A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

  • 49 Posts
  • 280 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: January 19th, 2023

help-circle


  • Actually, I think you’re spreading some false-hoods here.

    I’ve spoken to the core-devs about this here, and they acknowledged that being able to follow people/users would be a generally good idea, but felt that it was a lot of work and so not a priority at the moment.

    I’m with you on the desire of a platform the fuses the two general mechanisms (groups and users), and I think a groups-first platform like lemmy can bring something valuable to how a user’s feed would work … but the reality is that this sort of thing is just not in the fediverse’s DNA at the moment. These aren’t for-profit companies that need to wheel out features constantly to keep their stock price up!

    There’s an exception to that though … friendica, hubzilla and streams, the sort of alternative timeline or “ancient magic” for the fediverse that predates ActivityPub and mastodon by long margins. They have clunky UIs, but are quite feature full, and happily combine both groups and users.


  • Every browser released since 2020 supports this

    It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

    You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

    Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.


  • Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

    Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?




  • Woah woah … this is legit awesome! Just tested (on lemmy.ml) and yep … seems to be working like a charm!

    Give up to matc-pub for the PR (and maybe a new core dev for lemmy too?).

    I figure this makes live megathread style posts/chats more viable … which is certainly cool!

    I’ve mentioned this before, but an interesting possibility might be to enable selected posts to be “live chats” through a websocket like process as lemmy used to be, just for selected posts for certain windows of time, whenever a live chat dynamic is sort.

    It’s the sort of thing that could be scheduled and subject to admin approval or something if resources are a concern.

    Otherwise … awesome to see!



  • We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities;

    That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option. Plenty of people want their social media to have options for being relatively closed or relatively open, and I think it’s healthy to provide those options.

    I hear you though on the lemmy-world community closing possibility (and similar) … that would easily be an abuse IMO and it’s not entirely clear what would or could happen.

    To be fair though, the whole lemmy-world instance (or any other for that matter) could simply turn federation off at any point to the same effect you fear, so it’s arguably just part of the federation flexibility. In this case, any community mod has their hand on the switch for their community, which means we’ll probably see it get used in controversial circumstances at least once. But for any given community, going either private or local-only is sure to drop user engagement or be a PITA regarding managing the “approved users” list, so I can’t see it being a popular action TBH.



  • I think it’s a good option to have. Most who start communities want reach and engagement. But for those situations where you want a more in-group vibe, something like this is essential.

    It’s sorely missing in the fediverse and a rather good form of social media TBH that the fediverse, until now, has ignored (while it has kinda taken off on discord etc).

    Private communities though are intended to federate, just with gated membership. And they could be useful for particularly niche communities that don’t want to be disturbed by those who mainly use the All feed.

    It will be interesting to see how it interacts with federation/defederation dynamics though. Lemmy-world for instance, could easily start going local only because they kinda already think they’re the whole of the threadiverse and are certainly big enough to sustain themselves.


  • Ha … it seems like it at least.

    I think I was being dumb in asking the question actually.

    It’s really just about the circle of users to whom the community is visible.

    Local-only … visible only to users of the instance. I’d presumed that it could be writable only to users of the instance such that only users of the instance could post/comment there. But double checking, no, it’s only visible if you’re logged on with an account on that instance … so pretty private in the end actually.

    private communities … which are apparently coming … are visible only to approved users, whether on the local instance or not.

    And presumably, these will be stackable, so that a local-only + private community will be visible only to approved users from the local instance. So getting pretty closed.