krayj

I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it's nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don't think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

Also, for the record, I'm not actually looking for assistance. I've honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.

That's not exactly how it's working in practice.

Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that's kind of how it's working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by "all" instead of by "local", you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance's members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it's almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation...fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

The only way it would be 'solved organically' as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances -- but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.

I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn't you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don't join them because people haven't heard of them?

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

People haven't heard of them.

Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things....leaving me even more confused about what you're talking about.

The problem is when it's a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.

Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won't get an answer. If I'm a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective...due to the synergy.

If it's trained on previous community interaction, it's just going to automatically tell people (in the rudest way possible) their question is a duplicate and kill the thread for each and every new post.

Distance from screen: 1/2 to 3/4 back (2/3 back being ideal)

Horizontal position: as centered as possible

To take it a step further, the end site that causes the ad to load should also be jointly liable. They are the entity that makes the partnership with the ad network, they are the one benefitting, and they are the one making ads a requirement to use their site. It's the end site that pushes the requirement for the user to see ads to use their site, and so they should inherit some of the responsibility for ensuring those ads are not harmful.

if you force me to view ads to use your site, then you should be forced to vouche for the integrity of those ads.

These rules imply, but do not acrually require, that posts must provide a link to an authoratitive source. It is possible to interpret those new rules such that sources are optional and that the only time some of those requirements come into play is if a source was optionally included.

I think there should be an explicit requirement that all posts include a link to a source...followed by all those other requiremeents.

Glad somebody mentioned that this disparity is very largely and collectively self inflicted. It's not necessarily because they are stupid but because their various unproductive hatreds are so easily exploited.

Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It's like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.

That said, I don't think it's a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn't be a contest about who could afford the best surgeons. Well - as I said earlier I think beauty pageants are absurd to begin with, but if they have to exist I don't think it should be a contest between surgeons.

This is what I thought - I just wanted to make sure I hadn't failed to consider something obvious. Am meeting up with some old friends who are science geeks next month and wanted to throw out the line "for all we know, the center of the galaxy exploded 25,999.9 years ago and we could all die tomorrow" and I didn't want anyone coming back with "well actually...we would have detected that by now thanks to technology xyz that was in ivented in 20XX".