OpenStars

Honestly I think the hexbear situation may need to be revisited based on recent observations where among other things an instance admin lied to another instance admin. Even lemmygrad.ml had this to say about it:

The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.

Personally I want every single diversity of opinion to be able to be shared... so long as it is offered in good faith. Which HB is demonstrably not doing, even to admins of other instances. (That said, I don't always want to see it all of the time either - like porn, it would be good to be able to turn it off if I don't want it flooding my feed 100% of the time? Which after defederation, that is what I have bc you don't need an account just to lurk on content from an instance.) Ofc that's up to you all on lemm.ee to decide for yourselves, not us as outsiders, I was just offering my personal opinion since we were discussing it and it's good to be upfront with my biases:-).

I don't know as much about lemmygrad.ml tbh - that whole defederation issue predates me, although on StarTrek.website I did make the mistake of replying to a comment in a post that I found while browsing All that made me wish that I had never heard of the place. It might have been something along the lines of saying that at least Biden had lowered gasoline prices which helped poorer people and thereby that aided getting Democrats into the USA Senate during the midterms, and how while nowhere near enough it at least was a strategic move that wasn't "nothing"... but whatever I said, the response I got was EXACTLY like when I accidentally did the same to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net - I got an enormous FLOOD of responses filling up by Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. I did not feel like I fully consented to that level of vitriol and hate in return for what I intended as at least an attempt to better understand a complex situation.

Anyway if full defederation is the only way to prevent such content from showing up in every new person's feed, then so be it. Although I actually would rather have an opt-in system based on proper labeling than a "hard defederate", it's just that such is not made available to us by the developers of the codebase (although PieFed has it, yet the flagship instance PieFed.social has defederated from those two instances already). So since the only options allowed are full defederation vs. help spread all of their content without offering any warning to new users, and not only content but their echo chamber fueled hatred and vitriol towards any opinion that is less extreme than theirs... then defederation it is that seems the best course of action moving forwards, imho.

And perhaps that is what keeps people from putting communities onto lemmy.ee? Knowing full well that the hexbears and lemmygrads will be able to brigade it? If so, it's fine for lemm.ee to remain as a general instance - again it's up to you all who are on it to decide what you want for yourselves - I was just curious to think about the potential reasons why. Also I think it's great to have at least one instance in the Fediverse that is that way, and it would be a loss if it were to change. Then again, hexbear admins lying to admins of another instance... at that point the argument put forth that at least the admins were better behaved than the average user seems no longer true, and that the instance might not be trustworthy any longer in the future? Reaching out in full friendliness is awesome! But not in the face of such bad faith behaviors in return.

I agree on the rest - about people wanting to be more consumers and less contributers, in large part (from what I hear) due to the current state of the moderation tools that apparently are quite poor, and all the more so across different instances, which in lemm.ee's case would be exaggerated since to keep up the standards of a community the mod would have to remove content from hexbears.

Yes and I hope I did not come across as negative about lemm.ee's policies - the "shocking" part to me is not having exploding heads (probably bc it's defunct, yet most instances keep it there just in case it were to ever decide to resurrect itself, or another in its place using that domain name), and other decisions that are "unusual" (for the largest instances at least) are to not include hexbear.net or even lemmygrad.ml.

And even given all of that, it still has preemptively defederated from threads.net, which makes it all the more extremely unusual that Lemmy.World has not. Even so, as I mentioned, I get it, for those reasons stated.

Tangentially, I wonder why more communities are not housed on lemm.ee. The largest is a movies community with only a few thousand subscribers, and already the next largest is down to a singular comic (albeit a popular one). The next largest instance, sh.itjust.works, has 6 communities larger than the biggest one on lemm.ee. I guess it's related to the whole centralization on Lemmy.World thing, but most instances slightly smaller have communities that are larger - lemmy.ca, feddit.org, lemmy.dbzer0.com, programming.dev, etc.

Like this?

Hrm, that gives me ideas. If urban dictionary makes concepts simply understandable to people within cities, what would its opposition be? Oh wait no I already know, it's Faux News sharing its alternative facts to people living in the cuntry. :-P

I may not know what a vaccine is, nor autistism (sp), nor pastryesation (sp of pasteurization) but I do know that vaccines cause autistism, that's why I drink me's some unpastryesated milk - and ain't allow anyone in my house to do anything different neither!

Fwiw, Urban Dictionary has a definition of a cuntry flag. It is exactly as you would expect: the same definition as a regular country one.:-P

I hear you dude! 😜

Yes, PieFed has a tiled view that iirc is default for some communities - see e.g. https://piefed.social/c/memes@lemmy.world?layout=masonry&sort=.

For Lemmy, no, unless an app does it.

MrKaplan mentioned that there were a ton of "spam communities", so possibly they have since been removed. They weren't real anyway. https://lemmy.world/comment/13613002.

Want some...?

I hope so too.:-)

OnePlus phones also used to be nearly as pure and lightweight as older Google phones, I mean from before Google started the enshittification. But they screwed up so hard, running off one of their co-founders (the tech guy, being ran off by the business/money guy), that most enthusiasts abandoned them. Also they switched from their OxygenOS to the crappy ColorOS used in cheap Huawei phones.

Afaik, nothing else has risen to fill the gap, and looking at the state of technology in the world today where every company chases after purely short-term profits to the exclusion of all else, I don't know that there ever will be.

At which point it boils down to iPhone, if it works for someone to use that, Samsung if people like that (I don't), or something small.

We should not be so confident about anything involving the USA moving forwards - after the recent election, EVERYTHING can now be different. Maybe. Possibly, but while I don't know what will happen, I also do not know what will not happen either, hence this is a time of great uncertainty.

I have thought about trying another iPhone, though if I did, I would want it not to be my only portable device. I simply cannot afford to be sent e.g. an email message or calendar invitation or some such and have it not come through or be displayed incorrectly purely b/c it came through via a Microsoft (or more rarely Google) account. So then on top of the >$1k price tag, I would need a laptop or Android that is still yet another ~$1k or at least hundreds more? (or depending on someone's workflow environment - e.g. if your work offers you a laptop, and you need that for a trip - then at least carry around a USB drive with you as well, to have available to use at a moment's notice). At that point though why not just get the Android and bypass the iPhone entirely, especially if that one device would meet all of your needs? iPhones are very pretty, with amazing glass touch & feel, and have nice functionality - again, so long as you remain entirely within their walled garden, though depending on my future job prospects, I may not be able to always function within those constraints.

And yes Google is ruining Android, according to many people from what I hear, though I am not fully up-to-date with it. I suppose my point there is that a downwards trend to go from an open-source environment moving towards a more closed one is still not comparable to iOS that is fully closed already. If Google is bad b/c it is making Android more like iOS, then how bad is Apple for having made iOS that way right from the start? Although I thought the actual case against Google was about its search engine, not Android, or there have been some other investigations along the lines of its Play Store, again not entirely about the actual "OS" (when such things as F-Droid can bypass their monopolistic store).

Most Apple fanboys, such as myself, tend to love Apple until it betrays/disappoints them and then abandon it in a huff of rage-quitting:-). I have taken a middling approach though and remained with Mac OSX b/c it is a fantastic product, but iOS is a different story imho. Either way their hardware and the software integration with that is top-notch, I agree with you there. It also is significantly more expensive for a similarly-specced Android device, especially for offering much less functionality - I suppose it is a more "premium" device, for those willing to and capable of working entirely within its tight limitations. I suppose my biggest beef is that I would no longer feel outright "proud" to own such a device (necessary for me to justify a higher price) as I would have in the past, and yet I cannot really say that about any modern mobile device anymore, unfortunately, with enshittification having touched every manufacturer so hard.

So I will vote with my wallet and find something that meets my needs when the time comes to replace my current one - possibly a non-flagship cheapie, or maybe a Fairphone if that would be good enough.

Google and Microsoft are not the only evil software corporations - Apple has become that as well. Fortunately desktops seem to have been made immune, while the iOS app continuous to lock everything down inside of its walled-garden philosophy. Apple makes it super difficult to send files to the device - e.g. if you wanted to transfer a file (like a PDF) from one machine to another using your device as a USB drive - and other things so that while yes, if every single thing that you want to do lies within this walled garden then you are fine, however if you want to set even one foot outside of it, you will quickly find the limitations unbearable. e.g. the experience using an Apple email account is amazing - you can start typing a message on your phone, then continue on your desktop, then continue again on your phone, back and forth as much as you like. But even just sending and receiving emails at all, or like working with calendar invitations, using a non-Apple email account provider, such as Google's Gmail or Microsoft's Outlook, it's absolutely abysmal. Every professional workplace I've ever been has given me a Microsoft email that is mandatory for me to check, so I don't have the option of simply not using Microsoft, and instead I find myself not using iPhones, as they do not meet my needs.

Android is not Google. Android is open source, and there are many implementations of it - Samsung is very popular, OnePlus used to be, and yes Google Pixels are just one example of Android but they are by far not the only ones. They are the most "pure Android" versions of the software though, without added vendor-specific stuff like both Samsung and OnePlus have entirely separate stores to purchase apps from in addition to the Play Store. It gets a bit more complicated when Google has used the "embrace and extend" philosophy to somewhat destroy Android from within by poisoning its development from the inside to make it work the way that they want to - but importantly, anyone at any time could create a fork and continue its development along different lines (which routinely happens! these are the "custom ROMs", like Lineage OS), so it still lies within the realm of open source software, as opposed to Apple's walled garden that is entirely closed, both in source and in terms of you not being allowed to do with your Apple hardware what you wish.

You might also like a Fairphone then. Or we may both end up hating it - I don't know enough about it to be able to guess, it's just that other than iPhone or a major Android provider like Samsung or Google or OnePlus, what else even is there, especially an option that is more purely open source?