I think the whole thing might be a joke? 😀

I’m confused, is this a serious take? How they make their money leads to how the game is designed and who for. If it’s advertising it’s shit. If it’s microtransactions it becomes about min-maxing annoyance for most gamers while attracting whales, gambling and is shit. Monthly subscriptions is a model that needs loyalty and should attract people who want to “live” in an permanent virtual game world.

Ideally I’d want a global “entertainment subscription” non-profit that is funding projects for the players benefits and is somewhat crowd-controlled like a socialist bank.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Yeah the “happen to be” was meant to be slightly sarcastic. The only answer is to make conscious and smart decisions to be more inclusive and representative instead of profit motive. Unfortunately there seems a lot of pushback with hatewagons that will make producers more conservative.

The problem is that it’s commercial driven. They want the big stars who just happen to be white. But then want to sell inclusivity for profit that lead to questionable creative decisions.

The rage is misdirected but not wrong. Representation is important but is being exploited by soulless corporate robots.

Still interesting. zstandard using pretrained dictionaries (zstd --train). Previously they used zlib.

Does anybody know if you can pretrain dictionaries for 7zip for large ebook libraries? Or any better compression library for text?

Wait, it’s already over?

“You rape one child and you get booed at the olympics!”
– some hypothetical case, hopefully /s

Yeah thinking about this, individual servers for specialized topics seems like the way to go. I guess it depends on the type of community. Vegan is large enough but still a specialized community that yeah doesn’t need size. It’s specialized but not a niche.

But other niche communities, e.g. av1, jpegxl or velomobile, are too niche to work without more people. I think.

But it would still be good if you could at least set a community to automatically “forward” to a new instance. And maybe that a community could “export” the posts from existing instance to a new instance. Then you could move or merge. I believe something like that is needed.

Ok I’m just thinking out loud here…

Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.

There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.

And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don’t need downvotes since there wouldn’t be too many “controversial” topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn’t enough “tagging” on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post “funny/silly” or “unconstructive” or “misinformation” or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I’m wrong with this.

But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn’t support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can’t filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.

Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more “post-truth”, not just the fascists but the “leftists”, liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it’s bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they’ve been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to “heal”. But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don’t just mean the socialists lol).

And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it’s users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.

So I think it’s not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.

Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂

Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.

But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots… and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.

Wait, what? Where can I read more about that?

I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn’t defederated from the socialists or “tankies”. So I can participate.

This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.

If lemmy can’t somehow federate communities separately from instances I don’t see lemmy thriving.

Even talking about Tim Walz son is a distraction and a loose for us.

Ah normal people. My apologies

No I don’t use facebook or twitter. But it’s more for personal disgust than for morals. Nothing you or I or ten thousand lemmings do or not do will change the rising domination of social media on our civilization. Same as our individual choices won’t impact climate change. It’s the same illusion that only serves to prevent actual action against a serious threat. Not even thinking or talking about possible solutions. Corporate control of the means of communication is amoral, and accepting it is problematic.

Maybe I’m wrong and network effects can be overcome through a well crafted alternative like mastadon. But capital translates into power for marketing, development, articles and regulation or even legislation.

Normal people have friends and family and would like to use social media to stay in touch with them. There are network effects that make it practically impossible to switch. This is not something that can be done with the power of love and well informed agent in the marketplace.

One solution would be to nationalize facebook and other social media and turn them into public utility coops that are run democratically by giving the workers that work there a vote for who and how they should be managed. And give the users a vote.

Everything else is just fantasy. Facebook is forever. You’d need many billions in marketing and advertising to get enough people to switch. And then it will be the same shit.

Unless of course Elon Musk buys facebook, then it will be trash in less than a year.

We’d be able to create megastructures to shield or replenish the water by then. Whatever the “we” is then. Or just build a shit ton of orbitals, much better mass to real estate ratio.

Hmm. The initial drama seems bullshit, starting a huge fight over the word “craftsmanship” is just hypersensitive at best or toxic behavior to manufacture outrage at worst. A gender neutral terms would be preferable but hardly the biggest issue right now.

But since “uncle bob” supports Trump then that alone is enough to condemn him as a supporter of fascism and bigotry.

Yeah even full on nuclear war won’t be as bad as the big asteroid 65 million years ago. Life will be fine for the next 1.5 billion years until all the water evaporates.