Cheers for the response! Interesting to see that we generally align pretty accurately over this. I wasn’t clear we would and half expected you to come in and say “fuck that, I just don’t like lemmy world”.

I did think of making a separate post of my rant, but figured it’d just get downvoted and there wouldn’t be any point. After this, I’d be happy to put it up.

Also, I’ve just posted in the meta community about this, generally poking around the issue and what happened and how better administration might be possible.

I’m a little late on this thread/issue, but I agree with @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al .

I’m also inclined to push back on the anti-lemmy.ml stance being pushed here. And to be clear, While I’m on lemmy.ml, I joined before “the migration” when it made sense to join the “main” instance as it then was and I have no particular affiliation with them or their politics.

Inline with what sabre is saying, I think there’s a certain degree of political entitlement and “defederation-fever” creeping into this general sentiment. I think the communists/tankies should be allowed to do their thing without it being an issue, just like any other niche interest/viewpoint that can build a space here.

I suspect there’s some dangerously presumptive politics at play here … where moderation action is presumed to be “power tripping” mainly because the moderator’s politics is presumed to be completely wrong. How about, “yea, that’s their thing, it’s unlikely something productive will come out of speaking flatly critically about china on lemmy.ml … their moderation can go overboard sometimes, but their defensive about all of that … if you want to do that, you’ll need to go to a more western instance/community”

Building different spaces with different rules, vibes and beliefs, while simultaneously committing to inter-connectivity as much as possible … is basically the idea of the fediverse. It allows us to talk to each other without being stuck in one group’s (or corporation’s) policies and world-view … and more idealistically, allows us to see different world-views more clearly as we contrast the different spaces we can be connected to. If everything were on lemmy.world, it’d be hard to see the world-view (ha) that the mods/admins and even majority there impose on the rest.

That’s the idealism, and I think it’s very real.

But the pointy end of the stick is disagreements which lead to downvotes and moderation. That’s what enables the creation of a particular space, and needs to just kinda be accepted a bit more.

That’s the part not stated enough IMO … at some point, if you’re going to be committed to the inter-connectivity part, you need to be respectful of the fact that another space exists and can be antagonistic to some of your views. That’s fine. On reddit, we’d just steer clear of a particular sub-reddit and maybe disparage them elsewhere. De-federation or targeting an instance as plain bad or wrong is a useful tool that the fediverse provides but which, IME, can easily become over zealously embraced in a sort of dog-pile behaviour. A more useful behaviour, IMO, is to try to work out ways that the fediverse can persist with such antagonism and disagreements.

Not being surprised that communists are hard on criticism of communist countries seems like a start to me (where, TBF, such criticism is pretty wide spread in the west to the point that I don’t blame them for being cranky about it). Being open to the idea that you can get along with same communists on just about any other issue is a good next step. It’d be the same with criticising tech workers on programming.dev or trans/gender/queer issues on blahaj.zone or criticising western imperialism and capitalism on lemmy.world. Though I suspect the lemmy.ml admins could do a better job at sign-posting their politics/policies here.

These are spaces with particular sensitivities. Antagonising them indifferently is kinda rude at some point. Demanding that they not have their sensitivities is kinda against the fediverse at some point. Interestingly, the admin of lemmy.ml, dessalines, basically said the same thing recently.

Now, to be fair, I haven’t looked into the moderation stuff that seems to have precipitated this conversation and I’m certainly open to the idea that the lemmy.ml mods overstepped (mods tend to do that IME). But my general view is that, as communists living in the west, they’ve probably come against a good amount superficial criticism and frankly prejudice that us general westerners wouldn’t really notice, and so have pretty sharply guarded boundaries around that sort of dialogue. So they’ve built their own space (well platform actually), that is generally geared toward FOSS and privacy about which many of us have shared interests … but they also have some pretty clear policies around communism that are clearly very personal to the admins that are better respected than exiled or antagonised.

Also, none of this is to say everything should be on lemmy.ml. Quite the opposite. Diversify! That’s part of my point. But away from lemmy.world too, and with the understanding that part of diversification is enabling niche spaces that can cause friction and said friction isn’t, in itself, a problem. Instead, IMO, we tend to get a bit feverish whenever these sorts of things spark up. Anyway … rant over!

You need to see it to believe it I think. I was generally on the side of “too complex” but then came across instances perfect for it and used it right away and found it pleasant.

I’m still generally on the side of “too complex” though, and think there are probably better things for PSF to work on (cough packaging cough).

Hmmm yea. Put together, cosmopolitan and “ape” do point in a single direction. I still wouldn’t be surprised if it were trolling. But yea, interesting. Being hyped on SV as a Googler in 2014 seems to me to have been a thing (you might disagree!), so so that doesn’t surprise me either.

Thanks!

yea, from what I’ve seen of her, you could say she’s part of or used to be part of a sort edge-lord techno anarchism that involves a good amount of “fuck you” trolling and embrace of the chronically online/urban life style. The “fascism” part here seems to come out of nowhere. The twitter post from Justine that that whole blog post hangs off of doesn’t exist anymore (and she’s active on twitter). In the end though, if she’s a bit nutty on how much better tech governance would be than ordinary government, I don’t resent her for that. And the sorts of things she’s building technologically certainly align with my interests.

What would “cosmopolitan” and “ape” be dog whistles for? Racism?

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

Yea, I forget where, but she’s openly lamented the rise of ARM for this reason. Not because it’s a small blemish on redbean and cosmopolitan libc (what redbean uses to be “universal”) … but, IIRC, x86 had gained such ubiquity that simply sticking with it for the sake of interoperability and backwards compatibility was/is probably worth it. However accurate that is, or viable in today’s tech world, I certainly resonate with the sentiment. And given what her and cosmopolitan libc seem to have accomplished (I’ve never used these things), it certainly seems like one of nice things we could have if we just did things in a nicer way.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

So is kbin unofficially dead now?

EDIT: Huh, checked the GitHub repo’s contributions graph … and yea, nothing since the end of last year. Is Ernest ok?

By comparison, mbin has multiple significant contributors … nice to see.

You’re not wrong, but I think you’re missing the bigger picture.

The problems and associated solutions aren’t just about being a heroic lead dev. They’re organisational now. And so “grandstanding” has its place, especially when it comes to informing people about why they should consider organising together. You may be sick of their articles but many haven’t read any of them and I’m not sure there are others out there trying to solve these problems at a system level.

Sorry … downvoted.

The statement in the article had a footnote that provided a link to a 2022 Verge article in which Rochko said on the “BDFL model”:

That’s what I would prefer to stick with, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s better ways to involve other people and have better communication.

Moreover his behaviour in maintaining Mastodon is very much inline with this model. It wasn’t name calling, it is literally what he is and happy to be described as.

Nebula.

If Ghost fulfil their wish to get payments and subscriptions working over the protocol then that would count. They said they think they can in their recent announcement. But then it seems they may have crypto in mind for it.

For me, at least, Lemmy comms mirroring HN links are the best of both worlds

Yea I enjoyed it too.

fediverse had a strong european presence before the reddit migration too. The Mastodon lead-dev/founder, for instance, is German. And European governments have been far more interested in running their own instances on the fediverse than any other country AFAICT (to the point that I’ve seen it confuse North-American admins).

Just had a brief look … they seem to be created by the admin and not user defined?

They have multi communities!? Didn’t know!

Yea I think some more straight forward mechanisms could help there. Federating the alliance at a deep level is probably tricky. Some thoughts:

• Being able to view all the comments from the different cross posts or duplicate-link posts (which lemmy can automatically register). This has come up before, even in this comments section.
• Easily manageable multi-communities. Basically my idea, but making sure that they are easy to share, load, manipulate and view. For instance, your idea of “Allied communities” could be achieved to some extent by having these communities list in their side bar (or maybe some other convenient spot for this specific purpose) a suggested multi-community that contains the other allied communities. But, instead of just being a list, it’s some sort of link that takes you to a view of that multi-community, like any other feed, which you can then easily save to your list of multi-communities.
  • If done along with cross-post comment merging, I’d say you pretty much get to your allied communities idea.
  • Maybe there’d some way to combine the two where the “cross-post-comment-merging” mechanism is aware if you’re viewing through a multi-community and so automatically (depending on a setting probably) merges across communities in your multi-community, or at least presents a button for easily doing that.

All of that would be, I think, easier than some deeper addition to federation.

More generally, I think a lot of fediverse stuff comes down to just getting smarter with our clients where some helpful endpoints on the server can help but aren’t nearly as complex and don’t need to increase the complexity on the federation side of things.

I’m not sure I understand what that would look like or why you’d want that … ??

Like … sort of an alliance of communities on different instances that are discrete but, because they’ve chosen to “ally” with each other, can be interacted with in some unified way??

AFAICT, it’s been something on lemmy’s radar for a long while too. I get the sense the devs never worked out how they wanted to do it or maybe were a bit too ambitious in what they wanted from the feature and so it was kinda left by the way side, unfortunately. If I were to ever start contributing to lemmy it’d probably be the first thing I try to pick up.