SterlingVapor

So I just learned this recently, but apparently after the whole Victorian "smash and grab" thing where Britain stole all the art that was or wasn't nailed down (there's a lot of feet and footless statues lol), archeologists went to sites and realized how much knowledge was destroyed by their predecessors who only cared about impressive finds they could show off

Technology and techniques are always improving, so now when they find an archeological site, they excavate only a fraction, leaving the rest for future generations who will have better tools.

Obviously, non-destructive methods are still on the table, but I found that pretty interesting

Plus, the bones are good - it doesn't do everything, but what it does it does surprisingly efficiently and robustly. And there's the rest of the fediverse for most of it - Lemmy doesn't need to handle messages, there's matrix for that (there's even a matrix ID on the user definitions)

There's definitely more to be done, like user migration and modtools, but a lot of the shortcomings are in the client. And now that it caught so much attention, you're going to see a lot of apps and different web interfaces very soon

It's kind of incredible what you can do on the client side too since there's no company trying to keep you reliant on them. I'm building an app, and while I'm prioritizing getting it out ASAP, I'm looking through the data and imagining what I can build on top of it. Especially when the rest of the fediverse is taken into account.

It's like a new Internet built on top of the one stolen from us

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

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

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