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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

    Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

    Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”


  • By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

    Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

    They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

    Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

    Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

    Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

    And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

    They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

    We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible


  • As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

    So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

    100s means you asked for metadata

    200s mean it went ok

    300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

    400s mean you messed up

    500s mean I messed up

    So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

    418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot


  • I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

    But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media



  • It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

    Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

    At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

    Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter



  • What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

    If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

    But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

    All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

    You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

    You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

    I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

    Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

    Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further q


  • What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

    If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

    But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

    All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

    You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

    You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

    I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

    Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

    Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further


  • What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

    If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

    But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

    All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

    You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

    You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

    I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

    Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

    Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further


  • I made 2 posts on Reddit, one was a meme about my friend jumping over me to see my username, the other was some random text post. Thousands of comments though

    It’s just not in my nature… So much so that I’m trying to release a Lemmy app tonight, and I just remembered I haven’t started on the ability to post…

    Everything else came easy to me - you should be able to click on anything, everything should stay where you left it… But I have no idea how people want to post. I should probably just do it now before I overthink it



  • I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

    We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

    Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

    But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

    And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

    And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

    This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital


  • Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

    The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

    But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?

    Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

    When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work


  • I’m considering a free version on the app stores with limited ads(subtle and no tracking), a paid version without them, and one with optional donations on alternative stores.

    I don’t like ads and I don’t want to shove them down unwilling throats, but most people don’t care (and frankly I need the money)

    Among the ones that do, there’s those that hate seeing them, and ones with privacy concerns. If I make them subtle and offer an upgrade to remove them, I hope that’ll satisfy one group, and the other one can get a build where the ad libraries were never installed in the first place