If I’m reading the modlogs correctly, it looks like /u/Ruud@lemmy.world posted something homophobic?

A troll impersonating Ruud did so.

The real Ruud: https://lemmy.world/u/ruud

The banned troll: https://lemmy.world/u/ruuud

That…doesn’t sound like a good thing? I would like one game in my game, please. More than that, and it seems like surely things would get janky and disjointed and messy.

Watching this man’s trainwreck is so mind boggling. I mean just a decade ago he had every single one of us believing he was real life Tony Stark. I mean even pop culture sci fi like Star Trek mentioned him along Sagen and Einstein… He really pulled the wool over our eyes.

Hey, not every one of us. I disliked Elon Musk before it was cool. I thought he was always obviously just another obscenely wealthy self-centered guy with good PR.

I actually do not understand the widespread hostility that people have toward this kind of thing. I watch a lot of content on YouTube, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for premium. I watch a lot of content on Twitch, and I don’t want to see ads, so I pay for turbo. Hosting a major video streaming website isn’t cheap. It’s not like these things are unreasonably priced. If you hate the ads so much, then why not pay for the service that the platform is offering you, and for the content that creators are providing on it? And if you don’t watch often enough for ad-free viewing to be worth a few bucks a month to you, then why get so worked up about having to sit through an ad every now and then?

One thing you can do is start a community in another instance. The curent influx is great for growing communities.

Not sure how you can report this kind of community mod behavior to the instance mods

May I plug !trek@lemmy.pineapplemachine.com ?

And by the way, you can DM an instance admin by finding their profile link at the bottom of the front page sidebar, and then clicking “Send Message”.

From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.

This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.

You’ve got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they’re supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don’t see the humanity or the nuance anymore.

You’ve got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it’s the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they’ve been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team’s ability to keep up with the mod queue.

And you’ve got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.

And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you’ll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don’t know how one keeps these people out, once they’ve taken an interest.

I think there are some things that can help. I’ve seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn’t so involved and won’t burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)

But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it’s just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.

I currently have Kubuntu on my most-used Linux machine but, since a friend recommended it to me, I’ve been considering hopping to KDE Neon when I have some time to learn a new distro. (I’ve tried GNOME and I don’t really care for it, but KDE Plasma fits like a glove.) I’m not extremely experienced with desktop Linux, so I’d love to hear about others’ experiences with either distro and how they might compare.

Absolutely. There were any number of ways to approach this problem of sustainability from reddit’s end. I get it, reddit costs money to run. I think most people won’t cry foul over a few ads. I’ll be happy as long as I can adblock them or pay a fair price to not see them. But for it all to work out, reddit would have to be run by rational, intelligent people. The sort who would give a reasonable notice period before major changes, and who wouldn’t talk provably-false trash about the people they’re screwing over.

I doubt whether this will be the dramatic sudden end of reddit. But I think it is definitely a sign that reddit’s heyday is over, and it doesn’t have much longer before it fades into obscurity.

The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.

As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.

And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don’t want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.

I am also partial to “lemmings”

More importantly, where’s our Christmas album remaster?

Very entertaining, though tragically this clip from just after you released your own video could have been a fun one to end on…

https://youtu.be/O8gCqSmtkrM?t=24

i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.

Scrolling through the linked instances and noticed Lemmygrad was banned? Is it their politics or are they just annoying or smth.

The lemmy.ml instance federates with lemmygrad.ml, the collection of Marxist communities. It blocks lemmygrad.com, which currently redirects to the forum of choice for President Donald J. Trump. The latter does not seem to be hosted using lemmy and I think could not be federated with in any case? But presumably this was once the domain of a similarly-minded lemmy instance.

Some instances other than lemmy.ml do block lemmygrad.ml. Besides being a place for Marxist communities, the instance is also home to some very radical and very hostile users. I haven’t been around long enough to really know the situation for myself, but I have seen mentions of lemmygrad.ml communities engaging in brigading in the past.

It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?

User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.

But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.

The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.

The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.

I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.

My two most frequent listens are a combined playlist of the SimCity 3 and SimCity 4 soundtracks, and The Yes Album. If it’s not those, it’s almost certainly progressive rock of some kind. Nothing else comes close for productivity music for me.

Though really, these days I find myself working with a twitch stream in the background more often than with a playlist on.

You got yourself a new sub. Thank you for sharing!

Does the gmail SMTP server have a limit on how many emails can be sent per day?

I think it does, yes. The kinsta.com link says the limit is 500 per day. If you’re expecting a higher volume than that, or if the unpredictability of relying on a free Google service for anything is not acceptable, then you would probably want to pay for an inbox service.

But if you’re running a small instance and just need the occasional email to go through without a lot of effort or fees, then it ought to be fine.

I keep getting logged out every time I visit another sub-lemmy page? I’m trying to subscribe from the button but then I get taken to their site and logged out. Logging in takes forever as well. When I copy and paste the ! Link into the feddit.uk search I get no results as well.

I’m really not sure, but it sounds like these could be issues related to feddit.uk? I suggest asking about this on a community there, or messaging an admin of that instance.

Currently yes. If you wanted to be in full control of which instances you can see, then you will need to administrate your own instance.

Hopefully this will change in the future!