Community Dedicated Servers are always the answer. Every game I enjoyed growing up had amazing servers that were ran by fans. I was a mod on some of my favorite TFC ones. It’s a great way to keep cheaters out and build a sense of comraderie amongst the regulars.
As I'm sure some of you noticed, very shortly after Ernest posted the update to KBin that allowed for abandoned magazine adoption, I took over this magazine....
Yes, I occasionally crosspost to Reddit (which is as far as my usage goes) and I’m using these watermarks as a subtle way of “showing flag”.
My thinking being, that if I’m posting to Reddit as well why not show them that we are still here because back when r/place happened, I tried to win some Redditors over to feature their Lemmy sibling communities and a lot of replies I got were, that we wouldn’t hold and eventually return back and some thought we’d already returned.
And since the Lemmy devs / server owners don’t actively advertise I think it’s on us to do so if we want to get some (hopefully sympathetic) users to give this a chance.
Gonna add a comment to my upvote: I agree with this so fucking much. I look back at the joyous days when I had… fuck if I know how many websites, each dedicated to its own thing, most with its own userbase, so unique and so defined. The only good thing about Reddit for me was gaming communities that, unfortunately, replaced actual forums that once allowed me to engage with passionate people and look for relevant info, even if it’s been years since its creation.
It’s probably just me being unaware, but gaming communities these days feel dead outside their respective subreddits and some Discord servers - and the latter is an even worse experience because the form factor of an endless IRC-clone that actually seems to save chat history is pretty fucking dumb more than it is convenient. If anyone has any suggestions there, shoot.
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.
This claim is opposite to their actual current behavior. This isn’t a case where they made their ad-blocking slightly more effective, they added it to the terms of service. They changed their stance legally. To use ad-blocking on yt, is now legally the same as using cheats in competitive games. Which game publishers have sued over.
Blocking ad-blocking is not “trivial” from the software side, the arms race has made the work of both sides incredibly complex in some cases. It’s “trivial” to block the video if the ad isn’t served just as it is “trivial” to have the ad-blocker pretend to watch it if that’s the requirement.
It’s fairly clear to me, that YT has decided that whatever losses this incurs, outweighs the benefits. And I tend to agree. YT’s business model never made sense, not after they began allowing basically infinite uploads.
YT doesn’t charge for all the things that actually cost it money, no-one pays them to store the content no-one watches from ten years ago, or even six months ago. The rate at which their expenses grow is not coupled to the rate at which they charge. In fact, their income is constant, while their expenses have the potential to be exponential.
Compare that to Netflix, which has a fixed catalogue that they curate, and doesn’t grow out of the blue as users throw more at their servers to ingest. And they are in a downturn, with subscribing users!
Even targeted ads stop working once an individual gets used to them, ad-based revenue only works for a while, per customer. It only works long-term on a subset of people, which isn’t lucrative, nor ethical. That modern platforms are disproportionately subsidized by their most gullible users is a disgusting reality.
That makes data-mining and targeted advertising a huge business, but insufficient for running something like YT. Because it, is an even bigger business, one that has included all the people you can’t advertise to. Streaming doesn’t do “economies of scale” the way physical products do, servers and bandwidth don’t magically become cheaper the more you buy. In fact in recent years the opposite has often been true.
YT will never make enough with ads. The math simply doesn’t work out. I am very skeptical that it makes sense for YT to “allow” ad-blocking to “spread the message” of their product. If anything, to become solvent, YT needs to deliberately downsize their audience.
To grow and form a network, can be left to the communities that form around channels.
The last chip was manufactured 3.5 years ago and the last serious user was probably several years before that. Obviously no one’s running Itanium with modern hardware.
But just because the hardware isn’t modern, doesn’t mean the software can’t be modern. Tonnes of people run the most recent Linux kernels on 15 year-old laptops, so why not 10 year-old servers? Itanium is only for the hobbyists these days, but so what? Hobbyists have done a good job of ensuring modern Linux can run on 40 year-old 68k. Itanium can theoretically be done, too. It’s just a question of whether the hobbyist community has enough of the right people that can actually maintain it.
Today, I am addressing several ongoing issues that prove troublesome in the daily use of the instance. In the coming days, I will be working on several things slated for the next instance update:...
posting an image thread from kbin into a Lemmy community works. (example)
posting a new thread to a kbin magazine with a link to an image off-site (e.g. on catbox) does not show up on Lemmy. (example)
posting a photo thread directly to a kbin magazine does not show up on Lemmy still (example)
Comments posted on the latter two threads do not show up in my profile view on various Lemmy instances.
New threads to the [email protected] magazine are not showing up on fedia.io (link) either, so it's not just Lemmy.
If I check my profile on misskey.io, it shows stuff from a week ago and older (and also, somewhat disturbingly, messages I deleted weeks ago -- not really a big deal on those particular ones but a bit concerning in general). It's kind of hard to make sense of what's going on misskey at the best of times though. :p
My recent posts to anime_irl don't seem to be showing up on mastodon.social but my post to [email protected] and older posts to [email protected] do show up as well as my earlier comment on this thread in Mastodon's "Posts and replies" section. Note that directly going to https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] redirects to https://kbin.social/u/e0qdk instead of showing the profile via Mastodon, but searching [email protected] and then selecting my corresponding user gives my profile via Mastodon. (Seeing similar behavior for Lemmy users, so that's not just a kbin thing. I don't use Mastodon directly very much, and it confused me a bit so mentioning it here for others.)
If I go to other mastodon servers like mstdn.ca my profile shows basically nothing except some replies despite claiming I have 182 posts. Adding up threads, comments, microblog posts, and replies for my account gives 185 before posting this, so not far off in number.
Well, Lemmy is really not good at pushing new content/new posts and/or new communities to people. For many of us, that might be a boon: less algorithmic shenanigans, less "steering" of the user. Yet, if you are not a user who likes to actively seak out stuff, your feeds will look stale and slow-paced very quickly. There might be new stuff,.but the feeds struggle to find a middle ground between "only the upvoted stiff you subscribed to", "the always same server wide top posts" and "bleeding edge new stuff". It's also very reluctant to sprinkle on new communities.
I think that's a main contributor to the decline.
For the record: kbin is more liberal when it comes to that sort of stuff. So if you like a more active feed, you might want to try kbin. If you like your feed to be controlled by you more, use Lemmy.
Yep, I’m jaded in my expectations knowing what Lemmy was prior to the massive expansion through June and July…
It was still a fun place, but it was a couple dozen posts a day across all servers, by a handful of people from the bigger servers.
We still have a lot of fixes to make on Lemmy, especially on the moderation, management, and content filtering side of things (though apps have been thankfully filling the gaps on some of these issues). Niche communities still need more participation to get off the ground. I’ll see again where we are in a few months from now.
I won’t be lying I’ve seen like 5 reposts of some amd threadripper news in my active feed within 10 pages.
It’s true and one of the pitfalls of the de-centralized model. As a poster I try to crosspost the same link across servers to multiple communities big and small, as a way for people to “discover” niche communities.
I’m in full agreement on how there should be more laid back “chat about something” content. You might interested in having a look at beehaw.org (not federated with LW or SJW), that has !chat and that server might be more your speed, I personally like it a lot. Bee sure to read and follow the spirit of the server rules.
You end up with one community with 8000 user , second community 17.
Unless there a major fuckup, only the biggest community is viable and gets seen by anyone. It sucks the air out for everything else. Because nobody is going to manually subscribe to 50 microscopic /c/books communities on as many servers.
That recreates Reddit mod power problem and it will kill Lemmy in the same way.
Maybe Lemmy simply already isn’t viable, just a Reddit clone with meaningless federation feature that only decentralize unimportant stuff but not the strangleho lady that moderators have on communities.
The second community will never be viable because even if the first community messed up as bad as Reddit, we know less than 5% would even change their habits.
Lemmy is not spez proof, it empowers the spez as much as Reddit.
I don’t use that spyware but it’s probably the same as every tech bro Reddit like.
Everyone flocks to the one big “books” community and that sucks the air out for any alternative.
Lemmy’s one thing going for it was that it’s was supposed to be decentralized and prevent concentration of power.
But you end up with one big community, and a unaccountable minority owns that community and does what every they want with it. Just like Reddit, they can sell your grandmother, we know users don’t care enough to do anything about it and they’ll just stay. The 2nd biggest will never matter.
This means there isn’t a lemmiverse books community, there is one big books community, on one person’s server, moderated by one guy and his disciples and that’s it forever as far as Lemmy is concerned, the same end as Reddit.
When you go to “/c/books” on any server, the default should be an agglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers (notwithstanding the already ongoing defederation wars)
The -USER- then decides if they want to filter by whitelist or blacklist, the user decide what server or community@server goes on the list. Realistically, users will just follow other user’s lists, which should be sharable easily. You might even subscribe to someone else’s blacklist/whitelist and get updated automatically.
But none of that is possible if the baseline view is not the ability to “see all /c/book on the entire fediverse in its raw unedited form”. You can filter out data you can’t access.
Whitelists, of course, are poison were just just deem everything to be garbage except “the chosen ones”, usually handed down from above by your betters.
A public blacklist model would be much better. You could then build your own blacklist by scanning all user profile for what is on their blacklist and use that as a basis for building your own blacklist, this is mostly how spam filters work. Because in the world of email, if you say “everyone I don’t already know is garbage” well, then you might as well just abandon email entirely.
We literally defederated from a server that our trans community fairly unanimously said was harming them yes. Are you saying that we should have ignored our entire trans community?
Shit just works kept actually threatening our community so I appreciate our mods defederating from them too. Not sure what you think a “good” reason is if you apparently think “threatening actual material harm on a community” is a bad one.
All of this is clearly laid out in the posts about the defeds, which you could go read for more information. You won’t. But you could educate yourself instead of spouting complete nonsense
Except one fatal flaw for Lemmy. Communities are centralized on servers and the default view is “one community on one server” instead of “that community on every server”.
Result, you can’t just go to /c/books on your server and expect to see every /c/books on every server.
Even worse, if you post on /c/books on your server, it will not be seen by most Lenny users, by design.
Instead, you have to find the biggest /c/books community and go to that server
For me, this kills all hope and enthusiasm I had for Lemmy. This turns Lemmy into “Reddit with extra steps”.
If this isn’t rectified before the form of Lemmy is finalized, this will kill Lemmy for the same reason Digg and Reddit are dead and dying.
The power to silently choke Lenny is in a few hands and I promise to you they will squeeze when the time is right for them.
This is for the moderator’s convenience. For the dev convenience and the server owner convenience.
We all know a fractured community cannot transplant itself without breaking apart. There is power is centralization, communities are centralized.
We need to take the power of moderators and give it to the user’s. Moderation must be made communally and democratically.
This means moderation is something that happens in the client. It is something the user subscribe to. That the user can change at will.
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
Thank you for the update. What is the recommended process for updating supporting apps using lemmy-js-client? I’ve got three apps, all with branches using an alpha client for now, but will the official JS clients roll out in advance of the official release of the server so we won’t have to run Alphas in production until we can get updates in?
Also, I know I’ve mentioned this before, and the response I got was “It will get upvoted enough”, but the 11/3 update only had 100ish upvotes, and did not make it to Top on my instance. I would really, really appreciate an announcement vehicle that allows us to get a notification. As Lemmy does not yet have a “notify for all in community” (or a community just for development updates that others can’t post to), could we please get some other vehicle where you post links to these posts? Even a pinned GitHub issue on LemmyNet would be fantastic, as we could subscribe to that and then see the link to here. Thanks again!
while yes it’s cool that I can talk to Lemmy from my Mastodon account, it’s quite a clunky experience
I do wish they were slightly more interoperable. It’s currently very hard if not impossible to discuss Mastodon posts directly within Lemmy, and likewise you can’t make a Mastodon-style post to your personal Lemmy profile. These may seem like unimportant changes, but I think much of that stems from still viewing these services from the frame of the limitations of what they are based on. They could be so much more!
Lemmy itself has big problems with the interoperability of servers. There are two major issues I see with the way communities are structured. The first is that listed subscriber numbers are for your server only, which makes the entire ecosystem seem way less lively than it actually is, which has the effect of making it even less so. Subscriber numbers should be fed in from a community’s home server.
The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics. That way community leaders have the ability to easily aggregate similar content, rather than leaving it to the user to figure out, and you could opt-out as a user by simply not subscribing to the super-group community.
The second is that there are many redundant communities, which makes it difficult for onboarding new users. There should be some way to group like-communities into super-groups based on topics
Yeah this one has an issue open, you could join the discussion if you have any ideas, this is a big one
“Linux” is not an entity with well defined goals, it’s a community that mostly does whatever it wants. That has the fortunate side effect of producing labors of love in software, that prove really useful in the real world. But it also ignores things like user experience, which affect things like the desktop the most.
On Linux the user is a second-class citizen, because worth in the community is determined by how much a person contributes (in code, testing, artwork, documentation etc.)
The Linux mindset is best expressed by a quote from Simon Travaglia (which I paraphrase because I don’t remember it verbatim): “We’re tasked with the well-being of the servers, not the users. They’re lucky we even let them log in since users technically upset the smooth operation of the servers.”
There still are community servers for old games like CS 1.6. Personally, I prefer CS:Source which feels less dated, controls feel much better, and the game works properly on widescreen monitors.
The point is that there is still a dedicated player base. You can still play them.
Previously, on Linux, your desktop environment is made out of:
The display server (xorg), in charge of dealing with the video card (by talking with drivers in the kernel through a unified interface, DRI), and handling how to display stuff properly on your particular combination of hardware, including your physical screen and its peculiarities.
A window manager, in charge of asking software for what they want to draw, then drawing windows, decorating them, etc. and more generally organizing what will be displayed on the screen and how it will be displayed.
A protocol allowing both to communicate between each other.
That protocol is old, shitty, and insecure. Those are rightful criticisms of it, and it could be argued there is a need for an alternative. This is the often touted justification for wayland.
Note that the way windows and the general desktop environment is handled in the model above is completely distinct from the actual display server; this has a nice advantage: one can write a WM relatively easily, and as such there are hundreds available for linux users to choose from - including some that traditional Windows and Mac users would consider visually exotic and different, such as tiling WMs. This has long been considered a distinct superiority of Linux over, for example, Windows, where all of this is a monolithic block.
Now the dudes that introduced wayland didn’t just decide to secure the protocol; they decided to do away with that separation. Now a “compositor” handles all the stuff both xorg and the WM used to do. This means that almost none of the existing window managers work on this thing (actually the truth is none of them do, but Gnome and a few others for example created whole new compositors - today, you can run “gnome” either with that shit or with Xorg, for example), and that there will be far less of them to pick from in the future. The people implementing wayland didn’t even consider this an issue at first (everyone uses gnome or KDE, right ? imbeciles), so IIRC third party devs eventually tried to implement a library to restore some degree of separation (wlroots). This still requires reimplementing a WM though, and ultimately is extremely limited anyway due to the very “security” concepts the wayland protocol introduces. Some stuff that was trivial on Xorg will not be possible at all.
You might be considering why we’re talking about security in the context of a display server.
Well, the Wayland people noticed that more and more, people were installing software on Linux not through the official repositories of their distributions (which are high quality, somewhat audited, etc.) but from a galaxy of alternatives proposed by a variety of actors: flatpak, AppImage, snap, etc. The reason for this is the quality of software in general has taken a dive, and so has the quality of developers in the open source community; the usual process for someone wanting to be published on, say, debian, would normally have been to follow a few simple rules and to publish your package, accepting it’ll be audited and you may have a few points to work on before it’ll get up on the repos. Many devs these days are not interested, and deploy their software through the alternatives I mentioned above (which are basically all container or chroot based approaches to produce a “minisystem” with a set of defined libraries, meaning only your kernel will differ from the person having published that package).
As a result, a lot of clueless people are now installing shady software like monkeys on their system, coming from anywhere, just like on Windows. As such, the Wayland creators consider stuff such as an application discreetly capable of capturing the screen, or copying the clipboard from another app, to be potential “security issues”. You may be interested to now such “security measures” do not exist on, for example, Windows (but the “security issue” do).
I’m not even trying to argue whether or not they’re wrong here. I think mostly they are - the amount of issues and use cases they didn’t consider is incredibly large, and it’s been biting them in the ass ever since - but it’s irrelevant; in theory this would not be much of a problem because, you can just keep using Xorg and your WM, right ? the fear is that maintainers and support for these will dry up (I doubt that, personally), but also and more cruciallly that as Wayland becomes more and more omnipresent for many users, various features from various critical software - such as the browser - will eventually become problematic for Xorg users.
If you could only re-experience from new one game (like total immersion, wide-eyed wonder-at-the-majesty-of-it-all re-experience) and had yet to pick a console (Xbox versus PlayStation), what game on which console and why? (and feel free to remark on ideal controllers, add-ons, etc.)...
There’s an extremely popular private server called HorizonXI that is the game as it was in '04. The community is amazing and it’s always easy to find a party. If you have the time to spare, I definitely recommend it.
'Segregating high skill players from the population at large, forcing long wait times on them, is a form of discrimination': former Halo multiplayer lead on the 'failure' of SBMM in modern games (www.pcgamer.com)
What would you all like to see from this magazine? (kbin.social)
As I'm sure some of you noticed, very shortly after Ernest posted the update to KBin that allowed for abandoned magazine adoption, I took over this magazine....
I just wanted to enjoy 10hrs of "Mine Diamonds" :(( (files.catbox.moe)
F#€k $pez (lemmy.ml)
YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)
Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."
Will Linux on Itanium be saved? Absolutely not (www.theregister.com)
Lemmy Community server
Is there a Lemmy minecraft comm7nity server?
/kbin RTR#19 Summary of current work and plans for the near and somewhat distant future (kbin.social)
Today, I am addressing several ongoing issues that prove troublesome in the daily use of the instance. In the coming days, I will be working on several things slated for the next instance update:...
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org
choose... (feddit.de)
Lemmy 0.19.0-rc.5 and Development Update 2023-11-17
Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program....
How does ActivityPub differ from what BlueSky is using? (AT)
I don’t quite understand a lot of the details on how the implementations work....
A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article
Link to article: gist.github.com/…/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f227…...
Zoomer anon has brainrot (discuss.tchncs.de)
deleted_by_author
One console, one game
If you could only re-experience from new one game (like total immersion, wide-eyed wonder-at-the-majesty-of-it-all re-experience) and had yet to pick a console (Xbox versus PlayStation), what game on which console and why? (and feel free to remark on ideal controllers, add-ons, etc.)...