This is buried toward the bottom of the release notes so I’m bringing it up here:

Added instance-level default sort type

Any admins out there considering changing their instance sort settings or asking people on their instance if they’d like this changed, given that we can individually set sorting anyway? Taking into account the inclination of people to never adjust default settings (I remain deeply curious about this tendency, as an aside), I think it might be worth at least bringing up to one’s instance community.

If they decide they want it to remain the same, all good, and even better, it raises some people’s awareness that they can change it themselves.

I think while some of this may be people being people (i.e. tendency to only discuss issues/problems vs accomplishments/solutions), I think there’s also a technical element to it as well in Lemmy’s case.

Up to the latest release of Lemmy (as of writing this is v0.19.4), admins couldn’t adjust the default sort setting, which was Active. Read the docs on the sort setting and Active does what it says, surfaces those posts with recent commenting activity (taking into account score as well).

So you get this unfortunate mix of: people gravitate to discussing negative stuff, people tend not to change default settings (since despite defaults being Active, we can change these if so inclined), and the default sort settings surface whatever is being most discussed/commented on, resulting in this sort of negativity feedback loop you’ve observed.

I noticed and posted about this a few months ago, have tried to upvote and comment on less negatively-focused posts occasionally, but I think this may be an interesting example of a small scale systemic issue as it takes more of us doing similar to address what’s being encountered. However, as more instances update to v0.19.4, I’ll be interested in seeing if admins decide to switch away from the Active sort setting to try to address this in their own way.

I don’t know what sort setting may be better for instances to run with instead, but I’m glad they now have the option. In the meantime I think it’s worth reminding people that they currently have the option to change their default sort settings to something different to try to see different kinds of posts. Personally I switch between New and Scaled to see a variety of posts beyond many of the regular doom and gloom posts.

Appreciate the adjustments and responsiveness! Gave it another try after this and the different formatting hit the spot! Still need to use more to see more finely tuned results, but dig the idea.

Also as others have already said plenty, would be cool to see this cleaned up for an open source release. If you’d like to see how some others are handling a sorta similar idea but with RSS feeds, you might look to Nunti for ideas on how to approach it.

Little feedback on the UI from taking a peek at this.

When I went into settings and adjusted post display style from card to anything else, it wasn’t clear to me that this wouldn’t apply to the new For You feed, which left me confused and less inclined to use it. I still gave it a try to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and to see how much the feed seemed to change with some light interaction, but I think you’d need to use it more than I did to see an effect.

Problem being: display settings not applying to the For You feed means I’m not going to use it much with the default card view.

Second part is that there was some comment display lag as I looked through posts, so if I looked at a post about cats with cat-related comments, those comments would linger and appear for a moment under a different post about possums. It’s just long enough to be noticeable, so thought it worth mentioning.

Seeing as this thread is still active, instead of continuing to reply to people throughout, gonna go ahead and put this out here.

If you’re not finding an active community for something (safe for work, that is) or any community whatsoever for your interest, you’re welcome to post about the topics that interest you in !general@lemmy.world till you find enough likeminded people to get a separate community going. This was always allowed tbh, but I’ve tried to make it more explicit and clear that it’s cool.

You’re welcome to post about papers and discuss them over in !general@lemmy.world to try to get this going for more specific communities!

You might give the programming.dev instance a try for the first couple subjects, as they have an open !programming@programming.dev community that may work for them.

Given the absence of specific communities (or active ones so far), if people would like they could start these conversations over in !general@lemmy.world.

I recognize it’s not the same, particularly for getting to those deep dive points you mention with ATLA, but gotta start somewhere, right?

Also I can easily give this go-ahead being one of the mods there. Up to now I’ve hesitated popping into threads like this and pointing people there because I’m not a fan of consolidation, but it’s become apparent some simple meeting area may help to get more niche communities spun off and going.

You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).

Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.

Original article: https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-whats-happening-gaza-is-not-genocide-2024-05-20/

It’s pretty clear to me Biden’s trying to thread the needle on this in a gruesome way. The argument seems to follow the form of: civilian deaths are collateral damage, this is unfortunate but this is war and they are not purposely being targeted and so this is not genocide.

However that almost willfully ignores the denial and blocking of aid to the same affected civilians, which is a deliberate action that despite the cover story being to prevent it reaching Hamas, falls entirely flat as regardless, it results in direct suffering and death of the civilians. I say almost because some small efforts have been made to push back against the denial of aid, but as is evident to anyone monitoring the situation, these efforts are all far too small to address the widespread suffering and death of the Gazan people.

This whole semantics game around genocide is simply disgusting. You know those in government know exactly what people mean when they’re calling it that, they want an end to the killing and an end to the deaths of civilians, whether from military strikes or denial of aid.

I don’t know the specifics of what may have happened with Lemmy.film, so we’ll have to see if someone else may know.

As to what happens to posts to “their” communities, my rough understanding is that with the host server gone, federation either doesn’t occur or maybe attempts to reach the host but simply stops after some number of attempts. Upon failure I think it simply collects the posts on your home server/instance’s copy of the community.

Not sure what would happen if a new instance was spun up of Lemmy.film either from a backup or in general, but I’d imagine there’s some settings/adjustments that may be calibrated to prevent it getting a backlog of posts dumped on it causing it to get bogged down or crash.

As to questions specifically about the Lemmy software, you may try !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml or !lemmy@lemmy.ml, think either one would be okay for this.

But compare with GOG then. They sell games, you download them with no DRM so you own the download essentially.

This is the model digital media should take, frankly. Anything less may as well be misleading marketing, as far as I’m concerned.

At a glance, Misskey and associated forks may appear to be Twitter-clones, but dig a little more and you’ll find they’re a lot more, for better and worse.

The interface is highly customizable, not just with some different colored themes nor a multi-column interface, but that you can stack page elements in columns and set up “antennae” or filters to surface posts including specified keywords and/or hashtags while excluding others via keywords/hashtags as well. There’s also what they call “channels” which I think are sort of like groups or dedicated topics apart from hashtags to post to and discuss whatever the channel topic is.

Oh, and because it seems *key wants to have a little of everything, there’s Pages, which is basically longform blog posting, and some versions include simple games. There’s also options for some other widgets I’ve not mentioned here. It’s genuinely pretty wild compared to the other federated microblogging services with how much flexibility it has and all that it has packed in.

I think the only other federated service I’ve found that’s comparable in flexibility may be Hubzilla, albeit I got the impression it’s less user friendly, but still, very customizable and a lot you could do with it.

That still doesn’t touch upon the negative to tethering users identity to instances.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I was trying to point to was that despite the portability of identity, the fact that you may still be highly reliant on the Bluesky relay (or frankly, any large relay), tethers your identity to them as without the relays there’s kind of no point to having a personal server at all.

Moreover, given the reference model provided via the Bluesky App, there’s a good chance you’ll run into similar arrangements on the AuthTransfer protocol where personal servers and appviews are joined together to essentially create instances (or entryway services I think they call them). One of the remaining distinctions from this entryway instance arrangement and ActivityPub then would be which relay or relays your entryway instance connects to.

Lastly I understand what you mean about people bouncing off Mastodon, but at the same time you kinda lose me here. You clearly mention the Fediverse preceding Mastodon yet then conclude with people having a bad experience with Mastodon meaning the rest of the Fediverse isn’t for them…? We’re using another variation of the Fediverse and ActivityPub here, so we’re both aware there’s more to it than that, even in the microblogging space, so I’m kind of confused on this point.

Nevertheless, I otherwise agree, it’s good that people have more alternatives to get away from the trashfire Twitter’s become (arguably even more of).

use[r] identities are not tethered to instances

Tbh while this is technically true, given the current circumstances, identities essentially are tethered albeit in a roundabout way. What I mean by that is, there’s no real point to them* without some relay and appview to work with, and for now, that’s just Bluesky.

That said, I agree that it would be better to go to them than to Twitter (if they’re not even considering stuff like Mastodon), but that’s a low hurdle to clear.

*-A caveat, supposedly it could be possible for personal data servers to connect to each other directly instead of via relays, but I haven’t come across anyone having tried this yet.

Oh! Thanks for the notice! I swear I think the spoiler stuff may have changed at some point, but maybe I’ve been handling it wrong this whole time.

I’ve also not really wanted to use horizontal rules because of it turning things into headings, but haven’t found a better way to put some spacing between the end of lists and the rest of a post’s text. I think I’ve corrected it properly now to be less jank.

Idea is that eventually others will be able to build atop their protocol and set up different “appviews” as they call them as well as relays and personal data servers. As I understand it, “appviews” may be viewed similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are to ActivityPub, different ways to view data passed through ActivityPub.

Right now I think Bluesky may be the only such “appview” for their protocol parsing data from their relay, but the idea is you could spin up your own personal data server and maybe also your own appview, or choose from whichever may eventually exist, and that would be like your own “instance” connecting you to others via the appview parsing relay data.

So in other words, sort of yes to your first question, and it’s sort of because right now there’s only one AuthTransfer relay at the moment and that’s Bluesky, but the idea is that others could be spun up, allowing more independence from Bluesky as a company.

What would be really great is if companies could calibrate their reward structures based on what’s going to make players happy to log on, rather than trying to trap them into racking up the maximum amount of time in-game.

I haven’t played video games in awhile, so I don’t think I’m burnt out on them, which may make this a matter of differing mentality…But might it not also help to reevaluate whether a game should rely on a reward system/structure to entertain people to begin with?

It seems like these reward system designs are largely unsustainable without constant upkeep, in some part given that the rest of a game built around them often lacks sufficiently entertaining gameplay systems independent of them.

Linkblocks definitely sounds interesting. I’ve never gotten into social bookmarking (keeping bookmarks on another site/platform…?), but I can see the draw for building knowledge-bases this way.

For the moment, a lot of the fun on some of the federated platforms is behind several steps of effort that many of the corporate platforms have streamlined people out of being accustomed to taking, which is part of why they’ve kept their larger audiences. If a single click/tap is too much, that’s enough to keep some people away from here.

It’s not a matter of laziness either, it’s more of, how much effort do I want to put into something that I’m using for casual entertainment? For many people it’s minimal, but many federated platforms currently don’t really work like that. They’ve arguably thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an overcorrection away from commercial algorithmic feeds since existing platforms have conditioned people to not have to put effort into finding silly/fun content.

The types of people to post won’t be as inclined to post if they find their posts aren’t reaching people because people mostly have to actively seek them out to engage with them at all. The types of people to more passively engage won’t be able to as easily as those posts they might engage with may never reach them because they mostly have to actively seek them out. The end result of a lack of feedback and content for both types of people, despite there being a possibility and existence of both for them, results in this recurring sense of dissatisfaction.

Note that this is written largely with Mastodon in mind, and to a lesser degree Lemmy. In Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/PieFed/Sublinks’s cases I think they’re potentially better off in terms of structure and offering different ways to sort one’s feeds, but it’s a matter of more people joining to round out communities and discussion more.