• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • by adding features you can only get if you are on their platform. Their goal is to make most people prefer the Meta version of the fediverse

    Why is this a bad thing? This is the system working as intended: a company forced to make a service people want, rather than just taking users for granted. You resist enshittification because you’re not being held hostage through access to content, so the company is forced to make the service good. And this will attract other companies to produce competing services.

    And besides, most people already prefer the Meta version… they already have the user advantage. There’s already way more users locked in their services than there is on the rest of the Fediverse.


  • I am optimistic about Meta’s investment in the Fediverse. If you don’t believe the Fediverse can survive the embrace of big tech, I don’t think you believe in it at all. You don’t want an open web, you just want to be the one in control. The goal of a decentralized internet - in my opinion - is to separate content from service. And if you believe that is the future, then you have to accept that companies are going to build new services that will try to monetize that content. But the beauty of that paradigm is you get to choose the service that works best for you without sacrificing access to the people or media you’re interested in. And really, it’s not much different from say, Google, being able to monetize Chrome because it can access your website. I mean… yeah, but that’s kind of the point?







  • while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience

    I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!

    Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.

    The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.


  • I’m sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I’m also not interested in people who argue “but actually it’s not copying that’s not how the technology works it’s actually a really complic-” yeah I don’t care. Without the artists you would have nothing.

    BUT

    Don’t confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.





  • bogdugg@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlSo, on pronouns.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Personally, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Use what you think is appropriate. If you’re unsure, use they/them; if they correct you, adjust accordingly. If you want to be most accommodating, default to they/them for everyone you meet unless they correct you or you learn otherwise. If you’d like others to feel more comfortable providing pronouns, providing your own - even if you believe it is obvious - can be a way to help normalize it for others.


  • The non-specific disdain people have for reporters, media, critics, news, etc. as if everything is created equal. I think there are many people working in news and entertainment media doing good work, yet a common refrain is “media today sucks”. I think it speaks more to how you consume, what you consume, and what you expect, if you believe there is some grand degradation of journalism. Media has certainly become more fragmented, with niches of content and wider levels of quality; the floor is lower, but I also believe the ceiling is higher.




  • Some level of community merging seems both inevitable and necessary. Initially, my assumption was that a single instance would be the home for an individual community, but that’s just not how things work for many reasons. Communities of the same type should have a way to talk to each other, and more importantly, make it easy for users to follow them wherever they are. The current system is obviously inefficient for many reasons. I think there’s a lot of content across communities that is not being surfaced to users for whom that content is relevant, and it is making the entire system feel less lively than it could be.


  • I understand the sentiment, but there are things not worth knowing. I don’t care who was drafted in 1987 by the San Diego NFL team. I don’t care about the extras who appear in the 1957 film Witness for the Prosecution. I don’t care what you had for breakfast. My point is, I think your issue is less about curiosity, but of values. People who don’t value the things you care about, or worse, don’t even value the things they purport to care about.