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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about, either.

    What I’m talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing… how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn’t going to last indefinitely.

    As a personal example of a ‘motivated user,’ I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I’ve populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.

    For the most part it’s been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it’s still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it’s been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn’t necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.

    At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I’m not pointing fingers; I’m observing.


  • @https://lemm.ee/u/mjhelto

    Thanks, fellas! I guess the first need would certainly be to fully archive the community in question, i.e.: https://lemm.ee/c/eurographicnovels.

    Yes, I understand it’s already and naturally backed up across the FV as a whole, but I would think that having direct backups would help for any number of reasons, especially when it came to running a new sub somewhere, being able to edit previous content as needed.

    As part of that, backing up the community’s many images specifically hosted at .ee would be another priority I should think.

    Also, just want to point out that the community is indeed archived at Archive.Org, but last I checked, that tends to only preserve the post / comment text.

    Anyway, that’s for starters. Me, I have absolutely no idea at the moment if I’m going to be able to help run the place after migration, but at the very least I can hopefully find someone willing to do that. Anyway, I guess that’s good for starters!


  • Blaming the community for that is not fair.

    I’m not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.

    What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn’t happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it’s a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You’d have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess…


  • I don’t think reddit is necessarily doing anything better in that regard,

    I’d say the big, honking difference with Reddit is that there’s a team of paid admins and staff to handle so much of the chores and unsavory occurrences that the volunteer admins & mods on the Lemmysphere have to do on their own. Also, their software is years ahead, and I strongly suspect has many more out-of-the-box tools than Lemmy has on the admin side. It’s certainly that way for the mod side, I can attest.


  • It really wasn’t, sadly.

    The site founder put in an incredible amount of work setting the place up (something like 10 support servers at US$200/mo), but also tried to be lead admin for a year+, and that’s typically an extremely tough double-job to do well on a big, popular site / place. In his various posts he sometimes talked about all the vile content and destructive users the sub-admins had to deal with on an ongoing basis, and it certainly sounds like that burned out the whole volunteer staff in the end.

    From my own POV, and something I noticed from the beginning here, is that in the wake of Reddit (and other places) treating its users as assets, it was important to grow a userbase across the Lemmysphere and Fediverse with a strong community spirit. To me that means more participation, more content-creation, and more willingness to be civil and cooperate. Not that these things didn’t happen to a significant extent, but it seems like a lot of .ee users and visitors, while willing to hang out at the place, were moreso just willing to soak up the content without putting in much effort to help make the place work. Or even just being toxic and destructive, as above.

    A lot more could be said and debated about the whole situation, but sites like Reddit, as draconian as they might be at times, and whatever their other flaws, have proven that they’ve been able to establish a system that works stably over the long haul.

    Me, I love the idea of the FV, and for that very reason have put in almost two years of hard work in to my own project on .ee, but I’m very unsure about the long-term healthy function of the Lemmysphere in particular. More specifically, trying to migrate my project to another instance before .ee shuts down would be a herculean task AFAIK, especially with my having significant new health issues recently.

    So, yeah. :/


  • And unless I’m quite mistaken, any specific correction one might possibly contribute to the LLM project in question (i.e. software hallucination), is generally-speaking, roundly & enthusiastically embraced and even celebrated by the LLM, then immediately and completely ignored.

    I.e., they’re not programmed to listen to our feedback in a meaningful, educational way, only to keep munching on the databases their doggie-daddies have sicced them upon.

    EDIT: that cynicism / critique aside, ChatGPT in particular has been hugely useful in my language-learning, and there’s no question to me that it’s improved a lot, just across the last few months. FWIW








  • you’re claiming that they’re misusing the anti-CSAM feature to remove comments from the modlog

    Right, that was one aspect of that, but at the end of the day?

    What ML has clearly done is to fuck with the integrity of the Lemmy-sphere across multiple, fundamental levels, and that’s what I and many others find completely unacceptable, and have of course stated as much.

    Seriously, how is it even possible that you’re browsing the FV and haven’t seen this shit…?

    Yes, yes-- I get the fact that you’re a ‘self-declared weirdo!’ “Big proponent for killing all cis men! Token Trotskyite!”

    You DO understand of course that civilisation is collapsing fast, much of it due to our bloody inactions, is it not…?






  • It’s more than just that IMO. It’s breaking the stated aim of open federation by tampering with comments, posts and mod records, which in turn get propagated or de-propagated to connected instances, right?

    Yes, you may say that ML is of course free to screw with their own instance, but 1) one instance (particular a significant one like ML) affects other instances, and 2) they’re breaking the spirit of their own software by shamelessly abusing admin powers, in turn helping to normalize that behavior to the Lemmy side of the FV.

    What’s the point of leaving oppressive, commercial social media only to run in to the same kinds of abuse of power on a supposedly transparent, user-run, P2P social network?




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