I would love to see a truly wild and rich variety of skins that are radically different. Different uses of spacing, color, ways of organizing sections.

I feel like we lost that at some point - I remember winamp and windowblinds, and even just how custom web sites used to be. There’s so much potential available for so “cheap” that it could be a huge deal in terms of creating a flavor.

I agree with you about Diaspora*. I just don’t think it is designed well. I think mastodon, thank god, kicked off the trend of actually designing fediverse projects well.

I haven’t followed mastodon growth lately, but I’m optimistic. It saw a wave of migration from indian politics twitter people last I had checked. I hope that more and more people make it their own.

What I think is critical is to NOT expect instant, meteoric growth. I think this stuff takes time. It was frustrating in like 2016 and 2017 to see the occassional “Is Mastodon failing?” because some tech journalist heard about it 2 months ago and it didn’t immediately overtake twitter.

I think as long as the baseline community is organic, and earned, as long as that is sustained, there will be waves of new users at particular moments. Whatever reasons cause influxes of users, it won’t be something the fediverse directly controls. It will just be something that it’s ready for.

welcome @k_o_t!

🥳

a lot of healthy unpopular opinions will be banned.

Are there people in the mod log you view as examples of that?

It’s just hard to wrap my head around this for a number of reasons. One, in practical terms, I just don’t see it happening. Two, it’s very slippery slopey. Three, the whole model of the fediverse is that you can go and find servers that have that if you want, so I would think you’re all set, but your post appears strangely unresponsive to that. It seems like you want the entire underlying structure of the fediverse changed. If we want to talk about “healthy” exchanges of opinions, to me a huge criteria is responsiveness.

For number four, I just find the analogy to big corporations to be strained. There’s a real sense in which Facebook, Google, and the like have had effects on the fabric of democracy, they’re some of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world, they hold entire industries like print media in their hand. If a nascent link posting service with no money and a small user base is the same because it’s trying to stop harassment, to me that’s confused in so many ways I don’t even know where to start with unpacking it.

And fifth and perhaps most importantly, I find this just to be the wrong starting point for this kind of discussion. It’s been talked about a million times in a million different ways with a lot more nuance than here, and people have put a lot of effort into designing a fediverse system that takes issues of coordinated online harassment seriously. I think vague, meandering posts with open ended implications that are hard to pin down, aren’t putting in the necessary effort to engage with the reasoning that went into creating the system. So the whole thing is going to be a tedious slog.

I really think the best thing that can be done in threads like these going forward (they seem to be churned out near-daily basis now) is a one sentence response, basically saying “yeah, we’re not doing that here.” And a link maybe to the code of conduct.

Posts and comments are no longer live-sorted (meaning most content should stay in place).

Glad for this one. I got confused sometimes when I upvoted stuff and it seemingly disappeared.

I worry that the phrase “censorship” gets used as a thought-stopping cliche, especially given it’s repetition here.

You could ask the same question but with different words, e.g. “harassment, racism, and incitement to violence should be welcomed here.” And then ask people to vote up if they agree.

And you could post the polling options as different variants of that question: “There’s a right amount of harassment.” “There’s too much harassment” “there’s too little harassment.”

I mean… you could do it that way. And it would be equally as neutral as the questions you did ask. If you find that framing objectionable because only uses language that focuses on one side of an issue, well… yeah.

Well the best conversations on mastodon were when I connected with some individual people who were really passionate and well informed about something really obscure that they could talk about at length.

It seemed like it was a bit easier to discover those people and have those convos back in the earlier days of mastodon though.

I suppose, more than anything, I just want to say I think you’ve asked a good question and I hope there’s some good answers here.

For the bigots, its not just the enforcement of those rules, but the mere existence of them that turns them into whiny babies.

I’ve said this several times before, but one of the reasons I joined lemmy, and want to keep it active, is because I appreciate the values being brought to the project. It’s not just activitypub, but the kinds of people who are involved in the best projects, that are the among the reasons why I want to be on platforms like this.

I think it’s probably important to emphasize at this point that what’s being discussed is essentially a decision about whether or not to put something in a config file. Which is a very different conversation than the grandiose free speech debates some want to have.

If anything, my main issue here is that people can point to this issue and use it as a jumping off point to make “free speech” arguments. It would be good to nip that in the bud.

We don’t need another reddit full of “centrist” free speech warriors.

Exactly this. One problem I’ve noticed - there have been several times where people started threads like these, wanting to have long, fisky, point-by-point debates about everything.

I think it would be extremely helpful to say something to the effect of “this is not a place for The Free Speech Argument.” Even if it’s only applicable to this instance of Lemmy.

As @realcaseyrollins@lemmy.ml said in this thread: “I’m not active here, but I would be if there wasn’t hard-coded censorship on the software”. To me that shows that it’s working.

I agree, and this is well said. I haven’t found a need to slurs, and I feel that meaningful conversations that play out across paragraphs have more going on than just using slurs, so in practical terms (setting aside slippery slope arguments for a moment), I wonder what sense of values a person is coming from where they feel like that kind of filter is preventing them from expressing their values.

People who complain about “censorship” and “authoritarianism” while espouting the benefits of “freedom of speech” are exactly the type of people you don’t want around.

Completely agree. Too often you see pledges to celebrate free speech from right wing spaces that are interested misconstruing valid criticism as suppression of speech. One of the most insane things I remember seeing were threads across reddit related to Charlottesville, where tons of commenters defending violence in Charlottesville by talking about free speech.

And then these same people pull back and act like they are talking about these ideas in the abstract, sanitized of any need to engage with the practical problems that motivate efforts to protect online spaces from violent incitement. I have never, never never never ever, seen people making these free speech arguments engage with this problem in a serious way at all. I have never seem someone stop and say “hey, I really care about free speech BUT I also realize that right wing mobs that spread violence use that argument as a cover, and I want to make sure I’m not inadvertently supporting their growth!”

I have never seen these people talk about how the modern internet, starting with gamergate in 2014-2015 and then spiraling out from there, created new, unprecedented problems related to swarming, massive bad faith engagement, etc. that poisoned and took over online spaces if left unchecked. I’ve never seen them look at that and say “I agree that those are problems, and I don’t want to gloss over them when I talk about free speech so my solution is _____” and they fill in the blank with something that isn’t completely crazy.

They never talk about laws passed to prevent BDS, a major free speech issue. They never talk about how to raise funds for the ACLU. Or supporting local media either through online or offline platforms. They never talk about legal funds supporting reporters who are caught up in court for their reporting.

Generally, all they ever talk about is online message boards. If you ask them to engage with any of this, either the mask falls completely off, or you realize they have never thought about any of it at all, and the responses you get are them reacting in real time to information that’s completely brand new to them.

There’s a saying I’ve recently encountered, that I’ve found helpful. It’s the notion of being in the wrong room with the wrong person. If you are talking to someone about free speech, who wants to frame it in a way that erases every problem that moderation has been fighting, that’s not a person prepared to have the conversation they are trying to have, and, in short, you’re in the wrong room with the wrong person.

it’s extremely hard to do a full visual redesign like Microsoft did with their Office suite

I wouldn’t vouch for anything like an “extreme” redesign. I think there are inventive ways to reskin an interface on the cheap in terms of developer resources.

I agree the cost is not nothing, it doesn’t have to be treated like the biggest priority, we should be glad with what we have, etc etc.

But that all just feels really defensive. I think it’s fair to acknowledge that everything you are saying is true, and to say how fantastic Libreoffice is as a full-fledged alternative to major office suites, and acknowledge that libreoffice resembles software design from the 1990s.

Honestly, a huge issue for LibreOffice IMO is that it doesn’t look modern.

As much as I don’t want to just be reacting to a title of a post, this is where my mind immediately went when seeing the title.

I understand that the post is about a campaign to engage with a new generation of contributors, but just the same, the title got me to realize how much I felt LibreOffice would benefit from some sort of refresh.

A lot of caveats here, of course. One, it’s not a LibreOffice Good vs. LibreOffice bad thing. I use it, I always will as long as it can open office docs. So I don’t want to just dismiss the possibility of graphical improvements out of an impulse to defend LibreOffice. Secondly, one should of course be mindful of how much risk there is in attempts to do graphical refreshes of interfaces. That road may lead to disaster, given certain historical examples. So, obviously, you’d want the “good” kind of refresh, not the bad kind.

Anyway, long way of saying I agree with your basic point here.

Thanks for elaborating! I think your suspicions are very right. There’s an amount of infuriating and inexplicable poweruser stuff happening that I think many are oblivious to. Whether it’s just the way that reposts have been like industrialized factory production lines. I thought I was a curmudgeon when I complained about reposts after the exodus from Digg to reddit, but what happens now makes that look like nothing in comparison.

I agree with your observation about the parallels between thedonald and WSB. Also reminiscent of 4chan - there’s something about shitposty shittiness that I think is a standard baseline for inorganic content and behavior that amasses the capability to mobilize people.

The reddit admins openly said they generated content in the early days to create the illusion of user activity. Smoke and mirrors is the unspoken characteristic of reddit. The platform always had an aire of fakeness since inception.

I remember that!!! Reddit founders apparently posted under multiple user names to get the site started. Unfortunately I can’t find articles now that talk about this but I wish I knew the original sources for this stuff.

Probably a tie between the first Deus Ex and the first Life is Strange.

I have had my suspicions that this was true and would love to know more if you have additional thoughts here.

I think I chalked it up to the fact that money was at stake, so there were interests at play, so the culture there sustained itself in a way that that behavior normally doesn’t organically sustain itself on reddit.

Generally speaking, I’m all for mass migrations of users off reddit and onto the fediverse.

I wouldn’t love those folks, but I would consider it to be for the greater good, and there’s tools that let me not see them.

However, I think by contrast, the mass migrations to Mastodon were all groups that I think of as basically decent and nice people: some lgbtq+ folks, comic artists, Indian political people who left from twitter, furries (not my thing but they still seem like nice people), sex workers, Tumblr users. All those mass migrations were people who were in search of and deserved a better place and found the fediverse, and I can only hope we get similar types of movement from reddit to here.

Those all look good to me. More meaningful that total users. I know they’re different and all, but is the intention to have those all shown right next to each other? Would it make sense maybe to just pick one?

I didn’t know that abt proton,

Wait, what? Didn’t know what about Proton? I don’t see that there is anything in that wall of text that established any harm from Proton.

I think people are just seeing a big wall of text and being overwhelmed by it, and concluding that it must prove somethingorother. But I did my best to squint and read through line by line, word by word, argument by argument, and either I’m just a crazy person or there’s no real concrete connection to the CIA, no anti-privacy behaviors alleged, no anti-competitive practices claimed. There’s a lot of hand waiving and speculation related to CRV and MIT, which is quite intangible and several degrees removed from any direct thing Protonmail is doing.

Contrast that with, say, Google: you can look at their privacy policy or an article about them disabling adblocking extensions, and know immediately that Google is up to shady stuff. None of it depends on speculating about their associations with second or third parties which may or may not be doing something that isn’t proven.

Where are people seeing any proof of wrongdoing on Protonmail’s part? I feel like I’m either crazy or I’m the only one here that read through the whole wall of text.

There’s a huge huge elephant in the room here, which I feel like nobody is talking about. And it has to do with how scatterbrained, speculative, and disconnected all of these details are, and how far short they are of establishing, like really establishing anything at all. If you ask me why I shouldn’t use Amazon, I can immediately point you to an article about anti-competitive practices. Same with Google Chrome, I can instantly point you to some article about how they’re pulling adblock extensions from the chrome store or how they’re misbehaving at the W3C. It’s a straight shot to a clearly expressed problem with no speculation needed.

Normally, in everyday life, if I’m in a room with people I know, I could explain something like what I just said above and people would instantly know what I mean. But in internet comment sections, people appear to be completely unable to distinguish between speculative and concrete allegations of harm.