Flemmy

Hahahaha...he didn't start Tesla or spaceX

He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as "co-founders" and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

There's speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I'd still be singing his praises... Except he hasn't.

He's not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

Every time he's tried to start something, it failed - he can't build a team to save his life.

He's good at hype and having money, I used to say "he's a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up... That's not the worst thing to be".

Now? He's convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They're driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

I can't say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could've done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn't have done it from scratch

NAH (excluding cheating obviously)

Having gone through a very similar situation, I'll just say that I don't know if there's a right answer - I think they'd find out eventually, but a few years to let it fade would've hurt their relationship with their mom less

And unless she sucks as a mother, that isn't going to make their lives easier.

At the same time, maybe hearing it from her will make it easier to move past it, or maybe they would have blamed both of you and tainted both relationships... Who knows?

I would've told you to wait until they had a little more life experience to temper the blow, but it's a judgement call. Neither option is right or wrong - they didn't necessarily need to know, but it is also the truth behind an event that will change the course of their life.

You're their parents, and your only responsibility towards them is to do what's best for them. Even if I had all the facts, it's not obvious what that is - it's a judgement call

Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

But what if they had turned around and said, "fine, we'll start hiring you guys. You'll get paid hourly, but you'll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs"?

Most of them wouldn't be into it - they don't actually want to work for Reddit, they just don't like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they're not doing a job, and they generally don't want to be (there's a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don't try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don't break their tools and ask when they'll get back to work

My theory is he's heard Musk brag about how he's made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)

No way that's true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there's growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you "the users might get mad, but they'll come crawling back if you stand firm" they pay attention

It's pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient

I was using wefwef, it looks nice but it's slow and has awkward UX. Every time I want to reply or vote, I have to take a second to think about which way to swipe

I think you're into something about not complete or not good - I was hoping to be one of the firsts, but building a solid foundation takes time - I could've gotten something out there a week ago, but I've got big plans - I want to build discovery and sorting into the app, I want to be able to pull from multiple servers at once, and I want users new to Lemmy to have their hands held as they pick a server. And obviously, it has to feel responsive

To do that I had to build a data store and coax high performance libraries to play nice. I was pulling posts and had the account switching working on day 1, but I didn't even start on posting until a couple days ago - and only after I made drafts that would reload when you go back

It's easy to build something rough, fast, or inefficient Building something polished means working on the foundations, building it up, and doing and redoing things as you consider what feels "right"

Give Flemmy a shot in a few days if you're on Android (more like a couple weeks on iphone). It's still early days and there will be bugs and missing features, but, now that the groundwork is solid, it's moving fast

I really like how willing people are to read and write essays. I like to lay out my argument, cover likely arguments against it, reread it, maybe edit it down or come back to it later.

It makes me understand my own position better, and sometimes I realize I'm wrong (or they no good would come from convincing someone I'm right) and I delete it

On Reddit, people would just skip over it, hell a few people called me out on my response being too long and let me know they didn't read it... One guy said something like "who even are you, I don't know you and my gf doesn't talk to me that much"...it was deeply confusing

Totally agree - when the server was quiet and empty it was one thing, but the server isn't quiet or empty anymore.

It's annoying seeing memes reposted by bots (people can do that just fine all on their own), but I've seen stuff like AITA threads - the OP isn't even here to read it... Is the idea to judge people behind their backs?

I found it extra upsetting because I'm hoping the Lemmy version will be more like AITA using to be - it turned from "who is the problem here" to "did you have the right to do this"

I'm considering a free version on the app stores with limited ads(subtle and no tracking), a paid version without them, and one with optional donations on alternative stores.

I don't like ads and I don't want to shove them down unwilling throats, but most people don't care (and frankly I need the money)

Among the ones that do, there's those that hate seeing them, and ones with privacy concerns. If I make them subtle and offer an upgrade to remove them, I hope that'll satisfy one group, and the other one can get a build where the ad libraries were never installed in the first place

I think it should be dramatic - it's a very serious choice, and it shouldn't be made lightly or quietly. Especially when it's because of social rather than technical reasons

It should be a big deal, and admins should feel the need to answer to the community when they make that choice. It needs to be dramatic, or it'll become too easy

I think it adds character. I didnt like when they were global, but when they hung around certain subreddits it gave flavor to the place

Limited and local are the keywords here though

I've got a short list to finish before I release Flemmy on the play store this weekend, and a dynamic filter system is one of them... The UI is the hard part, so it'll probably be rough and hidden in a subtle menu initially, but one of the things I'm adding for the next big release is configurable feeds... The idea is you can take an account, a server feed (sub, local, all), apply filters to it, and it'll save where you left off if you switch between them or leave the app. I've done similar stuff in the past for data analysis screens, and it's one of those things that is magical when it's done well, and destroys everything when it's done poorly

I got requests for hiding read, nsfw, and keyword filtering (I'm iffy on if that last one is a good idea, but I'm going to give out a shot).

I also got a request for a "block all communities on a server button", which would work on your account globally.

What did you have in mind?

I've got a plan. I thought to myself "jeez, pretty crazy you can run a personal Lemmy instance on raspberry pi". So I start thinking - how much could you do on a phone? The answer is - a lot if you do it as you go

I'm pretty good with data - and there's a lot of it there free for the taking. But I'm not a company, and I neither want nor need your data. I don't even need a backend - you talk directly to the fediverse, and your phone crawls the network alongside you.

I'm not paying to process it either, so I don't even have to be that efficient about it - I only need to handle one person's data, on their phone, as they go. I tested it on the Android go phone ATT sent me for free a while back - the thing is a toy that doesn't even run a full version of the play store, and it had no trouble running it

I've laid some pretty significant ground work, and I'm nearing a release - it's not doing anything fancy yet, but it looks decent and it's a great foundation to build on. For now, the recommendations will be just stuff you've scrolled past, but once I build it out it's going to be so good I'll have to remind people their data never leaves their phone.

After all, it's based on how humans meet naturally - through common interests and meeting friends of friends

I'm testing the posting right now - I've been pretty stressed when I remembered that other people probably like to post, and I need to finish that and a new-user onboarding that will plop you on a bunch of servers to get a feel for them before you sign up. Keep an eye out for Flemmy, I'm putting it on the play store by Saturday, and an iPhone build will be not too far behind.

Well, I guess I should probably wire up the inbox... It's kind of therapeutic posting without being able to see replies, but probably not improving my social skills