trynn

What a dumb article. Sounds like an old C graybeard who’s never understood the point of proper type safety or readable code. None of the performance gains the author talks about actually matter, whereas the entire point of clean code is to make it easier to read and maintain by other programmers. Let’s also not forget this important quote from Donald Knuth: “premature optimization is the root of all evil”.

Simply put, unless you’re working in extremely resource-constrained systems, or have some code snippet being run an incredibly large number of times over a humongous amount of data, these kinds of performance optimizations simply don’t matter and you get more benefit from writing the code in a way that reduces bugs and is easier to read. Heck, most of the time compiler optimizations make this entire argument moot anyway.

No, you’re not quite understanding what ActivityPub is. The data under all the fediverse services is not the same infrastructure at all. The communication between those various services just uses the same language (ActivityPub). Those various services can interpret and store (or ignore) ActivityPub messages any way they want. Service instances add another layer to the whole thing as well.

In order for an “everything app” to be successful (if you buy the argument that it feasibly can be), it would have to be a centralized service. Decentralization, by its very nature, encourages the opposite of that – want to make some niche service because existing services don’t satisfy some fringe need you have, but still want to interact with others on other platforms? You can do that with the fediverse. But that also means your new service isn’t part of an “everything app”… it just can potentially talk to one that might exist.

Why would they put META and TIKTOK on there???

Because they’re alternatives to Twitter?
Not everybody on the Internet cares about censorship, data leaks, or centralized services. In fact, most people don’t. You just happen to be in a bubble of mostly like-minded people here on the Fediverse. For everyone else out there, now that their digital house is on fire they just want to find a new house that’s as close to their old one as possible.

Sure. Just look at Wordpress… it’s a blogging platform rather than a forum, but it has an ActivityPub plugin available that allows federation of blog posts and comments. ActivityPub is a standard published by the W3C (the same organization that oversees the HTML standard, among many others). Anyone can implement the standard in their software if they want to.

You’re applying the political science definition of ‘federation’ and not the computer science definition. They are different. Federation in CompSci terms has to do with networking providers using standardization to interoperate, which is exactly what the fediverse does.

Sounds like someone doesn’t understand what the fediverse is about.

It works from a Lemmy instance to see a /kbin magazine. It does not work the other way (from /kbin to see a Lemmy community).

Using !community notation is a Lemmy-only thing. Not everybody is reading this from Lemmy, and this particular community and the OP are both on /kbin. Providing direct URLs is a more generally useful way of linking to communities in the fediverse.

I don’t think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it’s the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.

The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn’t be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the “main” one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.

I don’t think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.

You also don’t seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don’t like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive. I told you the reason you’re seeing much more US-centric posts. You have quite a lot of options if you don’t want to see that stuff, but telling everyone else not to post it is not one of those options.

Welcome to how the Internet work? The thing you don’t seem to be realizing is that this isn’t an ‘American obsession’ thing. It’s a population thing. kbin.social is advertised as an English discussion forum/link aggregator. It just so happens that the largest English-speaking country on the planet is the US, and by a lot too. The next-biggest is the UK, which has a population 1/5th the size of the US. Canada is even smaller, at about 1/10th the population of the US. Even if people post things at the same rate, you’re going to get 5 US-related posts for every UK post, and 10 US-related posts for every Canadian one. There are simply more Americans online. This kind of thing is going to happen on any widespread English-language discussion forum on the Internet, and has been this way since Usenet in the 1980s.

I don’t know anything about the mobile apps for the fediverse, but you can definitely search for communities from the Lemmy web UI (same goes if you’re on kbin). If you go to the Communities tab there should be a search field in the upper-right.

Both the Lemmy and kBin UI show the domain of the link in a post. I would assume if someone got a post to the top of hot/active/whatever and edited the URL, then the UI would be updated to show the new URL’s domain.

It’ll have to be tested, but I’m not sure Perspectives will do what the ‘reddit’ query does for many people. I can only speak for myself, but I typically would add ‘reddit’ to searches because I was looking for thorough information on a subject, and I was certain there would be some random subreddit out there full of experts and enthusiasts on that specific niche topic. I don’t want social media or influencer content, I want content from people with extremely deep knowledge about very specific things.

This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author’s points, that’s not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn’t really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn’t provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they’re in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don’t go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.

In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.

I think it’s because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.

Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it’s about the number of visits.

Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.

52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we’d really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.

There’s evidence in the modlogs that the Lemmy developers (who are also the admins of lemmy.ml) have been banning users and removing posts from lemmy.ml with a reason of ‘orientalism’ or ‘racism’ when those users say anything mildly critical of China.
So it’s a bit more than just refusing to suppress anti-American content on their instance.

Yes, I realize that, which is why I added the parenthetical about users providing Reddit’s value. The fact remains that in the business/customer dynamic, we’re on the customer side. We’re not neutral bystanders, and we’re sure as hell not part of the business side.

You seem to be missing two rather important points.

First, users have no obligation whatsoever to ensure Reddit is profitable. That is not our job. We’re the customers (we also arguably create all the value of the service, but let’s set that aside since nobody’s expecting to get paid for commenting on threads on Reddit). If Reddit needs to find a way to be profitable, then it’s up to them to do it in such a way that doesn’t damage their business. They have full control over all of this, and have consistently made the wrong decision every step of the way. Reddit management could easily have done what most other companies do in situations like these and backpedaled, given some kind of pseudo-apology, and found a way to do what they want to do in a less objectionable manner. They didn’t. If Reddit goes the way of MySpace, it’ll be the fault of the /u/spez and the others running the business.

Secondly, the company was founded in 2005. That’s almost 20 years ago. If they haven’t found a way to be profitable in that amount of time then they’re not going to. They have a fundamental business problem they need to fix, and they’re in a tough spot because most solutions to that problem will end up damaging the business they’re trying to save. Sucks to be them, but they really should have thought of that over a decade ago.