@otter@lemmy.ca cover
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otter

@otter@lemmy.ca

I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer to use.

🍁⚕️ 💽

Note: I’m moderating a handful of communities in more of a caretaker role. If you want to take one on, send me a message and I’ll share more info :)

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

otter ,
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I saw this exact box recently and I was thinking about how I've missed seeing these 😄

otter ,
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I block ads everywhere, and so I sometimes forget that there are no ads on the Fediverse to begin with.

Remembering that made me feel a little bit more relaxed. I appreciate everyone here 😊

otter ,
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Generally there shouldn't be anything (on Lemmy anyway), it's showing 0 on mine.

Out of curiosity, can you check what is being blocked on yours? It could be worth following up on

otter Mod ,
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Amazing stuff, thank you!

Some other things I've learned:

Fediverse specific:

otter Mod ,
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I think you replied to me instead of the post itself

Brave is listed on their website, and maybe it wasn't included in this shortlist because it's US based and has had a number of controversies

otter ,
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The problem is that the algorithms optimize for this kind of content. The people seeing this LLM avatar wouldn't start seeing the "good" LLM avatars. Instead, content in the "good" spaces will become watered down with low quality/ rage-bait-y slop

otter , (edited )
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🫘

low beans

otter ,
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I saw a mountain lion in the closet, which means it's not hunting me. Who else is hiding in the room...

otter ,
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Oh, no worries then

r/Silksong joins Lemmy

For the past couple of weeks, some of us moderators of the subreddit r/Silksong, have been working on an exciting project. We’ve created a lemmy instance for fans of indie games. We officially run and support this instance and the Silksong community on it. Please check it out at !Silksong@indie-ver.se...

otter , (edited )
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That's amazing, welcome! I look forward to these communities growing.

The first link was broken for me, here are the 4 communities so far with clickable links for anyone else that wanted it:

https://indie-ver.se/communities

otter ,
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Thank you!

I'm also trying to help some of the new users on the linked posts but I'm running into Reddit's Karma requirements. I don't mind passing along the comments for a mod or someone else to post instead 😄

otter ,
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When your team has a moment, I would recommend setting up your instance on https://lemmy-federate.com/instances

This will automatically add your future communities onto other people's instances so that users can immediately start using them. It helps a lot with community discovery. You can also send out the existing communities after the instance is registered.

I'm not by a computer right now, but I can send over our settings choices if you have any issues.

otter ,
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No problem! Thank you for approving those :)

otter ,
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Right yes, when we set up piefed.ca we also had to wait a day or so before we could sign in on lemmy-federate. There may be a short waiting period for the information to refresh. Hopefully it works out :)

otter ,
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What is W?

Seems like it would be easier for the moderators there to collaborate with a threadiverse community

otter ,
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If anyone else is curious, here is what I found on the link

https://docs.hollo.social/intro/

Hollo is a simple, single-user microblogging tool that lets you run your own little corner of the internet. Think of it as your personal Mastodon instance, but stripped down to the essentials.

otter Mod ,
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There's a graphic in the article with a breakdown, 17% are "Not sure"

While that's normal for surveys like this, it's also annoying. They're unsure about if they want a war with their next door neighbour?

Sun releases the largest solar radiation storm ‘in over 20 years,’ forecasters say ( www.ctvnews.ca )

Powerful solar activity released by the sun is heading for Earth and it’s likely to create dazzling auroral displays in unexpected areas Monday evening and early Tuesday morning. It could also disrupt satellite-based communications and GPS accuracy....

otter ,
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Assuming you're looking for Lemmy/Piefed clients, you might be able to install some of the front ends as PWAs. Photon and Blorp for example

otter ,
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Voyager works, although I don't think it's intended for Desktop use

otter ,
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If looking at a gun with someone else and they assure you it's not loaded, you can respectfully ask themn to clear it in front of you before you handle it yourself.

Would you have a good video of what that looks like? I don't think someone should be handling a gun if they're that unsure, but it still might be helpful to someone

otter OP Mod ,
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I'll edit the context into the post, sorry about that

Lemmyvision is an annual song contest that's held here on the threadiverse, with the name inspired by "Eurovision". Instances nominate and choose songs to send into the contest on behalf of their country/region/niche, and then there's another round of voting to choose the winner. We've participated twice so far, articles about those times here:

Here is what the contest community has in their sidebar:

Welcome to the Lemmyvision Song Contest where communities and instances of Lemmy submit a song and vote on their favourites!

The aim is to promote different languages and cultures from around the world, to share more between our online communities across Lemmy, and discover songs from lesser known artists.

The second edition of Lemmyvision ran from March 1st to April 8th, stay tuned for the next event ! 🎶

otter OP , (edited )
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alam is also on the threadiverse, and may post updates about this as it develops

otter OP ,
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Thank you!

otter OP ,
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I see the original post got removed by moderators to prevent panic. Would you have an update that you can share in this thread? I'm happy to edit the title of this post too :)

otter ,
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Predictions

Showerthoughts

I had no idea Reddit invented having deep thoughts in the shower, or making predictions

🙄

Am I the Asshole?

Yea they can keep that one

otter ,
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What are the optimizations? I seem to be getting a worse experience vs. using it in the device browser since there's no adblocking

otter , (edited )
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Use the free trials with both and see what you prefer!

For podcasts, if you're on android, check out AntennaPod

edit: Adding some more information

  • The podcast format was designed to be decentralized and open. Most creators still do direct distribution, so you can follow your favourite podcasts without needing a centralized entity like Spotify to collect it for you
  • The exception is the platform exclusive paywalled stuff that Spotify produces themselves. Joe Rogan is one of those iirc, but I don't think that affects the majority of people here
  • If you listen on multiple devices and want to synchronize your listening history, see here: https://antennapod.org/documentation/general/synchronization
otter ,
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No problem :)

otter , (edited )
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I appreciate that you are gathering community feedback!

Right now it feels like the website is geared towards the style and content that technical users appreciate. I agree with the other comments that it would be nice to simplify the website down. Technical users are willing to explore for more information while the average user taking a quick look will likely leave.

Taking inspiration from other Fediverse platforms, my favourite landing pages are from Peertube and Mastodon:

How about the instance selection wizard (click “join a server” on the homepage), which lets you select topics and languages to select instances. Do the current options make sense?

This is likely a biased opinion, but could you add 'region' as a field, or 'regional' as a topic? For our instance, I think that's how a lot of people are choosing to make an account with us given recent events. It also helps the user find an instance that is nearby (for lower latency), and within a jurisdiction that they are familiar with / can have an influence over through voting or other means. pangora.social seems to be down right now, but I recall them having a nice way of organizing that

Another biased opinion, I agree that it's better to have large instances near the top since they're more likely to be up / fixed quickly / on top of moderation. You could include a note saying that larger instances are near the top because of XYZ, and that people can always make more accounts down the road if you change your mind. That way there's less pressure to pick the "correct" instance.

And the list of apps, what can be done here? For one thing the data is rarely updated, so we would appreciate pull requests.

Could you potentially collaborate with https://lemmyapps.com/ ? It would be easier for users to submit updates to one place (whether it is a PR to you or an update on that site)

If I were to try and critique the site in excessive detail, from top to bottom:

  • Could you make the logo have a rectangular / circle background around it? Right now edges look odd over the dark background. The hover effect looks nicer, maybe with different colors
  • In the header: News, Docs, & Contact can be collapsed into a dropdown under 'About' or something similar, since those are pages that someone would go searching for
  • Instead of 'Join a server', 'Donate' and 'See all servers', it might be better to have one massive "Join a Server" button/card on the front page that leads to the instance list page.
    • Join a serve and See all servers are very similar for a user that's not familiar with how this all works, and they end up in the same place. So instead of a popup, could you have it as a responsive widget on the instance's page? That way users can quickly figure out how the instances are tagged
    • Since the donate button is already in the header, it might be better to have a large section on donations further down the page.
  • The paragraph is a large block of text. I'd prefer something closer to what Peertube did
  • The screenshots could be larger and more prominent
  • The images give off 'AI generated' vibes, even if that wasn't their origin. Could you have large cards with simple icons, similar to the 3 header cards on our site: https://fedecan.ca/en/
  • I like the 'Create your own discussion platform' card's format. It's a bit hard to read, but otherwise nice
  • The 'more features' section could be simplified down to the important points, and maybe even combined with what is being done with the screenshots area

On the servers page:

  • The community explorer and fediverse observer are external sites, but they look like widgets right now.
  • Is every instance under one topic, or would it be possible to let the user select multiple and have instances appear and disappear from the list live?
  • I like Pixelfed's join page since I can quickly narrow down an instance based on what's important to me: https://pixelfed.org/servers
otter ,
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I just took another look at the site, and I love the new changes already!

Very good idea, also opened an issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues/526

I see the developer also found the issue, great to hear that you both might be collaborating.

The images are just to avoid having too much text, a bit similar to the Peertube site. I already mentioned it in another comment, if you know any better images to put there I would be happy to replace them. The icons on your site are very small, so it would still show a lot of text.

That's a good point. I like the images you have currently, and I'll keep an eye out for anything that might be better.

True these havent been updated in a long time. Any specific features that you would emphasize?

A few of them have nice big cards now, so those could be combined. Otherwise the features that I personally would have been interested in are (in no particular order):

  • Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing :
  • User tagging using @, Community tagging using !: You could also emphasize that this works across instances. For example: "Tagging users and communities from any federated instance"
  • Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
  • i18n / internationalization support for > 30 languages
  • RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community.
  • By hosting your own server, you can be in full control of your content.

Instances can have multiple topics, in fact you can make a PR to this file to update it yourself.

Thanks, I made a note for our team to look into that in the future!

I like Pixelfed’s join page since I can quickly narrow down an instance based on what’s important to me: https://pixelfed.org/servers

That's a good point, I'm also not sure if there is a good way for instance admins to change that on Pixelfed's site. I don't have a strong preference either way, but having some way for admins to update the information would be ideal. Perhaps an automated system with custom overrides through a file on the GitHub?

Some more feedback on the current version of the site:

  • It might be good to indicate that the instance in the first card is a random instance, and not an official or 'flagship' instance. That way, if it links to a poorly moderated / maintained instance, it doesn't reflect poorly on the project. My personal preference would be to have the Browse All Servers be the primary button, and then the join button be secondary. A refresh button might also work: "Refresh for a new randomly selected server"
  • Very minor, but some of the images are light mode while others are dark mode. It might look better if it was consistent
otter ,
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regarding the join button, I actually just saw a user have that same misunderstanding: https://old.reddit.com/r/Silksong/comments/1qltxzy/announcing_our_official_sister_community/o1hlnk3/

otter , (edited )
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Seems like the key word in the post was "mass implementation"

It's useful in some contexts while being hot garbage in others. Learning to use it for what it's good at is fine, trying to shoehorn it into everything is stupid.

Same as relying on it for everything. That's not adapting, that's being easily replaceable

otter ,
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Well duh

How does that add anything to the points above

otter , (edited )
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Well yeah, what I said was

It's useful in some contexts while being hot garbage in others. Learning to use it for what it's good at is fine, trying to shoehorn it into everything is stupid.

Same as relying on it for everything. That's not adapting, that's being easily replaceable.

Use it for the few things it's good at, and ignore their false promises on the rest.

This post was about tech companies trying to shove LLM based "AI" into everything. I'm looking forward to when investors move on from this one specific type of algorithm and we can get back to innovating properly.

Have there been shipwrecks that have been damaged by undersea communication cables (or even discovered because cables were being laid)?

Was reading about undersea com/internet cables. Then just started thinking about how wild it would have been if a wreck like the Titanic had been messed up even more if a cable (or cables) had been dropped on it (or even found due to laying them)....

otter ,
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The team wanted to set up here, but was held back by the lack of mod tools.

Lemmy hasn't really improved on them yet, but there's a revamped UI in the works. Piefed has a number of improvements already.

Maybe once things are looking good enough for their high standards, we can invite them back over to take a look 😄

This CEO laid off nearly 80% of his staff because they refused to adopt AI fast enough. 2 years later, he says he’d do it again ( fortune.com )

“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could work only on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only work on AI projects.” He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales,...

otter ,
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So they could have held paint drying Mondays instead, with the same overall effect

"Every single Monday was called Paint Dry Monday" Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could only watch paint dry. "You couldn't have customer calls; you couldn't work on budgets; you had to only watch paint dry." He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales, marketing, and everybody else at IgniteTech. "That culture needed to be built. That was the key."

A generation taught not to think: AI in the classroom

Across the world schools are wedging AI between students and their learning materials; in some countries greater than half of all schools have already adopted it (often an "edu" version of a model like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc), usually in the name of preparing kids for the future, despite the fact that no consensus exists around...

otter ,
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I always saw the rules against Wikipedia to be around citations (and accuracy in the early years), rather than it harming learning. It's not that different from other tertiary sources like textbooks or encyclopedias. It's good for learning a topic and the interacting pieces, but you need to then search for primary/secondary sources relevant to the topic you are writing about.

Generative AI however

  • is a text prediction engine that often generates made up info, and then students learn things wrong
  • does the writing for the students, so they don't actually have to read or understand anything
otter , (edited )
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Yup, it looks like generative AI + image editing after the fact

Image generators have trouble juggling multiple colors and patterns on clothing. It would be a weird stylistic choice to create that effect with image edits alone

Also if you look closely, she has 3 arms. Two arms holding the phone up, one arm holding a soccer ball against her body?

otter , (edited )
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Neat! I'm somewhat familiar with homebrew but I haven't kept up with it in years. I didn't know you could put Linux on it too

I wonder how it would do as a media center for the living room. I'd much rather use a Wii remote to navigate on a TV instead of buttons.

Being able to play Jellyfin off of it somehow would be amazing, I imagine it will need a custom app. Possibly based off of this thing? https://www.wiimc.org/about/

otter ,
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Thanks! I was looking up Niiofetch but it kept giving me results for Neofetch lol

otter ,
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Oh is that what it was 😄

There's an account that I haven't used in years, which gets a "Are you trying to log in?" email every few months.

I got 6 emails at once the other day, figured it was the same junk

otter ,
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TIL 😮

!pudu@feddit.cl

otter ,
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Looks like one user has been doing the majority of the posting, they might not know that people have issues with imgur / of better options