Kichae

@Kichae@kbin.social

Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

Este perfil es de un servidor federado y podría estar incompleto. Explorar más contenido en la instancia original.

Kichae,

Using chatgpt for searches

I cannot stress this enough: LLMs are not, have never been, and quite likely never will be search engines. You may as well ask your a auto-complete questions.

Kichae,

They probably won't like the communists here, either.

Kichae,

If they all want to pile into exploding-heads, it would at least make them easy to contain.

I wonder if there could be a way to effectively shadow-ban entire instances.

Kichae,

No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.

Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.

Kichae,

If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.

I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.

The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.

Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.

Kichae,

I'm not convinced that something good will emerge.

Keep in mind we still use "internet".

Kichae,

No, you're posting on kbin.social. You're never ever doing anything directly on a remote site. You view on k-so, you vote on k-so, you post on k-soc, and you comment on k-soc. Your actions are then, at some later point (which may be microseconds, or it may be hours, depending on traffic levels on both k-soc and the remote website), relayed to the remote website so the two copies of the community can be synchronised.

Kichae,

Smaller communities may mean fewer posts, but once a community hits a critical limit, it's still more posts than most people will read in a day.

This is only really an issue for really niche communities that haven't migrated here yet, and if all they find here when they come to explore is the exact same posts as on Reddit, but with no comments, then what's even the point of moving?

If they didn't come out of the principle of what Reddit is doing, then it will be the content that ultimately makes them move. And that content needs to be different, and better, than what they can get on Reddit. Not the same, but with zero comments.

Kichae,

The API will come. It's still very early days for the kbin project. It's, uh, kind of alpha software.

Kichae,

Honestly, I noticed so few differences that even my 3rd party apps still work...

Kichae,

They're not wrong. There's a few hundred thousand active users here. There are 10s of millions on Reddit.

Most Reddit users straight up do not care about the API, or 3rd party apps, or the shitty management of the site. They want their memes, and their niche communities, and their quirky Reddit shit posting, and all of that is still right there.

Users will leave gradually as the ads get more intrusive, and as development moves towards more psychologically manipulative features, and as Reddit cuts costs.

Kichae,

Should they? It seems to me that we should have way, way more control over how we choose to sort things.

That should be one of the options, of course, but we can have so much more here.

Kichae,

They're not redundant functions. They're... Mixed up on kbin right now, because things were originally built with the up button boosting content, but that's incongruent with how Lemmy does it, so it was changed.

But boosting isn't really about sorting at all. It's about republishing content, so that it can be sent out to instances that have started following a group after the content was originally posted.

Kichae,

Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.

When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.

With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.

Kichae,

How it's interpreted it is entirely up to the UI layer. On microblogs, it's surfaced as a retweet-like behaviour, but it's not surfaced at all here, really, except on kbin where it's used to report who has reboosted something.

At its core, it's a republish button, and just as if you were to republish someone else's blog post on your own blog, people can see, if they look closely enough, that you've done it.

Kichae,

Perhaps more importantly why would one retweet a comment? Rather than a post?

The way content propagation works here is that someone using Website A follows a remote content source (either a user, or a group -- aka a "community" or a "magazine"), and the remote hosting website (let's call it Website B) sends all subsequent content from that source to Website A, where the requesting user can then view it. If someone from Website A was already following that content source, then they get to see all of the content that Website A had already received, and benefit from earlier users efforts. But if that person was the first from Website A to subscribe to that content source, then they only get future content.

It's very similar to a, well, a magazine subscription in that way. NatGeo isn't sending you their 150 years worth of back catalogue when you subscribe in 2023 (not that you should bother subscribing to NatGeo in 2023).

The 'boost' button republishes content, though. Posts, comments, whatever. Hitting 'boost' on a comment republishes it, and once republished the group actor (the little bot-like construct that functionally is the group) sees it as new content, and pushes it out to everyone following it. This means it will reach websites that started subscribing to the group after the comment was originally posted.

Boosting is how older content (where older basically means "from anytime before literally right now") spreads through the fediverse.

Kichae,

Boost things.

Kichae,

Users who can see the content need to boost it?

Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they've seen.

Kichae,

Someone just needs to follow. The community owner either needs to seed the community to big instances using accounts on them, or people who find the community via other instances need to subscribe and know that fresh content will come. Then they can boost older content from the hosting site.

Things take some conscious effort here. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Kichae,

I'm not sure how Lemmy syncs and backfill, but under its hood, I imagine it's doing the same thing, just automatically. Lemmy groups are really spammy with boosts when viewed from Mastodon, for instance.

Kichae,

If my instance follows a community at time t = T, and your instance starts following it at time t = T+10, I can boost content posted between T and T+9 so that you can see it.

Meanwhile, if people on the hosting instance boost things posted from times earlier than T, we both get to see them. Then, once they're visible to us, we can continue to boost them for new instances to see.

Kichae,

This is why the functionality was hidden behind the upvote button initially, but people wanted the arrows to match the arrows on Lemmy.

Kichae,

then it'd only show up the user page of the guy who went to all of that effort?

Where are you getting that impression from?

Kichae,

The Fediverse is just the world wide social web. It lacks cohesion just the same way that the regular web does.

That's going to limit its appeal for the people who see the internet as 3 cellphone apps. But that's also ok. It doesn't need to be for them.

Kichae,

It doesn't need to replace Reddit.

And it won't, for many reasons. The biggest being that people don't like change.

But it can give, and has given, people a place to go who are ready to be done with Reddit. People who are ready for something new, not just "Reddit, but with a different name".

Until Reddit's website disappears, Reddit will march on. Those of us here are just those who can no longer tolerate feeding that beast.

Kichae,

"If" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, to be honest.

The average internet user has been ok with everything collapsing into a monolithic search engine and 4 giant social websites owned by 3 guys.

Maybe we accept complexity and expect a little more out of the people who end up here. People whole like what things have become can stay where they are.

Kichae,

The k-soc terms of service state:

Harassment, hate speech, or any other form of harmful behavior will not be tolerated.

Now, I can't read ernest's mind to determine what he meant by this line exactly, but this kind of mean spirited, bad-faith jab falls under "harmful behaviour" in my book.

Kichae,

Honestly, I don't think we should bother checking their reputation score even if it was working correctly. They're either engaging in shitty behaviour or they're not. All of us engage in shitty behaviour sometimes - we all get hangry, we all have bad days, and we're all suffering in some way or another - and the fact that someone has a record of saying popular things doesn't mean their shitty behaviour needs to be accepted or engaged with.

Call it out, ignore it, or report them. If there's a pattern of shitty behaviour, the mods or admins can have a chat with them about it.

Kichae,

Don't platform fascists. Don't play apologetics for platforming fascists. Don't tolerate people who platform fascists.

Stop treating fascism as a mere difference of opinion.

Kichae,

If they want to see that, they can start their own instance. No one is obligated to host them.

Kichae,

No, it's good for getting rid of antisocial shit heads who feel like they're entitled to an audience for their toxic or abusive ideas and beliefs.

Because that's exactly what it speaks to.

Now, if you want to argue with Karl, might I recommend getting a PhD in philosophy and starting from there, rather than whining on the internet?

Kichae,

The down vote button is whatever we want it to be.

Kichae,

Argue all you want. But if you're going to argue that the line between what is acceptable and what isn't is what is legal, first off, uh, no (fascist rhetoric is legal in most places), and second, whose laws do you want to apply?

Kichae,

People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.

And they very much don't want to do that.

And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.

Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.

And they don't wanna.

Kichae,

The question is, does Reddit ownership believe the money is in LLM training data or not. We've seen tech leadership jump on all kinds of bandwagons in the last few years, none of which have panned out. I don't think LLMs will, either, but every time one of these things gains some limelight, someone with an established tech company seems to believe they're about to make a lot of money.

And in this case, they actually might. Just not off of the tech, but off of an IPO where they centre the tech as the opportunity for new investors.

But I have no idea if they're smart enough to see the scam and run the play, or if they're true believers or not.

Kichae,

I've been abused. I suffer from ongoing complex PTSD from that abuse.

I have some fucking perspective, thank you very fucking much.

And that perspective is that the word is broadly defined, and that exploitation is fucking abuse. It's not physical abuse, no, and I didn't say that it was. I'm fact, I was very careful to avoid such comparisons. But exploiting people for their time and labour so that you can generate obscene amounts of wealth for yourself is exploitative, it involves lying to people, both implicitly and explicitly, and it involves engaging in emotional and psychological manipulation.

And that's a type of fucking abuse. It's the exact same type of abuse that narcissists inflict on their victims. It's just being done in a way that the law and our culture sees as legitimate, because there's a lot of money involved, and we all fall under the yolk of rich mother fuckers who think they deserve more from us, just because they already have money.

I make the comparisons not because I lack perspective, but because I have it.

Because corporate behaviour like this feels too fucking familiar, given that perspective.

Unlike previous attempts at trying reddit alternatives (like Voat), kbin and much of the lemmyverse doesn’t seem to be plagued with extreme far right buffoonery. (kbin.social) en

It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit....

Kichae,

That's some real Enlightened Centrism bullshit right there.

Kichae,

So don't use Lemmy.ml?

Kichae,

A tankie is specifically an apologist for militant authoritarians who claim to be communists. There are many, many more theories of communism than Leninism and Stalin worship.

Shit, the Fediverse is functionally an experiment in anarchism.

Kichae,

It's an open source, open contribution project. It has one maintainer who's confused being angry at the capitalist class with a call to reflexively defend people who use the word "communism" to justify whatever they want, but he's not "the devs".

No none seems to care when for-profit projects are backed by the slime of the Earth. Actual fascist Peter Thiel financially backed Reddit a decade ago, and people didn't care. And Tencent, with actual and direct ties to the CCP has been a major investor in Reddit for years now.

Reddit ran off of the direct support of white supremacists, anti-democracy advocates, and CCP supporters, and none of that was an issue for anyone until spez got stupid with some small developers.

The tankie guy's political influence will be miniscule in the long run. You can't say that about Thiel's or Tencent's.

Kichae,

On Lemmy, they're styled as "Communities"; on kbin, they're named "Magazines"; Friendica calls them "Forums". In most of the rest of the Fediverse, they're called "Groups".

Kichae,

There'll be another wave. It'll be significant, by current threadiverse standards, but not by Reddit standards. Servers will strain some people will be unreasonable about the degraded experience. Some others won't be. Resources will catch up as new instances come online. Things will relatively quickly return to organic growth.

Kichae,

There could be if we see a series of catastrophic collapses of major subreddits, but my gut feeling is that that's not how it'll play out. Instead, I think we'll see Reddit kick out the activist mods and things superficially go back to "normal".

It'll just be a generally degraded experience.

Waves occur when there's a big splash. Twitter waves happened every time Elon did an Elon thing, for instance. But sustained and persistent movement as people reach their limit with Reddit's decline in quality seems more like what'll happen here.

Kichae,

If you're expecting everyone to leave Reddit, you're going to be disappointed. Most Reddit users do. Not. Care. They'll stay for as long as Reddit entertains them.

The Twitter migration was actually a really great thing for the Fediverse. It diversified Mastodon, and made it an actually lively space. It's still a nerdy space, but it's so much more than it was. It's a genuinely general and engaging microblogging space. And while, yes, it doesn't have everything that draws the Twitter clout chasers, celebrity watchers, and journalists or politicians, it's a viable alternative for people who are looking to actually engage with each other.

The same is true here, and will be true after tomorrow.

Edit: Autocorrect hates me

Kichae,

If you want like 10,000 instant karma, bet on a New post and say snarky shit. If it gets picked to be one of the magic posts of the day, you win.

Just don't say anything meaningful, or you'll fall below the next person commenting for the lulz.

That's what a healthy community looks like. Right?

Kichae,

If you want to hang out with the Nazis, just say so and go. No one is stopping you.

Kichae,

Sure, but anyone complaining about defederation in the context of "group think" probably isn't thinking about how much it sucks that small spaces can't moderate well enough.

Kichae,

Once you have enough of it to live a comfortable life, money just becomes about power. So, what we have is some spoiled rich asshole who is used to having influence and power being shown that most of that was a gift. That gift has been recinded, and so the only control he has left is money.

He's spending some of Reddit's current and future earnings on stepping on necks. Because that's what the cash was going to be used for, in one way or another, anyway.

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