I used to think that too. First with Kbin, then Lemmy, next Sublinks, finally PieFed, but recently my faith in continued progress has been shaken and now I don't know what to think. What will be will be I suppose. We can have whatever we desire if only we are willing to work towards it, which seems to be the sticking point.

Miles O'Brien needs to suffer more, the gods Emissary decided, so he made sure that no other ship had access to this technology. Wait, scrap that - I said "no ship", forget that other word in between them...

Computer just post this entire log entry. Wait, no DELETE it, I meant DELETE it!!! Recall it back, dammit recall it back NOW!!!

Although ostensibly that's not so much a bug as a feature - so that whenever one goes down, its content remains elsewhere.

That thought will need revisiting as we get larger though, imho. Like many "downstream" instances could set their own chosen expiration dates as they receive content from the more "primary" ones... or sth.

Thanks!

we might want to check out nostr even if only rarely for specific items of interest?

I now vaguely regret some of my word choices then...! 😜

So fun!

That's... part of the charm? 🤷

And we all know how good people are at distinguishing slop from OC.

Except the vote quota goes against the spirit of Egalitarianism, and instead twists back around more towards Meritocracy. Consider some quick thought experiments:

1. person 1 logs in early in the "day" (furthest from reset), hits their cap in an hour, and cannot vote again for another 23 hours. Oh well, move on (perhaps to another instance or alt, or read a book, watch a movie, touch grass, etc.)
2. person 2 logs in late at "night", let's stipulate one hour prior to reset, and just as they are about to reach their quota, it resets and they can continue none the wiser, doing twice as much in one sitting as the person mentioned above - how is that "equal"?
3. more interesting is when multiple days are brought into consideration. If person 1 is only able to log in once a week, then the daily quota for them becomes a fully weekly one. While if person 2 doesn't log in again for another 47 hours but then keeps going according to that pattern all week long, then they receive the ability to vote ~7x more in total than person 1.

The busiest people - like doctors or nurses - are afforded the least consideration by this type of quota. A monthly quota would be more equitable... at least for these scenarios, but we could surely keep going. e.g. someone with a terminal disease could attempt to work a year's worth of voting crammed into a single week while in a hospital - is it more equitable to deny such a scenario or allow it?

Or am I misunderstanding something here? Those who can "work" - or dare I say "game"? - the system, not necessarily intentionally btw as the above thought experiment hypothetical scenarios show, are afforded the highest merit in terms of being able to vote. In other words, the "merit" there lies in the regularity of voting, more so than the total amount. To state explicitly, someone who attempts the same amount of votes daily as someone else who spreads them out more evenly in weekly or monthly batches, receives higher privileges. As in, higher meaning "not equal", based on a talent performed by the user.

Also, by definition all Lemmy users have nearly infinitely more merit than users on PieFed instances that have not disabled this opt-out feature - as Lemmy users can vote all day long whereas the latter are restricted by the quota. (In practice though this is limited by physical constraints such as time and even amount of content that exists to be voted on).

The only thing that truly seems equal to me is no quota. All users then have the identical opportunity to vote. Once the restrictions come into play though, it sets up reactions to and against them whereby those opportunities are never distributed fully equally, given how different people experience life and their time here on the Threadiverse. i.e. it seems an attempt at least at "equity" but... without knowing the pre-existing imbalances, how is this "fair and balanced" approach justified in countering those (which are what again, exactly)?

And perhaps that's what you meant by the "audience here", as in Lemmy is Egalitarian in this regard. But I wanted to point out how radical the departure of PieFed is from that: now, any community located on a PieFed instance that implements this quota is imposing a merit-based criteria whereby those who play along most closely with the criteria are afforded significantly higher (in some cases) consideration than those who try to use nonstandard timing scenarios such as those briefly outlined above.

All of that said, everything under discussion above pales in comparison to the fact that users whose contributions have been shadow-censored are not told about this. Lemmy and PieFed both have a modlog for instance, but afaik this rejection does not get placed into it, unlike removal of a comment or post. No acknowledgement will be sent to the originating instance (at least atm?), no ability is provided iirc for users of other platforms (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.) to see in advance whether their contributions are likely to be rejected, afaik no acknowledgements are offered in the community sidebars like "this community is housed on a PieFed instance that implements a vote quota, thus not all your votes will be accepted if you have already made [vote quota amount - which btw is set at what value, and would this displayed value be kept current, i.e. what happens when the admins change it?], prior to the daily reset [which likewise is when? and in whose timezone?]". The result is that some (by default it would be all actually, as this is an opt-out feature rather than opt-in) PieFed instances are manipulating votes that no longer match the counts on the originating instances? Or at least that is my fear - tbh I am fuzzy on the actual implementation details. Or probably that's too far, bc the instance where the community is housed at is by definition the source of truth, but it is definitely a complicating factor, and not transparent at all atm.

Finally, this system is ridiculously easy to circumvent, only requiring additional alts that so many of us across the Threadiverse already use for other reasons (like modding Lemmy communities or testing how features work differently across different instances). It seems akin to asking people to write down a name - any name alongside their vote. Therefore... people will do that, using whatever name they want to, and go about their day. I have the feeling that you know better than I how well any system can be expected to work that has no actual ability behind it provided for enforcement. And even worse still, wouldn't the concept of perverse incentive seem to apply here, where people are now encouraged to spread their votes across multiple alts rather than use a single one? I've seen several people claim that they reached the daily quota in merely one hour. Conversely, so very many accounts may as well be inactive, e.g. have 3 comments spread over the course of 3 full years with zero posts or votes. So setting the vote quota according to comparison to an "average" or even standard "median" value seems of little utility to me.

And since despite all my words I still have yet to answer your question: I think I would probably prefer some sort of meritocracy, even of the type that OP describes. Though I realize that I am naive in this so I also don't trumpet that thought loudly. Then again, I also don't understand the push-back that many people tend to offer: what exactly is wrong with wanting to incentive behaviors that we consider good while not extending those privileges to others until they earn them? At least at some very low, extremely minimal level - not differentiating between 10k vs. 100 but differentiating between -10 vs. +10. e.g. when I made a PieFed.social account I had to wait a week or two prior to being able to send any DMs. But... isn't that a good restriction, to help protect against spammers? I was glad to see it in fact! I am not "entitled" to be able to do anything at all on someone else's machine, and even though I had someone I wanted to send a message to all that time (and did so the moment that I could), those restrictions are in place for a reason and do not seem overly onerous to me. (Or would this rather be called egalitarian since the same rule is applied to everyone equally?)

PDFs as in pirated books i.e. we might want to check out nostr even if only rarely for specific items of interest? Or like useless whitepapers i.e. nostr would have zero value to most of us (or I guess you are saying that heavy curation can restore some utility).

You misspelled "decades" as "millenia" btw.

Speaking of Beverly...

The disinformation does not help. I recall Lemmy proponents saying that instances should not defederate from places such as Hexbear.net or Lemmygrad.ml until an updated version would come out with the ability of users to block an instance. Then we waited on that for like a year, and finally the feature came!

Except it was a lie - or at least least, on the spectrum it lay closer to a false statement than a true one. What a Lemmy user can block that way includes:

• communities located on those instances

But what a Lemmy user is not provided the ability to do includes:

• prevent all users from those instances from trolling in communities located on other instances
• prevent those users from sending you DMs
• preventing those DMs from sending you notifications

The latter point was added later - i.e. when the user-level "instance blocking" functionality was first rolled out the DMs did not trigger notifications, but those were re-added back. In this formulation, the so-called "blocked" users have far more power to harass than the victims of their harassment have to prevent that!!

In fairness, user-level blocking still exists, but that forces this situation where new, especially non-technical users are forced to learn the hard way that a comment reply in some community found via browsing All - such as [email protected], which notably most 3rd-party apps do not show the community sidebar prior to someone replying to comments - and then subsequently block people one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one by one... continued ad nauseum, particularly as they keep creating alts to get around community bans. A fact which some of them are quite proud to announce.

In short, we are a Nazi bar, which is another name for the Intolerance Paradox, although in this case a more apt name would be a tankie bar.

I prefer not to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the non-technical normies who would otherwise love to come to a place such as this and serve their OC here to an audience that would absolutely love to receive it. Instead, I think it is more interesting to ask what we can do to make them feel more welcomed here. Defederations are one tool, community blocks are another especially if they are opt-out so placed by people who know but easily discarded for anyone who wants a more "free-speech" environment (e.g. 4chan). Although the latter are nowhere easily accessible, and overall the tools of Lemmy, PieFed, mBin, etc. are exceedingly lacking in transparency.

And also usability too - e.g. Redditors are used to not having a modlog, but they do have a modmail, and receive notifications upon a moderation event, and can continue discussions with a mod or one another (anyone who has a link actually) even after a mod has removed the post from a community. Also they are used to polls, user and post flairs, and multi-reddits, all of which they have to give up on order to move to Lemmy. Although PieFed has all of these btw. Then again, PieFed is now shipping out a feature that shadow-censors contributions from the most highly active users without disclosure of this fact, nor the ability of someone to find out in advance whether their contributions are likely to be discarded or not - even those users who may be on Lemmy or Mbin or nodeBB rather than having made the choice to make an account on PieFed. This is extremely opaque.

The Threadiverse is simply too complicated for a non-technical normie to want to bother with understanding all of these nuances - made all the more complicated when 3rd-party apps are brought into consideration, which may or may not have half the features that the underlying choice of back-end platform would allow. We are the Arch Linux of forum software, and most people prefer Windows. Which might be mostly okay, except that we keep bleeding users and I definitely do not see our current growth as being any kind of a sign of "health". Nor, I agree, would we want all Redditors to suddenly flock here either. Having been trained on enshittified platforms, it is no wonder why they behave as they do.

I would suggest training instances where more mainstream people could go, where the most controversial of trolls are kept out? Lemmy.zip and PieFed.zip already do this, and iirc programming.dev too, but the blocks are leaky and we are now having to fight against having an existing reputation of being a tankie bar. Plus the tools themselves are simply objectively inferior (in the technical sense obviously) to what Reddit offers - e.g. we have no modmail to ask a mod team why someone's post was removed, even if they even manage to discover in the first place that a moderation event occurred; so instead someone would have to DM each and every mod in the listing in hopes of finding one that is even an active account, much less knowledgeable about why the event occurred, and also willing to explain (though tbf this aspect would persist even if there was a modmail).

Otoh, for a heavily technical user, one who is capable enough to install their own instance, the Threadiverse software offers unparalleled flexibility to have their own mini-Reddit with whatever community forums they wish to put into it. But even then, people are being driven away - see e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/55961762 - despite their ability to implement whatever defederations and other admin-level tools they wish. The Threadiverse will not grow, meaning that it will continue to shrink due to attrition, until it finds a better way to retain the people that are already here.

That's weird - maybe a country issue, I wonder if you would be able to see it if you used a VPN? (Not that it's worthwhile to try that but I'm just musing about the potential cause.)

Lion-O would be so proud.

Proof:

It sure is such a good thing that we provide funding for the sciences in order to continue researching cures for the... what's that you say? We FA and now we're about to FO? That does not sound very fun, like at all...

It shows for me on Voyager, and the Lemmy browser web UI (on Firefox in Android), and on Summit. I don't have Boost to test it further.

That is one problem with 3rd-party apps: every issue needs to be independently discovered and solved every single time, splitting the efforts rather than combining them.

changes in financial models are required to translate scientific advances into clinically approved antibiotics.

Just gotta get through this brief fall of democracy and capitalism in the Western World first, then we can get right on that...

Sorry, I am no fun today:-(.

Yoda even argued again him being a mere Padawan.

He's just that good!