Unblended

I think that bots that repost automatically are lame, personally, but as long as they are clearly tagged and I have the ability to ignore anything from any bot that's fine. We had the same issue on Mastodon, I still can't figure out how to straight up block bots on there which is frustrating so instead I just filter out any posts that say "twitter" or "RT".

I don't have any issue with bots as long as they're easy to block across the board instead of individually.

I do think it's lame and that y'all are better than that.

I wonder if China has a favorite.

Can't control when you do it.

I've been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I'm coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching -- you cannot tell people things like "you should just join lemmy/kbin" -- you have to wait for them to ask "how do I join lemmy/kbin?"

That's okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be "here's what you're missing", positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

It's an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn't gaslight people), but they're also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

Consider focusing on the positive -- link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don't need an account to read and enjoy.

Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread -- that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They'll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what's going on.

And now they've convinced themselves it's worth joining...

While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it's clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they're usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

I'm not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to "[email protected] and [email protected] are different people" because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn't take that long to click honestly.

Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don't turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn't seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what's going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I'm sure...!

I wonder to what extent the massive imbalance in news coverage was simply super wealthy families handing journalists pre-written pieces so that laziness would dictate this result (rather than the journalists doing this naturally, although laziness is natural enough I guess).

No, absolutely do not run your own instance, that's absurd. That's like saying you shouldn't bother using email if you don't host your own server.

Your concerns make sense, they have complete access to anything you post and I can't imagine that any sort of messages are encrypted. That's just true. They could theoretically take your posts and sell them for profit, though anyone can already do that by simply federating with your server.

Anyway.

There's a limit. Just assume anything you post is not private for sure. I don't know if you can edit things, but I'd be shocked if it were impossible for an admin to. Maybe I'm wrong, they're such early software...

The good news is that in theory you should be able to migrate your entire account from the one you are on to a new one if you don't like the policy. Maybe? Not sure if that works yet.

But no, do not roll your own instance, that is silly and ruins discovery. At the same time be aware that the one you are on is ultimately owned by someone with the root password.

In your case, lemmy.ca says this about the instance you are on.

Lemmy.ca
A canadian-run community, geared towards canadians, but all are welcome!
Welcome to Lemmy.ca!

“Lemmy.ca” is so named due to it running the Lemmy software, in the Fediverse, and it’s geared toward Canadians, hosted in Canada, and run by a Canadian. It is, however, not at all restricted to Canadians, or Canadian culture/topics/etc. All are welcome!
We have some rules here:

No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No porn.
No Ads / Spamming.

That gives a fair amount of information about what is and is not acceptable on that particular instance. Looking at your local communities only should tell you a lot about the general character of the group, I don't use Lemmy (this is from kbin, hi) but it seems like your UI has multiple buttons to show all/subscribed/local feeds, so switch it to local and see if it pisses you off.

Telling who owns it is harder, I think that's often somewhat obscured for dox/harassment reasons. However, in this case the website shows at the bottom of the right-side column who the admins are:

admins: @smorks @crb

And now I see that @smorks noticed your post and hopefully that will clear things up ;-) Hopefully they don't mind being doxxxxxxed.

Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?

I've been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I'm saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.

So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.

This is so far true for "what is a photon", "what is consciousness", "how do you do a kick", and "why are most metals thermally conductive" so I suspect this isn't a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.

Again, not criticizing especially since I don't know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.

I'll try submitting the same, sure.

I am suspicious that the search URL will only be indexing kbin.social and not the greater kbin/lemmy universe which is not good. But it's a !kbin bang and the !msocial bang goes to mastodon.social so I guess it makes sense.

I'd much rather see a !kbin search that returned results from all kbin instances it has indexed, and a !lemmy search that does the same for lemmy instances, or a !fediforum search that returned results from both. But it's a start!

Very cool, I didn't know they added !msocial.

Seems it only searches tags, which seems appropriate for Mastodon.

I feel like there is a huge difference in expectations of discoverability with this UI versus Mastodon, which makes full text search a non-question here whereas on Mastodon it was a (often ill-informed but well-intentioned) argument about privacy.

On Mastodon you can opt-in to have your posts indexed by Google, hopefully kbin/lemmy can rely on DDG or Google to do the full-text search for us with a flag on robots...?

hmm, but when I looked under the #mosstadon tag from within Mastodon, I don't see any of these. Something isn't quite talking yet.

there's a set of posts like this

https://toot.wales/@Knittingdancer/110283413448659149

I thought that the microblog/tag search stuff would share individual posts "microblogs" or whatnot between the tools. And ideally pixelfed so we can get #mosstadon posts originating from instagram style systems.