You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

As it should always be.

should be, ftfy :-(

You are fortunate that it takes “only” 30 minutes.

It is to their advantage to be act surprised, therefore they are “surprised”, see? This was your “opportunity” to show how dedicated you are the company, having worked all weekend long…

I strongly hesitated saying anything at all b/c there are so very many different rules governing the behavior of every single kind of symbol. Though one jumping off point is the use of the parenthesis, without slashes prior to them and them meaning alternatives within a grouping context rather than merely “remembering”, for the sake of e.g. replacement or copying, so e.g. in the Unix CLI “grep” command this would not work even with the -e parameter (I am not so sure about perl-style though, or rather, this would work within pure perl, but perl-style regexps from within grep is another matter, plus that option itself is not universal across all forms of Unix).

In any case, I hoped that the YoMama joke would be universally understood and appreciated regardless, across all of the many & varied language barriers 😜.

Also matches TakesOutzTheYourMother, since the asterisk allows for zero matches to the group, and there seems no bounding constraints:-).

Sigh… too true.

Why… why is the world like this?

POV: your project manager went in an “cleaned” it all up by removing them - your (sic) welcome! 😜

Better than “rejected - git gud”? :-P

“I (want to keep my job and therefore I) AGREE WITH YOU 100%”

They collect the big bucks, the rest of us can suck dirt - barely not able to afford a home, food, medical care, etc. Oh wait, sorry, I meant “YES SIR/MAM!”

“Job titles are actually a fluid concept - why feel a strong need to label everything?” :-D

On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That’s a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.

I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted… b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.

At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.

For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.

Literally: yes, e.g. https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

For-profit enterprises hijacked people’s various needs to increase their profits, so that they can haz moar profitz while they earn their profits, as they chase even more-er-est profits. It is the same reason why when you go to a website that you have literally never visited before, much less do not have an account on, they have an icon that looks precisely like a “notifications” button, with a badge saying that you have “messages” waiting to be reviewed. 🤮

At least when piracy websites have such things, they also offer to let you download an interesting item, whereas when you visit a legitimate “news” page that someone sends you a link to, they show like 2 sentences before fading out into a full-page blocking advertisement that lets you sign up to pay money in order to continue to read even more click-baity headlines followed by maybe some tiny amount of content, if you are lucky - and even that is most often like one tiny new fact that happened in the last couple of days or weeks but appearing only after 5 pages of knowledge that has been known for decades, or worse yet they just forgo the latter entirely and the entire article is only a paragraph or two.

I am saying: if the true goal of most news websites was truly to impart knowledge then they could have done so better in the 10-second read of the TITLE itself than all the lead-up to get you to come to that page, full of ads and tricks to get you to scroll down further to see more ads, all while wasting your time reading through something that absolutely was not worthwhile.

I am spoiled by such things as https://www.youtube.com/@crashcourse that essentially throw multiple whole entire college curricula at you - THOSE ads would be worthwhile to watch, for THAT content. That is like turning a firehose of knowledge onto yourself. But then other people want you to watch even more ads, in return for far less content.

Kurzgesagt is another example. Rather than simply downvote others or reply with a childish “your (sic) stoopid (sic)”, they instead add to the collective body of human knowledge and experiences by taking an ENORMOUSLY complex subject such as vaccine side-effects, and break them down into <10-20-minute videos that are watchable by the general public, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU. THIS IS THE WAY, imho. But, they already do it, and other corpos want/need to make their own profits, hence they use “tricks” like Google SEOs to increase their own rankings while decreasing those of legitimate content such as these from Kurzgesagt or Crash Course.

So, whatever votes might have once meant, or should mean, then or now, at hand is what they are, for good or ill. Just exactly like how vaccine active disinformation exists, so it is no longer enough to cure a pandemic merely by doing all that hard work to create a vaccine - now you also have to work against the disinformation that exists.

And wrapping back to the matter at hand: while *I* might follow these guidelines, and *you* may do so as well, *most* people will not. The likes of Facebook have spoken, training those kids who have now grown up and moved on to other platforms but now others have followed in their wake, and this is the world that we live in now, for good or ill:-(.

You might also be interested in a reply I gave to another post entirely, so linking it here just in case it helps: https://startrek.website/comment/7601231.

I sincerely doubt it. The main reason might be that people actually think that they are “helping” by downvoting?

In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes? (most especially in the “those leopards surely won’t eat my face off” sense)

And tbh, isn’t that what a downvote button is meant for? So however sparingly we may choose to use it, can we really complain all that bitterly if others choose to use it more often?

As someone who already follows these guidelines, I believe that most other people will never follow these guidelines. Far worse, even if >95% of the people across the Fediverse were to, that’s still an awful lot of downvotes, compared to the number of people that have heard of a brand-new sub that is trying to get up off the ground.

Lemmy is at best beta-version software - the apps I hear are amazing but Lemmy itself is still relatively undeveloped (most of the time lately whenever I try to up-vote something, I have to do it 2-3 times for it to “stick”, and getting comments to go through is also problematic, sometimes I have to cancel and try again, across multiple platforms and OSes including Android and Mac, Firefox and Chrome). We are desperate for a place that is not Reddit or X, but if we want something, we have to build it.

My suggestion: make downvotes public, not just to admins and mods but to everyone. Tbh I doubt very much that that would do the trick, but it is a thought to try to help people break out of that system of “I am anonymous so I can be as insensitive to the needs of others as I wish” mindset. i.e., if they thought that there might be consequences, then they might behave ever-so-slightly better? But ofc that would only reach the subset of people who actually cared.

I feel the need to be pedantic here: that quote continues on to the very next (and final) sentence being:

Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.

However, anything that is logically possible, is doable, with enough effort & investment - e.g. that infamous quote:

All that quote means is that it would be most simple to do as a back-end task, not a simple front-end one (though even a front-end could, in theory, e.g. slurp up 1000 posts and then use some metric to figure out how to display the most proper subset of 20 from that superset).

But for instance, someone could spin up their own instance, and then add whatever sorting method they wanted to it. However, recall again what happened to DMV.social - anyone who opens up a Lemmy server will be spammed with CSAM, it would seem - so there are other more urgent matters to be attended to first, unless that someone used it purely as a testbed, and made all connections to it to be read-only, or else had a team of moderators willing to put in large amounts of time to fend off those attacks with both manual efforts and also developing automated tools at the same time - e.g. they would need to have technical skill even just to moderate, much less administer the machine (unless, like existing Lemmys, there is a whole team of admins doing the technical parts already). Anyway, I don’t suggest this lightly like it is trivially easy, just to say that it is possible.

It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution.

Sure, I am not trying to tell you what to do. Just stating that until and unless someone is willing to tinker with actual implementations - and again, right now their attentions seem to be directed elsewhere, plus while Scaled-sorting Hot may not be perfect it is something (I don’t personally have experience to say if it is better than before b/c I was on Kbin.Social at the time which was totally different - but I thought I heard many people say that it is better now?) - then it is going to be a purely theoretical discussion. Which is probably how Scaled sort got implemented too? Though now that it is built, it could be tinkered with, if there is the will to do so.

But unless you are offering to do any of the actual implementation work yourself, I think you would need to discuss this with the actual admins who you would expect to do that work for you - hence you might try Matrix where they hang out, rather than solely discussing it here.

And then, as you said in your OP, when they say “no” and close all GitHub issues, that, as they say, is that. You can’t “force” someone to do work for you for free - and even if you were offering money, or perhaps offering to do all the “design” work yourself for free, they still would need to agree to actually do the implementation.

Moreover, even if you DID offer to do ALL of the implementation work entirely on your own, unless you do want to spin up your own instance to actually run it on, you still would need the buy-in of the instance admins, for which having the buy-in of the developers would go a LONG way.

So you asked:

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

And my suggestion is that you cannot walk into someone else’s house and tell them how they should do things. Especially when they have ALREADY said no. They know better what their prioritization is, and what they hope to accomplish over the next month, year, and so on. The absolute beauty of the Fediverse is that you can take all of the existing Lemmy code, which is entirely functional, make a fork of it, and spin up your own instance - and not just run it, but even modify the code to do… whatever you want! And then you can share that code, and benefit all the instances that are running Lemmy too! Discuss.Online, Lemmy.World - all of them, well, those that choose to keep your suggestions, though it is up to each one individually to either accept or reject them, and it is ultimately their call. Reddit does not work this way, nor FaceBook/Meta/Threads, Instagram, Xhitter, etc., but we do, b/c it is “open-source”. The caveat to that being… that someone, somewhere, must put in the actual effort to get it done.

And the people who would normally do that, seem to have said no. I gather that you feel frustrated but… it is what it is. Therefore, of what use is it to talk about any of this, when there is no path forward for it? THAT is how to move forward your ideas: either find or become someone yourself who can implement them, and THEN in talking to them you will actually be in an even better position to understand how it all works, and how it might be changed to work even better than it does now.

I dunno, perhaps I should not have replied at all? Sometimes I do overshare my thoughts and if you disliked that here then I apologize:-). It was my hope to help spur your thoughts along these lines that I was thinking, since it seems to me to be the only way forward. But I guess please ignore me if you think I am wrong, and I wish you luck either way!:-)

Fwiw, I do agree that eventually, when the developers are ready to move forward with this again, they indeed might appreciate a ready-made solution if one happened to be already available by then, but again that assumes that one could be made purely on theoretical grounds alone?

Step 1: it would be nice if we could at least talk about this in a friendly & civilized manner. I have spent a portion of my day today trying to defend even so much as casually mentioning in passing - in a reply to a reply to a reply even, iirc, much less a full-on post - that I would like something similar to what you said. I give up whenever I detect that someone literally did not read what I already wrote, at which point I see that they just wanted to complain rather than add something of substance to the ongoing conversation. And even if we took it for granted that I was a dummy Mc-Stoopid-buttface, nobody bothered once to explain why I might be wrong.

i.e., there seems to be significant push-back to this approach. I have no idea why though - it seems entirely logical and do-able to me? Especially if it were purely optional, like a new sort option rather than taking over the existing Hot one? At a guess, it may just be a difficult task, so it awaits someone to be interested enough to actually implement it. Also, please remember that the entire Fediverse has and continues to be under perpetual attack (message from DMV.social closing down due to being spammed by illegal CP & CSAM amid concerns over the ethical considerations of being a server that allows posts from external users, i.e. the entire Federation model, quoting: “Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don’t want to deal with the possibility of this crap.”) - I do not know if it is Huffman, or Musk, or Zuckerberg, or whoever might not enjoy how this could potentially take away from their profits, but they are correct that if we continue to exist on our own, that we need to do something to protect ourselves against this type of thing. So… sorting is important yes, but I could see if it was not the HIGHEST priority, right now.

But moving on, one thought regarding it: allow each user their own customization filters for each “category” of posts, e.g. 1% politics, 2% sports, restrict news to 5% (though the latter requires significantly deeper thinking to implement - e.g. is an article in a Technology sub still “news”? tbh, “news” is probably not a real category then). Or, as you say, an algorithm that would just work mostly fine for most people. The problem with all of this being that tags would have to exist first, so someone would have to develop that before any of this could begin to be developed and tested.

Which brings us back to: it is really fun to talk about such matters, but ultimately it will take someone rolling up their sleeves first, maybe learning an entirely new language (or several - according to this GitHub page, Lemmy is: “Rust 76.4% PLpgSQL 16.4% TypeScript 5.5% Shell 1.5% Other 0.2%”), and just getting something done. Otherwise, beggars cannot also be choosers, if there is nothing else available to choose from.