ElectroVagrant

Hey, so right off the bat, not a complaint thread, but wanted to request/highlight some little non-technical matters that I think would help a lot of folks.

In Ruud's pinned thread, there's an okay overview & recap of what happened, but what this misses are some key details to help folks resume access to Lemmy World both via browser & apps. For reference, I think Beehaw's admin's post is a little better at least in terms of formatting, resolving access issues on browser, & direction for further assistance.

Thankfully for browser it seems relatively simple, if you visited while the site was compromised, Ctrl+F5 your cache & if that still doesn't work, clear site cookies (typically accessed via clicking padlock icon in address bar, clear cookies/site data). However for apps...It unfortunately seems a little all over the place since they're still pretty early in development.

I think the best case for addressing the app situation would be to compile the info others have provided in the comments for resolving their login issues & provide a non-exhaustive rundown of the solutions, while directing folks to relevant app communities for additional help/advice.

Also, I don't recall if it was present before, but on review I've noticed the sidebar on the front page for lemmy world doesn't have a link to this community for support. If it was and hasn't been restored yet, it would probably be a good idea to restore that so folks can more easily find their way here to ask questions/report lingering issues.

Thanks to the admins for their prompt action in seeking to address this vulnerability & compromise, hopefully this further prioritizes attention on these areas from the devs/contributors to minimize risks in future!

See title, but for some added detail: I've been thinking lately about how one of the stumbling blocks for folks to federated social spaces is the absence of, for lack of a better word, engagement algorithms.

What I mean by engagement algorithms are the different systems corporate social media employs to drive your continued use of their apps/platforms. Choose a few interests/people/communities, see some suggested topics/people/groups to follow. You follow Mad Max, maybe you'd like to follow Furiosa!

Furiosa liked/shared your photo! You viewed this video, here's another you might like, and another, and another!

These systems tend to do a few things at once, keep your attention, minimize friction to find more to interact with/view, and in turn discourage actively looking beyond them. Depending on how you use them, or in some cases just how they work, you're almost discouraged from socializing and instead encouraged to doomscroll/perpetually consume as they tend to work more as broadcasting/advertising platforms at a certain point than social platforms.

Remove most of the engagement algorithms and instead have folks socializing as the "engagement algorithm" and some folks tend to seem a little disoriented or lost (which is sometimes the absence of familiar faces tbh, but not always!). Moreover, some just...Never really wanted to socialize much to begin with, so this may not really translate for them to begin with.

What do you think?

Ran a search & didn't see a thread on this, although there may be a Git issue raised on the subject. Nevertheless, I think it would be nice to have a setting from the profile & per post/comment to mute notifications for replies to posts or comments, as desired.

On Reddit there was no such account-level option so far as I'm aware, so you basically had to make it a habit to disable reply notifications on every, single, post & comment if you didn't want to see your inbox/notifications lit up.

I know this may be a little counter-intuitive, but after awhile I honestly don't want to see that someone randomly replied to one of my comments or posts from who knows how long ago. In the cases that I might, though, I'd leave the notifications on, of course.

Folks that have been here awhile probably already know this, but may have forgotten and new folks may not know it, so a reminder that we build the All feed together:

These previous ways will only show communities that are already known to the instance. Especially if you joined a small or inactive Lemmy instance, there will be few communities to discover.

With that in mind, for intrepid explorers here, I'd highly recommend looking for communities via Lemmyverse and joining them from here to make the All feed more varied than just Lemmy.World's communities.

I post this as I was browsing through All the other day and noticed it looked like I may as well have remained browsing Local for how few remote communities I was seeing. And that's not for a lack of interesting communities on other instances either!

This thread showed up in my community today, and it brought to mind that I don't think there's a policy/guideline in place for Lemmy.World to handle community closures/abandonment.

Presumably where abandoned communities are concerned, the idea is to rely on folks contacting the admins to request them so they can take on moderation & try to build up activity. For closures, however...It gets a bit more complicated.

I'm sure it would depend on the circumstances, but what would we want any such policy/guideline to look like? E.g. should moderators have to give some advance notice or open the closure to discussion, so that if the moderators simply found themselves too busy to moderate they could find someone else to take on their responsibilities?

Personally I have an idea of how I'd handle it, but I'm sure many other mods may as well, so it seems like having some policy/guideline concerning this would be a good idea going forward.

When you step outside the fediverse and try to talk to others about it on corporate platforms, chances are you'll either get, "Yeah that's too complicated" or "Isn't it full of [insert bad people here]?" or some variation thereof, at least if they've heard of it at all. A lot of this comes down to communication or messaging failures.

Some of those trying to invite others are excited by the new place they've found & its tech, but they don't entirely understand it or they kinda do & mistakenly think others might be too & try to talk both the community & the tech up (or just the tech) and completely miss their mark. The people they were hoping to invite are now more put off & think their community is full of similar folks, and at its worst they may think it sounds a little like all the cryptocurrency/NFT-bros trying to promote their crap.

So, how might we work around this? Following are my thoughts, but I'd like to read yours as well.

First: try to know a little about who you're talking with/to. This is how you figure out whether to try to invite them at all, and if so, how to go about it without rapidly losing their interest & turning them away from the entire idea. This is easier with friends & acquaintances, of course, but for strangers...

Well, try striking up conversations on posts where your interests intersect and/or platform dissatisfaction is expressed & if interest in another social platform comes up, bring it up that way. Don't try to force the subject, that's what drives folks away.

Second: forget the tech backends. The tech doesn't matter to the vast majority of the folks we might like here. It's cool, and interesting to some of us, but most folks? They don't care. One of the biggest mistakes Mastodon & Lemmy instances/sites have made is to put the tech upfront over the communities they're aspiring to cultivate.

Other community sites didn't build themselves up like that, and frankly, neither should we. So when you're trying to invite folks over, invite them on the basis of your instance/site's community culture and secondarily the formatting/structure, e.g. it looks like Reddit/Twitter/etc. but without ads & annoying algorithms.

Third: if they're your friends or acquaintances or just someone expressing some curiosity about the space, invite them to your instance. Don't give them choice paralysis by pointing them to a list of servers like on join Lemmy or Mastodon.

Pointing them there is like telling someone to check out forums and giving them a large loosely organized list of forums to pick one of & join. Very few would go from there & sign up to give one a try, and even then they're likely to bounce off from unfamiliarity & not knowing anyone there and what they even want to post to strangers.

Those are just a few of my thoughts though, what about you?

TL;DR: know your audience, pitch your community not the tech, invite them to your community instance & don't point them to a big list of instances.

I don't use some of them nearly enough, but I really like Zim Wiki on desktop/laptop for the ability to link to different files in my notes. For on the go, I tend to use Joplin right now as I like that it's open source & relatively easy to sync between my PC & phone.

I've dabbled a little with TiddlyWiki, but I feel like I need to learn more to really customize it more to my tastes. I've also been meaning to try running DokuWiki from a flash drive, as I like the wiki format a lot, but I feel like it may be a bit overkill.

I've seen some mention of Evernote & Obsidian here, but I've not used those personally. Also sorry if personal wikis are out of scope for this community, they're just among the first to come to mind when I read the name & sidebar!

Supposing that they, y'know, try to keep their setups secure anyway. With how much you see about breaches of different sites, it's hard to imagine individuals and smaller groups being able to keep their stuff secure.

Although, they may also benefit from being lower value targets in some respects, I suppose?

An interesting post going over the history of the social bookmarking site Delicious.

It’s not comprehensive as it was mainly for the author’s own research, but it’s a compelling read all the same imo.

(Sorry if this eventually appears again, tried posting this awhile ago when lemmy.world was having federation issues and it never went through.)

let's see if 0.18 has helped federating posts, maybe

I've been enjoying some classic shows' '90s/'00s revivals/reboots like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits lately, but I'd love to know of some other series with a similar anthology style to them.

They don't have to be similar to Twilight Zone/Outer Limits btw, just that format of different stories & casts each episode is what I've been enjoying.

First specifically reported a little over a week ago, more and more reports have been showing up concerning the issue.

The admins are well aware of this, and it's being worked on as Lemmy continues to undergo development, so hopefully we'll see this mitigated further with each update, and find ourselves with a better synced federated community.

For the time being, just be aware that your posts to linked/remote instances from Lemmy.world may not be getting through to others, so don't feel too bummed if you think people are ignoring your posts or comments...Chances are they aren't, they may just not be seeing them!

As to what you may do to work around this, you may want to make accounts in less bogged down instances so that you can more reliably post across instances, but if you're content with the local communities of lemmy.world, then you may post & chat here till the issues are minimized.