livus

livus, 5 months ago

Even before the LLMs, back when I was on reddit I would sometimes see conversations between bots that were 3 or 4 bots replying to each other with scraped content (usually in the personal advice subs) and getting upvotes.

I only noticed because I used to hunt bots as a hobby.

livus, 5 months ago

I'm on Kbin, which doesn't federate downvotes, so I don't actually see what Lemmy users normally downvote.

For that reason to be on the safe side I will write a spam ad for Cia1is or something and add some bigotry.

livus, 5 months ago

This, and moreover some instances don't dederate downvotes.

I'm on Kbin so I only see downvotes from other people on kbin.

People on Beehaw don't see downvotes from anyone because it's not a thing there.

livus, 5 months ago

Here is a Ghost Archive link to the original story which includes satelite imagery.

They were bulldozed to flat, featureless earth, the word "razed" is accurate in this context.

livus, 5 months ago

Great, I am really excited to see this. I really hope for a happy ending for Azi and Crowley.

livus, 5 months ago

@TheArstaInventor I misread the threading and thought you were responding to @ernest posting a dog pic!

livus, 5 months ago

Thanks for another great update. I'm really glad you got to do the walk. It sounds like fun!

livus, 5 months ago

Omg yes they are really bringing the best science communities.

livus, 5 months ago

Just wanted to say, I really appreciate the stuff you do.

livus, 5 months ago

Do you mean within your instance or outside it?

If outside, check out the collections page at kbin.social - even if you can't navigate to it from your instance (you probably can though since it's another kbin) it's worth looking through some of the collections (multis).

E.g you might be interested in the multi-community feed https://kbin.social/c/PCGaming

Another thing worth doing is go to a magazine you like, click on the microblog tag to see the associated Mastodon posts, and then start looking at the people and exploring the hashtags. I have found some really good content that way.

Also, following people who post interesting stuff in one of your existing communities and seeing where else they post.

livus, 5 months ago

Yeah I don't have most of these issues either (like seeing span tags).

Firefox on android.

livus, 5 months ago

That's so weird, I don't have this problem until p2.

livus, 5 months ago

I really love vanilla kbin on mobile, it works fine for me!!

I'm using the second light theme, classic view, and have tweaked a lot of the settings.

The only problem is threading gets a bit weird on long threads sometimes.

I checked it on Chrome (ugh) and it's better on Firefox though.

livus, 5 months ago

We have user level domain blocking, so if you block an instance it's a bit like defederation.

Afaik you can still sometimes see their users on other instances but you don't see any of the blocked instance's own content anywhere.

livus, 5 months ago

I'm strongly against it because of Embrace Extend Extinguish.

I'd encourage everyone to read How To Kill A Decentralized Network like the Fediverse if you haven't already.

I think Meta's history reveals it to be a bad actor and I don't think their intentions here are above board.

livus, 5 months ago

I think you're right though.

livus, 5 months ago

This is the sticking point for me:

wants to participate in the protocol exactly as intended

I don't think they want to participate in the protocol as intended at all. I think they want to gradually warp Activity Pub for their own ends.

This isn't about liking or disliking, it's about inferring future behaviour based on past patterns. That company has an abominable history. It actively impeded an international genocide trial (after it spent years facilitating the genocide).

When that's the kind of level they can stoop to I think it's madness to engage with them and expect good faith. The secret meetings haven't helped.

livus, 5 months ago

A wild polar bear might not bite me if I pat it either.

Personally it doesn't seem preemptive to me because I think the part where Meta held secret meetings with certain Fediverse admins and made them sign NDAs was a clear indication of the way they are going to do things, i.e nontransparent and not as equals.

Perfect conditions for embrace extend extinguish, which is boiling a frog so could do a lot of damage before most people are able to spot it.

I accept that YMMV though, I just don't think it's particularly closed-minded of those of us who are too wary of their motives to want to federate with them.

livus, 5 months ago

This, plus people can claim it and delete it if that makes more sense.

livus, 5 months ago

On Kbin it's automated, but so far if a community is active they're the ones who're likely to request to own it, and if a troll took it the others could bring it up with Ernest at that point.

livus, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

a great feature would be to have the ability for users to consolidate feeds into a single feed

We have this at Kbin - collections (like multireddits, but shareable/followable as well); they really help with discovery.

It's a great feature, I hope you get something like it for Lemmy.

Https://kbin.social/magazines/collections

livus, 5 months ago

@Sabata11792 it's great, we can see at a glance exactly where the active discussions are, when the crossposts are etc.

livus, 5 months ago

Me too. I get the impression we might have better discoverability in terms of being able to see what's active, and who is doing what where, as well.

Anxiety about the existence of inactive or small communities seems to be more of a Lemmy thing.

livus, 5 months ago

@wjrii me too - and if there's more than one discussion, sometimes they have gone in different directions.

I also like the way it gives me a chance to upvote the original poster, and see communities I didn't know were out there.

And, it helps avoid reposts within the same community, not to mention the phenomenon I saw recently where a post got posted in community A, cross-posted in community B, and then reposted as a cross-post from community B into community A again. :D

livus, 5 months ago

@ragica it's worked the opposite way so far.

People who made a bunch of communities and then didn't participate are the ones who were displaced after the update by active mods. I help out at a couple like that myself.

The system can always be tweaked if it doesn't scale right, but for now it's been quite revitalizing.

livus, 5 months ago

Lemmy.world has most of those because it's the biggest instance. If size is what you want, that's probably where you should look.

If your instance is kbin not mbin, when you search communities it probably doesn't give you the real subscriber numbers, only number who subscribed from your instance. You should look at number of posts to get a better idea.

Mbin fixed this I think.

livus, 5 months ago

@SamXavia yeah, I think it's what you're looking for in terms of being closer to the reddit defaults.

You're never going to get all of us to agree to close smaller communities and flock to the biggest, because the strength of federation is decentralization and for some of us it's important to have communities on more than one instance.

For example the biggest movies community is on Lemmy.world, Kbin has one, and Lemm.ee has a sort of hybrid one with television mixed into it. Then as you can see from the Kbin collections page there are little niche ones about film frames, trailers, etc.

If lemmy.world goes down there are still plenty of places to go.

I think bigger niche communities are going to form organically over time and the anxiety we see is just growing pains as people get their heads around federation.

livus, 5 months ago

And nevermind the fact that this whole thing has been going through international arbitration at the International Court of Justice.

Venezuela is the one ignoring international law on this.

livus, 5 months ago

This article doesn't mention the recent International Court of Justice arbitration, which seems a bit dishonest.

It's true that Exxon Mobil is basically co-opting Guyana, but that doesn't magically make Venezuela right.

As for this article, it's a bit rich trying to paint Venezuela's actions as anticolonial when Venezuela has literally been petitioning the ICJ to allow Britain a voice in the proceedings as Guyana's former colonial masters.

livus, 5 months ago

Israeli sources responded by pointing out that successive governments had facilitated the transfer of money to Gaza for humanitarian reasons and that Netanyahu had acted decisively against Hamas after the October 7 attacks.

Nothing says "humanitarian" like cash in a suitcase. /s

livus, 5 months ago

Yeah, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber would not be smiling this hard in this picture if Cop28 actually did commit to phasing out fossil fuels in any meaningful way.

livus, 5 months ago

He criticizes their war crimes with one hand but with the other hand he gives them billions of dollars to help them commit more.

Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday that Israel had received "full backing" from the U.S. for its ground incursion into Gaza and that Washington had blocked "international pressure to stop the war."

livus, 5 months ago

Maybe they mean this sort of thing.

livus, 5 months ago

It's also weapons. Many of which are sold as "battle tested" because they were tested in Palestine.

livus, 5 months ago

Israel sells billions worth of weapons a year, sometimes to repressive regimes like the Myanmar junta.

It also innovates quite heavily in that space.

I have been noticing a number of doctors mentioning a new kind of burn on children in Gaza. Israel routinely deploys new weapons there, and this may well be a new example of testing experimental weapons in Gaza

livus, 5 months ago

I don't agree with this characterization at all.

Here in the fediverse there are many people with opinions similar to mine, i.e we are on the side of civillians, not any of the belligerents in this hellscape of war crimes.

livus, 5 months ago

IDF are the good guys

Narrator: ...they weren't.

livus, 5 months ago

It's true, there are no downvotes on Beehaw. It doesn't accept them or federate them.

However, people from other instances see a downvote button and it registers downvotes - but only from people on their own instance.

@fosforus and @idiocracy are probably looking at those figures and mistaking it for over-all numbers.

livus, 5 months ago

Yes, it really is!

Come to think of it, I've seen several of his films at my country's international film festival.

livus, 5 months ago

historical claims

That's a bit misleading.

livus, 5 months ago

I think that might be a good thing to do if you can; there are probably others in your situation who would love to have a book like this.

You could even do something like donate proceeds to a kidney charity or hospital.