• 2 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • About a year ago I found Osmand near unusable. Maybe I should try it again. I currently use Organic Maps and it’s pretty good, though it’s missing a few basic features that are probably on a todo list. Also, some of its data is wrong. I expect Osmand uses the same wrong data. Unfortunately last time I hit an error, I had no internet, but will try again next time I’m there.


  • I don’t care much about any of these technical intricacies regarding word matching. I want Lemmy to be a human institution, which means no bots editing people’s posts beyond possible spam control. If there is a serious trolling problem featuring specific keywords in a community, I’m fine with a moderator manually kicking off some automatic action to remove a bunch of posts at the same time. But we don’t need robot nannies surveilling and messing with all of our posts.


  • Here’s another example, not from here. Before celullar phones, before television, before broadcast radio and even before the telephone, there was the telegraph. Communications with it were done in Morse code, by operators tapping away on telegraph keys. Telegraph keys were typically made of brass, and people who used them all day were called “brass pounders”. That profession is long since obsolete, but there are still ham radio enthusiasts who use Morse code as a hobby, and there is a group of them called the BPL, for “Brass Pounder’s League”. There are also people who simply try to honor the history of the venerable telegraph even though they recognize it as being a relic from the bygone era.

    Anyway, where am I going. Someone started a pretty good site about telegraphy and telegraph keys, called “brasspounder.net” which was a really cool name. Unfortunately Google’s algorithm seems to have classified that name as that of a porn site, because it saw the word you get if you ignore the “br” at the beginning, leaving “ass pounder”. Whoops. The site ended up changing its name to telegraphy.net, which is fine but less evocative in my opinion. Oh well.

    The above is an example of the so-called Scunthorpe problem. Let’s see if Lemmy has that too.





  • This seems like unnecessary fragmentation. Reddit became huge because it gave people interested in a topic a one-stop place to discuss their topic. Putting the interested people together gave a network effect that attracted even more participants.

    Creating new discussion venues (subreddits, usenet groups) is generally only worthwhile if an existing venue gets too crowded or cluttered to discuss a niche topic, or the niche topic becomes big enough that the existing venue is happier if the niche splits off. Example: there is a general programming forum, Rust gets invented and people talk about it there, then Rust becomes a big enough topic that a Rust forum is warranted.

    I’m a not-even-newbie to Rust but I’d be happier if the lemmy.ml and lemmyrs.org Rust forums somehow got merged. Because of federation, I’m basically indifferent to which Lemmy instance actually hosts it.