If you’re on Android and want filters, I’m looking for beta testers for my app. I’ve got keyword filters that can hide or collapse posts that contain a word or phrase… well really I have a system that is very easy to add filters to and I’m looking for feedback

If you have an idea that would work better for you, let me know

I’m finishing up testing today and spending tomorrow hopefully getting a build uploaded, let me know or check out !flemmy@lemmy.world if you’re interested

Iphone build is in the works, keep an eye out for Luna for Lemmy

That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”

By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible

Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals

Wildcard!

Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.

They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference

Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies…as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS

Leave the bad… Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they’ll go for it

And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It’s social media without an agenda - that’s both rare and pretty damn important for all of us

They can’t stop. There’s a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can’t stop - that’s just what a corporation is. I’ll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it’d still act like an amoral cancer on society

It’s not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they’re freaking huge…

As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

100s means you asked for metadata

200s mean it went ok

300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

400s mean you messed up

500s mean I messed up

So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot

I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media

Running a server isn’t that expensive. Someone did a breakdown, and found the cost is around $0.20/user/year. Their math might have been a little off, but it’s in the ballpark based on the back of the envelope math I use to see if something scales

That’s well within casual donation amounts.

But, that assumes admins and mods are volunteers- maybe they get a few bucks now and again, but their time is a far bigger factor than server costs

There’s also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it’s possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?

I’m actually working on this haha.

It’s definitely a v2 feature, but it’s in the works

It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter

Probably something with sundials. ~6am going up to 12 at noon, then going 1-6pm if night and day are equal (I’ve never actually seen a sundial and I’m sure people got clever with them as time went on)

I mean a sundial doesn’t even track hours so much as daylight before and after noon

I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital

Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?

Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work