not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development. if you haven’t already, it might be good to document the regressions and start/join the discussions on github or matrix (link for it can be found on the Lemmy github page). i’ve used these in the past for this project and the devs were reasonably quick to reply and apply fixes.

+1 for Darknet Diaries. got anything else to recommend in that nerdy/edgy genre of story telling?

• 99% Invisible (Roman Mars)
• Slate Star Codex (narrated form of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten column)
• Jack Rhysider - Darknet Diaries
• Maggie Killjoy - Cool people who did Cool Stuff
• Cory Doctorow’s podcast
• Jennifer Briney - Congressional Dish
• Lex Fridman

the first three are all tightly scripted storytelling: generally non-fiction, but exciting or interesting. sorted by general audience -> niche audience.

the next three edge into political territory, sorted from politically-adjacent to 100% political (not punditry):

• Maggie’s focuses on telling history. but she’s self-described anarchist and it bleeds.
• Cory’s is a narrated form of his blog. usually the overlap between tech & national policy.
• Congressional Dish is literally Jen watching hours of C-SPAN and reading 1000’s of pages of text from bills to give actual deep-dives into congressional happenings.

Lex Fridman is if Joe Rogan was hosted by someone who actually did his research upfront, planned out his questions, and chose guests that are less divisive, and more academic or entrepreneurial.

if you listen to any of these, please leave a recommendation for something similar you think i would like! ❤️

John Oliver hosts a political talkshow. that’s fine if you’re showing off a specific Lemmy instance or community, but if your goal is to show off Lemmy as a platform, doing so with that topic is a recipe for disaster.

yes! i landed on reddit twice during the last couple days that way.

• the NixOS sub wasn’t dark, but users were asking about that and some were dropping the lemmy link.
• the selfhosted sub (or one adjacent to it, don’t remember) was dark, and for this query i actually could not find the info i needed written anywhere else. that was a wakeup call.

few communities exist online in only one place anymore (for example, lemmy itself has a Matrix space, a #hashtag, etc). i think forums, IM, and the different kinds of (micro-)blogging coexist to encourage participants to balance length and substance/effort to different degrees in their discussions. IM favors short, distilled ideas; blogs favor lengthy in-depth things but don’t tend to encourage as much direct participation, and forums fill a middle ground.

but forums are also a victim of their own success: a highly active thread means you have to read for an hour before participating, or else you contribute something that’s already been said and you just add to the unwieldiness! tree-style comments really do let people selectively explore different, narrow slices of a topic without creating that mess. it’s not perfect, but if i’m forced to choose one or the other, it’s usually an easy call to make.

on the other hand, you could argue that some portion of “threads” in a chat app (particularly ones that live for more than a day) are really just watered down forums. so maybe we’re destined to recreate these things without realizing it, just in ways that borrow from all these different modes of communication in less rigid ways.

it’s not going to happen overnight. six months from now we’re not going to have 400M users like other big platforms, nor 40M, not even 4M. that’s not the timeline to expect here.

every corporate-controlled media platform starts out OK and over time becomes miserable. when that happens i leave. for reddit, that point was about a year ago for me. for you, maybe that point is still 5 years into the future. when i tried Mastodon in 2016, it didn’t work for me even as others were using it daily, but by 2022 it was better for me than whatever i’d used before.

more generally, i’m here on federated systems because i’m sick of investing too much of myself and my community into companies that literally do not care about me or the long-term health of these communities. it’s OK if Lemmy has its shortcomings, because it has the one thing that competitors cannot ever have: it’s operated (and sometimes developed) by the same communities that use it.

federation presents different UI patterns, as you point out, but it’s what makes the above possible. what allowed Reddit to ever be good? a huge part was the 3rd party apps, the community-developed moderator tools, etc. federation is important because it means these things can always exist. if Lemmy was somehow taken over by someone like spez, and they pushed for API fees, those operating the servers simply wouldn’t install the update. and if we grow this enough then as with Mastodon, we’ll have alternative server software (Pleroma, Misskey, etc) that means that something like the above wouldn’t even slow things down.

this is a place where communities that want to exist for the longterm can situate themselves. IMO that’s the #1 objective, and as long as we secure that then all the secondary objectives around user experience and so on will happen organically in time.