Another traveler of the wireways.

  • 4 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle

  • Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.

    The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.

    Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.

    Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).

    Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.

    Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.

    Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.

    The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.






  • I don’t know how accurate the stats are, but around the bottom of each instance sidebar they have a breakdown of users per day/week/month. I think that’s supposed to pull not from signed in visits but whether they were active by voting/commenting/posting.

    Excluding the instances you mention, there’s still a sizable amount of people active if those stats are reliable.

    You can see the weekly/monthly stats aggregated in the list view of instances on Lemmyverse:

    https://lemmyverse.net/



  • Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally), many of them seem to have a rather narrow set of interests they like to engage with. Namely technology (self-hosting & Linux in particular), news (primarily to do with politics), and memes (a mix of things but largely politically-tinged, old memes, nostalgia-tinged).

    Outside of these interests the next most active may be cute animals, comics, and video games with some gradually rising gardening, stitching, woodworking, art, and certainly other interest communities I’m forgetting or haven’t noticed.






  • Besides the active forum with an off-topic section recommendation, I’ve gotten the sense a lot of this style of communication has shifted from forums to group chats in whatever messaging app people are using, whether it’s Discord or Whatsapp or whathaveyou.

    It’s unfortunate as those aren’t the same style at all, but seems to be how things are now. It’s part of why I wish more fediverse instances would instead operate with a site mindset and try to build distinct identities. A few do and they’re much more interesting for it imo, feeling like the small community site they are in a good way.




  • Meant to comment this earlier. On your last point so far as I’m aware there’s currently no way to create a link post (direct URL lemmy link as you say) from Mastodon/microblog to Lemmy. The reason your test post is linking back to the Mastodon instance is because of the image attachment, because you can create image posts between the two.

    If you drop the image attachment, while it won’t look as nice, you can get the separate title, link, and body text without it looking too bad. Unfortunately it will lose the visual draw in the process, but that seems to be the workaround for the time being.



  • It may not do much depending on the mods/admins, but it never hurts to report and downvote comments or posts like that.

    Emphasis on reporting there, as I think sometimes that stuff lingers around because people have made a habit of only downvoting and blocking those doing that regularly. I realize in your examples it’s more likely bias or bigotry respectively, but still.

    Report first, then downvote and block. Doing only the latter only makes your experience a little better, the former may help the community.



  • Whenever you like, honestly. It’s mostly a nice acknowledgment to the poster that you appreciated their post. Unlike commercial social media it’s not sending out anything to your followers that you interacted with it (at least last I checked).

    I think many people boost more than favorite because it functions a little similarly in regards to acknowledgment, with the bonus that it helps share the post to others which is even more relevant in federated networks than on centralized platforms.