Spyke

Replies

Comment on

Lemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3.

Hah, web 2.0 was all about the explosion of user-generated content. Corps and cryptonerds wanted to make web 3.0 about making money, but the web has always been about the content, not its monetization. In trying to monetize the content, they're alienating people and forcing them off the platforms they defaulted to.

Humans like to create and share content, no matter how easy or difficult it is to monetize. If the people who want to monetize humanity's collective output make it harder to create, then hopefully the result is that people move off the ad-supported platforms and replace them with something that doesn't rely on centralization with lots of capital to stay afloat.

If nothing else, the way that youtube has made it impossible for segments of the creative community to monetize their content and forced them rely on platforms such as patreon has made it more and more clear that ad-generated revenue is a dead end. You can't force people to view advertising unless you hold their content hostage, and for the first time in history, they can't buy out the means of production.

adhd

Comment on

How do you deal with your ADHD?

Medication, alarms, chore lists with reminders, project boards (jira @ work, notion @ home).

My wife and I keep EVERYTHING in notion. Our entire lives, pretty much any plan or thing we need to remember to do or communicate goes in that app.

I use other stuff on top of it, but notion has allowed us to split the mental load of managing our household much better than before. I have terrible memory, but I can no longer use it as an excuse. I've gone from "oops I forgot" to "oops I didn't set a reminder, what do I need to do to prevent this in the future?"

It wouldn't be exaggerating to say that the combination of process and home project management through it has saved my marriage. Oh, and I guess therapy helps. Find a good therapist if you can afford one.

Comment on

Lemmy and Mastodon feel like the real web3.

Reply in thread

Kinda being pedantic. It's a comment on a post about web3, responding to someone talking about a blockchain currency. Frankly, unless it's unclear enough that someone might come along and ask "what does cryptography have to do with blockchain?", I'm not sure why you feel the need to correct my usage of the word.

Comment on

so, which Big Tech company do you think is going to shit the bed next and popularize its Fediverse/FOSS equivalent in the process?

Reply in thread

Hah, yeah I don't see people going from "I gotta change my username" to "I gotta change my username and find all my communities in matrix etc."

I see this as falling under painful but kinda necessary admin, which is nowhere near the level of friction required for a platform switch with massive disruption to communities.

That said, the barrier is lower for chat servers than it is for social media - history matters less in discord than it does for reddit, for example. If the server owners decide to migrate to another platform, they can probably convince people to migrate given a good enough reason and alternative. The people online at any given moment matter more than the last couple months of chat history.

Comment on

Hypothetical: What would happen if every user in the fediverse hosted their own server?

Reply in thread

Maybe I should clarify with "each user successfully spun up..." I'm mostly curious if the 5000 microservers trying to federate is a more sustainable access pattern than 5000 users hitting the website.

Since federation is an async process, it can be optimized on both ends in a way that user browser requests cannot.

At the same time, federation would overall result in more bandwidth being used because not every user wants to view every post in the frontend.

Comment on

Hypothetical: What would happen if every user in the fediverse hosted their own server?

Reply in thread

I think the main difference between fediverse and email WRT cache instances is that if you create a cache instance for email, you're only caching your personal emails. If you create a cache instance for a lemmy community, you're caching every event on the community.

My intuition says there's probably a breakpoint in community size where the cost of federating all events to the users who subscribe to them becomes greater than the cost of individually serving API requests to them on demand. Primarily because you'll be caching a far greater amount of content than you actually consume, unlike with email.

Edit: That said, scaling out async work queues is a heck of a lot easier than scaling out web servers and databases. That fact alone might skew the breakpoint far enough that only communities with millions of subscribers see a flip in the cost equation...

humor

Comment on

Parents: What did your child do today?

Reply in thread

The funny thing is that I've read it to him several times in the past. He just finally understood it well enough to do a double take and think "wait a minute, that seems like a terrible thing to do!"

Can't wait until my son is old enough that I can say "go hang out with your friends for a few hours" without being irresponsible.

Comment on

Is there a way to create Super Communities?

Reply in thread

Maybe something closer to migration management in mastodon? Two groups of moderators on separate servers agree to a common set of moderation guidelines, publish an event or setting which says "these communities are merging", and from that point on they act like aliases for a merged community which share responsibility across servers.

These "merged" communities could be visually flagged as distinct from the normal rules / moderation of their respective servers to prevent conflicts arising from differences in server management.

Feature support would be limited by the server events are sourced from. E.g. if beehaw.org and lemmy.ml merged their technology communities, people on beehaw still wouldn't be able to downvote posts or see downvotes, but lemmy.ml would unless they explicitly disable to feature as a part of the merge contract.

When subscribing, you might see a list of merged communities which share responsibility for moderating the final one, and you have the ability to choose which "entrypoint" you use.

writing

Comment on

Preferred writing medium

I've mostly been writing in Obsidian. I use syncthing to sync between my phone and computer, and use git as version history from my computer. For the most part, it's powerful enough for all my text editing and brainstorming needs, and the internal linking etc is nice for maintaining stuff like world-building notes when I'm writing something complex.

That said, I also do some writing on paper or my phablet using a digital pen and simple handwriting apps when I feel like it, and use transcription as an opportunity to do first-pass edits on stuff. I actually do very little of my writing at a desk - the ability to write when and where I'm inspired by something isn't something I can compromise, so I primarily use desktop applications for editing and formatting after the fact. Words on paper/screen is most important given my busy life, so I go for convenience (obsidian mobile / writing on my screen using the pen) over fancy editor features. I'm not at the point where I'm thinking of the words to put down faster than I can type on my phone, so getting a few hundred words in while I walk to daycare works great.