All this « editorial » content is so unnerving with so much shit happening in the world. It does not feel like a safe place if you doomscroll every time you browse it…

  • The weekly “How’s it going” thread is always sweet; I understand what you mean. I wonder if a platform built roughly like Reddit can properly support sharing on a more personal level though. The tools are never neutral.

    •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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      610 months ago

      That’s a good point. Part of why reddit became what it did probably is just the nature of the system. Points-based threads with subthreads, are definitely, like, a specific strategy for generating a body of content. It’s atomizing. It leads to direct replies to a specific person, which seems to lead to more fighting, and it commodifies posts into rated point values.

      Of course people are snarky on Reddit and Lemmy, it’s literally a system where you reply directly to someone and everyone rates everything you say.

      Compare that with a forum system where it’s just a single chronological thread and I can kind of see how it’s more conflict-oriented and less community-oriented.

      So if reddit-style social media is the social media of bickering for points, and Twitter-style social media is centered around cults of personality, what could preserve that community feeling and linearity of forums in a fediverse package?

      How do you scale a linear community?

      • For what it’s worth, having been on forums like Fuck Combustion, Erowid, and GameFAQs for an extremely long time, the proportional amount of snark here seems congruent with the amount of traffic they get. I will say I have noticed that instant message based ones feel a little different - IRC and now discord it’s pretty much depending on what you’re there for. Sometimes everyone is a jerk, sometimes everyone is insanely nice, versus posts like these where there’s time dedicated to each comment.

        You’d think that stoners and psychonauts would be a little more chill than gamers or the average comments on an article but… Honestly? Not really. The things I’ve noticed that matter is how the vibe of a community is fostered, as that will be the determining factor in how negative responses are received.

        In my experience the best possible communities are those that are focused on gaining and sharing knowledge to make the subject easier to have fun with. But if it’s too academic then it becomes a problem again, it needs to be focused on knowledge for creative fun. Whether it’s video games, recreational drugs, academia, the patterns are the same - there’s a common point where the knowledgeable get bored of repeating their information learned from the community to the new users, which leads to the decline of high quality information, which then creates a feedback loop where knowledgeable users then get annoyed and either stop participating or start becoming snobbish or condescending.

        The strongest communities that survive this are the ones that have a high concentration of knowledgeable users who encompass different facets surrounding the same topic. There’s a shared understanding of the basic concepts, functions and mechanics that the subject is composed of, but each user’s preference and interest make up the breadth. It seems to help prevent the feedback loop by replacing it with the understanding that preferences make for a wide variety of reaching the same results.

        I may understand that my way is suboptimal, but I want to know how I can most optimize this way of doing it. A good community supports that and shares their knowledge in odd and creative ways. A bad community condemns the user for even considering doing it that way in the first place, why bother when you can do it this way instead, I see where you’re coming from but you’re really better off just doing something else… rtfm you can figure it out. The manual: {This page has been intentionally left blank}

        There’s also a certain level of “just do it yourself” mentality that ranges based on different hobbies. It’s far easier to talk “theory” about building Mechas, LEGOs or painting minifigs than it is to talk theory about software. Physical or tactile tasks have a different way of interacting with the needed knowledge and getting a new user up to speed usually is pretty simple. It’s talking about techniques, motions, states of existence. Whereas if a new user doesn’t know the lingo for software, chances are they are missing loads of regular and contextual knowledge. Different things just have different levels of ease of access, all with different skill ceilings.

        This is mostly just hobby oriented, but it seems somewhat consistent overall. Hell, I’ve seen it in meme subs here like 196, “what’s the point of this post?” Like… Dude… It’s a meme sub, there is no point lol.

  • From the sidebar on the home page: As a news aggregator and a social media outlet, with a focus on being a safe and accepting space, we strive to create a positive social impact.

    This is a set of goals with inherent tension.

    As one of the moderators of !usnews and someone who started in print journalism in the '90s, I can assure you this is not a new problem even without the impact portion. There are a varying number of steps from assigning a story to having it be aggregated on Beehaw, none of which we have any control over (nor, I can safely say, would any of us want to), and readers always want more “good” news regardless of platform.

    If some of our news communities are upsetting you, removing those from your default feed is likely your best option.

      • Anecdote #1: Don’t put yourself in a position where you’ve got a bunch of servers that you have to upgrade from 2008 to 2019.

        Anecdote #2: The warnings against doing in-place Windows Server upgrades can’t stop you if you don’t read them.

          • In our case, there are a bunch of benefits and reasons:

            • Active Directory (plus certificate services, but I don’t personally touch those at all)
            • A lot of our software here in healthcare is legacy stuff that works on Windows and only on Windows
            • My boss is used to Windows and is far too busy and old to want to learn something different
            • Windows Server is generally okay and comes with some handy management features built-in

            We do have some systems that are on Linux (Photon OS for VMware stuff, a couple of vendor-implemented Ubuntu systems). We don’t really have much to do with these system, though. I’m the only one here who’s familiar with *nix stuff, and while I’ve tried implementing stuff like our Intranet server on Ubuntu Server, I eventually moved over to Windows Server with IIS because it was just easier for my coworkers to access and use.

            As for containerization, we have so many servers that do one thing and only one thing. Docker would be awesome, but it’s sadly just really not a thing in our slice of the healthcare and IT sector. We do plan to start moving to a hybrid cloud model with Azure, but that probably won’t be for a few years.

          • Going okay so far. We’ve had a lot going on this week, so I didn’t want to touch any of our critical systems for fear of adding even more shit to the plate for my coworkers. The non-critical system upgrades went smoothly. You can’t upgrade from 2008 R2 straight to 2019, so I do an intermediary upgrade to 2012 first (hooray, the Windows 8 start screen!) VMware’s mouse driver seems to break during the upgrade, and my RDP doesn’t like connecting to 2012 servers, so I have to navigate by keyboard to the file explorer to start the upgrade from 2012 to 2019. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I can’t be bothered to find it.

  • My father is in a relationship with my deceased mother’s sister.

    I don’t know how to feel about this.

    Firstly: Ew

    Secondly: He’s really old and has never been able to take care of himself, so I’m glad that someone is there with him and my aunt really is a kind and sweet person who also is single and both are really too old to date, so maybe it’s a good thing.

    Thirdly: Ew Ewewewew EW ew

      • It’s been a while, and he sincerely mourned her near daily for years.

        There was never even a hint of impropriety at any point, and I know they were both really concerned about the family perception.

        It’s still weird but they seem pretty happy together and frankly there isn’t enough happiness in the world to begin with.

  • When the migration started on early June, the content on Lemmy was mostly organic (people writing posts/requests and actual discussion).

    Now, a few months later, it is mostly links to articles in mostly every instance. I wonder how many are bots flooding the human voices.

    The communties I’ve come to follow are good, but not numerous.

  •  elfpie   ( @elfpie@beehaw.org ) 
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    210 months ago

    I would suggest something like a “good news week”. The last week of every month dedicated to sharing the good content we have stumbled upon or experienced. Something to practice a new behavior and make it stick. I don’t believe the changes will come organically. Or maybe a weekly challenge thread, with some goals to the ones that participate. Share a good memory, uplifting news, something that made you smile…