Stephen Alfred Gutknecht
Professional in social media since 1985, created / sold social media server apps at age 15. Traveled the world to study media ecology.
“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine
Linux community arrogance is to deny the device driver issues and think Apple is fine, when the reason Apple thrives is because they don’t have open hardware like Linux, BSD, Windows…
Hardware companies are rarely held account for their absent support of Linux - some campaigns have come and gone, but in the end Linux users tend to arrogantly say it’s trivial to switch and embrace dishonesty. I guess they figure Microsoft is dishonest, so they normalize it.
Agreed. It is urgent that we teach Neil Postman’s “media ecology”. The junk noise garbage shit Internet sucks, and enough is enough!
Being open source won’t prevent this, sadly. 4 years is still young, but if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.
you express very limited understanding of open source and how competition works. Just because Microsoft kept selling Windows and “Linux on the Desktop” never came to displace Windows by 2005, it doesn’t mean Linux on end-user machines was a failure. Android Linux came along and is the biggest Linux distro ever, defeating Windows CE / Windows Mobile.
if a critical mass shifts back to Reddit then Lemmy will be considered a failure.
Again, that is like saying “people looked at Linux on desktop in 2003 and went back to Windows, so Linux was a failure”. Trying to displace entrenched players is often not how it works, it is when people leverage the source code and some parts of the system in different ways - like Android did with Linux - that things often change.
Regarding Reddit specifically, the Reddit code was open source for a very long time, nobody wanted to leave Reddit for different owner/operators… that changed in 2023 when every alternate to Reddit has seen a surge in developer interest (even non-federated apps like Tildes). That’s not really happened in the decades Reddit has been around before that specifically large groups of people and app developers have specifically expressed interest in moving away from Reddit in mass (Voat was the only prior big movement, but API apps were not really a focus in that movement).
By “MySpaced” I mean “become irrelevant”.
8-bit video games stopped selling in the 1990’s, but then in 2023 there is a huge “Retro gaming” and “retro computing” movement. Same with vinyl music records going out of style then coming back in as retro. Right now TikTok and video dominate Reddit front page - which Lemmy hasn’t even been taking on with video clips that reach Reddit’s technology level, let alone TikTok. There are trends of changes that are more than just one platform owners vs. another. Some of those may be in favor like federation/networked servers that Reddit does not have - that even drew the attention of Facebook.
These issues need to be addressed or Lemmy will be MySpaced within a year.
Lemmy is already well over 4 years on the Internet and open source.
How is the Fediverse privacy focused?
Not only have there been major bugs with delete of comments not working on other servers, the whole idea of federation is that it gets sent out to any instance that wants a copy - with not even a ‘terms of service’ that is standard on Lemmy.
For such a communist focus that the Lemmy developers have, I’ts so odd that they don’t emphasize that content is public and have it like Wikipedia content contributions. They use GPL license to force people to share their work of the code, but then they turn around and promise privacy that they fail to deliver on given that they don’t even warn newcomers how federation works.
Lemmy is well over 4 years old.
memes from many sources. And a lot of people created several logins on other instances given all the instability of Lemmy.
A karma system is sounding pretty good right now
lemmy’s code already does it. person_aggregates keeps track of post_score and comment_score. It just isn’t displayed on lemmy-ui. A bot or new code can look at these values.
Imagine being in Taiwan and having full access to information about China and the west and still shilling for China. Those types of people should be looking for a dominatrix, not a political philosophy…
That’s kind of the history of humanity regarding religion. To some degree when the religious prophets were alive it make sense, but hundreds of years later it’s a story book (or oral tradition) and people still strive for the authority.
We haven’t really had that many teachers like Carl Sagan who describe the history and our favoring of authority - inability to question them. It’s pretty weird, as they often aren’t attractive or good speakers, but you see people just accept almost anything they say. I mean in the USA I witnessed so many people who would trust Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones kind of blindly, and there is some mechanism at play that humanity in total seems to keep engaging.
I can’t imagine the volume of those older years is that much, there weren’t nearly as many bots and corporate users.
Beehaw upgraded too. Lemmy.ml seems to be delivering none of the messages for past few hours, it is erroring constantly for a local user.
FYI: I’ve been unable to reply to direct messages
“Save” just spins forever, doesn’t show in sent messages.
I have configured a rate limiter which will prevent future DoS from the specific method that was used against us today.
For those of us running other Lemmy instances, what should we be looking for?
Thank you and good work