Growth is a secondary concern to me. I’m not against it but quality is much more important to me than quantity. And I mean quality in terms of content AND respectful interaction.

Historically, if one can even use the word for such a recent thing as the internet, techies are usually first to a new thing. And these types of conversations inevitably follow at some point as though growth at all costs is the only way to stave off death. And then a decade or so further on we end up with Xitter, Meta and Reddit where the anger is palpable and the interface revolves around pushing monetised hate at you and exploiting your private data for another source of monetisation.

I’m enjoying being able to go somewhere everyday where I don’t have awfulness pushed to a platform curated feed I can’t opt out of. If people want those things - fine they exist. I hope the fediverse does all it can to avoid interacting with or devolving to those places and that any discoverability tools that might get developed are for people not algorithms. I hope it remains an alternative to that mindset, not just another place to fling shit at each other.

Come on its obvious! Sedan - see Dan. Staring at a man called Dan.

Also ‘red’ has 3 letters, just like ‘gay’.

Only Brits or BBC International viewers will know this character but Catherine Cawood from Happy Valley.

And obviously Ellen Ripley, Dana Scully and Sarah Connor.

We do tell people. For example, when you get off the train at Reading station it clearly says “Welcome to Reading”.

As an English person this is highly unfair - we’re not all christians.

Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.

I’ve had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.

Came here to say this. Fucking traumatising.

Mate, I was simply extending an analogy you introduced. I neither know (nor care) what the presence of a McDonalds does or doesn’t do so don’t Sagan me. Nor am I claiming mainstream social media is all arseholes. What I’m saying is that mainstream social media most certainly has the ability and propensity to make people into arseholes due to constant enshittification - part of which is the influencer phenomenon in my opinion and the need for growth at all costs.

I most definitely have reached out to lots of good people on the fediverse and had lots of great exchanges that follow both professional and ‘hobby’ based interests I have.

But here’s the thing - you want growth? OK. I also have no issue with growth. But the best sort of growth in my experience comes organically. It happens at its own pace. The minute you start prodding it along with managed algorithms and all the other stuff mainstream social media now has you end up with an extended hate room. I don’t miss Reddit or Xitter at all. I genuinely mean that. No more ‘suggestions’ of people to follow, no more manufactured outrage getting pushed to my feed, no more clickbait. Instead what I have now is a curated feed across multiple different types of experiences that I spent some time getting how I want them and dipping in and out of when I want to.

You’re using words like ‘ambition’ and ‘irrelevant’ like the Fediverse is some sort of corporate entity. It’s not - that’s a point very much in its favour in the opinion of quite a lot of people on it. Contrary to your opinion that no one cares, lots do. What some of us don’t care about is catering to a set of people who are paid to express opinions and who, it seems to me, over a period of time end up becoming Andrew Tate or Russel Brand.

There’s no McDonalds in the town I currently live in, which is 20 minutes away from one of the largest cities in the country. It might come as a massive shock to you but I - and I think the majority of people - can survive just fine without a Mickey D’s. Not having one doesn’t make a place desolate, it makes it healthier. And if someone really wants a Big Mac, they can go and get one from elsewhere.

Do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t the same place as that - it’s quite nice to have a place online that still isn’t. And for those that do want that, they can still spend time there if they chose to.

Strangely comforting for something I’m sure you thought was a snappy comeback,

I genuinely don’t care about influencers. Like, at all.

Maybe they should stop caring about visibility and engagement and concentrate on participating in, building and y’know enjoying a community?

Surely you mean <ul>…<ol>…</ol></ul>

It’s entirely possible, I agree, but as of right now, there’s only really two ways to show a person ads - targeted or not targeted. And that applies to all forms of advertising really, not just online. I don’t know enough about marketing to say how long it might take to develop zero knowledge ads but in terms of funding development and hosting we’re very long way away from that being a possibility.

And the ethos of the Fediverse was, in part, formed around the idea of not being served ads that were either utterly irrelevant and thus irritating or scarily relevant and thus unsettling. The Fediverse is pretty closely aligned with open source and privacy philosophy. I think any instance that runs ads is going to see either no revenue as they’ll be adblocked or the instance will see a sharp drop off in users.

The issue with your first point is that in order to be served ads you actually want to see, the provider (instance admin) needs to know what you like and that way leads to tracking scripts.

Sure, it’d be easy to do that but that’s true for everything with an open API really. I don’t think that makes Lemmy less privacy respecting. The only thing a harvester could grab is the things you’ve chosen to post publicly. Is that a good thing? No, not really but it’s certainly much less invasive than being on a site/app that harvests both that and fingerprints your devices and tries to get all your OS/location data/etc at the same time.

If we look at how things went for Mastodon during the various twitter exodus waves, it’s a very similar pattern - huge increase followed by tail off, then another wave of increase followed by another tail off etc. I suspect the same thing will happen with Lemmy/Reddit. We all know reddit are going to continue to do stupid things prior to their IPO so it’s likely there’ll be more waves of influx followed by tail offs.

This is actually good as it’s organic growth/loss. I can’t think of an example where a big push by a company to get more users has resulted in a ‘better’ community, just a larger one. Organic growth/loss is much more likely to result in a better community as oppose to just a ‘popular’ one. Or, to put it another way, lets aim for quality not quantity.

Now that my instance has defeded from Hexbear I don’t see much outright tankie stuff anymore and on the very rare occasions I do come across it, I just block the user. That said, I have noticed a growing trend of people calling anything slightly to the political left of Joe Biden either socialist, communist or tankie as though those terms were interchangeable, which they’re not. Either way, if it bothers you, either ignore it, block the user, block the community or move your account to an instance that is defeded from the instances you are upset by.

Let’s also not forget Lemmy is not mature software and has only become as heavily used as it is now about 3 months ago. There’s a lot of features missing, particularly for admin and mod users, so we can either be patient and do what we can right now, fork Lemmy, create unofficial patches or not use it.

I do feel like we’ve become so used to highly polished, corporate solutions that do everything that we’ve lost our ability to be patient. For me, its vastly preferable to be somewhere where I’m not tracked, fingerprinted, advertised to and have my data sold but at the same time put up with a few idiosyncrasy’s of the software than the alternative.

It’s not necessarily privacy focused but it’s certainly much more privacy respecting than reddit, or any other mainstream social media company. The codebase doesn’t try and fingerprint you, the various apps don’t either so no shadow profile of you or your behaviour is being built or sold on to 3rd parties. The only info that’s stored about you (aside from IP address for mod purposes which is meaningless if you use a VPN) is what you volunteer to your instance and what you post publicly.

How on Earth do you get the idea that expressing distaste for mainstream social media methods is saying ‘the fediverse isn’t for the masses’?

Sometimes, after a period of time dealing with the day to day realities resulting from political issues, people just want to be somewhere where they don’t have to keep having to experience those issues, even in text form. Everyone needs a break for awhile and saying so is not an act of transphobia or any other kind of intolerance, its just an acknowledgment that everyone has a limit and needs to be aware of how stretching that limit can effect mental health.