Uh oh, but you said that you would never say the words “not good”… /s :-P

But yeah, the wisdom of the ages seems to tell us that “what goes around comes around” and “whatever system you choose to use to measure others with, you will end up using the very same system of measurement against your very own self” - i.e. if you don’t want others to be a certain way, like hypocritical, then don’t be that way yourself. It probably has to do with formation of the superego portion of our personalities, but however it is implemented, it seems to be an accurate description of human psychology.

So if we say that others are “stupid”… then isn’t that surely what we think that we do ourselves, at least sometimes? In contrast, if we allow ourselves to realize that others may not be “stupid” but merely “misled” or “mistaken in this particular area” or “in possession of incorrect facts with which to base conclusions upon” - all of these being very distinct from such thoughts as “they are most definitely dumb as a post” - then we see others more clearly, and also thereby are more accepting of our own very selves.

Which in turn allows us to see still other things (in the world, including both them and us) more clearly as well - i.e. instead of muddying the waters, we aim to see whatever is truly there. So it’s not even something that we need to do for the sake of “kindness” (to either them or ourselves), so much as it is necessary for deeper logical introspection as well.

Anyway, to me these words seem to conjure a thought like “don’t judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”. Or the political variation “surely the leopards who eat everyone’s faces off would never eat my face off in particular!” The converse of either of these points to a weaker, lesser, lower, unclear form of thinking… that will ultimately wrap back around to hurt our very selves, despite how at first glance someone could think that they only intended to be negative against other people. But there is a better way, and that is to realize the truth of this principle: “what goes around comes around”. So simple… yet missed by what seems like everyone that I’ve ever met (including, you guessed it, myself! 🤣).

Sometimes a critique can be most helpful, especially if delivered with kind intentions.

Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

All the rest: yup.

Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556

I wanted to add to others’ comments: usernames as well.

So e.g. I could go create an account called Matty@lemmy.world, and another called Matty@lemm.ee, and another Matty@lemmy.zip, etc. (assuming none of these already existed), and they each would be different - plus none of these would be you.

This is a reason why many celebrities say that they refuse to come to the Fediverse, b/c of this potential for misunderstanding regarding the account names - which tbf that is not entirely “new” issue since it would affect emails too, and yet in reality it is new b/c Twitter/X and Reddit and Facebook got people spoiled to expect a certain style of behavior so using the Fediverse feels to them a step backwards (we had a discussion about that topic recently).

So, exactly like email and a website URL, it takes the full thing to specify something exactly - a username, or a community.

Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)

Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof:-)

Yes, Nancy, exactly like that!

Beautiful illustration of this concept btw:-).

Except then you have to know the proper community name, which can often look very different from what is displayed. e.g. !world@lemmy.world is an entirely different community than !worldnews@lemmy.world, and damn, that example did not work bc both end up as “valid” links. Well, theoretically sometimes the feedback on having gotten the name correct could be helpful I suppose.

Also I note that what you are saying can seem in contradiction with the help docs. If you start a post or reply and click the help icon in the web UI, it will go to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html, which does not mention the word “community” at all, but does show link syntax. I am more inclined to believe you than the help docs! Especially when we can see the resulting behavior in front of our very eyes - except where it may pertain to other methods of access - but I am pointing out here again that for a new user, finding out such things is currently a terrible process! Even Arch Linux has at the very least man pages, as well as the wikis!

But I’ve been on the Fediverse since the Rexodus, and since I don’t use apps other than the webpage UI (I tried Voyager but while it looks nice, it doesn’t seem to function well, maybe that pertains to accounts on instances other than Lemmy.world such as mine - e.g. I would reply to someone but no amount of refreshing or clicking around would let me see my reply until I force-quit and restarted the app), Mbin, PieFed or Sublinks (or Tesseract), I don’t know myself what the “preferred” method of linking is. I just see what works (or not) for me. And again the help docs are of no help here.

So since you are saying that this 11-month old post is outdated, if you know the details of what would be better practice, perhaps you can write a newer post explaining that?

I’ve had situations where that doesn’t work for me, or like where I will start typing and it won’t expand quite properly - e.g. typing !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca expands not to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca but like to !newtolemmy!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca. The latter repeatedly happened to me on a desktop Chrome. Also if you user-block an instance, then the name expansion process no longer works.

There are actually two types of expansions - one done after you post, another while you are still writing. Neither of which I have ever seen written up in any guide anywhere, other than release notes from as you say like a year ago. Similarly I have not seen guides to cross-posting, in e.g. the Getting started guide.

Edit: oh, and this is the first I am hearing that the former expanded links won’t work - do you know when that happens? Maybe apps, or perhaps non-Lemmy Fediverse Mbin or PieFed? This is the first I am hearing of this iirc.

Finding out how things work on Lemmy, for those of us who do not use Arch btw, is a terrible process for new users. I was thinking, it sure would be nice if there was not just a single post here and there such as Lemmy.ml’s What is Lemmy.ml (that is the exact link that appears in their sidebar though), but an entire community somewhere where such guidance could be posted. If not this one, then somewhere else - but this is the only one like that that I have seen.

Edit: if you know more about when links won’t work, perhaps you can post the thought in that community?

Except some instances like hexbear have downvoting disabled, which tends to encourage people to comment more.

For things such as how to make a proper link that does not take people away from their instance, see !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca.

Stalker.

I mean… technically… :-P

Why can’t I quit you?..

Indeed it is good to think ahead, rather than make rash decisions:-).

I mentioned elsewhere, to the developers of PieFed that I will switch to, that Dessalines is still an ally in the flight against for-profit corporate control over everything, e.g. Reddit, Facebook, Threads, X, etc. But while I have ENORMOUS respect for having offered the Lemmy codebase, the way he runs his personal instance… it’s not all good, nor all bad, but definitely does have more worrisome elements than most Lemmy or Mastodon instances.

The lack of transparency in governance in particular, as well as how heavy-handed it is, and again the fact that the unwritten rules are so hard to guess at, and could change at any time. It leaves people feeling insecure in the situation, which seems to make it unreliable, unless you constantly dance to his tune, which he never states quite what that is. And even if you never so much as mention e.g. Ukraine or Uyghurs or Gaza, the fact that someone else in your community could, and therefore mandatorily become booted from the community (along with the entire instance), is not ideal. The rules merely state that Lemmy.ml is “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but there’s far more (politics) going on besides that.

At least Reddit was more honest about Huffman’s opinion - “you are landed gentry and I will harvest your data and no longer allow third-party apps unless they pay my exorbitant fee”. Okay… good to know I guess.

Anyway, if I helped any then I am glad ☺️.

Yeah that’s what I am starting to realize over the last couple of days - that while Reddit was bad, in some ways at least, they were less bad than Lemmy, or as you say at least lemmy.ml.

The key ingredient there is the transparency: Huffman may be a dick, but at least he is upfront about things: “you are landed gentry, under MY dominion, mu-wha-ha-ha now all will bow before me” indeed, but contrast that to claiming that lemmy.ml is for “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers.” - but did you get banned for spouting paid software? Or for violating privacy? No, or at least doubtful (I didn’t look:-). Look at the four rules - which ones did you break, that would warrant a site-wide ban? Some people get banned for none, e.g. for claiming that they have Uyghur family members staying with them who have experienced discrimination and potential genocide and… BAM, ban hammer. Bc neither Russia nor China can ever do any wrong - it is the USA that is “evil”, that is “capitalist”, and “democratic”, and “doing genocide”, but again, not precious Russia or China that does so.

I am looking heavily into alternatives that will allow banning lemmy.ml users across the Fediverse. One is lemmy.cafe, another is the Tesseract UI as implemented e.g. on dubvee.org, and another is Mbin (maybe, unless a bug no longer allows that? I saw one report of such anyway, but don’t have an account so cannot confirm), and I am leaning heavily towards joining PieFed, bc it’s so exciting what it is positioning itself to become in the future. Sublinks too but it never seems to be updating anymore, so I guess it’s stalled somehow.

Dessalines can do as he pleases. If we don’t like it, we can leave Lemmy. Those are our options.

The virus will affect us all… whether directly or indirect.