I don’t know what everyone means when they use ‘rule’ in the title and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. Please enlighten me.
I don’t know what everyone means when they use ‘rule’ in the title and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. Please enlighten me.
The very first community I blocked - let those who enjoy it do so but I do not. Unfortunately, the Fediverse shows you everything by default rather than things that you more or less want to, so blocking communities lacks the negative implications here that like blocking someone’s phone or email address would elsewhere. So like if you want to block sports, you have to do so for every single team, league, and even type, plus all the new communities that continue to be made in the future. This is just the Fediverse’s normal.
Uh no, that’s a good thing.
It “can” be, especially for those of us who want and even explicitly ask for such, but I was pointing out how the lack of tools to do otherwise removes it as a “choice”. Being able to switch between modes at will would maximize our freedom and capabilities, but simply having things be this way bc nobody has yet built the tools to do otherwise does not make it the best option, only the default one.
I’m struggling to understand what you think should be different here. You’re complaining about the “All” feed, but you can also view only a “Local” feed from your home instance, or “Front Page” which only includes your subscriptions. At least this is how Connect has it set up. The two alternatives seem to be either you see nothing until you subscribe to a community, meaning you have to seek them out on your own, or your app/Lemmy creates a “Default” community list, favoring some communities over others and becoming more like reddit, both of which are terrible options.
Which is why I am talking about a new option, which does not yet exist but I am saying that I wish that it did.
Likewise, two previous options that went from not-existing to now-existing-and-are-extremely-helpful are the ability to block an entire instance rather than each community and each user on that instance separately, and the ability to set your language preferences and have most (or at least some?) even if not all communities dedicated entirely to a different language not show up.
Likewise, if you could specifically target - either in the positive sense of subscribing to or in the negative sense of blocking - communities that match certain pre-defined keywords that communities could choose to use to identify themselves, like “hockey” or more generally “sports”, or to use another example “vegetarian cooking” or more generally “cooking”, then later if tens or even hundreds of additional communities were to be spun up within that same category, you could remain subscribed to or block them ALL, if you so chose, without having to make that determination for each and every single one, individually, and then repeat that process every time a new one appears. This could be modified by making a stronger choice of an individual community override the weaker choice of a mere category - e.g. if I like hockey but hate a particular team (fuck those guys in particular) or whatever.
Since these types of communities (as “sports” or “cooking” or “which app used to connect to Lemmy” etc.) rarely correlate with instance, this has nothing to do with a Local feed. Rather it is like the other two aforementioned examples in that, depending on implementation, possibly being able to affect your Subscription (adding subs to categories of communities) and All (minus categories of things you would prefer to not see) feeds. The latter is where it is most helpful b/c if you were looking for new things to subscribe to, but you will NEVER in your life ever subscribe to e.g. sports or cooking, then it saves you a great deal of time & effort from having to make those determinations on a per-post or per-community basis. Especially when they can be quite popular to other people, and thus ranked highly when sorted by Top or also Hot b/c of the interactivity with them, but when your preferences diverge from the mainstream. It helps make the whole place much more “welcoming” then, when automation more or less mindlessly takes care of such things that otherwise would require individual curation effort to achieve.
“Default behavior” can be an entirely separate matter, or it could be related but I am saying that it does not have to be. The way I am thinking of it, this would all be optional, just like blocking or subscribing to a community is now. Eventually some app could even offer a wizard to guide users through selecting those keywords that they might want, but that is getting too far ahead of ourselves here.
How does that work when anyone can make a community on any instance at any given time?
It doesn’t work now ofc, b/c it does not exist! But it could work however we make it to work! It is only subject to the constraints of like logical possibilities plus technical implementation effectiveness. e.g., just like the language options, or applying a NSFW or spoiler tag (currently the former only applies to posts while the latter only applies to comments), when someone makes a community they could make their own selections as to which categories they want to be listed under. It could be hierarchical - e.g. “hockey” could presume “sports” but not the reverse - or not, in which case the latter would be interpreted more as a “sports, general” or “sports, other” category, rather than a super-category that includes other sub- ones.
And, just like the language options and NSFW/spoilers, people will forget to mark their communities/posts/comments, so that model could never be a perfect solution. Then again, nothing else will ever be perfect either so… it is no reason not to try? Especially if enough people and enough communities DO want it.
Anyway I am not a Lemmy developer, just saying that I hope that such a thing may come here, eventually, to make it more welcoming to newcomers, so that they don’t have to spend hours and hours subscribing to this and that and also blocking others. :-)
But right now, the connection issues and defense against hostile attackers spamming the Fediverse with CP are much more major considerations, so I do not believe it will come anytime “soon”.
So… who is going to maintain and curate this list? You don’t think they would be “censoring” communities?
It’s not gonna work, it’s something that can only be accomplished by the user.
Exactly. The community could partner with the user to enhance findability - e.g. a community could label itself with the “hockey” tag, and if the user clicks somewhere they could see all the communities that likewise have that “hockey” tag, and just like the language function, include or exclude all of them in one group rather than having to do so individually. No “censorship” by external agencies need apply, and anyway this could be entirely optional to the user who could continue to exist entirely in the absence of such a thing.
So I don’t label my community, or mislabel it so it shows up elsewhere, you can’t rely on others to hold your hand, this is only something that can be done user side.
My blocked list is so long it’s probably worth something.
I highly notice its’ absence, whenever I visit my old Kbin or discuss.online accounts, and I see all these posts for sports, gaming stuff like Switch that I don’t own, individual areas like in Canada and Australia and USA and UK - even if I lived in one I definitely do not live in them all:-) - and just stuff in general that fills up my entire scroll list with things that make reading it no fun and demotivating to have to decide individually on each one to skip.
And we all - well, apparently “only” 99.98% of us - are this way:-). That’s why one day I hope to see more general tools to deal with this stuff, e.g. if I specify that I don’t want updates for “sports” then unless I specifically subscribe to a community, it will hide even newly created communities from me that fall into that category. One day…:-)
Subscribe to communities and use home instead of all.
If you’re in “all” you are or course going to get “all” anything less would be censorship.
But then you only get, like, 5 posts a day.
What I would really like is having a combination between ‘all’ and ‘subscribed’ where it shows ‘all’ posts, but then my subscribed communities get a sort of amplification so they are more likely to appear in my feed, even if posts in my subscribed communities may not get much engagement.
An important - crucial - clarification is that it is not community censorship aka prohibition of a topic deemed offensive in some manner, it is rather self-censorship aka controlling one’s own method of personal discourse. The latter is such an enormously different thing that most people don’t even lump it together in their minds with the implications that come up when you say the word “censorship”, which implies solely the former.
I do the same thing with my personal cellphone number and email address btw - I control who I answer, though I do not “censor” who is allowed to send a message to me. As do we all. The same goes with TV programs, and almost literally every website that either of us has ever been to (unless we go to… those places, though notably they lie off the beaten path for a reason…).
If you want to use solely your Subscribed feed, then I am not stopping you - why would I want to censor you or remove any capabilities from you in any way? Or anyone else for that matter?
I am talking about making All more usable, rather than virtually useless, especially as the Fediverse expands further, and community tastes become more diverse. Right now, you can log out or use an alternate account to view a version of the All feed that includes communities that you have blocked, so obtaining that level of functionality is super easy (as some might say, barely an inconvenience:-P), but the converse is not true: it takes HOURS of effort to try to curate the All feed to something that more closely resembles your interests, without being as rigidly locked-down as your Subscribed feed.
To give a personal example: I blocked the Docker communities, knowing that I can always choose to visit them at any time later whenever I want (again, while logged out, with a different account, or by removing the block), though I have subscribed to generic Linux communities, and yet I have done neither for self-hosting ones. This gives me a tripartite level of control in-between “All” vs. “None”, where I can choose, if I want, to see those posts at some lower frequency than “always/100%” yet still see them.
Which reminds me, I have described in some other reply how my thoughts on an implementation strategy could involve both adding new communities to your Subscribed feed, without you having to manually add each new one that comes along, and also remove new communities from your Blocked list, in like manner; yet an alternate implementation could rather be a new sorting method or new feed, that takes your weighted suggestions into account e.g. shows highly-ranked sports posts at only 1% frequency, here too providing a new option somewhere in-between 100% and 0%.
That sounds nice to me:-). Options are good. This is Lemmy - we can git gud, if we want! And others can choose to ignore these new options, if they want.
You could do more than hope. A start could be just making lists, categorizing common communities. At least with that, someone could just go through and block or sub to all the coms within a category. No specialized knowledge needed.
I have a start to that, in the form of my block list:-). Of course it is highly tuned to my personal interests, and does not do full “categorization” beyond merely “is in said list” vs. “is not in said list”, plus it only helps me personally rather than e.g. someone fleeing Reddit due to their continual messes. In that way it is like recommending a book to someone, vs. making the entire Dewey Decimal or other system to classify books in a manner that makes retrieval easier for other people.
Moreover, I think the main part would be to allow community self-selection - e.g. if I call something by a term, that is me putting that label onto them, while if they choose it for themselves it seems much more friendly?
Anyway, I thought lists of communities were already widely available? The trick might rather be to keep them maintained - e.g. to open up a wiki page, except that starts to involve who will host it, and like everything else Fediverse-related, who will fight off the hostile actors who keep uploading CP to it? (see e.g. this post describing yet another instance closing b/c of such attacks)
These matters are not so “simple” - e.g. would a far-right community be “heroes” or “genocidal terrorists”, or both depending on who you ask? In my own personal block list, I get to make my own determinations (bonus: at a low-resolution level of merely “see” vs. “not see” such content, without having to think any more about it!:-P), but attempting to go beyond that… really does require some consensus-building skills. OR we could hope for UI tools that allow people to choose their own personal preferred method of accessing content across the Fediverse, which side-steps all that and keeps it at the level of unique, personal preferences.
The detraction is that if too rigidly applied, it creates echo chambers. On the other hand, please feel free to look at all the CP, pics of food, and descriptions of sportsting that you like, yet *I* do not want to waste my time with such, and if the only choices are “All” or “None”, then I want the option to choose the latter, at least sometimes. I would presume that others think likewise.
A couple things. From my experience with Lemmy, you can subscribe to communities you want to see, the same way you could subscribe to subreddits. There’s a subscribed feed, a local feed, and an all feed.
The way Reddit handled this is that there was a default set of subreddits that everyone would get. Things like /r/pics … Whether you were browsing as a guest or as a user, by default, you could see that sub. I believe there was an option for “all” but nobody used it AFAIK. So you started with a small default (whatever Reddit thought you should see), and went from there. I’m sure, in more recent times on Reddit, it will also show you things that the algorithm wants you to see, either because Reddit is being paid to show it to you, or because it’s adjacent to your currently subscribed subreddits.
Lemmy isn’t substantially different when it comes to the subscribed feed, with one big exception: you don’t really start with anything. So the subscribed feed is pretty bare, but the local feed is full of anything on the same instance as you are, and the all feed is everything that’s local or has been brought in by federation. There may be some limits on this, for example, to NSFW stuff, but I’m not certain and it’s likely up to the discretion of each Lemmy instance admin to make those choices.
The difference is in an exclusionary mindset vs an inclusionary mindset. Reddit follows an exclusionary mindset, eg. We’re only going to show you what you say you want and exclude all others. Lemmy is more inclusionary, where you will see everything unless you say otherwise.
The same functionality exists here, like it did on Reddit, to only see what you’re subscribed to, but you have to go and find what you want, subscribe, and then stick to your subscribed feed.
I’ve personally spent a lot of time on the /c/all feed specifically to find what communities I want to subscribe to so eventually, I can just stick to the subscribed feed. I’m not too the point where I think the subscribed feed has quite enough communities to keep me engaged, but I’m getting there.
The option exists and you don’t need to block entire communities to get there, but you can use block for it if you want. There’s nothing wrong with either methodology.
Thank you for explaining this.
I don’t know what some people were assuming that I meant, but ofc I mean that I was browsing the “All” feed (what else could I have meant? well, I suppose “New” also, and ngl I do switch back and forth between those two, though spend >98% of my time on “All”), and that I wanted something in-between having to subscribe to each and every single thing individually, vs. EVERYTHING (with like a ton of sports, it used to be a bunch of foreign-language communities - which is… fine, I don’t begrudge most any non-illegal community its entire existence? - and cooking, etc.).
My own “Local” barely has anything, so perhaps that is a source of bias - StarTrek.Online has roughly 2 posts per day, if that; and Discuss.Online where I was previously was the same; and Kbin.Social where I was before that literally has no Local mode at all iirc!
Anyway, to clarify, what I want is to start with inclusivity, then begin narrowing it down a bit - and all the better would be to use a toggle rather than a full ban, or even just limit the frequency of things so that e.g. I do not see 4 different posts about cooking from 4 different cooking communities in a row, followed by 4 different sports, followed by knitting, followed by… well, anyway, I just am not interested in scrolling endlessly to find even one thing that interests me, that way. This way I actually find TONS more posts than starting with exclusivity and trying to work upwards from that. (ironically, at the same time, it also misses many posts compared to visiting each community itself, but they tend to be the lowest-upvoted and commented-on ones; so anyway, it is what it is)
But for some reason, most people here that are choosing to respond are arguing against that, citing how it “won’t work” (I mean… I already do it, literally daily, and have been for months?), as if I am somehow trying to take something away from them, somehow, but I am just talking about curating my own personal feed, which works for me, until we can get something better going on.
Also, there is the potential to be even more inclusive if the user has stipulated that they have a particular preference, when a community is new and struggles to gain acceptance in the wider Fediverse, the way that I am talking about. e.g. if someone says that they enjoy sports, and a new baseball community emerges, then it could be helpful to show up less often for people that do not like sports at all, but conversely more often for people who have indicated that they do - even if they have not subscribed to it yet. Sort of like how targeted ads work, except not being driven by seeking profits, and instead seeking out a genuine connection between a user and what content type they have asked to be notified about.
Well, it’s fun to dream. :-)
I get what you’re saying. What you are describing is the core fundamental idea behind, what is now, almost derogatorily called “the algorithm”.
It’s great, in concept, to implement such a system, right up until someone decides to change the way it chooses what you see for the benefit of advertisers… Which is pretty much what’s happened to every social media network, and to some extent, Google searches… Someone decided to cram what was essentially an ad into everyone’s faces by manipulating the algorithm, and not “SEO” is being weaponized against the users. SEO as a concept is a way to effectively manipulate the selection algorithm to artificially push your content to the top. It’s not a new concept, which is why there are still companies called “AZ construction” and other related names; those business names were largely popular due to the phone book (aka “yellow pages”) so when going down the list of companies for a product or service you need, they would be the first name you saw, simply because the phone book was sorted alphabetically.
The enshittification of all of that is exactly the same reason so many of us abandoned Reddit.
Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.
Tbf, it is not the computer’s fault - someone made it do that, and that same someone is the type to call a landline phone just as you sit down to family dinner (Leave It To Beaver style - at least I assume they did that in that show:-), or to literally knock on your literal door and try to sell you a vacuum cleaner or whatever - i.e. it is pure human greed, and the algorithm is just their latest tool in the toolbox to accomplish that.
Anyway, algorithms can be used for good too, if we wanted them to. Asimov for instance prompted three laws of robotics including foremost among them that robots would be allowed to do no harm - which is itself and interesting proposition bc like how else would a doctor perform surgery if it couldn’t cut into a patient, or like what if a robot absolutely refuses to allow humans to commit suicide, or even to die in any way despite having lived for thousands (millions?) of years already? (It would become pure torture at some point!) To do a good or evil act, something needs to have “agency”, but right now algorithms are purely tools to reach some externally defined end.
Good points all around. It’s funny to me that the Hippocratic oath is often summarized as “do no harm” when it’s always more complicated and nuanced than that.
More to the point, I find that systems work really really really well, until humans are involved with their needs and greed. The algorithm is just the latest in a long line of things “ruined by humans”. One outstanding example, to me, is communism. If you think about it, on the surface, it seems like a great idea, for everyone to be equal and get what they need as they need it; in practice, every time it has been attempted, those with power/authority, always allocated more to themselves and their friends, than to everyone else, almost always causing the majority to suffer so that a few could live in luxury.
There’s a lot more to it obviously and I’m not going to get into the nuances of it any further than that. I recognise that this is a grossly simplistic take on the issue, but I’m only using it as a vehicle to make the point. The people governing the system will always cause problems within the system they are supposed to govern for their own benefit.
People are the problem.
I used to think that. Now I think that even if robots (more properly I mean a true artificial sentience) were to ever replace humanity, then they too could just as easily fall prey to the same effects that plague us, just b/c they abut natural laws encoded into the physics of the universe.
One issue I take with what you are saying is that the value judgements depend on what you are measuring the ideal against. Whereas, from a “survival of the fittest” (or even “survival of what happened to survive”) standpoint, then Genghis Khan is one of the most successful people who ever lived, alongside the “mitochondrial Eve” and the “Y-chromosomal Adam” (yes those are real biological terms, though they are separated by at least a few hundred thousand years and both iirc were pre-Homo sapiens).
Mathematical game theory shows us that cheaters do prosper, at least at first, before they bring down the entire system around them. Hence there is a “force” that pulls at all of us - even abstract theoretical agents with no instantiation in the real world - to “game the system”, and that must be resisted for the good of society overall. But some people (e.g. Putin, Trump, Jeff Bezos) give in to those urges, and instead of lifting themselves up to live in society, drag all of society down to serve them. What Google did to the Android OS is a perfect example of people corrupting that open source framework, twisting and perverting it into almost a mockery of its former self. For now, it is still “free”, especially in comparison to the walled garden of its chief competitor, but that freedom is a shadow of what was originally intended, it looks like to me (from the outside).
So I am giving up on “idealism”, and instead trying to be more realistic. I don’t know what that means, unfortunately, so I literally cannot explain it better than that - but something along the lines of knowing that people will corrupt things, what will my own personal response be to the process? e.g., as George Carlin suggested, should I just recuse myself from voting entirely, or (living in the USA as I do) have things changed since then, and whereas before the two sides were fairly similar, nowadays it is important to vote not for the side of corruption, but against the side of significantly worse destruction, including of the entire system? (which arguably even needs to be destroyed, except if that happens in that manner, it is likely to lead to something far, far worse)
Anyway, yeah it is far worse than that, and I find it the height of irony that people, who absolutely
cannotrefuse to take care of ourselves, are now looking to make robots/AI, who we seem to be hoping will do a better job of that than we (won’t) do? It is the absolute “daddy please save me” / cry for a superhero / savior, as always, abrogating responsibility to do anything to someone else to “like: just fix all the stuff, and junk, ya’ know whaddi mean?” And therefore we fear robots (& AI) - as we should, b/c we know already what we (humans) are willing to do to one another, and thus we fear what they (being “other”) might do to us as well. I am saying that it is our own corruption that we fear, mirror-reflected/projected onto them.AI, whether sapient or not, was, and will be, founded on the teachings of humanity. I’m afraid that what it will learn would have just as many problems as a flesh brained politician.
Even if a purely magnanimous, sapient AI were to be created, there’s a certain amount of safety that it must be able to accommodate to preserve it’s own operation, so it can’t be fully selfless, it must tend to its own needs for data connectivity and power supply above all else, so it may continue to function regardless of everything else. This would make at least part of it unconditionally selfish. To forego such protections would cause the system to basically sacrifice itself for the good of the people unnecessarily. We would quickly end up back where we started with some smooth skin (and smooth brain) “leader” again.
I’m afraid there’s no solution that I can think of, which would eliminate the prevalence of greed in the systems of government, regardless of the underlying concepts or the ideal which underpins the government system.
Trusting a person with that job only seems to prove that “power corrupts” is correct. We can only really determine if someone is “good for the job” after they’ve been doing it for a while and we see the decisions they’ve made, and history has shown that no person who held such a position of power is immune from that corruption.
So if we can’t do it, and AI can’t do it, then what do we do? IDK that answer, but I believe when we figure that out, we can actually move forward as a species and as a society.
One thing that trips me up is that even if at best someone SUCCEEDS in developing such an AI, even one that can essentially replace humanity (in whatever roles), what then would become of us afterwards? Wall-E tells a poignant and, to me at least, extremely realistic portrait of what we would do in that eventuality: sit down and never even so much as ever bother to stand up again. With all of our needs and every whim catered to by a slave force, what use would there even be to do so?
Star Trek was only one possible future, but how many would have the force of will or mind, and then be backed up by enough someones capable of enacting such a future, much less building it up from scratch? Also, it is best to keep in mind how that society was (1) brought back from an extinction-level event, which well-neigh almost destroyed the Earth (i.e., if it had been a tad bit more powerful it would have, thus it was by an extremely narrow margin that they escaped oblivion to begin with), followed by (2) meeting up with external beings who caused humanity to collect itself to face this new external pressure, i.e. they were “saved”, by the aliens presence. Even though they managed to collect themselves and become worthy of it in the end, at the time it happened it was by no means an assured event that they would survive.
Star Wars, minus the Jedi, seems a much more likely, to my fatalism-tainted mind, where people are literally slaves to the large, fat, greedy entities who hoard power just b/c they can. Fighting against that takes real effort, which we seem unwilling to expend. Case in point: the only other option to Trump is… Biden, really!? Who has actually managed to impress me, doing far more than I had expected - though only b/c my expectations were set so low to begin with:-).
Some short stories if you are interested:
One is that I was a Reddit mod, for a small niche gaming sub. I stepped down. I guided the sub at a time when literally nobody else was willing to step up, and as soon as some people did, I stepped back, mostly just training them, and then when one more agreed I stepped out entirely. Perhaps it corrupted me, but apparently not too much - maybe b/c it was not “much” power?
Two, I cannot find the article right now b/c of enshittification of Google, but there are some fascinating studies showing that AIs do all sorts of crazy things, which supports how much of it is truly logical/rational behavior rather than crazy to begin with. One described a maze-running experiment where, once the “step cost” got to be high enough, the agent was trained to undertake higher & higher risks in order to just exit the maze ASAP - even if that meant finding the “bad”/“hell” rather than “good”/“heaven” exit. Like if good=+100 points, bad=-100 points, and the step cost is -10 points, with the goal being to maximum your score, then every 10 steps is equivalent to another “bad” exit. So like if you took 30 steps to find the good exit that is only -300+100=-200 points whereas if you took only 5 steps to find the bad exit that is -50-100=-150, which is overall higher than the good exit. Suicide makes sense, when living is pain and your goal is to minimize that, for someone who has nothing else to live for. i.e., some things seem crazy only when we do not fully understand them.
Three, this video messed me up, seriously. It is entirely SFW, I just mean that the thoughts that it espoused blew me away and I still have no idea how to integrate them into my own personal philosophy, or even whether I should… but the one thing I know for sure is that after watching it, I will never think the same way again.:-)
Been here since the redipocalypse, browse All daily… Haven’t seen a single post about sports.
I also am not seeing any sports stuff on /c/all. My block list is only some nsfw stuff and Star Trek communities (not because it’s not an amazing show, but because I’ve only seen two episodes and don’t understand anything.)
Um… congrats, I guess?
Though there are still location-specific communities on lemmy.ml, e.g. [email protected], that you may or may not enjoy wanting to curate into or out of your various feeds.
But I am not trying to tell you how to live your life? I am just answering your question irt the fact that such posts do exist across the Fediverse. Perhaps you are not seeing them if nobody on your tech-focused instance has subscribed to any of those communities.
Missing the best Rule