OpenStars
@OpenStars@piefed.social
Compassion >~ Thought
- Comment on How to secure research funding 1 day ago:
- Comment on Sleep Scream Die 4 days ago:
Did you see those abs?
It was implied:-D.
- Comment on Wizardry 4 days ago:
- Comment on The Rock smells bullshit 4 days ago:
I dunno, if everywhere you go you smell BS, it might be time to check your own pants?! 😜
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 6 days ago:
Omg it's amazing! Treat yourself enough to make an account. Once you see the sign-up wizard, asking you what your interests are and pre-signing you up to communities based on your responses, and it asking you how much content you would like to see containing the keywords "Musk" or "Trump" (importantly, not just All vs. None, but an intermediate Some as well), you'll see what the Threadiverse has been missing!
After that, it does take quite some getting used to, coming from Lemmy and Reddit, but that's a good thing bc it has so many more CHOICES that you can make, like not just All vs. Subscribed (vs. Local), but categories of communities. Like e.g. you could choose not to subscribe to any political communities so that you won't be deluged with such every single time you log on, and yet all the News and Politics are available in the appropriately named News and Politics - which (it just keeps getting better and better) are also user customizable and shareable as well!
It's not perfected yet - notifications are sometimes buggy and the search function sucks compared to Lemmy - but it serves my needs 99.9% of the time and for the rest there's my Lemmy alt to fall back to anyway:-).
So yes indeed, try it and you'll fall in love instantly, finding yourself using it more often until it's your main. You'll see.:-)
Oh and the developer team adds features practically weekly, plus is super friendly and responsive, so there's that too.:-)
- Comment on thanks mom 1 week ago:
I think that means that we need to repeat the study then?
For science?
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 1 week ago:
Me too. I found a post via browsing by All, and responded with something innocuous (I thought) to the effect that "Biden may not be perfect, but he did at least lower gasoline prices and that's not entirely nothing"... and the responses kept coming for WEEKS and WEEKS. And then I did it again - once was on Lemmygrad.ml and the other on hexbear.net.
Even taking it as a given that I'm a dumb stupid idiot (am I though?), it was obvious to me how "consent" matters not at all to them. I was being "dunked on", which tbf is literally written in the side-bar text of ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net!... EXCEPT that I found it by browsing All, so had never seen that!?
So to clarify, it's not that I think such places shouldn't exist entirely, just that they are not a match to everyone else across the Fediverse, particularly the more mainstream normie, mostly centrists in the USA that were coming over from Reddit (including myself).
Mind you, PieFed provides full solutions to all of these issues: the side-bar text is shown down below EVERY post from a community (okay so someone could still find something via All and respond via comment without ever seeing it but... it's something?), and more importantly it provides the ability to place messages attached to like URLs or more relevant here, Lemmy instances. Hexbear is fully defederated from PieFed.social but if it were not, then for one I wouldn't be here, but moreover I would push heavily for such a message to be added that warns people who do not know the lore already. Also you can do personal defederations without needing admin support, by truly blocking all users from a given instance (I do it for lemmy.ml), unlike Lemmy's horribly misnamed feature that would be better termed a community muting (that still allows those users to spam your inbox with notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS). Also, PieFed allows you to trigger notifications for anything at all - a user, a particular post, a singular comment (whether yours or by someone else), and thus CRUCIALLY allows you to STOP receiving notifications for something when you don't want that anymore.
And those aren't even the top features of PieFed:-). However, back then PieFed didn't exist, so I can well understand all the people complaining in places such as r/RedditAlternatives (as I mentioned but I'll bring it up again:-) why they tried out Lemmy and decided to abandon it. You and I almost did the same - and we are by no means alone in that, as, still yet again, many did do so.
Unfortunately Lemmy's feature set in this regard have actively gone backwards lately - e.g. instance blocking used to not allow notifications, but now it does. And Lemmy.ml seems integrated heavily into the Lemmy processes, so much so that most instances don't dare to defederate from it. This seems relevant since the OP was talking about "centralization", and while in theory the Lemmy sourcecode doesn't absolutely 100% mandate that a new instance be federated with lemmy.ml, in practice it is true that every single major instance has done so. i.e. we talk a lot about decentralization, even while we have this major centralization feature present in the Lemmyverse.
Thus forcing new users to be exposed to the anti-Western propaganda (e.g. "bOtH sIdEs SaMe"), before they learn how to block those communities and users (but are prevented from doing so for the entire instance) one by one...
- Comment on Am I entitled to compensation? 1 week ago:
Is there a website where I can type all that out and find out if I am affected? 🤪
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 1 week ago:
Do you work at Boeing? 😜
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 1 week ago:
Even so I'll add a warning that Hexbear.net is a troll instance. They don't so much truly believe in anything so much as spoil for a fight, which is fine except consent does not matter to them and they refuse to restrain themselves outside of their instance that was created for that purpose. Also they have been caught actually lying to instance admins. Even so they can be fun to talk with, so long as you aren't taken by surprise e.g. mistaking it for people being serious:-).
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 1 week ago:
Maybe in certain communities? Some power tripping mods do exist. Likely they could be reported to the instance admins and possibly removed for such a scenario. It's happened before in some extremely high profile cases.
Downvoting the admin of Midwest.social would get you banned though.
Fortunately there are communities such as !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com that help spread knowledge of such information across the Threadiverse.
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 1 week ago:
- Comment on Are most people here left-wing? 1 week ago:
"Come to Lemmy, we have batshit insanity from more than just the two sides" 🤪
Although on Lemmy.world, you won't see two of the Big Three instances that spread the majority of authoritarian propaganda present on Lemmy, because lemmygrad.ml and Hexbear.net have been defederated.
The conservatives likewise were defederated from, and apparently fell apart internally, presumably moving over to Truth Social.
If you or anyone else truly wants to read every POV though, then you can check out Lemm.ee that aims to defederate from as few instances as possible.
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 1 week ago:
Even so, if celebrities started using something, their users would follow them - as happened with Bluesky, and to a much smaller extent the Rexodus from Reddit to Lemmy over the 3rd party app debacle.
But there seem to be just too many problems to make it worth most people's efforts. Like lack of content. And speaking of Lemmy, r/RedditAlternatives is full of people that came over here, but then went back - citing lack of content and presence of toxicity as their top reasons.
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 1 week ago:
Tech people tend to make horrible salespeople, especially to non-technical normies.
The thing is, some people value different things... and that's okay.
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 1 week ago:
Thank you for explaining about the relationship=me links.
Email ofc is the same - e.g. BillGates@google.123 just maybe might perhaps not be the same person as BillGates@microsoft.com. Nevertheless, Bluesky makes this stuff trivially easy, as too does Reddit, by virtue of centralization.
So the task would come down to convincing people to prefer more effort on their part vs. less effort somewhere else - while also at the same time doing this on top of all the other criticisms as well (none of my friends are there, there's barely any content, trying to find stuff is so very hard, why do the developers fight amongst themselves leading to an abysmally slow rate of improvements, and basically why should I care about this anymore then, if others likewise can't be bothered to care either?). And the vast majority of people are going to choose the latter over the former.
It's not even necessarily a bad thing, so much as it simply is, and we must make peace with it, or expend effort to overcome it ourselves, bc that's just how the law of entropy works.
- Comment on X’s dominance ‘over’ as Bluesky becomes new hub for research 1 week ago:
What else is there though? Mastodon by design is counter-culture, so why then are people surprised when "culture" in turn does not like it?
As just one example, if a famous person makes an account, and then a spammer makes an identically-named account, just on another instance, then the famous person's followers could get confused. Throwing out right or wrong, famous people worry about stuff like this, which would require a level of coordination and communication across the Fediverse - i.e. a type of "centralization" (even if accomplished via possibly decentralized means?). I'm not sure if I am remembering correctly or not, but I thought there was even a fix submitted to the codebase, which has sat for YEARS without being reviewed or approved. If not this feature though, other features have definitely followed this pattern.
TLDR 1: you snooze, you lose.
TLDR 2: ideological purity
testsbeatings will continue, until moral improves.TLDR 3: FAAFO means, it turns out, that if you entirely ignore everything / most things that the users that you hope will use your platform ask for, they might just go elsewhere, where they feel welcomed.
Is Mastodon behaving similarly to an incel culture, demanding that people like what a "nice"
manplatform it is, rather than do the work required to make people actually happy with what it offers? And if not (due to other reasons, perhaps funding), then what is the functional difference really, between that vs. whatever it is doing?So yeah, Bluesky it is then. If we want something better, we had best get to actually building it.
- Comment on ain't your buddy, pal! 1 week ago:
- Comment on ain't your buddy, pal! 1 week ago:
Oh dear God...
I now need eye bleach, for my ears? 🌽
- Comment on what is the truth 1 week ago:
I find it interesting that PieFed renders that comment correctly - there seems to be a fundamental difference in how it renders markdown.
- Comment on how do you work?? 2 weeks ago:
You put the nose and mouth into the...
You know what, I don't think you really want to know!?! 😶
- Comment on I hate the modern web 3 weeks ago:
It did not used to be this way. Every website result used to be "cached", but not anymore...
Enshittification 😔
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 3 weeks ago:
Unfortunately, the former is rather what should be the case, although so many times it is not:-(.
- Comment on How the White House Uses Semantics to Downplay the Signal Leak 3 weeks ago:
The servers are outside the United States
Oh my, this just keeps getting worse. 😞
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I hear that. Fwiw, a lot has been broken for a very long time - not merely weeks or months or even years but rather decades, so this is more of a reckoning that is catching up to us than it is a total surprise.
Similar to Brexit I would imagine, and many other similar trends around the globe, with similar causes and effects. People got complacent, the wealthy ignored the plight of the poor, who reacted out of desperation, and now... we'll see.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Omg, you might not have been paying attention lately, but I 100% guarantee that it will be solely in English. Assuming we are allowed to vote again, which tbf we probably will, it's just that the options will be preselected for us. As it has pretty much always been, but moar so now.
- Comment on Absolute Nonsense 3 weeks ago:
Get out of here with your product advertising! (/s)
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be an age but a knowledge requirement. Some 10 year olds know that there are (were?) e.g. 3 branches of government, while I kid you not there are some 20+ year olds that are not aware of that plain and simple fact fact. On average, older people tend to be a little bit more knowledgeable than young, if only due to having had more time to figure stuff out, although otoh also society does change out from under them - e.g. which is more trustworthy, something seen on the TV "news", or something shared on TikTok?
It seems more like an attitude of responsibility to me than an age or anything else. Perhaps make college degree a requirement - while keeping the GI bill offering college funding to people who successfully serve (without being dishonorably discharged) in the military. Or just a test of how government "works".
Or rather, used to work. We aren't coming back from this, methinks.
- Comment on Democratic Senators Team Up With MAGA To Hand Trump A Censorship Machine 3 weeks ago:
And the linked Bluesky post.
- Comment on Wait, why is the White House using Starlink to ‘improve Wi-Fi’? 4 weeks ago:
You... don't want to know (if you know what's good for you, capiche?:-P)
