jadero

This doesn’t surprise me at all. Compared to most other forms of social media, lemmy is pretty old-school in concept. Like the earliest forms of social media (USENET, FidoNET, forums, mailing lists), it’s based on discussing topics of interest, not following people of interest. Thus, I subscribe to (and post within) “woodworking”, not “Paul Sellers” or “Stumpy Nubs”. (I do follow them elsewhere, though.)

In addition, it’s been pretty close to 20 years since it was standard procedure to go to teenagers for help figuring out “this computer thing” or “this internet thing”. Oh, sure, maybe someone my age can benefit from the knowledge of a teenager when it comes to something like tiktok, but the vast majority of even the over 50s have got all the basics and more figured out.

Taken together with the fact that there are a lot more people over 20 than 10-20, I would have predicted that their numbers would be about the same as for over 60. And that seems to be the case.

I suspect that a better breakdown would be 10-year cohorts starting at age 15 instead of age 10, but that might make population-level comparisons more difficult.

Another way to look at it is that lemmy has more in common with FidoNET than with Facebook or tiktoc. I was using FidoNET in my late teens by dialing into a local BBS before internet became publicly available. I’m 67 now, and have just followed the evolution of “topic discussion” over time.

Yes, it was very badly constructed. I had to read it a couple of times to decode it, and I have the advantage of having graded essays :)

That would have been awesome, but I suspect that it was just the arms and that it was powered in some way, hence “pendulum-like”.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Oh that’s not good. Obviously, I’ve chosen to allow js, but basic stuff should work without it.

Heh. I gave up trying to figure out voting a long time ago. I find it both fascinating and disturbing that there are people out there who see anything I write as worthy of a dowvote. :)

Anyone who hasn’t followed that link needs to do so now! It’s got human cadaver arms manipulated with fishing line and guitar tuning knobs. It’s got a link to an article titled “Your Face: Punching Bag or Spandrel?”

You can’t possibly find a better way to spend 10 minutes!

Same with my dad. He said that the military liked red/green colour blindness for spotting camouflaged stuff.

Not your usual teaser, but still a teaser. “Look at all this techno-marketing. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. By then we’ll have some actual code to look at and toys to play with.”

In fairness, they are providing what looks like a decent overview of their underlying system (Rama) and how they used it to create their mastodon instance.

But I guess it worked :) I bookmarked their page and will check in from time to time. Maybe their toy (prototyping) system will be enough to run a personal instance…

Canadian Open Source Community Association

I like it!

Yeah, I’ve started thinking that, too, so I push back every chance I get. As an actual boomer, I think it’s my prerogative, in a kind of “get off lawn” way. :)

Really? Every boomer I know, including me, was an absolute pothead. Many still indulge regularly.

I think that the active participation of members is how we get strong communities. One way to be an active participant is to take responsibility for what you want to see. If you don’t like the bot, block it.

This is analogous to walking out of a movie you dislike rather than calling for it to be banned.

As far as I can tell, it’s not breaking any terms of service or policy. That doesn’t mean that terms of service and policy can’t be modified, but that should be done only to address general principles, not specific cases. (Although it may be that a specific case makes obvious the need for change.)

Then I guess that’s at least 2 of us on the same page :)

I would hate to see it filled with commercial interests, but I think there is room for some that is relevant within specific communities.

I think there must be a happy medium somewhere. I hate surveillance ads as much as the next person and blatant, “pure” self-promotion is a pretty close second, but there are forms of advertising and self-promotion that are useful.

There was a magazine I subscribed to called “Small Craft Advisor” that covered the small boat market, frequently homebuilt, mostly sailing, mostly cruising (like camping, but from or on a boat). The main reason I maintained the subscription was for the ads and the articles written by various suppliers describing how to use their products and showcasing their offerings in detail. Now that they’ve gone Substack, those ads and most of the “vendor articles” are gone and I’m dropping the subscription. It just doesn’t provide my window into the hobby, its supplies and techniques, and suppliers that it used to.

I also remember when there was such a thing as computer magazines that were similar in format and similarly valuable.

The mobile client I’m using, Liftoff, does an excellent job of both account and instance switching.

this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.

Yes, I’ve started looking for instances that I think represent the “natural home” for communities I’m interested in. For example, I was subscribed to a lemmy.world community for the go programming language. Then I discovered the programming.dev instance. They also host a go programming community, so I switched.

Then I realized that I was likely to join a bunch of communities on that instance, so I just joined the instance directly. I think that reduces the federation burden, but it also helps me manage my personal feed because now things are grouped by more general categories.

The only thing I don’t like about doing things that way is the multiple inboxes. It would be nice if the client would collect all the inboxes into one.

Every network that wants to stay decentralized has to guard against anyone gaining a controlling interest.

Once an instance gets big enough, it generates a kind of gravity, attracting not just the majority of new users, but tempting everyone else. And a few years or decades down the line, we end up with a centralized service. History has shown that anyone with the capacity to be a controlling interest eventually exercises that control to serve its own ends.

I don’t know if anyone is discussing the potential problems of existing good-faith instances becoming too large, but I think we should be. A Meta controlled instance would instantaneously dwarf any existing instance and maybe the totality of all instances.