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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • This thread is an amusing display of sample bias. Only people that want to respond yes and brag about it bothering to respond.

    In reality only about 2/3rds of people in the US can drive stick and almost no one owns manual cars.

    I’ve never driven a manual car. I’ve had people be like “You can’t drive manual?!” and then I would respond “So are you going to teach me?” The answer is always No, of course not, not in their car (assuming they even owned a manual, which none do anymore). My parents had manual cars but sold them 10+ years before having me.

    I understand how a clutch works. It wouldn’t be difficult to learn. But what reason or motivation is there to learn when almost no cars are manual? They total something like 2% of new car sales. If you’re buying something like a 718 GT4 RS or a 911 GT3 RS for maximum driving engagement that’s great, but those cars are priced for the 1% of the 1%.

    Even if you had a fun car, which I do, the drive to work is stop-and-go, roads are full, even the fun country backroads are filled with traffic on weekends, forests are burned down, gas is eye-watteringly expensive if you have a slightly performant vehicle. The time to have fun driving cars was 40 years ago.




  • I’d like for kbin/Lemmy to be a full substitute, but right now only meme subs on lemmy are taking off or getting significant traction. It’s actually sort of annoying and makes me not want to bother. Apps are rough, block tools are inconsistent, see tons of posts twice or more all day (would happen on Reddit too, but pretty rarely, when big news was relevant to several large subreddits). Until the smaller subs I frequented Reddit for in the first place start coming over, kbin/lemmy can’t realistically be a replacement. Just something I check for a few minutes to try to leave app feedback and contribute traffic where I can.

    It will take a very good app and a couple more high profile niche subs (like /r/piracy) mostly shifting to the Fediverse to start a real migration.






  • I’ve tried Mlem and Memmy, and the biggest features missing as I see it are:

    • Once you have logged in, search all currently federated servers. See what their subscriber count is on their local instance, and across all instances. Sort by subscribers, posts/day, or comments/day.

    • A tab which shows you your subscribed communities so you can go straight to them (Memmy and kbin both make you go in to your profile to do this, it should be front-and-center)

    • Ability to subscribe to a community by looking at its main page

    • Ideally kbin communities would show alongside lemmy communities, I think this is a limitation of kbin right now though?

    • Swipe posts to upvote/downvote (right), reply/save (left)

    • Something which tells you the last time information was pulled from a federated server - sometimes it would be useful to know that I might be seeing a page which is 8 hours out of date vs. one which was updated 30sec ago

    • Something which tells you or prevents you from posting to a defederated community since the post will not behave as expected

    • Expose options for copying links to comments, links to parent comments

    • Ability to see your post history separated by threads/comments/etc., and messages; from a comment, go to the specific thread in question (i.e. direct link to parent or contextual comments in that thread, not just the original post)

    • Hide posts you’ve voted on already

    • I don’t think any currently existing apps expose moderator tools. I’m not sure how much of this is present on the API side so far but will be hugely important as communities get bigger.

    • Content density. On Apollo I can see ~6 posts at once on any given page. On Memmy or Mlem I see ~2.5. Just a much more efficient display of content, tell me what the post title is, what community+server it’s on, how old the post is, how many comments, what the upvote-downvote calculus is. If I want to know the user count or read the blurb on the post I can tap in to it.




  • This is my current biggest gripe. You have to have a four year degree in random smart home garbage to figure out what works with what. We have a guy like that in our friend group, but I still need four different smart home apps just to control a handful of lights and a couple cameras. The apps have constant problems (Nest app signs me out nearly daily), the aggregator apps like Homekit and Google Home are missing nearly all features for the lights we have aside from on or off and some simple color settings, Nanoleaf app claims to be able to do scheduling and automation but I’ve never gotten it to work. I bought a google home tied-in tablet at the recommendation of said friend to be able to check cameras and control lights from a device that didn’t have to be biometrically locked, and it turned out it couldn’t see the cameras OR the lights. Pending some future theoretical update which still hasn’t rolled out. Insanity. Makes me want to throw it all out.

    Considering how expensive the smart home items are, especially the lights, the user experience is horrendous for pretty much everything but flashy tech demos.


  • If anything it’s probably ultimately better (from this, specific perspective) that the Reddit blackout was only two days and only really drove 10k~100k over to try out Fediverse instances and not 100k~1m. In general I don’t think things are clear and digestible enough to start porting entire communities (even small ones), but I think with some stress testing and getting some QOL updates, apps, etc., we could be in that position in as little as a few weeks or months.


  • How does the lemmyverse link get its numbers? When I go to any of those instances the subscriber numbers are vastly off. For instance, /c/selfhosted on lemmy.world is listed as having 5.1k subscribers there, 6.8k if I go there directly, and 300 if I navigate to it via kbin.social/m/[email protected].

    Also the Hot feed on kbin.social for that community is 100% different from the Hot feed if I go there on lemmy.world… it’s very confusing.


  • Complete silence is impossible. At best only a tiny fraction of power users are the ones invested enough to care about the impact of what Reddit’s doing, and are willing to do anything about it. The 99% of the platform who are lurkers, by and large don’t contribute, and just want the platform back open and for everyone else to stop complaining are what’s being fought over.

    If you shut down enough of the platform - which the power users and mods can do by setting to private, restricting posting, or simply not posting when they otherwise would have - then the lurkers go to the site, see nothing to interact with and leave (or at the very least, spend less time on the platform as there is “less” to do). Over a long enough time span that would have started showing up in a big way. But it wasn’t going to happen in two days. If anything, the blackout was so telegraphed and so much news got stirred up that it would make total sense if their traffic was actually not impacted or was even high for those two days (at least in terms of clicks and votes, not posts and comments). The lurkers are still valuable to Reddit though - that’s where their advertising revenue is coming from.

    People mass deleting their post history will hurt the platform. Some big subreddits staying private will hurt the platform. Some small subreddits staying private will hurt the platform. All of those things can bleed away users and diminish Reddit’s usefulness and dominance. Really the ideal outcome is we scare them enough that they pull back to a more reasonable position and things can continue as normal. Maybe Huffman gets ousted and they plan a longer timescale and more reasonable pricing.




  • API discussion was definitely the catalyst. But the doubling down and response of the admins to the community was what finally sealed it. Hopefully the mass exodus of users to federated servers makes the news cycle too. When communities reopen in a few days then I think there will be a lot more awareness raised for them and there’ll be another wave. We won’t get to Reddit’s 15mil or whatever active users in a week but the fact that we could be even 5~10% of that is insane.