The placement of that text is deeply frustrating. Just a black text box placed without any care? No craftsmanship at all?

And a watermark? Still, in 2024? Uggh.

This is just Lemmy.World. You don’t have to be an admin here to help out Lemmy as a whole.

It’s a good read, but as with absolutely any discussion around high school on platforms like this, it heavily shaded with the cynicism of the adult that looks back on their high school days bitterly and thinks little of the teenagers who don’t hate it as much as they did/do.

The whole comment is based on the assumption there’s some kind of FOMO-esc pressure to make prom incredible, where kids feel like they “must” go big or they’ll miss out.

But it sidesteps the simpler explanation: maybe some teenagers just genuinely enjoy making prom a blowout. Going big has been part of the tradition for a long time, and maybe it’s not pressure those teens are feeling, but simply excitement.

The basic notion of prom is that it is the night to go big. It is the last high school dance. It seems incredibly reductive to assume teenagers would not look forward to making it a special occasion if it weren’t for outside pressure.

Funny that she thinks it ruins it in the first place. I wouldn’t have even noticed if she hadn’t drawn attention to it.

Now, I say that, but I’ve also done this exact thing before.

Agreed, but let’s also be honest about this:

The smaller, less visible alternative communities seldom grow. It’s the classic case of the biggest and oldest trees getting all the sunlight, while the saplings in their shadow are stunted.

We saw this on Reddit, too. Alternative subreddits, usually born out of protest of the moderation on the original, popped up all the time and never grew. Some did, some even overshadowed the original, but that was rare. The algorithm and search results would always funnel visitors to the old one.

Unless there’s an effort made to give more visibility to the smaller and less established alternative, there’s a good chance it goes nowhere.

So in reality the user choice you’re describing is less about choosing between two communities, and more about choosing between a community or a DND group that gets together once a week, but half the people flake out anyway.

Who is “they”? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don’t think people around here spread lies too?

Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that’s not the whole instance.

And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on “lies”, determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.

Besides, you keep talking about “lies” but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let’s not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let’s open some dialogue about it.

But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes. If admins can’t put aside biases and commit to the idea of federation, then it isn’t going to work, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, while making this whole thing less useful and even more confusing for new users.

I don’t know if there’s a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.

Oh, so /r/drama shitposting is here now? Wonderful.

So this is this just r/unpopularopinion or Trolling: Community Edition?

I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.

Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.

But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.

Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.

I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)

But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.

You’re doing fantastic work work with app.

For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.

Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.

But that never happened because he killed himself.

We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.

He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.

And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.

And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.

He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.

Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.

It is shocking because they did it after the investigation had started, which is monumentally stupid.

You can destroy any records you want at any time, unless there’s an investigation underway or you have good reason to believe one will be starting. At that point, you’re destroying evidence.

Always people that come along and say this.

To them I say: imagine if you had a calculator app that you only ever used for basic addition. Then the calculator app removed the subtraction, multiplication, and division functions. It may would not seem like a big deal to you, but that doesn’t mean the app hasn’t gotten less useful.

Yeha, but they can make their free tier as shitty as they want

Who suggested they couldn’t? Having the right to do something doesn’t mean no one else can voice their displeasure.

If you don’t want to pay but still think you deserve a product with all the features you like, then you’re delusional.

It has nothing to do with “deserve”. Shitty businesses practices are worth calling out. Especially because this has nothing to do with supporting Spotify and everything to do with enriching stockholders. It’s a sign of desperation: they can’t make their product better to entice new customers, so they’re making their free product worse. It’s trashy and greedy.

But please, go on expending your energy defending a corporation from valid criticism.

Why are they even charging you for lyrics to begin with? It’s not like they write them. It costs nothing to give you that feature for free.

Kind of like the YouTube app requiring a subscription for background playing. It’s a basic function that does not cost them anything, yet they break it to sell it back to you.

Stripping extremely basic features away and locking them behind paywalls is shitty and should be called out as such, full stop.

Their when it works and it’s profitable.

I tried Apple Music recently, and while I wasn’t impressed by the platform, one thing I was legitimately taken aback by was how much effort they put into the lyrics. The little animations as the lyrics follow the song, where the words move in different ways based on the song in question, it’s really aesthetically pleasing.

Some of the animations definitely feel programmed by employees who are genuine fans of the artist; it doesn’t feel generic or auto generated. The little ways the animations move along with certain inflections in the singer’s delivery, or react to minor shifts in tone. There’s some care being taken with them, song by song. I was legitimately impressed, and I seldom ever have anything nice to say about Apple.

It wasn’t enough to keep me paying for it but I genuinely enjoyed it quite a bit.

No, Tidal never had that. Deezer might still allow it, they’re the last I know that did.

Technically you can still do it with iTunes on a desktop, but I don’t think those files will play on the Apple Music app.