• 45 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: November 1st, 2020

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  • I think you’re getting hung up on the word “federations” (noun) instead of the adjective “federated”.

    Who decides who gets to email who? The email provider admins. Should everyone be in a single email network/bubble since otherwise there is no communication? Mostly, yes. Do I need a separate account per email bubble? Per email bubble? Yes. But how many email bubbles are there? One? Whats the practical limit on number of providers per the email world? None, mostly?

    Gmail does ban a lot of small email providers if they don’t seem “legit” enough. And that is where you’re onto something with the noun federations.

    If a bunch of instances really disliked a different bunch of instances they can indeed severe each other from each other. The admins would do that. They put the other instances on a block list. Most Mastodon instances block Trump’s Lie ehm Truth Social etc. But otherwise you can talk from gmail to hotmail to mcselfhost, with one account.

    Basically federation works based on a block-list, not a allow-list, unless the admins of the instance set it that way, just like email providers.


  • That’s fair. Assuming people do behave that way, it wouldn’t be an issue.

    On a slightly tangential angle: what about the communities that maybe won’t have a dedicated instance, like: corgi, cooking, jokes, etc… all those communities and posts would be on the biggest instance(s). If the devs don’t want this instance to be the flagship instance, once/if lemmy hits sudden growth they’ll be in for a rough time. :P

    I just feel like this approach isn’t super conductive to decentralization. In the alternative scenario you’d be seeing corgi pics all over the network, this way most likely just here. But maybe that’s just an issue of lemmy’s current small size, and would be solved on its own once it grew, and the number of instances grew. Maybe I’m underestimating the growth potential of smaller instances.


  • True, but so would all the other askelectronics communities on all the other random instances too. Good luck finding the best instance and the best community on your own. Maybe, depends.

    Also, I might’ve ninja edit my comment just as you were posting, somewhat relevant to this, so I’ll repeat it here: I think this would lead to people just simply asking about the best community all the time. In this case, this stuff might just have to end up being stickied somewhere, in literally all the communities: “If you want a better answer, go to: yaddayadda”.


  • zksmk@lemmy.mltoLemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 years ago

    Long comment ahead, sorry about that.

    This is the exact worry I’ve had about lemmy’s federation for a long long time, so I’ve even made an issue on the github awhile ago, with a possible solution. Take a look.

    But I don’t think it’s been high up on the dev’s priority list, either due to lack of time and a backlog or they just don’t see it as a desired feature, because they might like the idea of a hundred separate similar communities. They might see the future of lemmy’s federation in the form of old school forums but with one account login, instead of as a single large community a la reddit. I think that’s a mistake. There’s a reason reddit replaced forums, and it’s not just a single login, it’s also single communities.

    I almost think mastodon might solve this sooner than lemmy. All they need to do is take the existing feature of “trending posts”, and just apply it to individual hashtags too, which can btw already be followed, since the latest update. Boom, they basically already have interconnected “subreddits” at that point. They would just need to add top of the day/week/month, and they’ve mirrored all the features.

    And to be honest, I see merit in both approaches. There is a certain level of humanity, personability and coziness in old school forums that isn’t often or easily replicated in large communities generated by the modern social media format. But the other format also has its merits.

    Imagine there’s an instance dedicated to engineering. It would obviously have the best askelectronics community. And lets say you’re a person that’s into plants and has an account on an instance dedicated to gardening. And now you want to ask a question to askelectronics. You’d first have to know about the existence, the name and/or the url of the engineers’ instance and then go there to get a good answer. That seems like a hassle and unlikely to happen. Mastodon has hundreds of instances.

    What would instead happen, is that people would gravitate to a couple, two or three, large instances, that would become huge, most likely split on political grounds. And that’s, to be honest, kinda what’s already happening with lemmy, no? Maybe two or three additional instances, for, continents or something special, like an instance for official communities of projects. I feel like this future would lead to max 10 large politically echo-chambered instances.

    If instead we really would get random topic based instances, things would be very different from reddit. You’d always start your posts with: “So… guys… what’s the best instance to ask this question on?”

    And if this feature I suggested existed, with the opt in/opt out choice for communities, you could have the best of both worlds, with ease of use included. Actual technical, bandwidth, funding, scaling issues not withstanding, I haven’t considered that yet.

    Maybe I’m wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m curious what other people think.











  • zksmk@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.mlBforartists
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    2 years ago

    Bforartists was a lifesaver for beginners back when Blender had horrible UI.

    These days default Blender’s UI has been improved immensely, but BFA is still great, even though slightly less necessary.

    One of the down sides for beginners is most of the tutorials are for regular Blender, but it’s close enough.





  • zksmk@lemmy.mltoFirefox@lemmy.mlRandom search engine
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    2 years ago

    < Is it possible for the default search engine in Firefox to be randomized at each search

    I’ve been wanting this exact thing for quite some time, and would love it if Firefox could do this natively.

    There’s an add-on, but you have to lead your searches with a custom word all the time.


  • < not a dictatorship in any way or form

    I said potential for in that specific part of the process, and corruption is a thing, was there a need to put an emphasis on that? What if the fish starts rotting from the head in a system like that? Believe it or not, western democracies also have a potential for dictatorships, particularly when the press isn’t free. There’s already semi-dictatorships in Europe, like Hungary, for example.

    Your links, which I most definitely read, all the way back when this stuff was posted like a year ago, literally say, that to start your climb in the political institutions you need a college degree. That’s interesting, but so much for accessible for anyone. And to climb, you will also need approval from the higher ups. You don’t see potential for corruption there?

    I never even claimed the Chinese system is a horrible system, why are you getting so worked up? You’re the one that keeps insisting it’s obviously superior.

    < The systems in Europe aren’t all that different from US

    That’s why we have stuff like this?

    And to be fair, I’m a bit saddened you’re bringing the discussion to the level you’re bringing it, with the typo remark, and the other remark you made about being educated, while simultaneously showcasing a lack of awareness where the EU’s notorious democratic deficit was (somewhere in these discussion comments), and flip-flopping on it, so, as I feel this discussion is no longer in good faith, and your emotions are getting the best of you right now, Imma bail out.


  • < selection process based on demonstrated competence

    All I see here is a potential for a benevolent dictatorship and a malevolent dictatorship. Benevolent dictatorships are cool. Until they turn malevolent. That’s the big problem.

    In liberal democracies you have a choice. There’s been plenty of random movements and parties that exploded in size, like that five star movement in Italy, or the Greens in Germany, or whatever. Just like there’s been random politicians that came out of nowhere, no capitalist background, like the Finnish PM, Sanna Marin, or whatever.

    I’m not touching the US’s essentially two party system (due to “first past the point” voting) with a ten foot pole here. Or the UK. Or the Anglosphere in general.

    < regular working class people

    The CCP has plenty of working class "foot soldiers”, just like western democracies’ parties do too in their ranks, I see no difference.