OpenStars

joined 2 years ago
[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 year ago

img

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

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 year ago

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:-).

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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?

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 1 year ago

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!:-)

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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!:-) 🥰

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 year ago

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)

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But after I blocked hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, I started to forget that all of that was even there, though I internally made a kind of automatic mental block for Lemmy.ml too (like WHAT!? oh nvm it's from them...). I shouldn't forget though, that that is what a new user would see... thus it would be quite unfriendly for me to bring fresh meat to the fascist audience for their amusement.

Listening to instance admins, I just don't know why they refuse to see those campaigns of brigading as you described happened to you (can you prove it btw, like if the account still exists, and you find a way to view downvotes - does Mbin let you? I tried but maybe it needs a login to do that and it appears greyed out to me without one...), and they say things like "they don't affect our users" (bullshit, you just perfectly described a situation that I suspect happens all the time where it does), and basically act like bullying and intimidation is not a thing that exists in the world. Like, if you ever say anything to anger someone on lemmy.ml, then that's your fault and you deserve whatever comes your way after that!?

Tbf, there are instances - e.g. reddthat.com - that disable downvotes entirely. But I don't want to simply become insensitive to everyone else's disapproval around me - rather I want the system to work properly so that I am only getting disapproval from people who I either respect or at least are neutral, i.e. not fascists who abuse the system bc they are allowed to by inattentive admins.

If there was an instance somewhere that had defederated from the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - I would likely join it, and promote it, and recommend Lemmy to people irl again. Otherwise, I will either leave the Fediverse if it gets too bad, or far more likely simply block lemmy.ml but then only enjoy the Fediverse privately rather than as something I am allowed to share bc of how poor and off-putting the initial user experience is.:-(

It is extremely sad how heavily this aspect hinders our continued growth - even if Reddit does something annoying like finally kills off old-reddit for good this time, are people really going to want to come here, so that instead of being exposed to the right-wing propaganda over there, they can be exposed to the fascism-disguised-as-leftism over here? Fascists are controlling everything, everywhere!?!? But we were supposed to be different, here. At least that's what we told ourselves.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 0 points 1 year ago

Fascism is quite capable at achieving its goals - seeing as how it is not limited by any of that pesky "morality" that slows others down.

view more: ‹ prev next ›