Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

I’m making an app with a focus on streamlining pain points for user signups, and discouraging looking for centralized lists of the biggest groups by “crawling” the network for servers and communities based on what you see and who you interact with. I hope by making this easy, I can push smaller, more diverse communities in the fediverse

It’s getting close. I’m almost at the point where I can switch over to my app from jerboa for daily use, and then I’ll try to put out a beta

I had grits, I really need to go grocery shopping

Here’s the thing - we’ve been raised from birth to think “people don’t make things, companies do”.

Most people have never used software that isn’t company branded, they’ve never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they’ve never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It’s learned helplessness. They don’t have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they’ve tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball… Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you’re just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn’t bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it’s going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it’s going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it’s important to remember we’re animals, and we’re not just trainable, we’re the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It’s going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they’re going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I’m working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I’ve got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I’ve been at it for 30 hours now, but I can’t shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

My theory? It’s Musk.

He’s going around saying he only lost bots and scammers, that he’s made Twitter profitable, and that advertisers are back and happier than ever

He isn’t showing his numbers and there’s no way his claims are true, but he’s saying what they all want to hear. “Don’t worry guys, you can squeeze your users for cash hard as you want, and they might grumble about it but they’ll soon come crawling back”

There’s also increased pressure to become profitable ASAP, much of it is likely due to the economy, but Musk lying through his teeth is probably getting to the other billionaires. It’s worth mentioning, if you’re a billionaire the only reason to still care about money is for bragging rights

You underestimate the power of addiction.

The official app isn’t a bad thing because it’s buggy and has ads, that sucks but I’ve used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though

It’s bad because it’s built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let’s throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We’ll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven’t used the app in a few hours? Here’s some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there

I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn’t really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.

For those of us who aren’t going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It’s a strong reminder that corporations not only don’t care about us, they can’t - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn’t hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits

No, I think it kind of goes against what we’re trying to do here - if a list like that became popular, it would supercharge the growth of certain communities

There’s a lot of people pushing for that because it would make the site a straight Reddit replacement, but the promise here is a lot like the original promise of Reddit - give users a single place they can go to access a bunch of small forums

If someone makes a community for that purpose or a community wants to draw in all the Reddit refugees, I have no problem with that, but I think the growth would be healthier if people find them organically rather than putting a centralized list somewhere

Sites will start to pull in a community if any of the members on that instance sub to it and there’s talk of adding the ability for communities to band together in multis

It’s like when you let kids vote on what to do for the school faire.

Not only will the teacher and school change the result if they don’t like the winning suggestion, you also can’t vote to do nothing or protest the event

It’s just a way to give you the illusion of autonomy to boost engagement. It’s only a choice between the decisions they find (more or less) equally acceptable

This. We don’t all need to be one big happy family… Federated does not mean a single site decentralized. It also doesn’t mean isolated.

There’s a million flavors of in between they the fediverse let’s us explore, and hopefully instances will rise and fall as we find what builds the best communities. Some will over-moderate, some will be totally unrestricted, some will be safe spaces and echo chambers who carefully manage what users are exposed to, some will vet their users carefully, and most will probably be open to whatever their users ask for

The goal is that instances become all sorts of different places, and users can freely move if they like somewhere else better

I like the game grumps and Lex Fridman. The documentaries are cool, but I have to watch them in a different container or YouTube will start feeding me 30 minute ads or rants that sound reasonable but are super bigoted and flawed when you actually think about it

Reddit meant more to me than anything else I do online, and I committed to leaving it behind even before I found Lemmy… YouTube is barely worth it even without the ads. And I’ve got a whole fediverse of video content to investigate

That’s the advice CorgySkog gave them lol

Well, if you start one I’d join.

I’ve been looking for the next thing for more than a year, because the things that made Reddit a (relatively) healthier form of social media were being eroded. I tried out tildes, and the community was much more friendly, but almost too friendly. It was like they were overcompensating out of fear of the community becoming toxic… It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t comfortable - it felt like meeting strangers who you really want to impress. They’re also somewhat anti-growth, which isn’t a bad idea, but they were well below the sweet spot

Plus, I never loved the old school Reddit visuals, and it’s design principle is html only and had no app or dark mode… All in all it’s a great place for a specific group of redditors that didn’t include me

Then I made up my resolution to leave Reddit when my apps go down and started looking at making a custom app to collate RSS feeds, and I started hearing about Lemmy.

I liked it enough that I’ve dropped everything and started building a better app. There’s a lot missing, but there’s so much good energy.

And the design principles of the fediverse address many of the fundimental problems with social media and the Internet as a whole. This might really be something important

Because humans are barely sapient animals with limited understanding of ourselves and little to no awareness of the long-term consequences of our actions.

We don’t operate in our own best interest or the best interest of the group, we’re built on the assumption that the environment and our local community will moderate our actions. There’s natural limits to physical actions, natural repercussions to social ones when everyone knows each other

Technology doesn’t have these limits. Things made of code can scale past human comprehension in seconds. And it changes it’s users

Part of the ethics of software development is to carefully consider the ramifications of what you bring into the world.

The public can’t make an informed choice, because they lack both the nuanced understanding of the tech, and every choice has a cognitive load. It’s up to you to make it safe and healthy or to inform them of the consequences, and you can’t just put up a 26 research papers on the psychological and solciological considerations for hitting a button… No one is going to read that.

You also can’t have booby traps - anything a user can do inadvertently or accidentally shouldn’t have serious consequences.

There’s some room for debate, but it all comes down to this: you’re responsible for how an average user is going to use your technology. You should do all you can to make it easy to use the tech safely, you should add covers over the buttons that do something with consequences, and things with deeper ramifications should only be available to power users who presumably have the technical knowledge to make an informed choice themselves.

So onto this situation. Say you make this button “sub to /c/_____ and all sister communities”. That’s not really a choice - it’s like you go to McDonald’s and order a burger, and they say “for the same price, I’ll give you 3 additional burgers with different options”. Some people would say no, but they wanted a thing and you offer them more of the thing. If they haven’t tried them before, there’s fomo - what if one of the other burgers is better? And it’s not like they couldn’t just stop eating.

The majority will accept 4 burgers, because they don’t see the hidden consequences. There’s no world where the average person sits down with 4 burgers and eats less than they would if they had 1 - it’s human nature, studied and documented… Giving someone more food leads to them eating more, because we judge the amount we’re eating in large part visually. Put it on a larger plate or pile it higher, and we underestimate how much we’ve eaten. Put it on a small plate, and we eat less.

Sure, there’s people who understand this - those of us who’ve struggled with weight or food scarcity are either not going to accept the burgers, or we’ll set 3 aside for later. There’s people who might benefit from eating 4 burgers - someone who burns 10k calories a day needs that kind of intake (even though they’d be better off with more variety).

Good or bad, you’ve increased consumption based on how you’ve presented this choice. The outcome was a statistical certainty, but technically it was a choice. It’s just a choice that every human would naturally answer the same way if they went in blind - do you want only the thing you asked for, or that plus more free stuff.

So if you make this a button, it’ll overwhelm the single sub option. And there’s a game theory aspect to this - I’d likely hit the button too, because individual choices here don’t matter, it’s a matter of speed and volume of users subbing and unsubbing

I think this was the proposal - but problem is still doing this automatically.

It’s not posts I’m worried about, it’s comments. Comments are where the discussion takes place and the culture develops

Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

I liked GTA V, but I spent my whole time with rdr2 just being like “everyone loves this game, what am I missing? Maybe if I make it to the next act it’ll open up more”.

It was beautiful, the world felt alive, the mechanics were good, but it’s like instead of making a game with the wonderful foundation they built, they decided they’d rather tell a story than make a game.

I loved the hunting, the bounty quests were kind of ok, the gunfights were ok even if they were so repetitive they felt procedural, but I just couldn’t care about the story they shoved down your throat.

I wanted to build up the settlement and have to run around robbing trains to come up with money, I don’t want to do a 5 minute ride while the characters give exposition through dialogue, fight a few waves of enemies, then ride off - rinse and repeat.

I wanted to grind progression through upgrading weapons and gear, but the upgrades are minimal, new guns are linked to story progression, and while hunting was fun the legendaries were just tedious jumping through hoops

I like multis and I think discoveribility is a bottleneck, but I’m very wary of this idea. If you merge communities together like this, you essentially multiply the users in that community. Moderation isn’t 4 small instances anymore - it’s one large one with 4 separate mod teams each handling a quarter of the posts

I think this is more likely to lead to polarization and eventually echo chambers than if you kept them separate - outrage drives engagement more than anything else, and explosive growth is a great way for a fraction of the group to dominate the first few pages of comments, which turns off moderate voices, which works like confirmation bias to make the outraged believe they’re the prevailing voice of the community, which again drives them to post more incendiary comments, and the whole thing spirals

If you want to avoid echo chambers, the best way is to throw a small group together and make them get along through mods that are involved in the community

But then you’d probably end up with most members of one community slowly joining the rest, which is a healthier growth model, but still not great

My intuition is that the ideal solution involves encouraging users to join a single smaller group, but being exposed to top posts from sister groups to avoid fomo. Possibly through something like the way Reddit handled crossposts, where you get the post but not the comments, and a small link to the discussion in other communities. It could be automated if the post crossed a certain threshold of votes, keyed to a certain deviation above the daily average of the original group and optionally with a minimum up/down vote ratio.

This would help keep moderation ahead of participation, and hopefully build a tighter knit community - people are less willing to be jerks to people they recognize than strangers you get in a larger population. By encouraging users into one small random group instead of shopping around for the one that best fits their view, I think we could resist natural grouping by beliefs.

To go further, if this works we could consider a mechanism for “mitosis”, a splitting of a group when the mod team feels the culture of the group is getting past their ability to manage in a nuanced way

The goal is decentralization after all, not distributed centralized groups

I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

Nah, it’s more than that. It’s a way of decentralizing power and becoming resistant to control.

It doesn’t start or end with Lemmy - you could build Remmy, join it to the network, and somehow group up these communities and present them to the users as a single group. You could build Kenny because you’re suspicious of the Lemmy devs, and help users migrate away from them (taking their content with them). You could make the server ad supported, make one for your students to speak amongst themselves semi privately, you could make one dedicated to LLMs

Hell, Reddit could decide to join the network and try to take it over, and each server owner could decide if they want to let them try or limit communication with them.

At the end of the day, you can only get so much control. Because while there are benefits to being on a specific server, ultimately anyone can spin up a new one and their users get access to a social network that includes all its members, and if instead of one animemes most users sub to 4 smaller ones, you again have less power in any one place

There’s also the moderation aspect - no matter how good your tools, mods can only manage so much. Push past a certain point, and even with large teams you’re going to get inconsistent moderation and a lot of resentment from it. But with smaller groups, mods can be closer to their members, and groups who don’t want any moderation can have it their way - they just might be blocked from a server if the admin thinks they’re going to ruin things

I mean, there’s also already instances being blacklisted from the bigger Lemmy servers - they’re not cut off from the network, but the instances don’t talk directly to each other anymore.

And while we’re very likely to see some consolidation, I think a lot of us would resist if the groups grew to rival front page subreddits.

I’d like to see science and technology go in that direction because I’ll deal with flat earthers if it means I can see all the best takes from subject matter experts (and it’s easy to tell the difference), but current events? Already I was on r/animetitties instead of the main news subs, because they have a very strong tendency towards polarization