kopper [they/them]

Just because you wish to talk about your own country does not mean I want to listen to the politics of a country I am not a citizen/resident of nor have ever set foot in. That’s what content warnings and other functionality allow me to do. Unfortunately, Lemmy.

(Also notice how I specifically single out “US politics” and not “politics” in general. That is a different thing where “politics” is sometimes used to mean “anything I don’t like not from a white cis het from the upper middle class person”. That is not the case here. I am simply tired of hearing about Trump and Biden and Harris and whoever the new VP is or whoever the Republican Main Character of the day is or the Democrat Main Character of the day is)

True, that will at least let you figure out what is a fediverse link and what isn’t. Most implementations I know either use the same URL for both the AP representation of a post and it’s HTML one (differentiated by the Accept header), or have a redirect from the HTML view to the AP representation when an AP type is requested (or, very rarely, the via Link header/<link> html tag), which means you can reuse code used for the “search URL to load community” feature in order to make this possible.

Given the list of fedi instances your instance is aware of is already present in the API, clients already have the tools to do this, I believe.

How do you expect for that auto-detection to work? Just a regex on example.com/c/community? What happens when some other instance software decides to use a different URL format? Or do you just assume Lemmy is the only thing out here?

Doesn’t help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you’d expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn’t conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a US politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)

I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)

while i don’t have any specific opinions about this that other people haven’t addressed, i just want to flag up something;

How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.

this seems unenforcable. as in, you can’t really tell where someone discovered a post from. yeah you can just remove the buttons from those views clientside and it’ll probably work for the majority of cases, but alternate clients or modifications to lemmy-ui can simply put the buttons back in (or in cases of unmaintained or differently opinionated clients, just not remove the buttons at all). the backend can’t really differentiate which view a vote comes from. federation especially can’t differentiate which view a vote comes from.

Look into opening an account on an Iceshrimp instance like https://fedia.social, or an Akkoma instance like http://pleroma.envs.net. Their APIs are an extension on top of the Mastodon APIs (and both support Markdown and should expose them to apps). Sharkey also has some Mastodon API compatibility but it’s quite broken and might require some odd workarounds to get stuff working.

That said, for rich text, parsing the HTML will be more than enough for nearly all cases.

epic megapost

(vanilla) mastodon does not have markdown, and content from other instances (marked up or not) get transmitted as HTML over the wire (and the mastodon API serves sanitized HTML to apps).

mastodon forks like glitch, and clones of the mastodon API like those on pleroma/akkoma and iceshrimp do serve the markdown source AFAIK, but unless OP’s looking to… idk, support MFM (which, on a non-web app would be difficult) I don’t really see the point in that.

mastodon doesn’t “discover” akkoma content and won’t show anything unless you’re following a user from there, which kinda sucks.

I mean – that’s how all of them work. Even Lemmy. Unless your instance administrator joins relays (which have tradeoffs between privacy / effectiveness of blocking) your instance is only ever aware of posts from followed people (and reply threads followed people are involved in)

(also MUCH lighter on server resources, compared to most other twitter-like alternatives)

Mastodon is just unusually heavy, really. Even Misskey & forks are lighter than Masto on the server side (preferring being bloated on the client instead)

Mastodon feels like a fucking funeral.

You’re clearly nowhere near the good parts, then.

In my experience, once when you find your way into the correct circles the microblog-verse makes the “shitposting” of Lemmy look like r/memes. I do agree that discoverability could be better though, it took me 4-5 months before I got the hang of it. And now I barely check Lemmy despite my Lemmy account being older than my earliest microblog account (under this name, anyway).

One important thing is that your instance matters quite a bit more than here. Starting on a large general purpose instance (especially if it’s mastodon.social) and just following Large Accounts and Nobody Else like most people recommend for some reason is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Instead, get on a smaller interest-specific instance (rule of thumb: the weirder the domain the better your experience will be!) and follow the local timeline (and on good software, the bubble/recommended timelines). And post stuff/interact with people. Don’t be that one person that does nothing but boost news bots and occasionally butt into replies of people asking rhetorical questions they already know the answer for.

(Perhaps Lemmy is better at news or whatever, I wouldn’t know as I block all news communities I can find – I just don’t see the point as all the discussion around most news ends up predictable, unproductive (not that internet communities necessarily need to be “productive”), and unnecessarily angry)

Also in a world with usable™ Misskey forks and Akkoma I think the limitations of Mastodon the software are really starting to show, and I urge anyone who’s been disappointed in Mastodon to try other microblog software. (Quotes are already a thing if you know where to look! So are emoji reactions, because people have more emotions than :star:)

What I’m more worried about are posts relating to news mainly. Where even if the immediate first level comments are fine, there are threads that get out of hand really quickly.

I agree that while posts inherently designed to be controversial may not benefit from Active considering the influences voting has (though me being on an instance that has downvotes disabled may be influencing my view here!), Active may make it significantly easier for an otherwise innocent post to devolve into a flame war.

The main excuse for this kind of algorithm seems to be around “promoting discussion”, but in my experience tech that’s intended to promote discussion does inherently promote flame wars too, as they’re extremely difficult if not impossible to distinguish without a human in the loop. I’ve attempted to write something about this on the microblogging side of the fedi, directly influenced by this post

I’m just throwing this out there but having the default sort incentivize comments seems like it’d highlight posts meant to cause flame wars… Is that what we want out of this platform?

the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect

afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through

.world is unique in that because of its size it has kinda ended up being “Lemmy” to most people. I very much doubt the people posting porn on .world care about instances and federation and just treat .world as a centralized site

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