The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
The perfect place wouldn’t allow them [people bringing their own shit?] anyway.
As in, isolating the system? No perfect isolation is possible; and even if it was, it would limit the amount of information/entropy of the place. In other words the community would get stale and die.
We could pretend moderators are like Maxwell’s demon, able to sift the newbies one by one; if they’re bringing shit, don’t let them in. The amount of energy necessary to do so makes it unfeasible.
I agree with the core argument - we need to focus more on communities (as “groups of people sharing something”).
Not talking about the Fediverse
This will become increasingly more viable over time, as we [people already in the Fediverse] establish and nurture more communities. For now, however, I think a lot of recs still need to be about the Fediverse itself - because it’s how you show people “you don’t need to subject yourself to the whims of a Nazi billionaire or the greedy pigboy aping him”.
Not talking about apps
I think it’s important to be aware of a few options, and be able to answer questions about apps, but I fully agree we shouldn’t advertise the Fediverse based on apps. Specially since you can always check the content without one, even from a phone.
Smaller and focused instances
Yup, I agree. It’s better for two reasons: more attractive to newbies + it keeps the Fediverse decentralised.
General purpose instances have some reason to exist, as not everything “fits” into neat boxes. But I think this will change as the Fediverse gets more mature, too; people eventually migrate from the general purpose instances to more specific ones, as they find their own homes here.
Perhaps the relative amount of all-or-nothing folks is different, but you’re right - they’re here too. And everywhere in the internet.
In fact, I have a hypothesis that four donkeymen are to blame for most social media woes:
The all-or-nothing folks sit squarely at #3; for them gradients - like “Lemmy has some shit, Reddit has more shit, thus Lemmy is less worse than Reddit” - are hateful, too much info, too “hard”, too “I don’t understand, I’m so confused…”. It’s simpler to say “Lemmy has shit, Reddit has shit, both equal, EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!!1ONE”.
Yup, pretty much.
And there’s more: if, hypothetically speaking, we could make a platform completely shit-free, people migrating to that platform would bring their own shit with them, so the platform would be shitty again. As if there was some sort of equilibrium to be restored.
…I’m going to call this Le Shitalier’s principle.
Will this keep Redditors saying other alternatives like Lemmy are not worth it?
Lemmy sucks regardless what Reddit does. // Its not mutually exclusive, they both suck.
Every fucking thing sucks. If you want the perfect place, tough luck - you won’t get it, ever.
So instead you look for the place that sucks the least, given your priorities. And when one place is becoming shittier by the day (like Reddit), the others (like Lemmy) do become more attractive.
Even the fact we have different pieces of software to access the “Fediverse forums” is already great, we shouldn’t rely too much on any single dev team. Plus as you said, it has some nice features.
A few features I like:
Got it - sorry for the confusion then!
And I need to admit that your take of the mod = Maxwell’s demon thing is way more interesting.