Somebody asked for soldering tips on Lemmy today and got several thoughtful responses within 5 minutes. That's pretty amazing compared to the feed a few weeks ago.
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to find new/interesting/novel communities I came up with this - sorts by newest communities on all instances with keyword filter: https://lemmyfind.quex.cc/
Hi there - just a follow up and I appreciate the discussion because I've been thinking about this quite a bit. Bots weren't really a thing on usenet, That was the wrong term - what I should have said was spam - it was just flooded with spam and got worse and worse over time. The closest thing to an interactive bot that I can remember back then was ELIZA (wikipedia), which I daresay you've heard about but that was a local program that ran on your PC for amusement - I suppose it might have been possible to integrate ELIZA-like stuff on a BBS somehow and somebody probably did it but it wouldn't have been anything like the kind of bot you're talking about on social media that's deployed to comment - more just for the novelty value. Sending nonsense to usenet was not well tolerated, ISPs were not the best moderators but they did act on repeated abuse complaints, usually, and the knowledge needed to spoof and circumvent basic controls wasn't widespread then. I think people at the time were just into the fact that you could actually communicate with strangers via computer about all kinds of subjects. There was no point in making an ass of yourself there.
That's the other thing I wanted to emphasize about the difference between Lemmy and Usenet (there are many similarities) -- I am fairly certain there was no community moderation on Usenet whatsoever - it was a free-for-all. Spam, porn, everything. I think the only control was the ISPs who carried UseNet and they did presumably ban users and remove groups / behaviors that were really offensive, although there were plenty of really awful groups. You can imagine how that worked out - people went to facebook because it was "safer" and the structure was focused around individual connection versus community, which was also a big change. I think this difference is important because UseNet really was very cool and very fucked up at the same time. However I think the bad part could have been fixed if there was some degree of community moderation and control.
Yes, I completely agree that we are vulnerable to bots. The APIs are wide open by design. It will be interesting to see how it evolves but ActivityPub is supposedly designed with this stuff in mind. Yes it's easy to act maliciously and create accounts. There are a million ways to attack. It's a fact of life, sadly. Also probably the natural order - we've been chucking rocks at one another for millennia.
It happened on Usenet. It wasn't a paradise, it was full of spam and trolls and bots. However the fragmentation and self policing of the Usenet groups somehow kept the experience tolerable. Maybe we just expected less. Lemmy reminds me a lot of early BBS days. Not even any spam so far. It's remarkable - but probably temporary. I'm liking it though.
Mastodon is built on ActivityPub and seems to be thriving. I don't see spam or problems there so far. It seems quite civil. It's more like Twitter in format than Lemmy is, but the big instances have dealt with DOS and malicious actors and seem to be coping ok.
Your work sounds very cool. The development over the past few years in data analytics and machine learning is indeed startling when the ability for deception and manipulation is so easily scalable, but I think we will find ways to isolate or mitigate these issues gradually. It might take years and a lot of suffering, but innovation to solve problems is also our natural inclination.
Lemmy setup about is as easy as you could make it. The ansible approach is very simple on Ubuntu. You need a host with ports 443 and 80 open and ssh key login for the server. Happy to help if you need it.
I used BBS systems before Usenet. They were a labor of love. It is absolutely possible to maintain civility and constructive collaboration online, in fact it's the natural order. I wish there were a better word than 'enshittification' to describe the corrosiveness and malice that corporate-controlled social media wrought, but seeing it go from what it once was to Twitter and Facebook was dismaying - shitty, even.
Lemmy is a really big deal. Not only is the threading format and aggregating similar to reddit, BBS and Usenet days, but it also captures the spirit of self-moderation, innovation and user-autonomy that allowed reddit to flourish. Reddit was built and held together by a great deal more than software and hardware. Lemmy has that and it's non-commercial and scalable. It's the best thing to happen to social media in a long time.
thanks - open source search - what a wonderful idea! Although duckduckgo is tolerable, I used google without an ad blocker a couple of days ago while setting up a new system - wow - the search results are so full of clutter and garbage that it's practically unusable. Google search was useful once - not now.
The main reason ChatGPT is popular is simply because it provides information quickly without a gazillion ads and SEO-driven click-chasing nonsense making the internet unusable. There's no "intelligence" beyond a much better and more intuitive information presentation algorithm. OpenAI is just a search-engine reinvented. We need to open source LLMs next.
Thanks! Respectfully, I think I'm OK on that side of the equation. But you're right - you should invest in your own learning and self-directed growth - this applies to all facets of life, not just writing python modules.
I like using copilot. Now that we aren't using punch cards to write monolithic BASIC and we have an internet to work with, most of the brain work in programming is component-based integration. AI makes typing out code a LOT faster, so I won't be ditching it to resume writing out for-loops end-to-end. I just don't want every line of code available to github and definitely don't want to fund the walled AI model if I can find a way around it.
It's a good analogy - in the days before email, all you had was a username @ your BBS (Bulletin Board Server). You dialed into your local BBS's landlines with a modem - they usually had 2-4 numbers available, so that gives you an idea of scale. The BBS systems were federated so user@bbs1 could see and respond to the same threads as user@bbs2. It was nice - it worked pretty much like the fediverse actually - and the tone was similar.
The messaging systems on the BBS communities evolved into email and Usenet before big money came along and fucked everything up.
yes, that's definitely very mildly infuriating - but wait, your const is a function???
Reddit's CEO just infuriated his striking moderators by saying 'this one will pass,' the way 'all blowups' do. They want to keep the site dark indefinitely.
The Reddit blackout was supposed to be a two-day event. But comments made by CEO Steve Huffman in an internal memo that leaked have strengthened the resolve of protesting moderators, who are vowing to keep the popular channels offline indefinitely.
Huffman, in a memo to Reddit staff Monday, reportedly downplayed the blackout. The Verge, which posted the email, quotes Huffman as saying the company has “not seen any significant revenue impact so far” and “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well”.
As of 11:00 a.m. ET Wednesday, more than 6,000 subreddits were still dark, with a large number set to restricted access, meaning Reddit users could see old posts, but are unable to make new ones.
Among the subreddits that remain dark are r/funny (with over 40 million subscribers), r/Music and r/science (with over 30 million subscribers each) and r/DIY, which has more than 20 million subscribers.
the damage that corporate social media has inflicted on our social fabric and political discourse is beyond anything we could have imagined.