Asklemmy

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A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

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If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

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founded 5 years ago
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A lot of people has been questioning why so many go to BlueSky, and I think convenience and familiar look to Twitter in the official web UI and mobile app, not having to choose an instance by having one pre-selected (although can be changed) and I was wondering if Mastodon ever had such approach, would any instance be able to handle a huge traffic and mass migration to the instance? Or perhaps shuffle by checking instances health, but then would that even be worse instead?

For those who don't know, BlueSky is open-source, can be partially self-hosted and has API usage available free of charge, also can be bridged with the Fediverse. Which comes a long way better than Twitter and easier to reach from the Fediverse. However, it does have some questionable connections. Not possible to have investments and control them? Weird, for anyone who has heard of LadyBird (web browser) which takes a whole different approach when it comes to investment and still managed to get heavily funded.

Most of the people in the Fediverse who joined having privacy as a firat concern is well-aware and hear often privacy comes at the price of convenience, I doubt people who waited this long to leave Twitter (not even YouTube calls it X, only has the logo X) was because of privacy concern. But even if Mastodon were more convenient to those people in such way, would it even somehow be able to receive 100-150+ thousands people per day?

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I may not be 100% wrong, but I noticed a pattern. Whenever a story is led by minorities and white male characters are secondary, most of the time right-wing ideological white men start complaining and attacking the story. So if someone is starting to create a story, is it better to focus on a certain audience and not create white male characters? Or is that an exaggeration?

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Films and TV shows and more often have subtitles, which are helpful for enjoying muted video, translation, people with hearing impairment, people struggling to understand accents, checking fast unclear dialogue and other reasons. They are important, and sometimes it's clear when they do something right or wrong.

Maybe we can't expect them all to be works of art, but there are certainly some easy wins even in the industrial media environment. What do you think?

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I'm temporarily taking a break from political activism, and it is tiring seeing everything right now. I have been politically active for 5 years now, and I desperately need a break. Voyager for Lemmy, at least for me, pushes political content like crazy.

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I'm fairly new to the fediverse, but my understanding is that different platforms are supposed to be able to share content between them. I have always hated most social media and reddit was the only one whose layout I could stand, so my favorite fediverse platform is Lemmy. I do have a mastodon account but if I can get the same content here I'd rather just delete it and use a platform I like. Is that how it works? If so how do I do that/know when I'm doing it?

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Not my experience, but my grandma (86 years old) told me about this woman from her area who was supposedly together with her dad (as in, this woman’s own dad) for decades. My grandma is a strong believer that this rumor is indeed true, because apparently it was indirectly confirmed by the woman’s ex-husband and the dad’s ex-wife multiple times. Both of them are dead now, the dad died in 2013 and the woman in 2016. Truly insane. Very curious about your own communities’ scandalous rumors.

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~~Pretty straightforward: where does the awareness that porn wrecks your mind and sexuality stops and where does simply conservatism towards sexuality begins (even in cases akin to bolshe morality)?~~

EDIT: okay, better clarifying it - i came across some video from some youtuber claiming that pornography is evil, period. and that there are things such as "metapornography", which could apply to someone in instagram posting videos of themselves in scant dressing and claiming likes of it. and that no-fap and anti-masturbation movements are good things.

i was really confused about that since that person came from apparently a progressive-yet-moralistic background. but talking to other people to see if some of my impressions checked, it came to my mind that it was a heavily directed video intended to attract left-leaning people to a conservative agenda. my bad.

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I's heard news that BlueSky has been growing a lot as Xitter becomes worse and worse, but why do people seem to prefer BlueSky? This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it, meaning it's just another centralized platform, and thus vulnerable to the same things that make modern social media so horrible.

And so, in the hopes of having a better understanding, I've come here to ask what problems Mastodon has that keep people from migrating to it and what is BlueSky doing so right that it attracts so many people.

This question is directed to those who have used all three platforms, although others are free to put out their own thoughts.

(To be clear, I've never used Xitter, BlueSky or Mastodon. I'm asking specifically so that I don't have to make an account on each to find out by myself.)


Edit:

Edit2: (changed the wording a bit on the last part of point 1 to make my point clearer.)

From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:

  1. Federation is hard

The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.

On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird "federation" tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that "federation" there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.

BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.

~~The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.~~

The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon's federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.

  1. No Algorithm

Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don't and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.

  1. UI and UX

People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky's overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.

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A/S/L (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by corroded@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
 
 

To me, it seems like most of Lemmy consists of users who are older millennials (born at some point in the 80s), male, and about 50/50 split between living in North America or the EU.

Do you fit this demographic?

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My dad always likes to tell us about the Christmas when my uncle bought my aunt a tin opener (a good one!) for Christmas, she was apparently rather unimpressed but the story has given years worth of good laughs.

I also remember when my dad bought a holiday in New York for my mum and himself for Christmas, but the tickets were in a small envelope right at the bottom of a HUGE box filled with packing peanuts.

What terrible/joke presents can you think of that would be a good laugh on Christmas day?

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I want to know. I don't care if it's a fancy artisan gelato or just your regular soft serve at McBurger's. Do you have a flavor you like? Perhaps a brand? Perhaps you make it yourself? If you're getting scoops, do you have a preference for which flavor goes on top of the other? Do you like wafer cones or are you a cup person? Any toppings?

I always prefer gelato, and some of my all time favorites are sabayon, mascarpone, anything with rum/berries/sultanas, and choc chip mint. I prefer cup to cone. When I was a kid I used to love the soft serve cones but as I grew up they started making me sick so I avoid them now.

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I have fully transitioned to using Lemmy and Mastodon right when third party apps weren't allowed on Spez's place anymore, so I don't know how it is over there anymore.

What do you use? Are you still switching between the two, essentially dualbooting?

What other social media do you use? How do you feel about Fediverse social media platforms in general?

(I'm sorry if I'm the 100th person to ask this on here...)

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I'm in the process of transitioning from my current career in teaching to the NLP career via the Python path and while I've been learning on my own for about three months now I've found it a bit too slow and wanted to see if there's a good course (described in the title) that's really worth the money and time investment and would make things easier for someone like me?

One important requirement is that (for this purpose) I've no interest in exclusively self-study courses where you are supposed to watch videos or read text on your own without ever meeting anyone in real-time.

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Both about a new topic or a topic that you already are interested in.

There are TIL communities here on lemmy and they are good, but mostly not about using the info to do things.

Any websites, rss feeds, youtube channels, lemmy(or other site) communities etc. that you subscribe to for that?
And going beyond online stuff, any books or publications or groups that you like?

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This is not a conversation about guns. This is a conversation about items that have withstood abuse that are near unbreakable.

Some items I have heard referenced as AK47 of:

Gerber MP600: It's a multi tool

Old Thinkpad Laptops

Mag lights

Toyota Hilux

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I don't usually watch YouTube for news, but whenever I do, I like to watch Sean Foo's videos. I don't think he's a Marxist, but I like the quality of his videos. Unlike other news YouTubers he's somewhat smaller and more detailed in his uploads.

I'm asking if other users have watched his videos; what are your thoughts on his analysis of current events?

Do you have any YouTubers or videos you watch for news? I'd like to watch more ML YouTubers for news.

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All I see are rows of empty questions. Did something scare everyone away? Don't tell me everything got empty after the last drama happened.

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I have a couple I'd like to promote, but I don't want to intrude.

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