OpenStars

This is a bit of a tangent though - OP was talking about instances, which at least one person said was removed deliberately so as not to overload them - so presumably by their own consent and likely even request?

Whereas here you are talking about communities, which should be visible across the Federation regardless - subject to the standard, complex set of rules (which you are working to lower the barrier for with all your alts pre-subscribing:-).

And to complicate matters further, it sounds like these communities have been missing from that list for many months now already. So this truly might be a unique situation, if that instance has actively removed consent to be listed there? Perhaps they would reconsider offering their consent to listing the communities if asked though?

I have stopped recommending Lemmy to people, bc I would be embarrassed for a new user to come here, get bullied as I have been (far more than happened on Reddit), and blame me like "you recommended me to talk to that crowd!?"). Kbin.social was different bc those communities were blocked from the start - at an instance level even - though that server has been down for days, and now I see it's back up and full of advertisement posts as usual, bc many mods abandoned their communities due to all the technical problems with the service.

But there is hope for change in the future, in terms of perhaps making getting dunked on an opt-in rather than as it currently is an opt-out feature delivered to members of the Fediverse with little to no warning. e.g. here is a discussion I had with an instance admin. Progress, since so many of us joined the Fediverse since the Rexodus, has been (understandably) slow, but can happen, if we work at it!

It could be neat if there was such a thing as like a FairPi (like FairPhone I mean, e.g. repairable). Arguably that would have almost defeated the main purpose of a $5 USD Pi, but sustainability is still cool, for those of us willing to pay 3x the price or whatever.

And now you have shared this with us all, asking for no remuneration just that we use & enjoy, in true FOSS style - awesome!:-)

Here is an excellent comment from 3 days ago, so it should be federated everywhere by now? I just shared that link with someone else in fact, in an unrelated reply. I then went to Lemmy.World and searched for that link, but it does not find the original, although it does find my recent sharing of it. I also searched on reddthat.com, and saw the same behavior. And lemm.ee as well. So the "sometimes it works" effect may have some additional not-entirely-characterized triggers for that behavior, but it definitely does not work all the time as a "find this comment" feature as we are discussing.

So as it now stands there is a way to use this search feature to find posts, but not reliably to find comments. Though that is still more than I knew a week ago before Blaze shared this trick with me then:-).

Yeah it is counter-intuitive to me. e.g. the URL of this actual OP (not the one used in your example, but this meta-one) appearing in my browser is "https://discuss.online/post/8717646", although its origin is "https://reddthat.com/post/20423663", and e.g. from Lemmy.World it is "https://lemmy.world/post/16390207", from sh.itjust.works it is "https://sh.itjust.works/post/20655918", there's https://dubvee.org/post/dubvee.org/1318278, and https://lemmy.max-p.me/post/lemmy.max-p.me/1264377, and https://programming.dev/post/15341414, and so on - all with different values.

Yet putting it into the search box manages the translation to find the correct post. There are so many areas of Lemmy that still lack polish - and K/Mbin even more so - but here is a great feature that is there yet people don't even realize that.

I am curious: how did you even know to try that - is it written in the docs somewhere, or you just tried it and it worked?

No I don't think comments works that way. For one, your search returns no results when accessed from on my instance, or from lemmy.world, etc. And for another, I have seen comments have different numerical tags after the instance name - e.g. mousing over the chain link icon vs. the colored fediverse graph sign icon shows the different values there.

There could literally be some Reddit shills there, or "useful" people who somehow are still holding on tooth & nail to the Reddit name - some people are just like that - and actually I am glad that those have not migrated over to here, even purely to do trolling:-).

But there are a lot of centrist, middle-of-the-road people, as well as right-leaning people too, who could add their voices here and contribute to the ongoing conversation - b/c not everything is about politics (even if so many people try to turn the conversation towards that here, and I am guilty of that as well; yet gardening, woodworking, knitting, etc. - not everything needs to bring it up consistently).

There is so much that we could do to make this place more "welcoming" for others. And I see you doing that tirelessly, so thanks!:-)

They are always on r/RedditAlternatives steering people towards the Fediverse too, along with a few others. Unfortunately most people there are resistant, and the heavily leftist-leaning nature of the content here turns a lot of people away (many instances including reddthat.com do not block either hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml by default for new users, so all those posts promoting literal violence against e.g. landlords show up immediately in their All feeds), but it is still awesome to see them trying!:-)

Personally I think the technology will need to be improved first - e.g. adding content labels such as Mastodon already has (and everything else these days except Lemmy) - before we will see wider acceptance, especially since there are a lot of centrists who nonetheless contribute niche content that otherwise will not feel comfortable here and thus remain on Reddit, or a lot of people simply swear off social media altogether. But damn, if we do succeed it will in no small part be due to their constant efforts!:-) 🥰

The problem with "equal voice" is that those who are okay to resort to unethical behavior - like spinning up 1000 bots - can "win", over those who constrain themselves to more ethical routes, of speaking or voting one-by-one. Obviously nobody is perfect, but game theoretical analysis shows us that the more unethical someone allows themselves to be, the more they can "game the system" - which DOES work, at least in the short-term.

iirc, blocking someone also prevents them from downvoting you. Though I'm not positive that that works when you, as an individual user, block an entire instance. So if there was lets say 10 people that follow you around downvoting literally everything that you do, blocking them would mean that either you would have put a stop to that, or else they would have to spin up additional bots to continue - which at least forces them to put in additional effort. Unless its an instance user block, in which case you no longer get notifications from their replies, but you can still see their comments, reply back to them, I think vote in either direction, etc. b/c that kind of blocking basically does very little to separate you away from them.

It seems to me that posting is inherently an unequal activity, compared to voting, b/c whereas when we do the former we expose ourselves to criticism, but others who use solely the latter can hide behind anonymity when they vote. Thus the system inherently is not "equal" at all, unless we could either post anonymously, or else if we could see who is doing the voting. I might not even mind if I got 40 down-votes, all from hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - I probably would wear that accomplishment as an achievement with pride:-) - but in that case I would want to know that that is the case, as opposed to 40 downvotes from non-brainwashed masses.

You are correct that it is not in the OP wording itself, but it came out as part of the discussion i.e. it is in the comment section if you want to read through that.

It is now getting significantly harder to find the comments I saw originally as lemmy's UI decides now to hide comments by default, bc there are so very many on that thread, but to get you started, one is https://lemmy.world/comment/10461570, and another is https://lemm.ee/comment/12369094.

Even if the former issue was the result of that new feature being tested out on Lemmy.ml first (and perhaps having bugs causing issues with the mod log), the other issue remains that the modding in such occurrences is accused of being rather... "over-zealous". As in why remove someone from a meme community, if they merely made a comment about China in a political community somewhere else on the same instance? What does someone being (potentially) incorrect in their facts have to do with being able to interact with people in a meme community that they have (reputedly) never commented in even so much as once? (presumably they must have interacted with it somehow, according to the wording of the new mod feature, so probably they did vote)