Lemmy Project Priorities Observations
I've raised my voice loudly on meta communities, github, and created new [email protected] and [email protected] communities.
I feel like the performance problems are being ignored for over 30 days when there are a half-dozen solutions that could be coded in 5 to 10 hours of labor by one person.
I've been developing client/server messaging apps professionally since 1984, and I firmly believe that Lemmy is currently suffering from a lack of testing by the developers and lack of concern for data loss. A basic e-mail MTA in 1993 would send a "did not deliver" message back to message sender, but Lemmy just drops delivery and there is no mention of this in the release notes//introduction on GitHub. I also find that the Lemmy developers do not like to "eat their own dog food" and actually use Lemmy's communities to discuss the ongoing development and priorities of Lemmy coding. They are not testing the code and sampling the data very much, and I am posting here, using Lemmy code, as part of my personal testing! I spent over 100 hours in June 2023 testing Lemmy technical problems, especially with performance and lost data delivery.
I'll toss it into this echo chamber.
On Reddit it became extremely popular to hate on Facebook by 2015, but very few would discuss why or how. It isn't as if Reddit was advertising-free and didn't have documented cases of grass-roots exploitation. The code and management of Reddit put a huge amount of time into trying to prevent vote manipulation (and make it a trade secret) - where none of that seems to be going on with ActivePub platforms. People notice where Reddit fails, but they don't seem to notice how hard the problem really is to solve when nobody cares about real identity.
Facebook people mostly used real names, real houses, real photos with their family. Reddit seems to really hate that for the mainstream audience, and that carries over to Lemmy in 2023.
People don't use fake identities to share secrets about companies by name, instead more often than not fake identities are used to pump garbage and copy old content and present it as new.
It's funny how when people talk about Facebook as bad, they never seem to mention the real identity aspects of many people on it who joined 12 or more years ago. And there is something kind of sick about a society where real identity and real problems have to be hidden to be accepted online. The thugs have kind of won.
YouTube you often know who the person is because so much is presented in the images and audio. Some of the small-time youtubers with only 700 views talking about technical topics are really the kind of sincere and earnest thing that have largely been abandoned.
Surfing memes of billionaires - be it Trump memes from his antics or Hollywood film memes or video games making billions of $ - and their memes... is dangerous. Trump rode on "high energy" and mocks scientific thinking. The crazy shark-frenzy trend-chasing of memes has become the cornerstone of Lemmy.
lemmy has had wave after wave of hate. Hate towards Reddit bring bitter and hate-filled emotions as the central core of Lemmy for many months. And hating on Elon Musk. And hating on this or that. It really has been an emotional Mob Mentality of hating things.
That's the kind of emotion Cambridge Analytica was spelling out to those who wanted to 'lead the masses', aka get votes - was packaging in 2013. Now it's all just accepted, the constant hate as a 'fun topic'. Bitching all the time.
There are people with great social skills... but they aren't becoming leaders away from hate or exploitation of crowds. A social movement towards goodness is long overdue, but it doesn't seem to take hold.
Christianity in USA has degraded to be almost pure anti-science and out-group hate oriented. Sure, this was there all along since 1492 when it came to Americas from Europe. But it has become notably worse since 2012, and people don't seem alarmed that groups can be shifted that way... much like Germany in 1930.
There are no easy ways to measure these things, but there are warning signs when entire populations become motivated by hate and mocking.
25 years ago... When Islamic societies used hate and anger as ways to motivate street gangs, everyday people criticized the hate and anger.
But now it's become politicians and leaders all over the world in 2023 who are using them - without any need for Islam. Politicians and other leaders have had hate and anger professionally endorsed by Cambridge Analytica medical professionals now for over 10 years.
Again, we used to criticize Islamic people for using hate and anger to form street gangs and followers.
Clearly people liked many aspects about how Reddit presented information, as an information system. And there has been very little positive discussion on Lemmy about the good and what to keep. It's mostly been hate-filed expressions of "fuck spez" instead of "what worked well and why anyone cared positively in the first place".
Reddit 2013 and earlier was very different, 2013 was the year of Cambridge Analytica engaging populations.