It’s dangerous for sure - both collectively (e.g. it has been demonstrated how they can map out military bases and movements following the patterns of when either the or even the surrounding people login, or perhaps do not log in during certain periods of time), and in a sense perhaps individually for people (this is probably most people) who are susceptible to additive behaviors. Although ofc forewarned forearmed and all of that, so just like any source of positive reinforcement (alcohol, drugs, gaming, even unquestionably “healthy” activities such as exercise and working), it needs to be used appropriately i.e. kept in check. “The unexamined life is not worth living”, and all that.

I should note that it was not America that made TikTok that way - at least not directly. That company has always done those activities. Capitalism always sells not what people want but what the company desires to sell them. If we want different - e.g. Loops or like PeetTube and Pixelfed and such - then we have to build it. The code is not simply going to spill out of a random generator and then email itself to us:-) - it requires a staggeringly enormous amount of effort.

And that is the problem. I, like you and most of us here, want an algorithm that isn’t Their Algorithm, but what we end up with instead still ends up being a form of Algorithm, just fueled by upvotes (vulnerable to disinformation) rather than monetary gain.

And we should all disconnect - I would argue not entirely, but stepping back a bit may do us all a world of good. Spend most time with people irl, spend only a little learning here, and don’t neglect other sources that are significantly better as primary or secondary or even tertiary means of getting information. Other than Reddit though, which is where the content creators are, I am not sure more specifically what that may look like but now I know the task ahead of me: to find that.

It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it… but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.

And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.

The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It’s sad to see it struggling so much but… writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.

In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don’t even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I’ve learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one’s goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).

The Lemmy way: yay!

The second half: yes I understand and agree - it’s a rather complicated issue, which can go both ways. Perhaps it can be something left to the admin to decide whether to enable vs. not? They can see all votes themselves in any case. In general I am not a fan of restricting people’s abilities “for their own good”, which seems in line with the spirit of PyLova, but in any case I definitely understand that it needs thinking about first bc it does run against the grain of what PieFed has done so far.

Thanks for talking about it with me.:-)

What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just “gaming”.

PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior “enthusiasts” in a community while excluding all those “hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far”), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people’s account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also “follow” users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.

Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I’m saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is “lost” that way.

PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.

The Threadiverse isn’t like “dying” or anything, but it’s definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.

Yes that - the second one, as shown in your image - is what I mean. Lemmy offers the option to show upvotes separately from (& adjacent to) downvotes. PieFed’s tooltip approach fails to work for me something like a fifth of the time, at least on PieFed.social. At least a third of the time it will not work even if I click the number >10 times at varying cadence, although most of the time then if I zoom in and carefully hit precisely the number rather than the general area it is in it will work. Ofc that could be coincidence like a server connection issue that manages to work upon subsequent clicks regardless of how I approached hitting the number.

Regarding showing who delivers the downvotes - that can be quite useful sometimes as well. I just had a serial downvoter go through every comment that I had made recently, across a wide swath of communities from memes to Fediverse matters and news and politics etc. - ironically they had never once posted and only made 3 comments in I think it was 3 years, yet they had downvoted people sth like 20k times and only upvoted iirc <3k total, so I seriously doubt that I was the only one that happened to. I want negative feedback the same as I want positive ones, but like… delivered as an adult, using words (at which point others piling them on only adds assent & therefore weight to that spoken position), not this childish “I don’t like your politics so I am going to downvote everything you’ve said for days, without even telling you why”.

Voting really is an imbalance of power if someone can do things like that, but the recipients have no power to block it. It has a chilling effect upon social media bc people will either speak less often, knowing they will receive those, or else grow such a thick skin that even a veritable flood of downvotes affects them not in the slightest. I don’t like either of those options.

Though I suppose there is an argument that people could too casually block others for offering downvotes… or something? Honestly I don’t quite understand that - anyone can find out who it is, with just a little bit of effort (e.g. I could make a post in a community that I moderate, so then when my serial downvoter strikes then as a mod I can see who they are, even if not as a user; or ultimately if I installed my own server then I could casually inspect the votes of everyone on every post or comment everywhere), this information is not “private” and there seems little reason to not place tools into people’s hands to balance out this otherwise inequitable relationship?

But anyway I’m not pushing for it - I just hate to see how like powerful people (e.g. jordanlund) have all this ability to see and do things (e.g. see people who downvote and block them), but what can the common person do? Although some of this seems to be based on the misunderstanding that accounts that you have specifically blocked cannot still vote on your content, whereas now I think that they can. There seems nothing that can be done about that.

Btw Mbin shows who offers (links given for a randomly chosen example post): upvotes aka favorites, separately also Increases, now seemingly called Boosts, but will only show the total count but not who offered them for Reduces (I don’t know if a mod can see these, obviously an admin could but I don’t know whether via this same interface).

Impressive!

I did get excited thinking that it might show downvotes, but now I see that’s only for admins.

Do you plan to expose downvotes received on each post/comment to the user? I’ve been through every single theme and setting on PieFed.social and could never find a way to display those - although I don’t know whether other PieFed instances can already do differently or not (they definitely don’t show by default in places like PieFed.zip).

Fwiw I think people would be very happy to see their downvotes separately from upvotes, since e.g. +10/-9 is quite a bit different scenario than simply =1 overall (controversial vs. total lack of engagement). Technically this is already possible but the tooltip display is exceedingly janky and does not work at all a good fraction of the time, when when zoomed in like 10x (which helps at least sometimes).

Anyway it’s always neat to see a “new project”, even if as a fork this is only kind-of half of one, it still counts in terms of offering new opportunities to users, which is always a good thing.

Or alternatively: It shows that handle on one specified instance, e.g. always from your Mastodon home instance.

Fwiw, PieFed already translates URLs on the backend so that visiting content from a foreign source will take you instead to the local copy.

Also this post might be tangentially interesting: https://piefed.social/post/1285215.

Only until the meds wear off.

oh no, not again.

Skill issue.

git guud

Oh hey, that was you!!! Like I said earlier, I enjoy your contributions. Though so many other people - like PugJesus - keep leaving, and based on the number of empty communities in my subscriptions, nobody rises up to replace their level of contributions (well not nobody, e.g. there’s Lady Butterfly, tirelessly lifting up pretty much half to all of the most strongly encouraging communities:-).

I’ve wondered myself if I should help set up a community for comics. But there’s a legal liability issue, which I suppose is why I am able to enjoy older ones like Foxtrot and Calvin & Hobbes delivered daily to my Subscribed feed, but not modern ones like Nathan W. Pyle’s work.

So what I did instead was to create a community c/AskUSA. Virtually nobody reads the rules though - e.g. to avoid politics (there’s even helpful links directly in the sidebar to alternatives to post those to), and the reality of what is happening to the USA right now is too depressing to contemplate so… I became one of those people who abandons communities myself. Realistically, I just don’t think we have the subscriber base to support niche communities. Multiple times I have stumbled upon a community that someone created (to hold the name I suppose?) and became the exclusively sole poster to it, never to have been followed up with even by the creator of it themselves. Community discovery is exceedingly poor on Lemmy.

Hence I put all my hopes into PieFed instead, to be all that Lemmy never will… at least until PugJesus left due to the issue of shadow-censoring users contributions. That kind of thing is enough to kill off an entire project, causing communities to choose to not migrate there from a Lemmy instance or from Reddit, or to decide not to switch over their instance or open up a parallel one running PieFed (e.g. sh.itjust.works was considering that at one point in time, I am not sure if they still will now though…). My hopes that PieFed will “save” the concept of the Threadiverse are dashed - even though ironically there is now more reason to have hoped for it than ever before - e.g. Reddit has begun killing off old-reddit, which will cause many to look for alternatives to run to. They will not come here though, as my earlier link mentions in their very own words, nor can I argue all that believably that they should, when what awaits them is to be bullied here into expanding the base to receive tankie falsehoods and propaganda, and otherwise incel toxicity.

So I am choosing to listen rather than always only ever speak, and see if I can understand this shifting landscape better.

Oops, but here I wrote a novel along with that. Don’t worry - there is no expectation for me to receive one in return:-).

Time marches ever onwards. Each new generation (of posters) will figure out what it wants to use this space for, if anything at all, or not. In the meantime I hope it has been more enjoyable to meta-discuss these matters, or at least more so than to add to your already considerable pain.

Counterpoint: those will happen naturally and don’t need planning.

Sometimes those are fraught with frustration though. Like I remember really enjoying discussions with the highly controversial user FlyingSquid, who left Lemmy at least a year ago. My discussions were about Star Trek, and I had already blocked all politics themed communities as well as the largest meme ones. It turned out that within the politics sphere, he seems to have shown a bit of a different side of his personality to people who tried to post in the communities that he modded. Was he right? Are all the people decrying against him - many of whom I note are often proven liars in other matters - right? Actually truth is significantly more complex than that, plus not having delved in depth I honestly and truly do not know (though suspect a bit of both).

And people say likewise about PugJesus too. I was never on the receiving end of his wrath either - perhaps I never could be, since my aim is truth and he wouldn’t have to be firm as I would literally welcome correction where needed? But now he is gone too.

Most of the people that I enjoyed speaking with the most are either gone, or comment far less frequently than they used to. Or in different communities.

A lot of the communities that I do frequent the most - among those that still exist anyway - have barely anyone who comments at all. I tend to avoid the largest ones (I make an exception for this one we are in now due to the subject matter), bc that is where the toxicity is highest. But then the niche communities barely exist at all… e.g. !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev has only had one post in the last 4 months, !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca, oops that one seems to have died a year ago already, so I just unsubscribed, the last post in !dankmemes@lemmy.world was 2 months ago, oops I just noticed several places I am subscribed in were on lemm.ee so obviously those are defunct now, the last post in !dogsincostumes@lemmy.world was 8 months ago, one of my absolute favorites was !nathanwpyle@lemmy.world, but the only post other than one asking the content creator where he went was again from 8 months ago, and so on. There’s also just a WHOLE BUNCH of communities that have next to zero comments in them - maybe they are bot posts that people prefer to block? e.g. !publichealth@mander.xyz. Others are not quite as often fully zero but are still less than 5 per post, like !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com, !globalnews@lemmy.zip, and every single poetry community I can find across the entire Threadiverse.

Don’t get me wrong, some people like ThePicardManeuver and LadyButterfly are holding up a good half of the Threadiverse by super posting to many many communities. But people used to say the same about FlyingSquid and also PugJesus as well. Like see this old appreciation post: https://feddit.org/post/3602869.

So anyway, you aren’t wrong, but it’s not as simple as that, when a good fraction of the communities here keep turning into ghost towns, and those that remain are either the largest, which again attracts the most controversial crowds, or else super super tiny.

But I do enjoy talking with you wherever I see you:-).

What if your problem is that you have too many wolves?

Believe it or not, send wolves. We have the most “not too many wolves” spaces in the world, because of having sent in more wolves.

Obviously, except that they CLAIM that they are leftists. So then they are “leftists” rather than leftists.

OP made clear the distinction by stating:

come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for?

North Korea obviously famously representing a brutal totalitarian regime that murders its own people “leftist utopia”.

The sheer amount of toxicity on the Threadiverse is a real issue. Multiple people have claimed to have been stalked irl (weirdly even incorrectly so, as in thinking they were someone else?) or received death threats (I dunno how credible but how relevant would that even be here?), over and above issues shared by Reddit mods.

My point is that it is incredibly draining. Add to this how ineffectual the tools have been all this time on Lemmy: no notification of moderation events, no modmail, no ability to continue discussing the matter on the very post that was merely removed from the community listing but not full-on deleted, and even no ability to bring on additional mods from another instance, where they can see the moderator reports (bc those do not federate). The upcoming v1.0 will help a tiny bit with very little of this, and the rest of the issues will remain. PieFed helps with significantly more of them, but not all - e.g. without a modmail, which mod do you contact on the list if you want to ask why your content was removed, especially when it is obscured by the modlog merely saying it was done by “mod”?

In all, this space is becoming simultaneously both less moderated overall, while also vulnerable to overzealous power-hungry mods who do things like preemptively ban people from communities that they’ve never so much as heard of, while using insults in the ban reason section (being protected by your admin means that you can say whatever you like, in the modlog - call people trolls, when you are a mod they have to let you do it, with no ability to stop you).

It’s a 4chan mentality, and it’s extremely unwelcoming to new users. It is entirely understandable to me why subreddits are refusing to migrate here, even as access to old-reddit is in the process of being curtailed (removed?).

Not really - all he does is ask questions ⁉️

Fwiw there is !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social, though with at best one post per week (or almost per month lately), and on the instance that has decided to shadow-censor votes even from other users of the Threadiverse like Lemmy and Mbin without disclosure of that fact. Announcement of the latter might have had a really chilling effect upon the community since this past month the number of posts has really dropped off a cliff.

It’s been really hard for people to be the change they want to see in the world, and to share the same spaces despite such major differences in outlook on life. And for all the criticism of their moderation policies (note I am not questioning the validity of that, especially since I don’t post or typically even comment in the political communities so have no direct experience there), each time a MAJOR Threadiverse user leaves, they take all of their posting efforts with them - I’m talking about the likes of FlyingSquid, PugJesus, and I almost hesitate to mention AdmiralPatrick since I’ve already been accused of being an alt of his:-).

I tend to not post often myself unless I really have something I want to share, as people either can respond negatively or else not at all, even for like a nonpolitical comic, and that can make it somewhat un-fun. (So instead I try to make the Threadiverse more lively by contributing comments:-)

Eternal September… except it’s fucking Groundhog Day now!!

Especially when they label themselves like “memes” and “comics” etc.

Somehow on the backend the wires must have got crossed and sent c/Lemmyshitpost content over to c/news instead 🤪

(/s …?)