Oh yea I hear you.

Just recently read your 2017 article on the different parts of the “Free Network”, where it was new to me just how much the Star Trek federation was used and invoked. So definitely interesting to see that here too!

Aesthetically, the fedigram is clearly the most appealing out of all of these. For me at least.

It seems though that using the pentagram may have been a misstep given how controversial it seems to be (easy to forget if you’re not in those sort of spaces). I liked the less pentagram styled versions at the bottom. I wonder if a different geometry could be used?

I mean, maybe a hot take, maybe not … casual/social voice conversations at a distance were never a good idea in the first place.

Not absolutely at least. A disconnected voice that can summon your attention at any time wherever you are is a weird, uncomfortable, unpleasant and maybe unhealthy thing.

Textual communication at a distance odd much more natural, as it matches the disconnected communication with a more formal and abstract medium.

I know, but Unicode is big. I’m saying that there may very well be something better.

I appreciate the argument, but I feel like there’s too much of a chance that we can do better with something in unicode. Or, that this isn’t really good enough. Three asterisks is just too meh, IMO, to catch on.

⁂ … to me right now just looks like a splodge on the screen.

Somewhat unfortunately, the pentagram in the older icon probably can’t really be used without some cartoon-ification, because reasons.

I was under the impression that friendica supported groups or communities and should be able to follow lemmy communities more natively (without using the microblog interface)??

If it helps, I’ve posted about how to bridge microblogs and lemmy before:

https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095

And on taking advantage of the new automatic hastagging: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/112720255264101773

… which is more relevant on the mastodon end but also rather helpful IMO and a major improvement if people take advantage of it.

In the end I’d say this is likely a nice demonstration of decentralisation and a plurality of instances is inherently valuable. Every online place will have its inclinations and slants, in many ways, which can always combine to create shitty interactions between otherwise defensible or understandable actors/motives.

Ensuring that there are multiple such “places”, which we can each connect to as we wish, means that many/most issues or people can have a place to “breath” without handling the shitty noise and friction the internet is so liable to create.

Hell, I don’t even use bookmarks. I type in the web address for my services every time

Yea, I hear you (I don’t use bookmarks either) … but I don’t think this is the average user.

I think the best example is the issues with that come from Lemmy/Mastodon integration. Mastodon posts have a different mentality than Lemmy posts do, not to mention with structure of responses.

This sounds to me like a design issue. In fact, this is kinda my point … better interaction here, which is the “promise” of the fediverse, may be best addressed with good aggregating clients rather than relying on too platforms to work out their historical differences over the protocol.

Hmmm … seems my response from mastodon didn’t federate (sighs) …

copy-pasted (sorry, for whoever federation did work, this is likely making things worse):

Personally, I’m there with you I think. I only use default web-UIs on all fediverse platforms I’ve used, and advocate for that.

But should multi-protocol systems and multi-platform clients become normalised, I think this goes beyond “to app or not to app”. What I’m talking about could likely just be a web-app.

The issue is more around aggregation and creating something “greater than the sum of its parts” out of open alt-social.

A useful lens I find is whether a social media system is good at creating, facilitating and hosting genuine communities.

Alt-social right now is struggling with this I think and, IMO, has plenty of room to grow in this regard.

The difficulty though is that it requires more features in our platforms, some likely non-trivial. That’s a big ask for an open non-profit ecosystem.

An effective means of aggregating multiple parts into a unified view could alleviate this.

To go on about it … I don’t think the browser does much at all. Unified feeds and notifications, with helpful filtering, sorting and organisation? Helpful account management? Making it easy to cross-post or copy across platforms or protocols?

Why have an RSS Feed reader if you could just visit each of the web pages individually? Obviously one can, but the feed reader is still useful.

While I think I understand where you’re coming from, I fear it’s coming from a position of habit and app fatigue rather than from a general consideration of what could work well on alt-social (where my position is that it isn’t really working well enough (yet)).

Do you happen to know what platform compatibility they’re aiming for (I haven’t picked up on that) … a “plain” mastodon & user-actor or anything involving more that could be compatible with groups / threadiverse?

Yea anything big and mainstream just seems super shallow.

I’m not on top of things to compare accurately, but it was always kinda like that (and is like that here sometimes too). But whenever I’ve gone back, I’ve definitely felt like it has gotten somewhat worse. Some of that could easily be a shifting standard from spending more time on other less “mainstream” platforms though.

A few months ago, the “Nazi” presence on substack and substack’s insistence on not moderating them (like at all it seemed) broke as a story, during which Casey Newton (and by extension his “platformer” blog) got engaged with substack about the issue and, after being disappointed with substack’s responses and policies, famously left for Ghost (see their post on the move here.

Pretty sure that boosted its profile and prompted talks of federating, which they were initially hesitant to do … but here we are now.

Ha, yea! If you know rust, then you don’t need to reach for Python (right?!). Plus the main motivation was to contribute to lemmy itself while also learning rust. That another platform is good for personal instances doesn’t change that, though piefed does seem cool and I can see myself wanting to get involved with it at some point.

Cheers! 2 threads and 2gb RAM I’d what I would have hoped for anyway. Thanks!

But I get the database thing. Its spiking every couple minutes and a lot every hour. It’s not a big deal if you have 2 threads at least but I can see how it doesnt work for everyone in every scenario.

Yea database management seems to where the growing pains are right now (with the core devs welcoming help from anyone with DB/PostreSQL expertise) … and indeed it seems to be a perennial issue across the fediverse platforms.

If I may ask (sorry, probably annoying) … what sort of resources would you recommend for a small personal lemmy instance? (let’s say 1-5 users, ~200 community subs and a few local communities?)

Yea I did a quick search through the GitHub issues, and it seems like there are some growing pains with updates they’re making to the way things work and the load it puts onto the database. Sad to hear for smaller instances as my impression was that lemmy had pretty good performance for smaller instances. Architecturally, it makes sense that there are different tradeoffs for bigger and smaller instances. It’d be good to see things mature to the point that you can tune things for your instance size. In the end though, picking the appropriate platform but with the assurance that migration can occur when you need to change platform may be a good way to go.

I think there’s a pretty fair argument that more common and easier languages and tech stacks are preferable platforms for smaller more personal instances … just the comfort of being able to modify and debug is probably worth whatever other tradeoffs may be encountered. Python, naturally, is basically a prime candidate. So yea, PieFed seems very cool, especially for personal servers and they’ve got a good performance profile.

Interesting! Any insights or comments on what’s increased the resources of lemmy over the recent updates?

but it shouldn’t

I’m curious about why you think this relatively strongly (if you don’t mind my asking)?

Without knowing the financial history of the place, it seems a good case study in something that could have gone for the sustainable stalwart of the internet path but instead fell to the dark silicon valley profit/growth side of things. With wikipedia being the only great success (AFAIK) at forging solid and sustainable foundations for the internet, I suppose the lesson is that it has to be non-profit, or open-source (or both) from the beginning.

In a way, it is kinda on many of us for not realising this and pushing against it sooner.

One of the great things coming out of the fediverse (and bluesky too at the moment) is all of the open software being developed that will hopefully plant seeds that will last a long time.