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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn’t cheap. It’s not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?


  • There are a lot I’d recommend, but I think the only must-play for me is Cave Story.

    When I was growing up, Cave Story was like the paragon of games as art, and was a major inspiration behind me making games as a hobby and getting into software development professionally. Cave Story was made by a single talented auteur, not for profit, and released for free. And it was as good as Metroid and Mario, or maybe even better. It proved to everyone that such a thing was even possible.

    I think the only indie game that could possibly compete with Cave Story for the title of “most influential” would be Minecraft. Though Minecraft should probably be disqualified from that title for having sold out to Microsoft as soon as it started to get big…



  • Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.

    Most likely yes, I’ll be sticking around. Something I very much appreciate about lemmy as an advantage over the big social media sites is that lemmy is set up such that you can be reasonably sure that there are many more human users than bots. On reddit you can mostly avoid the bots by sticking to the smaller subs, but I think lemmy may be able to grow larger than that and still avoid being overrun by propaganda and marketing bots due to the prevalence of manual approval for newly registered users.

    I’m definitely hoping to see even more features that emphasize this advantage of lemmy. I’d like to try contributing some code for this myself, at a time when things feel more stable (i.e. no huge sweeping changes in the pipeline, like the HTTP client is now) and I can find some time for it.

    For example…

    One obvious improvement would be to add an invite system, where new user registration occurs via reputable users sending invite links to people they know.

    And I envision a feature where one instance may mark some of the instances it federates with as low trust. Users on the instance would have the option not to see content posted by the low-trust instance’s users, or the option to have their content explicitly marked in the UI. This could be used, for one thing, to still federate with larger instances that are less stringent about disallowing bot accounts, but provide a means to view only content where there is a higher degree of confidence that it was posted by a human, or to at least clearly mark low-confidence content.


  • I currently have Kubuntu on my most-used Linux machine but, since a friend recommended it to me, I’ve been considering hopping to KDE Neon when I have some time to learn a new distro. (I’ve tried GNOME and I don’t really care for it, but KDE Plasma fits like a glove.) I’m not extremely experienced with desktop Linux, so I’d love to hear about others’ experiences with either distro and how they might compare.


  • The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.

    As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.

    And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don’t want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.









  • Rust is a really cool language, but all this drama has been very off-putting. I sincerely hope the team gets their shit together and learns from this.

    Agreed. Rust the language seems like a good tool, but I am very discouraged from getting invested in it when at least half of anything I end up hearing about Rust is some kind of new drama or in-fighting among the people who oversee the language and its community.

    Shit happens, I know, but with Rust it feels like the frequency and magnitude is way out of proportion to other dev-centered communities. I am not involved, and I do not want to be, but from the outside it often appears like many of the people who are in positions of leadership are more concerned with posturing and politics and exercising whatever power is afforded to them than they are with the actual programming language and the well-being of its community.

    So there was a mix-up with a speaker. So then the organization responsible should make it right, and announce that there was miscommunication and that it will be handled differently in the future. If it happened because someone was acting unprofessionally, then handle that internally and separately. It is ridiculous that one mishandled invitation is spiraling into a public mess of personal attacks and 4,000-word blog posts.