Let's discuss how to efficiently promote Lemmy to potential new joiners

[email protected]

Yeah, and while it may not solve everything, it could still help!:-)

[email protected]

Hehe go for it then:-).

Rimu

Still ongoing, but basic functionality is working.

[email protected]

I think they're calling you a liberal because you used federation with HB and grad as a negative criterion for your list.

Blaze (he/him)

We could do a poll to see how people feel about those two instances, but the vast majority of posts on [email protected] involving them show some clear power tripping

Note that LW can be sujected to the same criticism

Blaze (he/him)

sites that permit it

So Bluesky nowadays, based on Meta and Facebook recent removal of Pixel fed and Lemmy mentions

[email protected]

I don't disagree

[email protected]

A thought that just hit me in the shower.

I don't feel like lemmy is too small. It quite comfortably fills all my lazing on aggregator time without getting stale. The thing is, like many here, I'm a libertarian leftist politics nerd that's into linux and self hosting.

That description describes a sizeable chunk of this project's userbase so enough content is being posted enough to saturate the feed.

If you want the project to expand into other niches, you will have to be post into the void about whatever you're into. Seed forums with TV shows or photography or hiking or warhammer or whatever you're into and encourage others to do the same.

All forums are dead at first but if you want people to come and talk about pottery, you're going to have to make that forum cozy before it gets enough interaction to become self sustaining.

[email protected]

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I'm misunderstanding, what you're proposing amounts to "if you want to downvote in a community you'll need to make an account on it's instance". This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that's potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren't the community host. Disabling downvotes flattens these nuances into the same "-40", which I agree isn't great when it can lead to deletion - but I'd argue that's also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn't prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it's implementation and what federation needs to function properly. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing it away entirely.

So much thought has been put into "how do we convey the different instances' character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn't a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way" in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already there.

I'll acknowledge up-front that the "just" in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I'm suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They're written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they're called votes: there's a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don't know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I'm currently unaware of). I wouldn't expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I'm ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they're run for lemmy, for example).

I can't foretell if this would "solve" opinion downvotes on it's own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of "subscribed"/"local"/"all" + the different vote rankings.

[email protected]

Well, also maybe Reddit, unless they're also removing/burying other social sites. Besides that, any messaging services one may use to chat with friends or others.