Ride those celestial surfboards through the 'verse!

I think while some of this may be people being people (i.e. tendency to only discuss issues/problems vs accomplishments/solutions), I think there’s also a technical element to it as well in Lemmy’s case.

Up to the latest release of Lemmy (as of writing this is v0.19.4), admins couldn’t adjust the default sort setting, which was Active. Read the docs on the sort setting and Active does what it says, surfaces those posts with recent commenting activity (taking into account score as well).

So you get this unfortunate mix of: people gravitate to discussing negative stuff, people tend not to change default settings (since despite defaults being Active, we can change these if so inclined), and the default sort settings surface whatever is being most discussed/commented on, resulting in this sort of negativity feedback loop you’ve observed.

I noticed and posted about this a few months ago, have tried to upvote and comment on less negatively-focused posts occasionally, but I think this may be an interesting example of a small scale systemic issue as it takes more of us doing similar to address what’s being encountered. However, as more instances update to v0.19.4, I’ll be interested in seeing if admins decide to switch away from the Active sort setting to try to address this in their own way.

I don’t know what sort setting may be better for instances to run with instead, but I’m glad they now have the option. In the meantime I think it’s worth reminding people that they currently have the option to change their default sort settings to something different to try to see different kinds of posts. Personally I switch between New and Scaled to see a variety of posts beyond many of the regular doom and gloom posts.

Appreciate the adjustments and responsiveness! Gave it another try after this and the different formatting hit the spot! Still need to use more to see more finely tuned results, but dig the idea.

Also as others have already said plenty, would be cool to see this cleaned up for an open source release. If you’d like to see how some others are handling a sorta similar idea but with RSS feeds, you might look to Nunti for ideas on how to approach it.

Little feedback on the UI from taking a peek at this.

When I went into settings and adjusted post display style from card to anything else, it wasn’t clear to me that this wouldn’t apply to the new For You feed, which left me confused and less inclined to use it. I still gave it a try to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and to see how much the feed seemed to change with some light interaction, but I think you’d need to use it more than I did to see an effect.

Problem being: display settings not applying to the For You feed means I’m not going to use it much with the default card view.

Second part is that there was some comment display lag as I looked through posts, so if I looked at a post about cats with cat-related comments, those comments would linger and appear for a moment under a different post about possums. It’s just long enough to be noticeable, so thought it worth mentioning.

It’s really hard to gauge humanity when it really only takes a few terrible people to ruin things for everyone else.

Using that perspective to recognize the many other alright people I think might be a way for people to encourage one another and feel less wary of calling out bad actors. It’s a funny thing, but the same live and let live tendencies we appreciate from others at times seems to diminish the slight resolve necessary to push back against those negatively affecting many others.

Similarly, I think it’s beneficial to recognize the good as much as the bad, as otherwise we take the former for granted and can grow too jaded and overly cynical.

It’s a fun way of saying be yourself more or less, and also that we’re in major industries and always have been and will be; plus that we’ve always been around regardless of what others may insist

Didn’t honestly expect so much advice, but appreciate all of it! Feel free to share some interesting stories as well though!

In the worst case they don’t get anything at all 😬

Tales from the Crypt for spookies.

Mentioning this in contrast with funnies got me thinking…And hey, they did meet!

“The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window” was a pretty good (non anime) series too. – It’s a kind of hilarious take on scary movies and the tropes within them.

I see they’re competing with some Japanese shows for long, descriptive titles! Jokes aside, this sounds up my alley!

Hah, yeah, I tried to mention a variety so people wouldn’t think any show was too old or too niche. I watch whatever manages to snag my interest in some way.

Some shows I check out simply from the sudden uptick in memes, which is how I found my way to Columbo.

A little surprised this hasn’t been discussed more on here…Also this is particularly relevant, if true, given Altman stepping into overseeing safety:

Toner says that one reason the board stopped trusting Altman was his failure to tell the board that he owned the OpenAI Startup Fund; another was how he gave inaccurate info about the company’s safety processes “on multiple occasions.”

Emphasis mine.

bummer, an ent using comms tech despite the classic trait of’em being against exploitative civilization didn’t click as much as I thought it might

more fun imagery for me! In my head it’s a clear visual of a cross between solar and cyberpunk. Then again, I don’t remember ents in Shadowrun, but people play the TTRPG a little fast and loose like D&D, so I stand by my OP thought

oh, uh, for those unfamiliar: Shadowrun’s a tabletop RPG as well as a computer RPG with a cyberpunk setting but with fantasy creatures and magic mixed together

I am very good at being online so I am definitely not just getting around to mentioning that I cross-posted this to our peer community !casualconversation@lemm.ee where some others have responded with some of the active communities they’ve found: https://lemmy.world/post/14734186

If you’ve any you’d like to add, comments are open here as well!

In strict technical terms, yeah it’s okay, albeit with the shortcomings to be expected of a smaller development team. In terms of population and activity with this format, I think it may be at the top compared to alternatives as well.

There’s still others and other software options though for this format that people could try, which honestly may even be technically better, but lacking population/activity means they’re in an odd spot.

The first of these you’ll read about on here are likely Kbin/Mbin, possibly followed by PieFed or still-in-development Sublinks. Kbin/Mbin is definitely the runner-up in terms of federated Reddit-alternatives, as it was one of the few options available at the time people were leaving Reddit.

PieFed and Sublinks have emerged more recently with different priorities and approaches compared to Lemmy, but with the same desire to offer a federated option for people to deploy.

The last you may read about around here would be of stuff like Discuit, Lobste.rs, Raddle (and any other sites built with Postmill), Tildes, and the like, which are all most like Reddit in terms of their being stand-alone sites, unconnected to any others running the same underlying server software. However each of these, I think, may have lower population than the cumulative population of the Lemmy network of sites.

All that said, cutting to your last question: ultimately it heavily depends on the instance/site you settle into.

Lemmy isn’t a monolith, which is both its greatest strength and weakness compared to Reddit. You may be able to find a Lemmy instance/site that heavily blocks out politics and moderates lightly, but the irony of this is that it means it may have to be overly-policed to achieve that, and might appear less active in the process from heavy disconnection/defederation from any instances/sites that permit political posts/discussion.

Right now though, much of Lemmy is heavily political, and it’s arguably because of lax moderation to keep political posts/discussions to relevant communities, which is itself probably in part because of lacking moderation tools to enable lighter touches to redirect posts/discussions.

Nevertheless, it’s possibly the best option fitting the format available at the moment given the rest, but if Lemmy and federation doesn’t suit you you might check out Tildes or Discuit. Although be advised: Tildes remains invite only for now.

Links to all options/alternatives mentioned:

• Kbin, flagship site: Kbin Social
• Mbin. No flagship, check list of instances.
• PieFed, flagship site: PieFed Social
• Sublinks. No flagship, still in-development as drop-in replacement for Lemmy.
• Discuit. Not federated, but open source.
• Lobste.rs. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.
• Raddle. Not federated, built on open source Postmill.
• Tildes. Not federated, but open source. Requires invite.

One last point, I swear, but if you do stick around and just want to chat about tv shows, movies, and music, I’d recommend visiting:

!moviesandtv@lemm.ee
!movies@lemm.ee
!music@lemmy.world
!casualconversation@lemm.ee

Honestly I think any general/casual discussion community would welcome posts about those subjects as well, which there are a number of across Lemmy sites to check out.

Er…I get this is a play off of the other post, but you could do that in a comment to it if you wanted instead.

As is this may as well be a duplicate post, so I’m locking it.

It’s the site you’re on, so in your case: lemm.ee.

Instance in this situation is usually the same as website.

At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.

The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.

Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.

I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).