[-] shepherd@kbin.social 11 points 11 months ago

It seems like the whole fediverse is having a lot of the same growing pains.

Discovery is still basically an impenetrable jungle. If you already know exactly what you're looking for it's fine. But I basically just wander around and happen upon neat stuff every so often lol.

And sorting content is another type of discovery problem. I'm subscribed to some interesting stuff but I need to remember to actually go check them because none of it shows up in feeds.

I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how long it takes to work out these types of issues. But I do know that I'm only still around because I'm hopeful, not because I'm actually finding it particularly useful or entertaining.

The fediverse currently feels like it might be competitive with webforums from 2010: The platform isn't doing much to help, but it's fine 'cause the people have spirit lol.

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I vote both!

There's a lot of situations where shared bikes are a great idea, so to me that's a default "Yes!" answer lol.

But my own bike can be better suited to my needs and preferences, so that also becomes a "Yes!" to me too lol. For example, I usually prefer my bike's seat to the ones on shared bikes.

But! If I've walked to my friend's house, and we get invited to a game across town, I'll gladly pick up a shared bike rather than detour home lol.

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I love your question! I think these words are examples of a trochee!

In English poetic metre and modern linguistics, a trochee (/ˈtroʊkiː/) is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one.

It's usually easy to recognize a word that's a trochee because it'll sound like kids TV show title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Power Ranger Mega Turtles lol.

In this case, it's trochaic dimeter because there's two trochees. "LET'S-go RAN-gers!" You may have heard of iambic pentameter, somehow that one always seems popular to people. Well an iamb is just the reverse of a trochee, and pentameter means you'd put five of them on each line.

Now that you know what trochees are, you're gonna see 'em everywhere. Or maybe that's just me lol.

Edit: For extra fun, what do you think is going on with the clapping afterwards? I feel like we're doing something with this at the end, but it's late and I should go to sleep hahah. Good luck!

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by shepherd@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

As far as I can tell, magazine tags are mainly used when searching for magazines, and maybe for determining related magazines.

But I think mag tags should be applied automatically to threads and posts inside each magazine. This would make for a decent multireddit substitute.

If I'm looking at the #tech tag feed, I think that should include a lot of content from a lot of different sources that have marked themselves as #tech, not just the individual threads that remembered to actually tag it lol.

In the future, being able to make my own customized feeds would effectively allow for a proper multi-feed experience! Like #tech+#DIY+#raspberrypi feed, or whatever!

Okay, tell me why this is technically difficult, impossible, or otherwise won't work the way that I'm hoping lol.

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Wait so when am I supposed to boost? Upvotes sort now, so I should usually upvote and boost when I think something should be at the top?

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you're open to a dexterity games, I'd highly recommend Animal Upon Animal, Rhino Hero, or Click Clack Lumberjack for that age group. Even left to their own devices, I've seen a group of highly concentrated 6 year olds stack animals surprisingly high lmao.

Considering he's already into boardgames, King of Tokyo is probably in scope, or will be soon! If not, the mood of Shadows in the Woods (Waldschattenspiel) can be just so good for young kids!

I'm having some trouble thinking of collaborative kids games, but maybe Dixit? That might be an 8 year olds game tbh, I don't think most 5 year olds are subtle enough yet lol.

Good luck!

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

Discouraging Clout Chasing Behaviors:
Promoting Content Quality and Relevance:

I see your goal here, but how would this actually work? Like what buttons does the user see?

Are we all still collectively deciding what counts as valuable contributions? If so, this sounds veryyy similar to what we already have using either upvotes or boosts lol.

  • "Agreement" sounds like an upvote. I like this content.
  • "Mark as quality" sounds like a boost. More people should see this.

So what metric(s) do you actually want implemented?

alternative ways to measure influence and impact (insightful comments, fostering discussions, valuable contributions).

If those are the buttons you think we should have, I don't think the internet can be objective enough to make these reliably more useful than an upvote.

If I see buttons saying "Insightful / Fosters Discussion / Valuable", I'm mostly going to just hit any or all of them when I like the content. And I'll click none of them when I dislike content, 'cause duh that's not insightful or valuable!

So what should we actually do to achieve these noble goals?


Engagement, interactions, relevance, and authenticity

Ehh, sorting by interactions can encourage excess commenting or spamming near content you want promoted. More interactions doesn't necessarily mean higher quality. I'm commenting several times on this post, but it could have been one commentary for the exact same content. Should this thread's quality be treated differently based on my format?

Unfortunately, engagement is highest around controversial topics, which again doesn't necessarily indicate the highest quality content.

I'm pretty sure sorting by relevance is how YouTube & TikTok try to serve you content, but I don't think we should aspire to black box algorithms.


Agh, I swear I'm not trying to just shoot down all your ideas. I'm trusting based on your writing that you're open to collective constructive criticism. You're obviously thinking here, thinking more than most people do lol.

It's just that this is a very complex issue, that will need very nuanced solutions. Humans have spent a heck of a lot of time, money and effort trying to figure about it, and we still seem to get it wrong a lot haha.

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@Biscuit Very reasonable question!

I highly recommend this article, How to Kill a Decentralized Network (such as the Fediverse) by Ploum as a relevant factor in this discussion. Even if there's parts you disagree with, I think that's worth discussing too!

To grossly oversimplify the contents of that article, I think federating in bad faith could look like:

  • Joining the ActivityPub protocol, intending to drown the initial userbase with their own so that the fediverse begins catering to the needs of the majority aka their users.
  • Introducing subtle bugs that make certain instances function suboptimally, but putting the onus on minor developers to fix it because major portions of the user base comes from them.
  • Adding features to the ActivityPub protocol that benefit all users, but forces most instances to adopt their practices.
  • Creating their own version of the protocol "ActivityPub+". It's initially open source and well documented, but increasingly deviates from ActivityPub, until it's functionally closed source fully under their control. It's also mandatory to interact their instances.
  • Defederating everyone who doesn't fall in step, but that's okay because 99% of content is now on MetaPub anyways. This fractures the Fediverse into confused micro shards (or compliant loyalists).
[-] shepherd@kbin.social 31 points 1 year ago

It seems unlikely to me that corporate instances would ever actually federate in good faith.

They may appear to be compliant initially, but in the long term they just have different goals.

I'm not sure where exactly the line gets drawn, but at the far extreme, I say we treat money-making instances as bad actors. If they stand to gain profit from their actions, they need to be defederated to prevent the sabotaging or enshittification of the fediverse.

72

I'm seeing discussions on other instances about how a "federated" corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company.

What would kbin.social's stance be towards federating/defederating with a Meta instance?

Or what should that stance be?

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

tl;dr: I fully agree with you that there's room for improvement here, but I can't for the life of me decide on a solution I actually like lmao.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be common while the masses settle on which community/instance they want to emphasize.

The question for now is, how do you think this should actually be handled? What counts as identical links? There's several factors that can change, and that makes handling the problem much more complicated than it initially seems.

In your example, it's 1) the same user posting 2) the same link with 3) the same title to 4) different communities. That does seem like basic reposting, and it would initially seem like we should just combine them and have it say "[USER], 10 hours ago posted to [Community1], [C2], [C3], etc"

But each of those communities and each of those instances may abide by different rules. It would definitely be a disservice to each community to pile all the discussion threads into one communal comment section.

So.... I guess if it's 4) a different community, then it's okay to have 'duplicate' threads? Uh oh.

I have a feeling that same argument would apply to veryyy similar threads with 1) different users, 2) different links to the same content, or 3) different titles. So what the heck, how do we improve this situation?? What are we even asking for??

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Label your boxes with the room they should go in! Ideally all the boxes go straight to the correct room as soon as they arrive at the new place.

This makes things much easier for everyone involved in the labour. When I help my friends move, I don't know what "Nice Plates" vs "Mom's Plates" means, but this box says Kitchen, and that box says Dining Room and that's all I really care about lol.

And it really helps you get reestablished too, because everything is already pre-sorted for you. No need for you to find, sort, move everything all over again. All the kitchen stuff is already in the kitchen, all the bathroom stuff is already in the bathroom.

Good luck!

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COME 'ERE AN' BRING ALL YER GROTZ!!

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

I miss all my hobby and crafting subreddits lol. Off the top of my head,
Woodworking / Beginners
Sewing / Knitting
Dioramas / Terrain Building
Painting
Survival / Preppers / Camping / OneBag / Travel

Not trying to out myself, but I don't see my Country / Region / City here yet.

Wouldn't mind some health, lifestyle, and research science.

Can we get AskHistorians on here??

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Hi!

Is there a way to filter for different languages?

This morning, I started seeing German posts, but I don't speak German. I tried blocking the magazine but there's actually a lot of different German Magazines lol, and I'd rather just filter out the language (until I decide to learn it!)

On the other hand, is there a way to add other languages? I don't care about specific magazines in English when I'm browsing /all here, and I'd be happy with the same for Spanish or French.

[-] shepherd@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Reddit isn't going to die overnight. It will probably not die at all (at least not as a result of this latest stupidity).

I expect reddit will be like facebook in the long run. Facebook is still useful for specific things (marketplace, messenger), but otherwise it's just a bloated zombie hippo now. Still massive and still moving, but definitely bleeding out lol.

We'll have to wait and see how July goes, after all the third parties get killed. In the meantime, the fediverse needs to become as high quality as possible, 'cause a bunch of people are gonna be deciding between a increasingly poor experience (reddit), and a fairly steep learning curve for non-tech people (fediverse/instances/threads/posts/boosts/favourites/reduce/magazines/microblogs/communities).

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So I've gone with kbin over lemmy for now, folks seem pretty friendly here.

Main question:
I understand that the point of the Fediverse is (relatively) easy access to decentralized communities. But what happens if the folks in charge of an instance decide they want to close it?

If ernest suddenly decides he wants to close kbin, is all the content just lost? Do we have ways to migrate the content/users/everything?

Even the reddit blackout was noticeably "someone else says you can't have this anymore" so I'm a little more sensitive to this than normal lol.

I realize we're in the early stages of the Fediverse, so it may just be a matter of patience while the smart people figure it out lol. But instance-death or long-term community-blackout seems like a risk across the whole fediverse!

Followup question:
If I post content, should I be basically spreading it across several instances to ensure my contributions aren't lost when someone else closes up shop?

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shepherd

joined 1 year ago