Saying that someone as esteemed as Francesca Albanese has “a history of antisemitism” is absolute slander and defamation of character.

The name alone makes me feel extremely unwell.

I never knew what it was because I’m a bit desensitised to knew apps / app names.

Edit: using https://phtn.app/ has made Lemmy extremely pleasant to use too. I haven’t had a better experience on any platform.

I use https://www.sendbig.com/ I haven’t read their privacy policy, though.

“I’m from Toronto but proud to be from somewhere I’ve scarcely been!”

One of the problems with the way federation currently works is if I block US politics on one instance, I still get it en masse from other instances.

Before activity pub, all that duplication of threads would’ve been handled by moderators merging them together. Actually, it wouldn’t even have been so necessary since userscan see the existing thread and just post underneath that.

When blocking a community, we really need a check box to allow us to block the same community on all instances.

We can go further

Things can be good from the consumption side. But the developers are often working long extra hours to make that happen. If we want to escape capitalism ever, we need to think of the human element.

I would love to see a non-proprietary desktop music player. Just something simple that I can listen to my MP3s with. Audacity is great, but it’s a PITA when it comes to casual listening.

/s. As sbv Said in another comment, I think it’s best to join an existing project. Loops has potential to rival TikTok but it’s still not in a state I would use.

Edit: I could have placed the /s a bit better to flag my surreal sense of humour. I was joking about FOSS lacking a desktop music player, because there seem to be hundreds of them. I use Audacity for editing, not listening to mp3s :)

I could really use some of these. There’s a video showing what they look like for anyone interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUxcMQ4MKK4&pp=ygULRHVtYndhcmUuaW8%3D

If I understand you right, you’re saying that you support making software like Lemmy accessible for users of all types. I agree completely.

A little unrelated, but “intelligence” is not a singular thing and nobody is “intelligent” or “not intelligent”. Also, because we each have our own limitations, we’re not really qualified to evaluate the abilities of another person since we tend to reference ourselves in doing so. IQ is now increasingly seen as not fit for purpose by academics and professionals of education. And all this without mentioning IQ’s history is in the support of eugenics. So if the experts are abandoning the idea of IQ, we can do the same and stop beating each other over the heads with it. Then we can get on with focussing on accessibility, which as you say is where our priorities should be.

The whole process was a massive time and energy drain in the end with no benefit. I don’t think anyone with a life would pursue something like this any further. I trialled-and-errored my way to Lemmy.world while I was out of work. Otherwise I’d still be on Reddit.

Championing for accessibility is the opposite of gatekeeping, no? And coding doesn’t solve everything. At the moment, the perfect Lemmy instance could be coded and nobody might find it given the plethora of existing ones. Anyway, we disagree and that’s okay.

In the EU there is some amount of data protection and privacy rights, so that matters to quite a few people. Commercial outfits handle those distinctions behind the scenes (eg, US users vs EU users get different amounts of privacy). On the fediverse, the user has to figure this out themselves.

Beyond that, I agree with everything you say. Some of the instances don’t even have the name “Lemmy” in the domain or brand which makes it confusing. Or maybe they’re not Lemmy but just ActivityPub compatible. I have no idea. You can also get unlucky picking a “bad” server. I first joined Kbin.social because it had the best UI at the time but man, it rarely worked and totally put me off.

“If somebody gave up on the registration, how would you know?” Because although I have an account here on Lemmy I can still see discussions on comparable sites.

“If you gave up on the registration, then how are you here?” Because I came back a year later after coming across a good explainer for how the fediverse works.

I’m not going to look at that link.

If any of that were true there wouldn’t be posts and comments here and elsewhere from professional programmers who gave up on the registration process because of bad UX. I was one of them. People don’t give up on registering here because it’s “scary”.

If you’re one of the many people here happy for this to remain a niche for tech people then that’s different.

I’m not trying to say that marketing is empathetic. I’m saying that meeting people where they are at is.

Biodiversity is great. Abandoning confused users isn’t. Those options can still exist without baffling the user.

“Marketing programming” understands the human condition and tries to facilitate people. That part - for all its other failings - is more empathetic than telling people who struggle that we refuse to “dumb down” the process for them.

“I cannot fathom how the idea of having choices could be considered, let alone by so many people to even make this into a controversy, to be bad design. That’s the very thing that makes federation great.”

Because for every choice presented, people want to know the consequences of each one before proceeding. It’s a well understood problem in sales and marketing. People do not want to put themselves in a position where they have to undo. Companies like Apple do this very well. In computer shops, the reason staff are hired is to help get the customer from “wanting a laptop” to “choosing one laptop”, rather than walk away feeling that they need to think about it more.

“Just look at a few of the most populated sites, and pick one that looks good. The choice makes 95% no difference in practice”.

Maybe if they said that on the signup page it would help. I think it would have helped me. But just because you have a sense of what “looks good” doesn’t mean the average person does. It’s the average person that I want to interact with on the internet.

Maybe you’re right, but I think that the issue isn’t that everyone was on one server, but there was nowhere for them to go without loosing touch with the people they connect with there. The fediverse can easily give people an out and they can still stay in touch with the people they want.

“I started out on .world but didn’t like their moderation and defederation practices, so I moved.”

That works for me. But most of us here have been running linux boxes on ARM devices for so long that we have trouble relating to the average user. I met someone recently who makes great contributions to Reddit posts like fact checking and providing digestible research. They’re not tech savvy and I doubt we’ll ever have the value of their contribution here while things are as complicated as they are up front.