Comment on Creating a Lemmy assignment for college level comp course
wowwoweowza@lemmy.world 1 month agoI popped off of mobile to reply to this but I do not believe that even on a keyboard I will be able to express my gratitude for your thoroughness, reason, and wisdom here.
Yes – turns out I have a pretty sweet gig and I want to keep it.
Your points reminded me that before Reddit imploded, I had an assignment that I agonized over for many of your excellent points here. The previous president of our school applauded me for teaching A Clockwork Orange. Academic Freedom and all that. But we have a new president and I just don’t want to risk it. In fact, my reddit assignment was tied specifically to: r/TIL. That was it. I had huge warnings about traveling beyond that sub.
As I read your contribution here, I was stunned that I had just “gone native.” I personally just avoid the ugly on Lemmy and do not even notice it or react to it.
The short version here is this: thanks for your kind and erudite wake up call. WTF was I thinking? I did one term use Lemmy in an assignment where I created kind of a private group called: our class or something like that. Ostensibly this was just where we could reach out to one another to discuss class topics… but the shadow agenda was moving people off corporations and onto the Fediverse. It’s so frustrating that they do not care about privacy or anonymity. Oh – when I had them all try to create accounts in class, we ran into an IP blocker likely created to stop briganding or something.
Anyway – I’ll keep thinking about this – maybe find a more gradual way to introduce elements of the fediverse… like TIL videos or something to begin.
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 month ago
You are very welcome:-).
My journey was similar, and in fact from what I hear of people talking, that applies to most and probably all of us (e.g. regardless of what people “say” about opening themselves up to a wider expression of ideas, we all tend to retreat to places that are comfortable or familiar - the only difference is whether we honestly acknowledge that an instance admin has done the work for someone of outright banning people who have dissenting opinions, vs. whether we implement those efforts by ourselves).
Personally I had to put in MONTHS of effort to make the Fediverse “usable”, as I switched around between various instances. My start was Kbin.social, which before it went defunct I noticed how much friendlier the Fediverse seemed, compared to Reddit!!! But when it stopped working I switched over to startrek.website and then to my current account at discuss.online, neither of which block hexbear.net (and the former is quite rare in not even blocking lemmygrad.ml, as most others do). The “feedback” to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse and something in lemmygrad.ml, which persisted for WEEKS and WEEKS, each, after what I considered a fairly innocuous comment, almost convinced me to drop social media entirely… but I persisted, and after finally blocking lemmy.ml, I am now quite happy with it. Ofc my personal user blocklist is still quite long - but blocking the big 3 immediately improved by experience by >95%.
Likewise, you can ditch a lot of news stories that have the most clickbait titles by blocking the bots that post them, while retaining the rest of the community that may then have content that you actually want to see. Unfortunately, nearly everything in Lemmy is “opt-out” rather than “opt-in”, but… it is what it is, and it can be workable, as we both (& everyone else here) have found. Also, there are shining beacons of hope - e.g. check out !globalnews@lemmy.zip, which is now #9 if you type “news” in the list of communities on your instance and sort by user count, but when it was told to me it was MUCH further down the list iirc, and therefore quite buried and exceedingly difficult for newer people to find, but avoids a lot of the spammy !worldnews@lemmy.world. i.e. I am saying that if someone wanted “news”, but less of it and only some of the most interesting stuff, then this “Interesting Global News” fits the bill, yet is opt-in rather than opt-out:-).
And therefore our monkey-brains forget all the pain that came before, to get us to this point.:-) Which is healthy, b/c why carry forward that negativity when you don’t have to?:-P But then when people looked at me with such a horrified expression on their face, I literally could not figure out why, at first, b/c my own experiences are so VERY different than theirs. Also those kinds of posts don’t dominate everyone’s feed every day, also we keep hearing of places like X/Twitter that do somewhat similarly so… at some point, isn’t that up to you, to curate your own feed, just like literally everywhere else? Like, why would you stay on Reddit but not try out Lemmy then, when this aspect is the same?
But then again, I am a Unix programmer, and most people do not think like us:-). i.e., not everyone is willing to RTFM in its entirety prior to being able to make realistic use of anything here. Also, anytime there is a major election in the USA or UK such posts have a way of popping up all over the world… but since then they have receded (it looks like?), and thus again we forget, until it comes back around again.
Mind you, like you, I would love to see more content-creators here on the Fediverse!!! I mean, I am here, and would benefit from such, and college students are exactly the crowd that might do so - creative people letting off steam by posting interesting material, presented in a funny way? Yes please!:-) But… yeah, all of the aforementioned “issues” are definitely more than a little bit of a minefield, for the uninitiated.
Also, this is where we enjoy chatting, but there is very little to no actual “content” on the Fediverse atm - everything is posted here from elsewhere, and unlike even Reddit, I am not aware of e.g. answers to technical questions given here that exist nowhere else. So like you said that you wanted to share a video but… off the top of my head, I cannot even think of one that would qualify. I did post a Super cool video on viruses in !videos@lemmy.world, but it only got 3 upvotes - I thought at the time in large measure b/c I posted it immediately after someone else also posted the one (oops, I hadn’t seen it), and yet that one likewise received no (net?) upvotes. Oh, and both of these of course are merely links to YouTube. So… we aren’t all that receptive to “content” of a nature that isn’t news, comedy, maybe fuck-cars, and everything technology but most especially GNU+Linux (sort that community Top for this year and see precisely what I mean), oh and ofc nostalgia e.g. Trogdor the Burninator, obviously.
img
So… it’s hard to justify sharing even a video, with all the variety of pitfalls that also await. But… maybe you’ll find a way? Being forewarned is forearmed after all, so now you can go forward more safely!:-)
wowwoweowza@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sorry for the two month delay in reply to your exceptional wisdom. I kept this message “unread” believing that I might own another such thorough reply. Then the term started and it’s all a blur.
I will share that I DID create an assignment on the FEDIVERSE. Very very general with major caveats about their free will and content they will encounter if they are not careful.
Best best response when I dropped the guidelines was a student who clapped her hands in glee and said, “OMG! We can go back to Internet 1.0!” — this is a 19 year old and she was being sincere. I asked her to clarify he thinking for the class and she said, “There was a time before corporations owned the internet when it was just people.” Oh… it was lovely!!
I won’t hear about this experiment for a few more weeks.
But I am hopeful.
OpenStars@discuss.online 1 week ago
That’s so cool! Do be careful but yeah, it is such a wonderful experiment. On the one hand, if I didn’t have access to Lemmy, I would never have found out that e.g. after Biden forbade the railway workers from striking (two Christmases ago iirc?), he worked with them for MONTHS to get them all the things they needed e.g. time off with paid sick leave. The corporate media (for the most part) refused to cover it, probably bc it was boring and they couldn’t sell ads as effectively with such content as well as something that bleeds and thus leads.
On the other hand, Lemmy also allows disinformation campaigns to spread too, e.g.:
img
(For one it ignores how both Russia and China are doing genocide - relevant bc on Lemmy.ml where it was posted you are only allowed to criticize such things when the “other side”, meaning Western capitalism, does it, so like you can say how the USA aids Israel’s genocide but you can not say how Russia is doing similarly in the Ukraine, or China to the Uyghurs, etc. - and it ignores that Trump has said that he will write Israel a blank check to do even more, instead seemingly pointing blame at Biden’s administration for doing genocide, all without ever saying so explicitly but that seems the implication, given the timing of it being released just prior to the USA election? Oh well, surely anything that fosters apathy among the voting populace could never influence the outcome now could it…?)
You might point people to !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca, and post to that community yourself anything that you want a new user to know?
Also check out PieFed - it lacks significant polish, e.g. if you tag my username there like @openstars@piefed.social I will not receive a notification bc that feature hasn’t been implemented yet, but especially for a student has such great resources so it at least is something to be very aware of and kinda show off what the Fediverse has to offer now plus where it is heading in the future. Especially as so many people want to get away from the “tankies” - e.g. Lemmy.World announced wanting to support a different project, Sublinks, though that one might be stalled at this point:-(.
Do let us all know how your experiment turns out? I mean make a post somewhere (and please tag me to make sure I see it!:-) so we can all be enriched by your efforts and the fruit that they bring:-). If you need a suggestion for a community, maybe… !fediverse@lemmy.world or !fedigrow@lemm.ee.
wowwoweowza@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Had I been truly bold, I would have included in the assignment guidelines that they use the platforms themselves to execute their “creative projects” with the Fediverse — this way you’d be able to see what was done “live.” As it is, I used a digital format for their work they are all familiar with… they’ll be presenting live presentations with google slides…
My guidelines are general enough that the hideous things some folks have run into cannot come back to bite me, but as you predicted, some have run into genuinely nauseating material. I’ve just smiled and said, “I hope you clicked away.”
I believe the best response I’ve received after some adventuring in the Fediverse one student came back hooting about how much she has dreamed of “Internet one point oh.” This is what she calls the Fediverse — and she’s not wrong. Zero corporate Shenanigans.
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
!bestoflemmy@lemmy.world highlights quality Lemmy-unique content