tech-oriented.
It took me hours of trying to read through not-my-kind-of-jargon to understand what the hell I was looking at and what kind of consequences that unexplained choice would have, and it really seems like a good number of users that initially struggled forget the learning curve extremely quickly the moment they’re over it.
Decision paralysis is real even for stupid things. Like, “what are the implications if I pick the wrong instance?” Was something that made me put off finishing signing up for mastodon and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Acting like it’s trivial isn’t helpful to anyone even if it was trivial or you
Yeah decision paralysis definitely delayed my joining any ActivityPub based sites, but really most of what it affects is stuff that wont matter until you’ve spent enough time on the platform to understand the difference to begin with
It was a case of:
Lemmy.ml isn’t accepting new users atm
BeeHaw requires me to tell them why I’m a good user
So does this other instance… Why do I have to justify myself!?
Hey, Lemmy.world let’s me just sign up! Perfect!
And that was how I chose an instance. Thank you for joining story got with Valek
It took me hours of trying to read through not-my-kind-of-jargon to understand
I started off going down that road of trying to understand it, but my laziness and impatience got in the way and said “just start using it and you’ll work it out.” And that’s exactly what happened for me. In a way, the explanations made it all sound much more confusing than it really is. Sometimes you just gotta take a deep breath and dive in.
I’ve been explaining it like email. There’s no email webpage you go to to create an account. It’s just a protocall a bunch of people have agreed to use, so you go to one of them and you create an address. I also think your username in the fediverse should be called an address too, but I don’t think that’ll catch on. It makes it a lot easier to explain, because everyone can use email, even the most tech illiterate people.
Maybe I’m setting the bar too low but a lot of people have no clue if their emailing, texting or messaging. They just know that their phone pings and they can either reply or not. I learned this when I worked support for a smartphone manufacturer
I know I’m an old school techie, but was there really a high entry bar for lemmy compared to say twitter or Instagram? I honestly don’t know, other than r3dd!t the last social media I signed up for was what? Facebook well over a decade ago?
If the few steps it took to make a user name, pick an instance, and then get my head around the fact that I had to also join any instance I wanted to respond to, is enough to keep the unwashed internet masses out, well, they are just even dumber than I already thought.
Non-techy guy here. I read an infograohic and made an account. 0 issues whatsoever. And the infographic was just to help me understand how it works. You don’t really need to understand lemmy to interact with it
Yeah I dove into Lemmy and Mastadon with very little research and even Mastodon with its “pick an instance you like first” step was extremely easy. I ended up on smaller instances for both and honestly I like it. Best part is, if you feel some FOMO either make another account on another instance or in the case of Mastadon export your account and migrate it to the new instance
Many people genuinely give up at the “pick an instance” stage.
Part of it is a slight failing for not blasting “if you join any of these instances you can respond to posts on any of these imstances’ communities” but also the level of tech literacy has fallen off of a cliff post-smartphone world.
Bolstering technology literacy (I’m talking simple things like: what is a file browser, where do things you download go by default, what are some common file types for music/videos/applications) need to be added to public education because there’s clearly a decline happening here that will have downstream ramifications.
I used to think the next generation was going to out code, design, and trouble shoot me in five years, and that the one after that would make me feel like a dinosaur in my 30s.
Now I’m almost 50, and the army of tech savvy teens coming for my job simple hasn’t materialized. With the ease of use of so many devices, a world where “plug and play” actually exists, the effort and skill requirement for most things has gone way down. On top of that, the battle for attention is so great that there is always something easier to go play with, and if it requires a bit of noodling to make it work, screw it.
For a bit I thought “Great, job security!”, but now I’m at the point where I need to think about finding interns and replacements, and unless they come from one of the historic tech pipelines like PC gaming or the makers community, not a lot of kids have that kind of background.
There are great programs now in the schools for making app, 3D printing, graphics, music, etc, that draw kids into technology. However, like everything else it’s all slick and user friendly. You don’t have to spend hour after hour figuring out how to make the thing work.
I watched my two year old nephew trying to swipe on the pictures in a magazine and was confused why they didn’t move. He was basically born with an ipad in his hands.
I agree completely that a basic computer class covering those things and more should be standard in schools. Now we have niche tech courses akin to the woodshop and autos class of my high school, but they are electives, and don’t cover the fundamentals.
I’d say it’s less so a decline and moreso a lack of literacy to begin with. The number of relatives I have that are fucking stupid with the internet is insane. And surprise the kids are just as stupid with tech, since the parents are dumb and companies made tools for them and the kids.
Absolutely no surprise there. When you keep the barrier to entry low and throw in an algorithm to increase “engagement” via outrage, the soup turns to poison quickly.
This is why every time someone says the Fediverse is “too confusing,” I just smile and nod. That attitude of petulant, lazy, self-imposed gatekeeping is what’s keeping the Fediverse a much nicer place to be.
If the “hot” and “active” filters continue to work as expected and bots get reasonably moderated or blocked, I don’t even think Lemmy needs a high barrier to entry or petulance. The most important thing is to not optimize any recommendation or sorting algorithm on session duration, ads seen before closing session, and revenue per user.
This is so true and people seem to have a really hard time seeing this. The cultures on other social sites are far more manufactured than we’d like to believe. I think the human driven systems of Lemmy and Mastodon are brilliant but the true killer feature of the fediverse is going to be an open content recommendation algorithm. A collectively developed non-profit driven algorithm would undoubtedly be better at surfacing positive impact content than either system.
Can we use ai to judge emotional content of threads so I can get recommendations for threads where people are relaxed and happy?
Actually yes and I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Sentiment analysis is not a hard task nowadays. If overused the site would become a bunch of artificial positivity, but I think there could be a place for this. Could be part of a mod toolkit too.
I’d imagine if it uses the sentiment as a weight but not a gate when selecting what content to boost that would probably provide a good balance. Especially if you get some controls to adjust the weights in the settings panel
I definitely don’t think something like that should be used to only show one emotion though. If AI were used to control content based on how it makes people feel it should try to balance, not control how we feel. Give us an equal amount of everything.
It’s not good to cloak ourselves in only feelgood stories and lies that sound nice and ignore all the bad stuff just because an algorithm wants us to feel nice and cozy. If no one cares about the bad stuff, the bad stuff gets worse.
Funny enough Hot filtering is currently bugged on small instances.
Yesterday it was bugged on world, too. I’d keep hitting next page and seeing half of the same things on every page. It’s working better today though.
It’s been noted on the GitHub. It seems the bug is amplified on small instances. I’ll regularly get posts from two weeks ago with no comments on the top of All/Hot when using this account.
This this this. The fediverse being “confusing” keeps the idiots, boomers, trolls, and overall horrible people away. Having to learn something new is too much for those people. Lemmy/Mastodon and so on are “nerd” platforms, and I really like it that way.
Easy on the boomer stuff. You just lumped “horrible people” into the same group as regular people that happen to have lived more years than you. If you are looking for a “nerd” platform, you’ll do well to remember that there are a ton of extremely nerdy boomers out there and you just helped turn the soup to poison for them
It’s like IRC. Just zany enough to keep out the riff raff.
Oh the IRC days, what a time
/slap speaker_hat
*Veltoss slaps speaker_hat around with a large trout.
That mIRC flashback hit me like a Vietnam vet’s PTSD…
IRC is hugely flawed but also, I miss it. Could we have a federated discord? It’d basically be irc but easier to find stuff right?
Man I’d love that. I feel like we will soon honestly. I just hope the lemmy/Kbin apps bring these other federated projects inside, so we can do it all on one app too.
matrix.org is basically IRC 2.0. It’s federated and has a lot of cool clients.
Wasn’t IRC itself pretty much federated, just maybe not calling it that yet? Networked I think they called it. You’d have a bunch of servers in a network and users could join channels and chat with users on other networks. Every now and then you’d get a server split where some subset of servers would lose connection with the rest and a bunch of people would all leave the channel at once. Then, it would resolve, and they’d come flooding back in.
Yes. For example, you’d have a collection of servers that federated to create EFnet. DaLnet, etc. Joining any of those servers would get you onto that federated network. You could be banned from one server but you could always choose another to still get into the same network. And yes, netsplits happened. A lot.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what Matrix is?
There’s also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it’s possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?
All matrix is to me is a classic late nineties action sci fi movie.
The Matrix but they use the Matrix protocol on a The Matrix themed Matrix IRC channel talking about talking about The Matrix in the Matrix protocol in a The Matrix themed Matrix IRC channel (woops sorry that is the Matrix 2 I think my bad)
https://attrition.org/archive/www.detonate.net/matrix-orig/
If extra layer of “difficulty” is introduced by giving the users the choice of an instance is enough to keep them away, then I’m all for it.
It just needs to be easier for the ones that managed to figure it all out (better apps, stability, UI/UX, and QOL updates)
IMO the only algorithm I’ll accept for lemmy/kbin is slightly faster “expiration” for posts, sometimes some posts stay too long on my frontpage.
My first instinct would be to say, “This is the 21st century, learn to use a damn computer already!” But then I think of the long term and WANT people to think it’s too hard to join Mastodon or Kbin, just to keep the average IQ of these sites above room temperature.
IMO if technical difficulty is the filter, it would actually only select for people good at computers. There are otherwise dumb, shallow people who are good at tech.
(I’m not saying its difficult using lemmy, just replying to the idea in general)
It’s concerning just how many people can’t be bothered to spend 5 minutes to pick an instance… Keeps it nicer for us though
I don’t really think it’s fair to pretend that, before two weeks ago, anyone under god had any idea what an instance was unless they were already heavily tech-oriented.
It took me hours of trying to read through not-my-kind-of-jargon to understand what the hell I was looking at and what kind of consequences that unexplained choice would have, and it really seems like a good number of users that initially struggled forget the learning curve extremely quickly the moment they’re over it.
There was no learning curve for me. I randomly picked an instance LMFAO!
Decision paralysis is real even for stupid things. Like, “what are the implications if I pick the wrong instance?” Was something that made me put off finishing signing up for mastodon and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Acting like it’s trivial isn’t helpful to anyone even if it was trivial or you
Same here. I had no idea what picking an insurance meant in terms of the amount of people, communities, level of engagement, etc.
I could have picked one of the more toxic communities that have been defederated and my experience of lemmy would have been much worse
Yeah decision paralysis definitely delayed my joining any ActivityPub based sites, but really most of what it affects is stuff that wont matter until you’ve spent enough time on the platform to understand the difference to begin with
It was a case of: Lemmy.ml isn’t accepting new users atm BeeHaw requires me to tell them why I’m a good user So does this other instance… Why do I have to justify myself!? Hey, Lemmy.world let’s me just sign up! Perfect!
And that was how I chose an instance. Thank you for joining story got with Valek
I started off going down that road of trying to understand it, but my laziness and impatience got in the way and said “just start using it and you’ll work it out.” And that’s exactly what happened for me. In a way, the explanations made it all sound much more confusing than it really is. Sometimes you just gotta take a deep breath and dive in.
I’ve been explaining it like email. There’s no email webpage you go to to create an account. It’s just a protocall a bunch of people have agreed to use, so you go to one of them and you create an address. I also think your username in the fediverse should be called an address too, but I don’t think that’ll catch on. It makes it a lot easier to explain, because everyone can use email, even the most tech illiterate people.
Maybe I’m setting the bar too low but a lot of people have no clue if their emailing, texting or messaging. They just know that their phone pings and they can either reply or not. I learned this when I worked support for a smartphone manufacturer
Well said! A high barrier to entry, and a low barrier to exit working as intended. Let’s enjoy the good times while they last.
Its not even a high barrier. You just have to choose an instance from a list.
Well, it’s not easy. I fell it’s like choosing a Linux distro to use.
Yeah that’s why everyone gravitates to the most popular one, like Hannah Montana Linux.
Absolutely agree. I love the high barrier to entry and how it has kept the conversations (for the most part) more substantial.
I know I’m an old school techie, but was there really a high entry bar for lemmy compared to say twitter or Instagram? I honestly don’t know, other than r3dd!t the last social media I signed up for was what? Facebook well over a decade ago?
If the few steps it took to make a user name, pick an instance, and then get my head around the fact that I had to also join any instance I wanted to respond to, is enough to keep the unwashed internet masses out, well, they are just even dumber than I already thought.
Non-techy guy here. I read an infograohic and made an account. 0 issues whatsoever. And the infographic was just to help me understand how it works. You don’t really need to understand lemmy to interact with it
Yeah I dove into Lemmy and Mastadon with very little research and even Mastodon with its “pick an instance you like first” step was extremely easy. I ended up on smaller instances for both and honestly I like it. Best part is, if you feel some FOMO either make another account on another instance or in the case of Mastadon export your account and migrate it to the new instance
Many people genuinely give up at the “pick an instance” stage.
Part of it is a slight failing for not blasting “if you join any of these instances you can respond to posts on any of these imstances’ communities” but also the level of tech literacy has fallen off of a cliff post-smartphone world.
Bolstering technology literacy (I’m talking simple things like: what is a file browser, where do things you download go by default, what are some common file types for music/videos/applications) need to be added to public education because there’s clearly a decline happening here that will have downstream ramifications.
I used to think the next generation was going to out code, design, and trouble shoot me in five years, and that the one after that would make me feel like a dinosaur in my 30s.
Now I’m almost 50, and the army of tech savvy teens coming for my job simple hasn’t materialized. With the ease of use of so many devices, a world where “plug and play” actually exists, the effort and skill requirement for most things has gone way down. On top of that, the battle for attention is so great that there is always something easier to go play with, and if it requires a bit of noodling to make it work, screw it.
For a bit I thought “Great, job security!”, but now I’m at the point where I need to think about finding interns and replacements, and unless they come from one of the historic tech pipelines like PC gaming or the makers community, not a lot of kids have that kind of background.
There are great programs now in the schools for making app, 3D printing, graphics, music, etc, that draw kids into technology. However, like everything else it’s all slick and user friendly. You don’t have to spend hour after hour figuring out how to make the thing work.
I watched my two year old nephew trying to swipe on the pictures in a magazine and was confused why they didn’t move. He was basically born with an ipad in his hands.
I agree completely that a basic computer class covering those things and more should be standard in schools. Now we have niche tech courses akin to the woodshop and autos class of my high school, but they are electives, and don’t cover the fundamentals.
I’d say it’s less so a decline and moreso a lack of literacy to begin with. The number of relatives I have that are fucking stupid with the internet is insane. And surprise the kids are just as stupid with tech, since the parents are dumb and companies made tools for them and the kids.