People have a psychological bias to humanize anything that communicates with them and companies are trying to latch onto that mechanism because they benefit when people get an emotional attachment to websites. So I think Google and many others are trying to make people think of websites as things with agencies, rather than machines controlled by people. And yea I think they are partly successful.

Not dissimilar to how LLM AI is marketed nowadays.

My mom asked me the other day whether a virus warning was a scam or not. It was a webpage in her browser. She did not understand that it was not her computer system warning her, but just the website itself. People can’t even tell the difference between their operating system and their apps.

I think you vastly overestimate the technical proficiency of the average user. The average user does not understand technology and computers at all. The average user can barely send an email.

Honestly it has a lot of anti-late-stage-capitalism ideas but the core of the show isn’t even really about that. It’s a very good show, I’d recommend it to anyone.

(Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually)

I think rather we’ll see more software popping up and diversifying the ecosystem. Then you can pick whichever you prefer. Which is the whole point of the fediverse. I’m currently working on my own implementation. Might take a long while before any alpha version as I’m super busy but I try to do at least a bit of work on it every day.

In general I don’t think I can do story games anymore

Wow, that’s the complete wrong take if you ask me! It sounds like your problems with these games are mostly in the gameplay, not the story? Have you ever played Outer Wilds or The Talos Principle? Unique puzzle games with a great story.

The sequel with Neil deGrasse Tyson is also really good.

It’s not social media that did it. It’s monopolistic, unregulated, greedy, giant tech corporations that made the internet shitty.

I’m a fan of Linux Libertine. Very nice serif font.

For monospace, Inconsolata.

Sans serif… I’m honestly not sure. Haven’t found any that particularly stand out I suppose.

I actually would really love to hear how “right to be forgotten” applies to an email you’ve sent. I mean you can’t force anyone to delete an email you’ve sent to them, so how does right to be forgotten even apply for emails?

The fediverse would work in the same way, I think.

No. In fact, ActivityPub has no general mechanism for even knowing where content has been distributed to. So when you ask your instance to delete something, it can’t actually know what other instances to ask to delete the mirrored content.

Mastodon tries its best by sending deletion requests to all known instances, in the hope that that will reach all instances that have fetched the content. But in fact, instances that are unknown to your own instance could have the content as well, though this is probably a very rare occurrence.

Bottom line: Don’t write anything on the internet that you don’t want publicly displayed. Anyone can save it and then you can’t force them to delete it. That applies to the entire internet. It also applies to the fediverse.

This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.

Of course mods are not always like that. But if mods are like that, just go to another community. If mods are bad, just leave. On the fediverse, you “vote” with where you participate.

Yea it’s still only a partial solution. Even those feeds could get very active over time (we can hope 😅). The way Piefed implemented feeds is interesting but seems almost overengineered? Sharing feeds could have been done via a simple query parameter I feel like.

Yes, but that doesn’t scale. If there are thousands of comments being submitted constantly, the All feed would just be a new page every time you refresh for the new comments sort. It would be chaotic.

It should instead be based on a recent rate of comments for instance. Much like normal votes but comments instead and not based on the age of the post.

Sort of, but doesn’t it just sort by the latest comment? I.e. any thread would be bumped to the top by a single comment? I might be wrong. But that makes it kind of less than ideal if true.

The solution is not to build this yourself. If you are sitting and building features yourself for search, stop. Use a dedicated search database instead.

I honestly personally preferred Reddit’s sorting algorithm. Lemmy’s algorithm is a bit too slow to update for my taste. This is kind of part of Lemmy’s design though. My problem with Reddit was never it’s sorting algorithm (honestly that was a big part of its strength!), it was just all the ways they enshittified later on.

Yea, the best solution is:

• Keep votes “semi-public” (visible to mods/admins) to aid in moderation and avoid vote manipulation.
• Make it very clear to users that votes are not private.

As long as users know that votes are not private, it should be okay.

Well, that’s the nature of link aggregators. Lemmy’s and Reddit’s style is a link aggregator, not really what you would consider an old-fashioned forums. It’s a different sort of use case with different pros and cons. A con is that you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. A pro is that… you don’t get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. :P

Private message here on Lemmy or just a comment here is fine :)

Thanks for the clarifications and thoughts!