you could just design an alogorithm that heavily favors any posts physically close to you. the closer they are, the higher in your feed.

check out NextChat and LibreChat

the color scheme of that icon physically hurts to look at

Netflix is literally 6x more expensive while having like 6x less content too. and the content they do produce is garbage.

terminal fedibrain

The way I understand it, no technical support questions (because there are other communties for that). Other than that any good faith questions about anything are okay, as long as it’s not considered discriminatory, hateful or otherwise disruptive. And the mods decide what those latter three are.

Like asking something about fishing or cooking or life advice or anything you might want to ask someone.

Is there a sub for lemmy related technical questions only?

Would be nice for specific implementation questions.

I’ve joined 3 weeks ago and aside from a couple of images not being visible once in a while and my instance being down one day, I haven’t had issues at all. But I could easily create an account on another instance as backup and browse there.

Signup was a bit confusing at first because the apps are not 100% there yet, but in general the apps do everything you want them to 99% of the time. Only “powerusers” will be unsatisfied.

There is easily enough content to browse all day already and I’d say a lot of content isn’t even techie related or politically charged.

I’m just missing a few art subreddits, but that’s it, compared to Reddit it was a pretty easy transistion. I don’t miss it at all.

I mean, it’s not just boomers, because it’s a world wide problem. But in general inequality is more or less the biggest problem. After every financial crisis birth rates drop and stay down.

All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971 when we introduced the FIAT money system. Basically ever since then the entire system is set up to steal from anyone who can’t benefit from debt and give that money to those who can. Any savings and income is constantly eroded away steadily making the bottom ~80% poorer. Then we also started artifically lowering interest rates, which made the stock market and real estate markets go nuts, making everyone who already had assets rich and those who didn’t even poorer.

Boomers didn’t really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means, they just passively benefited from it, because they already had assets. It’s more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system in 1971. The entire financial and monetary system were reengineered to benefit the rich.

Mark Blyth frames it as a revolt of capital in his book Angrynomics. Basically before that workers benefited hugely from the system, because wages were constantly rising in line with productivity growth and cumulative inflation was so low that you would actually save. There were no crazy real estate bubbles created by the central bank like we see today. That stopped after 1971.

I wouldn’t say Boomers did this, because they were way too uneducated to even notice what happened, because they got all their news from the same people that stole their children’s future. You can blame them for being to stupid to stop it, yes.

There’s some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues, but inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest. It’s pretty much clear as day in the data if anyone cares to even look. It’s not some big mystery, it’s just going completely ignored, because it would be a huge problem for the people in power.

Oh yeah, and the reason why this problem is world wide is because we exported that same system all over the world to pretty mich every country on earth. Ghadaffi wanted to break that system with an African stable gold backed currency and that’s why Libya was destroyed. It would completely invalidate our imaginary money like the Dollar or the Euro and the powerful couldn’t steal from the rest of us every single day.

depends on what channel you’re on

Almost all our social systems are built on the young providing for the old under the assumtion of generations growing. The population collapse we’re currently starting will be the biggest issue in the future. (alongside the loneliness epidemic, but that’s a different issue entirel)

We’re in for a like a 45% reduction in generation size each generation. And this trend is only increasing rapidly. All the causes of this are deeply entrenched economically and socially, so we won’t be able to turn them around on a dime.

Unless we find some social, economic or technological solutions, we are all majorly screwed. Eveyone who won’t die within the next 30 years or so will be majorly affected by it.

And no, immigration can’t fix it long term, because all the rest of the world is experiencing the same thing. They are just at different stages. India, China, the Americas, Europe are below replacement rate and dropping. All the other regions are are slightly above replacement rates and dropping, except Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan African women are having one less child every 10 years, so they will be below replacement rates within a generation. More and more people having internet access will only rapidly increase these trends.

So in 20-30 years, it’ll be a zero sum game who can most effectively steal each other’s populations.

The only groups that are still growing normally are highly conservative religious groups. Israel is one of the only developed countries that still have normal fertility rates, and they are slowly being taken over by the ultra orthodox.

Maybe life extension or AI can save us, while generally keeping the social order in tact. But all the other solutions don’t look very appealing. You could have A Handmaiden’s Tale, or government/corpo created babies with artificial wombs, like Bladerunner or Brave New World…

You can’t run a society on old people and for those saying it’s good because climate change, you won’t be able to fix climate change if everyone is in total chaos and only concerend with immediate survival. It’ll be like “everything is fucked and YOU want US to stop burning coal, yeah nah”.

Well maybe it won’t be that bad, but it’ll certainly be a huge social issue.

You habe to have both. People mold their behavior around incentive structures. If you give them the incentive to commit crime, they will commit crime. If you give them the incentive to do better, they will do better.

Then again you also shouldn’t have bullshit laws that punish people for things that hurt no one but themselves, like the war on drugs. If they do something to hurt someone while doing drugs, that’s what we have all the other laws for.

Viewing the comment history of other people shouldn’t even be a feature, or at least optional. It made Reddit so incredibly toxic.

Same, post history should be optional.

It’s such a childish behavior to stalk someones history just to be able to dismiss their argument. It makes nuanced discussion between different camps so much harder and is a big reason why Reddit was so polarized.

On YouTube, everything is much more self contained, you only see like 3 comments of the same person on the same channel. It is much more refreshing to be there in my opinion.

Being on Reddit is like fighting with your toxic ex who constantly brings up something irrelevant you did 10 years ago.

The features a social network has very much influences the quality of the discourse. I would much rather Lemmy gives users much more fine grained control over these kinds of features. Like give users the option to hide their post/comment history, but then perhaps also let communities ban those users from commenting, let each community decide. Same with anonymous posting etc…

Yeah, the nested comments section with up/downvotes is the most efficient way to structure a discussion. Infinitely better than the old forums.

There are a few issues with how up/downvotes can be undesirably distributed (like brigading), but the core concept is good.

It would make sense to have different filters on top of that.

Like rewarding high-quality comments (based on some metric like lexical complexity). Or maximizing diversity of opinion, like by rewarding comments that are different from all the others, would help with the circle jerking and brigading. Or categorizing comments as serious, joke, insult, by political leaning, etc.

Also with these LLMs, it would be interesting to try and summarize the entire comments section, giving you briefly the most brought up points or most interesting points.

Or by rewarding comments that have been made by people like you. Like if you are a nuclear physicist, you will preferentially see comments by other nuclear physicists.

And you can toggle between all of them like new, hot, too all, etc.

Perhaps you would even have a marketplace for these filters where anyone can post new ones, like an app store. Give users maximum control over their experienve.

It’s about trust. In a low trust society people show no regard for the society as a whole and will only act in their own interest.

There are various reasons why people loose any sense of belonging to a society, but the outcomes are always the same and you will see what you are describing.

I wanna say today it’s mainly caused by inequality and cronyism that’s been skyrocketing over the last 50 years.

Inequality at the levels we’re at destroys society from multiple angles, from making life completely unaffordable, to making dating harder to making different demographics blame each other for all the problems.

If you don’t feel your investment into the society is reciprocated, then you feel no need to follow any of its rules or make any sacrifices for it.

Yeah that is a good point. I think it would need some permissions managment, like “only community members can vote” or “only community members can see posts”. And those might be attached to every post or not depending on how the community is configured.

You also have the ability to restrict users based on certain rules or roles. Like on Reddit, no posting if your account is less than X days old, etc… Certain members may be allowed to upvote but not post etc…

You may set it so new users can only see any posts made after they joined or not. And then they are also exempted from forking those posts.

Automatic timeouts for when posts should be deleted would also be nice. Also togglable community wise.

Basically setting the platform up to be as public or as private as the community wants.

Would be pretty complex though and not that essential. And might break the whole fork model.

deleted by creator

I think social media designed like “Reddit” is just THE logical way to structure social media. That’s why I think there is just an inherent demand for a platform like Reddit. Because of the network effect, social media platforms strongly tend to centralize. More users > more content > more users > more content > … it is a self-reinforcing cycle favoring centralization. So that is the reason why reddit is popular, it was “the first”, it is big. The only reason why people would ever leave is if Reddit themselves screw themselves over. Luckily for us, they do all the time.

Where Reddit really fails is how powerful admins and mods are, and regularly abusing that power. To fix this, you need to change the incentive structure so that power goes to the users themselves. Lemmy is already better at this because of its federated structure.

But I would go a step further and make communities work more like git. Anyone can fork any communities, meaning they create a new copy of a community but under their management. If enough people switch over to that fork, they get to keep the name of the sub.

That way mods and admins are incentivized to act in the best interest of users at all time, because if they don’t, they are easily deposed.

As a bonus it would also result in making new communities from two groups who shouldn’t have been together in the first place. Essentially creating more and more specialized communities more closely matching the wants of the users.

This is different to Lemmy or Reddit where you would have to create a new sub, with zero content to depose a mod/split the community.

You essentially make the process to switch out mods as low cost as possible for users. Thereby massively increasing competition, increasing quality and user satisfaction.

Ideally this would all be built on top of some base data storage layer like IPFS or something, so you don’t have to literally copy over all the content any time you fork a community, but you just copy the references to where the content is stored.

Also hosting should be as simple as possible, ideally on some decentralized hosting service, like some of these crypto solutions.

This would basically remove all barriers to creating and maintining your own communities, except for hosting cost and moderation.

If you had to design the perfect social media platform, I think that would be it.